I Saved Myself

I'm an atheist. At the core of it, I'm just like most folks, except I believe in one less god than they do.

Growing up, I was a Christian. I spent most of my teenage years heavily involved in the church. I was a youth leader. I went on my first mission trip to Acuña, Mexico, before my 13th birthday. I even preached a few sermons to my youth group. Looking back, that feels wild, because at its height, that youth group brought out 400 to 500 kids from all across Pittsburgh. On an average Wednesday night, it was anywhere from 75 to 100.

There was always a dichotomy, because when I wasn't at church, I was with my friends in my neighborhood, usually while they were bagging up crack or weed. I've always walked between worlds that way.

You could say my deconversion happened gradually. There was no single moment where I said, "Okay, I'm an atheist." It was a bunch of unanswered questions and circular logic that never sat right with me. Plot holes in a story I was expected to blindly believe in the name of faith. Interacting with people of other faiths, beliefs, and walks of life helped me reflect on my own.

When I was about 14 or 15, I got into a conversation with an adult Muslim who had studied the Bible, and he knew more about what I believed than I did. It made me realize I couldn't go around telling people they needed to believe what I believe without knowing what they actually believe. That put me on a path to studying apologetics, the study of other religions in defense of your own. I started learning about all of the world's major religions and seeing the overlap in their stories. It was the first time I was led to look back at the Bible critically.

As a kid, I turned to the church as a refuge, a place to help me make sense of a world that didn't make sense. The stories in the Bible were never presented to me as fables or theories. They were presented as a factual history of the world. Once I truly began to read and examine it through a critical lens, it was no longer a useful tool for understanding myself, my purpose, or the world around me.

That process of critical thinking brought me to an understanding: I was already the person I thought I needed Christianity to help me become.