Your faith timeline.

[kyc0705]

I think I've alluded at pieces of my own faith history before, but here it is in a more comprehensive setting:

Before age 11: I was born into a rather devout Mainline Protestant family, heavily involved in the church. The particular church/denomination I was raised in had an evangelical emphasis on what salvation looked like: in the Born Again style, you had to make the physical decision to accept Jesus into your heart. There was no ambiguity to how they taught this to kids: it was sometimes barely more complex than if you did say and believe this prayer, you went to heaven, and if not, you went to hell. I was terrified that my most recent prayer of acceptance would be insufficient, so I kept renewing it whatever chance I had. In retrospect, I associated faith with terror and basically nothing else.

Ages 11 to 14: This is the longest section of the post because, thus far, it's probably the most consequential few years in my faith history.

During this time (graduating at the end of middle school), I attended a private Christian school associated with an Assemblies of God church. It was, in my humble opinion, nuts. One instructive story: after a student once mentioned, with no feelings of malice, how they knew a family in their neighborhood who was Muslim, a teacher laughed and joked about how "they'd be in for a rude awakening" when they all went to hell. This also coincided with the peak of the US debate over gay marriage, and also, my own realization that I was gay. Needless to say, the doctrine of this school was not terribly accommodating: in a small private school, everyone wore multiple hats, and the principal sometimes taught a Bible study class. One day, she took several minutes out of nowhere to declare her belief that being gay "is a conscious choice," and anyone who thinks otherwise is free to "come to my office so we can discuss it." I can't overstate the menace she put on the word "discuss," and I didn't dare go to her office.

I felt alienated and unwelcome for these and other reasons, and as my family church's denomination/congregation also trended more conservative, I didn't feel any better on Sundays than I did during the school week. Parallel to this, I started to develop these bigger, more fundamental questions about faith and belief that I just couldn't reconcile. The effect of this is I withdrew from feeling involved at all.

Ages 14 to 18: I just privately accepted that I didn't believe what I used to. Eventually I became something of a deist: I didn't doubt the possibility that something had to create all of this, but I couldn't bring myself to believe that force could possibly be involved with everyday life. I thought it was a good compromise.

Since age 18: For the last few years, I've both been in that same general area and also somewhere a bit different. I'd probably classify myself as a wishy-washy agnostic who just doesn't think about it all that much, but at the same time, I recognize that it's an ongoing journey where my exact place is likely to change over the course of my life. I stopped thinking of anything as a "compromise" and more a part of a whole. Considering my own beliefs involves the work of undoing the simplistic terror that became associated with how I was raised and taught. I don't know what that looks like, but I know it's not over.

[fhtagn]

0-16: Baha'i
16-18: Some cringe semi-Buddhist phase
18-25: Atheist
25-27: Agnostic
27-29: Exploring Christianity, mostly Baptist
29-present: Roman Catholic (baptized & confirmed)

[Hope For A New Era]

Age 0-10 (2001-2011): Generic Protestant Christian. My immediate family was (and continues to be) ostensibly United Methodist, but never really took denominationalness seriously. (My extended family, mostly located in Virginia, does take it seriously). The religious members of my close] family attend a nondenominational church these days and have for years.

Age 11-13 (2012-2014): A doubter for sure, but still officially a believer. I'm not totally sure where the doubt came from, but it was probably a combination of the sudden realization** that every religion believes itself to be "the one true religion" (I guess somehow before this I thought that non-Christians knew that they followed a "fake religion" and were okay with it somehow?**) and the fact that I was attending a religious school at the time and hated it with a passion. I also went through two periods in 2012 and 2013 of obsessive thoughts about death (a product of my OCD, which is a product of my autoimmune thing in which my immune system sometimes just decides that the basal ganglia in my brain is made of strep bacteria), so I guess "the nature of life, the universe, and everything" is something that was on my mind a lot for these few years.

**Maybe this is an autism thing? Theory of mind and all that. It's possible that if I had been born neurotypical I would have come to this realization a lot earlier.

Age 14-15 (2015-2016): An atheist in denial. Even when your environment is not and has never been remotely fanatical, religious programming runs deep, and I was scared of what admitting my non-Christianity, even to myself, would mean.

Age 16-17 (2017-2018): I definitely called myself "atheist" here. This was definitely when I was "loudest" about my religious position, though I was still almost silent about it to most people. My identification with the label was strongest here probably because of a combination of politics (see: 2017-2018) and the people I was spending time with at the time (including, probably most consequentially, a short-lived romantic relationship in 2018 with a very loud-and-proud atheist).

Age 18-20 (2019-2021): Dropped the label "atheist" in favor of "nonreligious." This was because  "atheist" specifically means someone who explicitly rejects any and all belief in any kind of deity/supreme being/supernatural/etc, which is in itself a belief. I do not hold this belief, because it's not possible to know this for a fact, and anyone who claims to know it for a fact is acting on faith alone, committing the same "sin" (for lack of a better word) as the religious people they criticize.
I simply have no belief. Really, I try to ignore religion as much as possible.

To add to the above, I don't think there will ever be an answer to the religion question. Really, I think that, regardless of whether divinity exists or not, the true nature of the universe is probably beyond human comprehension, and that it is very arrogant of us as a species to ever assume otherwise.