When I was Pre-Post-Christian

Hello internet.

I don't think my parents did anything particularly wrong in giving me a Christian upbringing. They were just doing their best. They were relatively liberal, and when I "came out" as an unbeliever last year they were fine with it. At least that's what I think, we didn't really talk about it. I think they had seen it coming for a while.

My parents started having children young, they finished their seven year architecture degrees with four children. I don't think that was for weird Catholic style reasons but I know that university is where Christianity really happened to them and it seems to be a really big part of their relationship and the things they have chosen to do with their lives. When something like that gets so big it in many ways becomes your whole life, you can see how the religious concepts and spiritual relationships become tangible. Perhaps it is easier to be a believer if you build you whole life on it, so that doubt never really becomes an option. For people who really do religion it can become Too Big To Fail.

More or less everything they actually did, in terms of using their authority as parents, seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. In fact, it was much more the emotional side of our relationship not the use of authority that made me be a Christian. My parents and I loved each other, and I wanted to live in a way that made them happy, made them proud of me. For a while I wanted to be a missionary like them when I grew up. They lived in a meaningful way according to some amazing code I didn't quite understand but which seemed a kind of magic. So wanting to be like my parents not only made me a willing indoctrinatee but also meant that I kept giving the church second chances, and when I withdrew from Christian life for a long time it was associated with intense feeling of guilt or self-criticism.

There were a couple of early episodes where they might have been a bit illiberal. I remember once I was playing around on my bed when we were suppose to be praying together. My dad smacked me for it, but it wasn't so much the smack that hurt but the feeling that I had failed, that I had done something unforgivable. Also, when we were very young it was never an option whether or not we would go to Sunday school. This was probably as much for logistical reasons as anything I guess since there would have been nobody home to look after us, but it did mean that we were automatically culturally situated within the tradition of Christianity. I know the Bible stories and I even had some infantile interpretations of my own. I know the doctrines I was taught, and I know how some of the rituals go. Everyone knows the Lords Prayer but to me it really meant something. My parents were young though and didn't really know that well what they were doing, and besides everyone makes a couple of mistakes. I have since met Christian parents who are much worse.

As soon as I was old enough to think properly, say twelve or thirteen, my parents became much more relaxed about whether I went to church, on the surface at least. Most weeks I would stay at home and play computer games or spend time with friends instead. Though they never ordered me to do anything I could feel their disapproval whenever I said no. There was a regular ritual where on a Sunday morning Dad would ask me in a very very nice voice "Are you coming to church with us today?". And I would say no. And feel terrible.

I still self-defined as a Christian though and still kept to fairly strict Christian morals of the standard anglophone non-denominational kind. You see even though I questioned things and I thought about science and philosophy and everything, I was still very much a Christian in my habits and emotions. In addition to that, being a Christian made me feel like I was different to other people in a very psychologically powerful way. I already had a sense of differentness because I had spent a long time abroad, and this continued to be a powerful force on my personality until I noticed and took steps to intentionally correct for it. Being a Christian made me feel special, the morals I kept and others didn't let me feel like I was better than them. Now I realise that was complete rubbish, but the reason it was so convincing a thought at the time was because all around me I could see that the world really was messed up, and I thought I knew the way to fix it.

It was utter hypocrisy because some of the stuff I did do was obviously bad, and the stuff I was choosing not to do didn't really matter. I might go into a bit more depth on this another time but by the time I was 16 I regularly lied to my parents, I was arrogant, a bit of a bully, occasionally violent, cowardly, borderline homophobic, a truly terrible boyfriend: I was a pretty awful person. I was so fixated on my own specialness due to some inconsequential stuff I did or didn't do that I never really gave any serious thought about what it meant to be a good person. A system of rules loosely inspired by the Bible but largely fabricated by various religious reformers had ethically lobotomised me.

I think the main thing which differentiates being Post-Christian from never having been Christian at all is what I call spiritual withdrawal (there also exists a spiritual hangover). I still know the conceptual framework of Christianity, I could go right back into if I wanted to (apart from the obvious reasons why that would be a terrible idea). For a long time I was unable to "kick the habit" because whenever I strayed away I would get intense feelings of guilt. I gradually managed to wean myself off Christianity by dropping beliefs one by one in favour of the fairly standard Western liberal thought I now seem to have as a start point, though I took an interesting detour via Quakerism. It has been a long process but I have to say I feel better about myself and more able to find meaning and value in the world than I ever did when there was a divine answer to everything.

Caleb