I AM NO LONGER A CHRISTIAN

As many of you have noticed on my latest Facebook posts (especially my current profile pic as of November 2016) I have expressed for the first time publicly that I am no longer a Christian. Many have expressed questions and curiosity, and many have expressed love and acceptance for which I'm incredibly grateful. I completely honor and appreciate all of these responses. I am especially grateful to my family and close friends with whom I shared this with first who have been so accepting. Bless you.

For those of you curious in hearing more, I think I'll start by sharing a letter I wrote to my family this August (2016). This was probably the most terrifying thing I've ever written, but came from a place of honesty and vulnerability and desperation to be me. I share it with you now and I welcome further curiosity, questions, and love. Bless you friends!

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"Beloved family,

I have a lot of fear starting this letter. I’m afraid that when you are done reading this it will drastically change my relationship with each of you. I’m afraid that you will think less of me and that you’ll live in fear that I am hell bound and will constantly worry for my soul. I imagine you each turning to each other and other friends and family and asking for prayer for me and that I would remain a constant worry on your hearts. I know what this feels like and I don’t want this for you or for me.

I am also afraid that you will only listen enough to think of counter arguments that you hope to present at your earliest convenience. I’m afraid that you might shame me and tell me that I should know better and attempt to guilt me (if even subconsciously) into feeling like I have made a terrible mistake and that my family is in danger. I have wrestled with these fears and more for months and have been stuck in a place of anxiety.

I am anxious because I love you all and I don’t want to damage our relationship or put up a wall between us. Yet, I am also strongly convinced that it is unhealthy for me to hide who I am. I want to live in the freedom of being me and following my convictions and I hope I can do that alongside you. Thus, it is with fear, but also strong conviction that I share this with you now:

I am no longer a Christian.

I don’t know if reading that sentence brings you to tears, makes you gasp, fills you with disgust, or even dread. I want none of those things for you, and yet that sentence is true. It has been a true sentence for about six months. It is a conclusion I arrived at after a 14-year journey that ebbed and flowed with doubt.

I know you must be filled with so many questions. One of the first questions I would probably wonder is, “What do you believe now?” There is a whole lot I could say here, but I will try to summarize it for brevity’s sake. If I had to label myself, I would say I am some kind of “agnostic mystic.” Something that (ironically) resonates as true for me is that I believe absolute truth exists, but it is not as knowable as I once believed. Thus I claim to be agnostic. However, I still deeply value many Christian values taught to me from the Bible and my upbringing. Specifically the fruit of the Spirit, in addition to practicing hospitality, vulnerability, and living a life of authenticity. Yet, what is most profound to me are the concepts of beauty and compassion. Beauty, in all of its forms - beautiful landscapes, beautiful music, beautiful art, beautiful faces, and so on - seems to innately contain eternality, and that eternality seems to call to something eternal within us. Put simply, I believe God is found as we encounter beauty. Not only this, but I believe the most beautiful life we can live is a life of compassion. The compassionate life is the most beautiful life we can live and it seems to me that through living a life of compassion we encounter God.

Thus, I want to live my life fully encountering others, meeting them where they are at with no agenda, loving them as they are, and showing compassion towards them as they suffer, while also showing compassion towards myself as I struggle.

So do I believe that God exists? Yes, most days I do, but I definitely think I could be wrong. Do I still believe the Bible is the Word of God? No, or at least I think it could be, but I have a really hard time believing that now. I have a hard time trusting men who claim to speak for God. Do I still believe in sin, heaven, hell, and that Jesus is the Son of God and came to save us? All of that might be true, but I just have a hard time believing it now. I see so much harm in having a concept of sin and innate depravity within all of us. This doctrine seems to only breed shame and guilt and hopelessness. Even when I believed that Jesus saved me from my sins, I still constantly lived in shame over what I believed was sinful and often felt hopeless to change. There may be a heaven and we may get to see God after this life and spend eternity with him, but I just don’t know anymore. Truthfully, nobody knows. I guess that’s my point. I have a hard time emphatically saying any spiritual or religious beliefs must be true and that others can’t be true. Instead, I would rather admit that I don’t know what is true, but I know that a life of compassion resonates with me and that beauty seems to point to something beyond this life.

You may be wondering how I arrived at these conclusions? The story is too long. Nonetheless, this is where I have stood for the last 5 to 6 months, and my convictions have only grown stronger.

What about Michelle and the boys? Michelle is on a similar journey as me, though slightly different. It would be best for you to ask her where she is at instead of me attempting to share her truth. For the boys, I have stopped praying with them and stopped singing Christian songs with them and reading Bible stories with them. However, I am still teaching them what a life of kindness looks like and doing everything I can to love them well as a father. Michelle still prays with them sometimes and still sings Amazing Grace with them sometimes. How will we teach them spiritually in the future? We are still figuring this out, but we know that for now we are not interested in churches or religious organizations. We are teaching them our values every day and every moment that we spend time with them.

What does this mean for my relationship with you? My deep, DEEP desire and longing is that you would accept me as I am. If this news breaks your heart, I expect you to grieve. I anticipate that you will likely pray for me and my family and that you long for me to return to evangelical Christianity. Where I don’t see this happening, I hope that you can still love me and still trust that my heart is filled up with the Christian message of love and compassion and that our aims in life are similar. I hope that my revealing this truth draws us closer to each other instead of pushing us away from each other. I am still your son or brother. I still love you all deeply and want our families to continue to spend time together and to continue to grow together. I also hope that you will give me the space to believe what I believe and that you won’t try to guilt me or shame me into believing differently and that you won’t constantly try to present arguments to me to believe what you believe. Just love me and accept me. That is my deepest hope in all of this.

With that in mind, I ask that you please take a few days before you respond to me in depth. If you want to reply to this post or text me something caring and accepting I would deeply appreciate that. However, for now please hold your questions and concerns.

Additionally, I would love to meet with each of you in person in the next week or two. Feel free to text me times that work for getting together. I want to honor you each with time together to explore your questions and to hug each other.

I know this must feel like hard news, but please know that it is something I arrived at after years of consideration. Although this is hard, I hope you can see the beauty in me being honest and revealing myself to you. I hope that you can hold that with me and that this would invite greater depth to our relationships.

I love you all very much,  

Kevin"