Trying to Quit God

The year that I was 23 years old, I wrote in my journal that I had made some progress on a particular goal. I had managed to go for a month without praying. (I admitted that I had actually slipped once, but I wasn’t counting that because it was short, and not actual conversation.) It was an incredibly challenging thing to do, but I had done it. Another step toward getting to where I wanted to be. Maybe I could finally give up on this whole believing in God thing, I thought optimistically,  and move on with my life.

That right there should tell you a little bit about my 23-year-old self. I was intensely obsessed with matters of religion and faith and God, but they caused me such profound ambivalence that I constantly  dreamed of letting them go. After graduating from BYU, I had decided that I was done with the LDS church, done with the patriarchy and the authoritarianism, done with what I saw as religious brainwashing. But simply quitting church, it turned out, wasn’t enough. I needed to quit God as well. And I was determined to do it. I actually thought through five general situations which tempted me to pray, and tried to come up with alternate things to do when those came up. I was going to find my way out.

I know all of this not because I remember it in detail now, but because I wrote in my journal a lot that year. And I wrote so, so much about religion. I wrote in circles, asking the same questions over and over, having the same internal debates. I did my best to analyze what drew me so deeply to belief. Maybe it was simply because it was the worldview that I had absorbed growing up, I noted. After all, it’s always challenging to rethink your basic life premises. Or maybe, I wrote, it was because it all sounded so good. It’s comforting to think that there is someone who is ultimately in control, given how little control we have over the world. It’s hard to resist the idea of someone out there who knows you and loves you and will always listen. I also noted that there was a significant identity component in this, which I hadn’t really noticed until I attempted to give it up. Defining yourself as a believer and focusing on following God gives you a strong sense of you are, and gives meaning to your world. I thought through all of that carefully. But I tried to keep a clear head, emphasizing to myself that none of this meant that God was actually real.

And I pushed back against all the good-sounding stuff, reminding myself that religion had a dark side, a very dark side. It might sound appealing on the surface, I wrote vehemently, but in practice it would wreck you. It would demand that you give up everything, including your integrity. That was the step that had broken me. I felt that I was expected to push down my own sense of what was right, and surrender it to what God proclaimed was right. Practices like the subordination of women might appear wrong to me, I had been informed again and again, but that was only because I had limited vision. It was not my place to question God. I objected loudly to such ideas, but underneath my righteous indignation was a deep anxiety that I simply lacked faith, and that eventually that would catch up to me. That God would show me who was in charge. That God would put me in my place.

I also confessed in my journal that I wondered whether it was more than that, too. Whether it was anger, even rage. Because I could not, could not, could not, no matter what I did, no matter how much I prayed and fasted and prayed more, get the answers from God that I wanted. I was highly frustrated over the lack of answers, of course, but I think what hurt even more was the possibility that God simply couldn’t be bothered to respond. That God didn’t care about me that much. That maybe God was in the other room and heard me pounding on the door, but was too busy to make time for me. Or even worse, maybe God didn’t want anything to do with me because I was such an awful person, and God knew it. Maybe God knew that I was irredeemable.

I worried a lot that God was angry, and hated me. But occasionally I also noticed that I was angry, and hated God. It would be nuts, I wrote, to become an atheist simply to spite God, but I sort of wondered whether that might be what I was doing.

It didn’t work, though. It was an utter failure. Rather than bringing me any peace or resolution, I felt more unsettled than ever. After the atheism attempt went nowhere, I tried some other strategies. For a short while, since I couldn’t let go of my belief in God, I decided to declare personal war on God. After all, I thought scathingly, God was a petty, egotistical tyrant who didn’t really care about anyone but just wanted blind obedience. That God was certainly worth opposing. But as it turned out, fighting God felt somewhat futile, and also took a lot of effort. So my next plan was to simply ignore God, to do my best not to care. Whether or not it was true, I argued to myself, it had nothing to do with me. I was going to leave it alone. Like someone in a 12-step group, I resolved, I would take one day at a time, and not get caught up in the religious angst that was eating me alive.

That never really happened, though there would be in fact years later in my life that I did feel very distant and disconnected from faith. But that wasn’t on the menu for 23-year-old me. I couldn’t convince myself not to care.

Looking back on this time of my life, and on the endless agonizing over this question, perhaps what strikes me the most is that while I was determinedly flirting with atheism, somehow the link in my mind between God and the LDS church was unbreakable. To believe in God, in my mind, would necessarily mean to believe in the particular version of God that I had been taught about all my life. The LDS faith, like any religious tradition, is not monolithic, but for a variety of reasons both connected to particular church teachings and connected to other factors in my life, I had internalized a view of God as extremely authoritarian, concerned above all with obedience, rigidly patriarchal, and intolerant of human failings. Obviously there was more to it than that; I learned about love and forgiveness, too, but that often just made things more confusing. I couldn’t tell whether God was actually loving in a way that would be meaningful to me, or whether God’s version of “love” was completely disconnected from what humans meant by the term. I wrestled with that a lot. But somehow while I could question God’s existence, it was much much harder to question my most basic assumptions about what God was like.

When I decided only a few years later that I wanted to run off and study theology, it felt to me like a plot twist in my life that I never would have predicted. Reading back over this sort of thing, I think—well, maybe it wasn’t quite as unpredictable as I imagined. I suspect that there are a lot of threads between “trying to quit God and failing,” and “realizing you want to study theology.” Some parts of you just keep emerging in different ways. And maybe there’s a reason why the third person in the Trinity is sometimes called a ghost. It never stops haunting you.

(cross-posted from The Hour Before Sunrise)