I’m leaving Christianity and I think I might lose everything
Hello all, I wasn’t sure quite where I should post this but I feel desperate so here we go.
So as a teenager I made the decision to denounce my Christian upbringing and I dove headfirst into Wicca. I don’t even think of it as denouncing, as I was only 14 and I think I was just accepting that I had never really believed in the first place. Of course my parents hated this and at the time it caused many frankly painful and heartbreaking conversations where I was confronted on the evil, corrupt nature of things like Tarot, spell jars, of course altars etc.
My experience has been that truly devout Christians who hold to their beliefs are nearly incapable of coexistence with non believers as their beliefs are innately Evangelical. (Even if they are not this flavor of christianity, the belief system requires you to ‘other’ people and places a sense of urgency on conversion.) There was not much peace between me and my family when I did not profess Jesus, and I spent those teenage years feeling very alone.
Some time passed, fast forward to my 19th birthday and I was getting ready to marry my best friend in the entire world. Now sometime after high school I had ended up falling away from my witchy practices, I was sort of floating around as an agnostic atheist and wasn’t clinging to any particular label.
I think my initial fall away from Wicca had been due to lack of education on my own beliefs, pressure to return to something less offensive to my community around me and I had a lack of certainty in everything I was learning about common aspects of magick/witchcraft (ex: Im not convinced crystals have metaphysical abilities BUT i think they are lovely gifts from the earth and I collect them anyway lol.)
Around this time my fiancé had started to gain interest in Christianity, I took no issue with it although it was a lot of change to adjust to as he ended up choosing the Orthodox Church which was foreign to me as I had been raised Protestant and that was the Christianity i was familiar with. But I loved him and so we got married, and made it work.
After the first year I ended up getting curious about God again. Atheist life was admittedly not satisfying for me. I’ve always been a deeply emotional person and I’m very sensitive to energies and environments. I felt like there had to be another layer to this reality, a spiritual one that we can sense but maybe not immediately see.
I also noted that the Earth and animal kingdom seemed too intentionally designed for me to write it off any longer. So I picked up a Bible for the first time as an adult and I felt convicted.
I was overjoyed- everything just clicked. All my problems with Christianity seemed to overnight disappear - why is being gay an issue? why must women submit to men? why am i inherently evil and deserving of eternal torment? why do I have no goodness on my own, but only through a merciful gift from God can I achieve anything good? But everything seemed to click and I was just happy that I could be in the in-group again.
That was about a year ago. I’m sure Christians who have faith might just say Im not trying hard enough, or maybe I never had true faith in the first place which maybe is true, who knows? But over the last 6 months I’ve been on a spiral with my spirituality and I feel that I’m being confronted with the truth of what I believe.
I just cannot wrap my head around core concepts of Christianity, despite being raised in it and being familiar with the thought process, Jesus’ sacrifice doesn’t make sense to me. An all powerful, all loving God overseeing ANY human being descend into Hell forever (yes I know Christians see it as you send yourself but… still.) I felt like my fear of Hell largely fueled my loyalty to the Bible and Jesus, much more than unwavering faith.
Christians will say that doubt is normal even healthy, until your decision reaches a point that does not align with them. Again, this othering of non believers and the urgency to rescue everyone from themselves is incredibly difficult to coexist with. I was honest with my husband (we’ve been married for almost 2 1/2 years now) about where I was at with my spirituality. I explained that I was thoroughly unconvinced of the infallibility of the Bible and church leaders, that the theology seemed confusing and contradictory. And that I was interested in witchcraft again.
Through the years I have always felt these little tugs, nostalgia over how i remember the Goddess and nature worship making me feel. The sense of balance and reverence for the Earth, living in harmony with the seasons and using nature’s tools as gifts, it sits well with me and I feel magnetically drawn to this path. It feels tangible, and though I believe deities are most likely much more abstract and indefinable than a literal woman living in the moon, the energy feels real.
My husband, who is still devout Orthodox, did not take this well. He did not berate me, try to convince me I was wrong, but I could tell it was a blow for him to hear that not only did I not believe in his god but worse still, believed in magick and possibly multiple deities. I asked him if this is something he would see as a reason we might separate. “I don’t know… I hope not but I don’t know.”
I’m feeling so discouraged and isolated. The pressure of choosing between what I feel drawn to and what everyone in my life believes is maddening. My whole family and my husband is deep in this. I would always be perceived as an out cast, and I know that if a divorce did happen, my family would take my husband’s side, which I think is the most hurtful thing. I “chose to reject truth” and they would see him as having every right to leave me over it.
I don’t know if my husband would leave me, yet. But with the conditioning of otherness from the Christian church, am I fighting a losing battle here? My husband is my best friend and I truly believe we were meant to be together, I’ve known him more than half my life and he is a part of me. And of course I love my parents and family and I want to be respected and welcomed and I am worried about the response if I completely leave the broom closet.
Again, my mental health has been in shambles over this lately and I have not slept much so apologies for the length and lack of cohesion in my story telling lol. I guess I’d love to hear from any Pagan/witches who have Christian spouses or partners, or advice on how to cope with following a pagan path in a Christian world, or just fellow ex Christians who have been through the ring of disconnecting from communities not by choice but because of the nature of this belief. I don’t want to give up on anything but this journey is always so lonely.