I Thought I'd Always Belong to a Church. Here's Why I Don't Anymore.

I love the power of faith. The idea of a higher power gives me inspiration to do the right thing even when everyone else is doing something else. The idea of a bigger plan can make grief seem like a step to something better instead of a senseless tragedy. Growing up, church was a place to focus on this, to feel blessed and designed for a bigger purpose. To know that there was a Divine Being looking out for my welfare was a great blessing for an awkward girl who was good at school but not at social skills. It helped me to look past the drama of high school and set my sights on being a light in the world.

While my faith in God (in his/her infinite forms) has never left me, my belief in the church began to waver as I grew older. I know I’m not alone in this; in 2020 for the first time, church membership fell below half the population, according to a Gallup poll that has been taken each year since 1937. Here are some of the pieces that have chipped away at my faith in the church, even if my faith itself remains:

The Evil of Evolution

I work professionally as a biologist now. I love the natural world, and nothing inspires awe, wonder and faith like being outside. Landscapes and the processes that create them are often breathtaking. The wonder of learning the idiosyncrasies of how an animal survives in a wacky way is both hilarious and inspiring. I see God in this, far more than I ever did inside the ‘60s building that served as our church.

When I shared my goals of becoming a biologist with my faith community, there was definitely pushback and judgment.

“Do you really believe people come from monkeys and not from God?” one friend asked me (Evolution doesn’t actually say this, it says that both come from a common ancestor).

After taking the classes, my faith was strengthened, not weakened. The idea of God the thoughtful engineer who created a system by which life could sustain itself through different genetic mutations gave me more respect than a magician/creator of one static form of each species. But this was my first experience being torn between what I felt in my heart was true and the teachings of the church.

My Brother or My Faith?

After I graduated college, my baby brother came out to me as gay. I had struggled throughout college between the conflicting messages of “God is Love” and “Gays are Evil” that seemed to come from the church. What made it even harder was watching churches actively campaigning against civil rights for people based on who they loved.

My perspective was changed forever, and my true break with the church began when my brother came out. I refused to be a member of a place that actively campaigned to deny my brother the basic respect and kindness that had always been, to me, the “Christian” way. I no longer wanted to attend when this happened, and I took the first steps of understanding what my faith, without the guidance of the church community, would become.

Global Warming

Today, if you are a biologist, climate change is almost certainly intertwined with what you do. Somehow, the church has taken this belief up as well, though I think that this is more about their siding with one political party over the other than it is with a faith-based mandate. This has created an even bigger rift, for me, between what is true in my heart and what I feel I’m being asked to believe.

Parenthood and the Church

I stayed away from the church for a long time. When my kids were born, however, we tried to find a church that would work for us. My husband and I had different asks when it came to choosing which congregation to join with; for me, they needed to welcome LGBTQ folk as members. For my husband, they needed to be within a 30-minute drive and preferably within the same school district. (This was not that long ago, in 2017).

It was easy to see we couldn’t find something that met both requirements. A search of the 23 nearest churches showed that most of them stated on the home page of their websites that they strictly believed in marriage as something between one man and one woman. Those that were more subtle had spoken on the concept as the main topic of their sermon within the past two months.

A few churches were more welcoming, but they were over an hour away, which didn’t meet my husband’s requirement. Ultimately, we have tried to teach our children about faith at home.

My Thoughts on Faith Today

I still believe that there are few things as powerful as a group of people who are motivated by faith. To avoid selfishness, you have to subscribe to some form of wanting to make the world better, and to commit to have less yourself so that others may survive and thrive. Instead of committing myself to a church, I volunteer my time in places where I feel that I can make a difference in the world. Instead of teaching Sunday School, I work at my kids’ school, help clean up parks and beaches, and share my scientific knowledge in community restoration forums.

I think that God, in his infinite wisdom, can see what I’m aiming for. And I’m happier than I was when I was constantly second-guessing myself in church. I’m sure that this joy and confidence makes me the light in the world that I sought to be so long ago; even if I shine a bit differently than I was told to.