How A Concern for Morality Drove Me Into, and Then Out Of, Evangelicalism

I was not raised to be religious. My parents would on rare occasions express a sort of vaguely-Christian spirituality that was about as close to any real religious sentiment as an ocean-scented candle is to a real ocean. The religious part of their mind was a place they only seemed to reach into, with a visible twinge of hesitation, when I tried to enlist their help to answer one of the Big Questions I’ve obsessed over since I could put words together— questions like Why hasn’t everything already happened?, What even am I?, What happens when I die?, and How can I be a good person?

The seriousness and importance of these questions is so clear to us when we’re children that it seems strange when we realize none of the adults are particularly concerned with them. But life, in its modern course, seems to progressively dull the clarity of their urgency and significance in the same way it dulls the clarity of high pitches: very gradually, without our noticing.

Life, it seems dulls both senses at about the same rate, too. By the time we’re 25, the sum noise of our ordinary lives — sounds of traffic and conversations, of barking dogs and loud restaurants, noisy neighbors and newscasters — has beaten out of us the ability to hear much above 20kHz. By the same time, the concerns of daily life, those that seemed so offensively mundane when we were young, have beaten to death whatever the mental equivalent is to those little hairs in our ears, which let us perceive their significance.

Along with most other adults, I haven’t consciously perceived anything above 20kHz in years. But, for whatever reason, those Big Questions never became any less clear or seemed less important as I grew up — or failed to grow up. In fact, to the degree that I refused to grow out of my concern with the big, overwhelming, unanswerably abstract fascinations of childhood, their intensity swelled, so that, now, they sometimes occlude my immediate experience of the world, like a bell ringing in my mind so loudly I can’t hear the timer going off, telling me to check the roast, or the cashier asking me, again, if I have my discount card.

But, back to childhood.

When my mother occasionally did encourage me toward any sort of religion, it was toward prayer — mostly when I seemed overcome by the stress of a frequently traumatic childhood. The only real instructions she would give me were to tell me to ask Jesus to guide my heart.

Those instructions felt profound then. Like a sort of incantation I was learning, making me an initiate into the hidden world that held answers to those big questions I carried in my head.

I know now that the apparent profundity of it all was a product of its total vagueness. What could it possibly mean, to ask Jesus into one’s heart? When something is vague but seemingly profound we call it a mystery. So I would engage in the mystery, asking, for what I did not know, using words I didn’t understand the meaning of.

But this wasn’t really Religion. It wasn’t even lower-case religion. We didn’t go to a church or follow any special rules, or participate in a community of religious belief and living, or do anything at all that would count as sincerely practicing a religion. And, divorced from the communities and rituals and belief systems and ways of experiencing the world that religions comprise, it was more like trying to cast a spell that didn’t work.

Even so, I was very interested in religion, because I knew that it had something to do with the Big Questions. And I sensed that it was somehow deeply entangled with my favorite Big Question: How can I be a good person? A question whose subject, morality, was for me what dinosaurs or sports or astronomy was to some other kids.

Even today, after reading hundreds of books about it and spending thousands of hours thinking about it, and eventually earning a PhD in ethics, it’s still my central fascination. That’s because it seems to me that all the things that are profound and beautiful and magnificent about human existence are profound, or beautiful, or magnificent because of their relation to the moral realm. Moral and immoral acts transcend, in their significance, the material world. In the material world, words are just sound waves. But the moral realm transforms them into infusions of kindness or cruelty that can harm or benefit another person as much as a curse or a blessing. Morality, to me, has always been the closest I could get to real magic.

From childhood it seemed like the only thing that took morality seriously, admitted it was a thing worth thinking about, and tried to offer answers to the question of how to be a good person, was religion. Today, I think less in terms of the magical or spiritual; I understand moral matters as part of the sprawling discipline of Philosophy. But it wasn’t until halfway through my freshman year of college that I realized there was a whole three-thousand year tradition of moral thought that took place outside of any religious context at all.

And I’ve gotten ahead of myself again.

In tenth grade I had my first chance to flirt with anything like a real religion, through a loosely Evangelical organization called YoungLife. You may have heard of them. I took to it immediately, at first hiding my enthusiasm for the opportunity to hear religious teaching behind my enthusiasm for the opportunity to be in close proximity to all the attractive girls and guys at the YoungLife meetings.

Within a couple of years I had fully immersed myself in the religion and culture of Evangelicalism. I was by then a college student studying music. I attended church regularly, and had been baptized. I read religious books voraciously and indiscriminately.

Then in the midst of a prolonged anxiety attack that I believed was guidance of the Holy Spirit, I dropped out of music school in St. Paul to attend a Bible College in Birmingham, in order to make my religion my vocation. I spent five years at that school, studying theology.

Thus began a long period of ever-deeper immersion into Evangelicalism, deeper than most in the community will ever experience. During the week, if I wasn’t in class at my Evangelical college, studying Evangelical theology, I was sitting in chapel services three times a week, or I was playing in the worship band at a college fellowship on Wednesday nights. On Sundays, I would play in one or another worship band at one of any of Birmingham’s notoriously massive churches.

Then there was work. I supported myself through college by playing in yet another worship band that had become successful enough that we regularly flew around the US, spending weeks at a time playing at camps and conferences. These were often events with huge production values and thousands of attendees. For nearly everyone else, these were special, “mountain-top” experiences, but, for me, they were increasingly a normal, familiar mashup of work, religion, and daily life that I tried to maintain during the down hours.

Ironically, it was this total intimacy with popular conservative Christianity — learning in my classes about the long historical development of the Christian faith, and spending every hour of school, work, and social life steeped in that culture — that began to undermine my confidence in the beliefs of Evangelicalism, and that gave me cause to question the healthiness of the culture.

It would be natural to assume that I soured on Evangelicalism because I got to see too much of what goes on behind the curtain — that the blatant insincerity or hypocrisy of Christian leaders, the affairs and inappropriate relationships we all saw or suspected but never talked about, the substance use, or the callousness of people who were purportedly compassionate by vocation, that caused my disillusionment.

All that certainly did feed a distaste for the culture of Evangelicalism. But I saw the culture and the religion as distinct. I always knew that people are imperfect, contradictory, complex, and inconsistent. Even — or especially — in their religious lives.

So I didn’t question God when I saw people act unkindly or irreverently, then don perfectly whitewashed personas before walking on stage to deliver an uninspired, improvised message for $1,000 an hour.

I questioned everything that was going on around me. Obviously some of what I was seeing around me was merely theater. It’s an unspoken secret in Evangelicalism that everyone, sometimes at least, tries to fake sincerity in hopes that if they go through the motions hard enough God will infuse their attempts with sincerity. How much of what I was seeing in the people around me was genuine? I slowly began to conclude that, for most people, the line between what was real and what was pageantry without spirit had been completely washed away.

There were, of course, purely intellectual discomforts I developed too. Certain doctrines, like the inerrancy of the Bible, became almost impossible for me to take seriously the more deeply I studied (and loved) the Scriptures. I was pretty sure God didn’t know the future. And that, whatever God was, none of the concepts we get from experiencing the physical world can help us understand a being so utterly different from the universe of rocks and quarks and fake plastic trees.

And in this way it became inevitable that I would begin to feel I was leading a dual life.

I became less and less comfortable with the entire framework of culture and beliefs within which I lived nearly every moment, and in my last year of college I realized I had begun a years-long process of shedding the worldview and culture of Evangelicalism. By then, I had come to a series of realizations that each acted as a small crack in the foundation of my worldview, and as cracks met and joined with one another to form larger, deeper fissures, I finally realized that the foundation was in a process of terminal deterioration, and that it simply could not continue to hold up indefinitely.

It’s difficult to describe the slow, devastating implosion this kind of realization brings on. It’s a mixture of heartbreak and fear that suffuses every moment. During most moments of daily life I lived in an interior world whose tone was like the churning, impending horror of a Lars von Trier film. Losing your religion is awful.

But those realizations — those irreparable cracks in my religious foundation — couldn’t be ignored.

Among the most important realizations were, first, that the Evangelical church’s formulation of The Gospel is not the message that Jesus actually taught. (Jesus’ message is summarized in the section we call “The Sermon on The Mount”, in Matthew, and “The Sermon on The Plain”, in Luke. And neither mention anyone needing to believe that his crucifixion pays for your sins.)

I had also realized long ago that Evangelicals are not on average any kinder, more generous, more compassionate, or more loving than non-Christians. (link, link) This was especially heartbreaking, especially given that Jesus insisted that those who followed him would be recognizable by their love for others.

It had also become apparent to me that the peace and joy that is characteristic of Evangelicals (especially when they’re at church services) is largely a manufactured, and often harmful, emotional burden for many of those people who, despite their sincerest efforts, don’t find themselves filled with God’s peace or joy, and who often feel like there’s something spiritually wrong with them.

Along the same lines, I realized that a significant portion of sincere Evangelicals (including myself) are psychologically harmed by the theology of their Church. There are lots of people who live in secret terror that they’re not really saved, or that they didn’t pray the Salvation Prayer sincerely enough. These torments are especially common among Evangelical teens, many of whom spend years in anguish, feeling ashamed, dirty, weak, or even damned because of the urges and thoughts and desires that are a very natural part of puberty. Evangelicalism makes it easy to mistake that normal pubescent feeling that your bones are a glowing furnace of desire and wild emotion for your sinful nature taking you over, or a first taste of the fires of Hell.

All the time spent in various churches and camps convinced me there was another problem with my religious movement: The vast majority of Evangelicals who teach the Bible as part of their job don’t understand the Bible very well at all. Most churchgoers are a part of just one congregation, but I got to hear sermons from hundreds of different pastors — usually centering on the same few handfuls of Bible passages. What struck me was not only how vapid or wildly inconsistent preachers’ interpretations of the Bible were, but how often sermons were obviously aimed at politicizing people who were far too young (elementary or middle school) to be made to think about pornography, or abortion law, or whether gays should marry. Just as commonly, I heard speakers teach ideas that the early Church — the Church of Jesus’ disciples and great-grand-disciples — had deemed heretical thousands of years ago.

It’s very, very hard to listen to a person of authority teach a bunch of teenagers something that you know Paul or John or Jesus, if they heard it, would say “No, this is not God’s message.” And at some point it all coalesced into an understanding that the religion of Evangelicals would be simply unrecognizable to the early Christians who were closest to Christ and his disciples.

I’m not suggesting that early Christianity was right, or that the Bible, when interpreted well, is God’s message. As I said before, I’m not religious. But when criticizing Evangelicalism, there’s just no getting around the fact that its problems aren’t the same as the problems one might raise with Christianity more generally. Evangelicalism, I realized, is a confused, often harmful mess, all unto itself.

So I left. It doesn’t happen all at once. I moved. I visited churches, looking for a special one I could attend without feeling like an impostor, or worse, a danger to others’ faith. But after a few years of searching, I gave up. And as the term “Christian” became increasingly politicized, I had one more reason not to use it for myself. And, then, one day, a conversation takes a turn where it makes sense to say The Thing You Haven’t Said Yet, and it just sort of pushes itself clumsily out of your mouth like a newborn animal, and you hear yourself saying “I’m not a Christian — anymore.”

I don’t disdain anyone simply for being a Christian or an Evangelical, but I’m certainly not shy in my criticism for the movement. And now, whenever anyone who knows me learns about my history with religion, they inevitably ask why I ever became religious in the first place, and after years of asking myself that same question, I know the answer: I wanted to know how to be a good person, and I believed then, wrongly, that religion and God were essential for understanding right and wrong well enough to live a moral life.

I know now that my life’s project is not actually a religious project. And I know that there are lots of other people who are trying to live morally good lives while also struggling to question or shed their religion. The process would be a lot easier and less painful if they had a little more clarity on what morality and religion are really about. But almost no one can pause life for a few years to think and read about all the important questions that come with that sort of struggle. I, however, did get that extraordinary luxury, and that puts me in a position to pass on the knowledge that helped me through that same struggle.

So, that’s what I’ll try to do in my next post here.

About the Author
Michael Glawson is an applied ethicist and consultant in Charleston, South Carolina. He has held positions teaching philosophy at the University of South Carolina, Georgia State University, and College of Charleston. Currently, he helps students, educators, academic institutions, and businesses work more efficiently, and embody their guiding values in whatever they do. For more, check out his LinkTree.