Leaving Christianity: The Story Behind My Decision

A Story of Faith, Mental Illness, and Self-Fidelity

Welcome back. Thanks for taking the time to read my post today.

I wanted to come on here and process the whole departure from Christianity and give even more context from my perspective.

I grew up in a non-denominational church in Milford called Cornerstone Christian Center.

It was started by Pastor Ellis, and Pastor Rooks took over for a while.

I gave my life to Christ when I was about ten and was baptized shortly after. I knew what I was signing up for, and I genuinely want to follow the faith of my community and my family.

As I grew older, I struggled a lot with porn, and it was hard to share it with people because I was so young and I felt ashamed because I called myself a Christian.

Despite that, I became a leader within Cornerstone under Pastor Watts. He started his pastoralship in 2001 and developed his program called Path of Success Students for Excellence (POSSE), which I was a part of in High School.

I had a lot of passion for Christianity and for my relationship with Jesus. I devoted myself to quiet times in the morning. I prayed for hours early in the morning. A lot of the congregation saw a genuine faith in me.

I practiced turning the other cheek in my freshman year of high school, when I got hit in the face by a student, and I walked away.

Pastor Watts preached a sermon about me after he learned that. I was dedicated to being a follower of Christ.

When I was 16, I became more serious about my faith, and I practiced abstinence and waited to be married to have sex.

I still struggled with porn, but I was more open about it.

I went on two mission trips, one to Mexico and then Haiti. Both trips impacted me deeply. I cried for days at the poverty and felt guilty for living in a place of abundance.

After Haiti, I had a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with bipolar type 1. A label and a category that I didn’t agree with for years.

During that time, my parents divorced, and we lost our house to foreclosure.

I still remained a Christian despite the chaos.

I applied to college and got accepted to Liberty University in Virginia, founded by Jerry Falwell.

2009, I started my academic pursuit in becoming a nurse after having such an impact from my mission trips.

I didn’t get in and switched my major to English. I felt so lost and didn’t have a direction in life, yet still remained a Christian.

I learned about reformed theology, and I started to adopt and apply God’s sovereignty, explaining that God allowed all chaos for my own good.

In 2011, the second semester of my sophomore year, my mental illness caught up to me. I had a full-blown manic episode, and I eventually got expelled because I exposed myself in my dorm room, along with missing curfew and getting written up for other things.

I was hospitalized for a couple of weeks, and the administration decided to ban me and kicked me out.

I felt terrible. I wasn’t in control of my decisions, and I never meant to break the rules.

However, I was kicked out of Liberty, and I didn’t do much for a couple of years.

I decided to go to North Carolina to restart my life. I was med compliant, and I sought Christian counseling when I got down there.

This is where I met Craig Morsett, and I spent six months with him, meeting every week, trying to understand my posture before God and my traumas.

He told me that I wasn’t a Christian and that I didn’t know the gospel in my heart. So we started from there, and I heard his gospel under reformed theology.

He shared with me Jeremiah 17:9 as the foundation of the position I was before God. My heart was wicked and deceptive; I couldn’t trust it.

After more of his session, I cried, wanting the real Jesus, so I gave my life to Christ again, or for the first time for real.

I was baptized and became a member of North Wake Church in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

That’s how I became a Christian again under the Reformed theology framework when I was 22.

In the version of Reformed theology I learned, Jesus increasingly came to feel less like an ethical teacher and more like the center of a legal system.

I experienced my humanity primarily through the lens of Total Depravity.

Over time, I felt that the more I accepted Jesus' divinity within that framework, the more I reinforced a story that I was fundamentally broken.

I was a cultural Christian. I was still addicted to porn; I started to drink, smoke cigarettes, and tried weed. I sought food to comfort me and gained a lot of weight.

I went to church, I became a member, and I could recite the creeds. I was affirmed by others that I had faith.

It was by the time I was 28 or 29 that I started to realize I was a hypocrite because I practiced those things like a person who wasn’t a Christian. And to be honest, most non-Christians didn’t do what I did, so I want to be fair.

I started to deconstruct my faith, and by 30, I shared with others that I was never a Christian.

I attempted suicide because of the weight of everything, and I was alone and isolated and wanted to die because I was deeply addicted to porn.

I survived the suicide and have been recovering my mind ever since then.

I was re-diagnosed schizoaffective for having weeks or months of psychosis without mania or depression.

I believed in Original Sin and understood the major theologies in Christianity.

All that to say, from when I was 30 till now, I’ve been back and forth as to how I want to live my life and how I want to serve within a church community.

I was a member of Trinity Baptist Church in New Haven on State Street and became a member of Cornerstone Christian Center in Milford in 2023.

I still navigated my faith; in some seasons I was all in, and in other seasons I was a skeptic.

I guess where I’ve landed now is maybe I am throwing out the baby with the bath water.

The Christianity I practiced was way too harsh, and it wasn’t freeing and caused a lot of confusion when practicing it.

However, when I say I no longer believe Jesus is God, it’s a response to the institutional and religious trauma I’ve endured throughout the years.

Many people will assume I left Christianity because I wanted permission to indulge myself.

Ironically, the opposite happened. Most of the destructive habits that defined my twenties began changing after I stopped framing every failure as evidence that I was spiritually defective.

I broke my addiction to porn not by religion or being delivered but by behavioral psychology.

I no longer get drunk or smoke cigarettes regularly. Not because of Jesus, but because of my agency of change.

I choose to empower my mind and sought to reconcile myself with my behaviors. Now that I am not a Christian.

I practice self-fidelity, being true to my own core nature, practicing loyalty to myself, and honoring my personal values

So that’s the context of not being a Christian. Could it change? Yeah, I’d be open to it. At the same time, I'd rather not deal with continuing the religious trauma within churches.

I hope that helps. It was great for me to write this today.

I don't regret the people I met or the love I experienced.

Those relationships mattered, and they helped shape who I am today.

While my beliefs have changed, my gratitude for many of those people hasn't.

I'm kind of envious of people who still believe in Jesus.

There seems to be a confidence and certainty that I no longer have.

At the same time, I genuinely don't understand what people mean when they describe having a personal relationship with someone they cannot see or hear.

That's a question I'm still wrestling with.