Gingerpithicus Frisii

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”

—Richard Feynman

If you’re reading this, it’s because I want you to know why.

Why I’m no longer a Christian. Why I’ve rejected religion as a whole. I can tell you up front: I didn’t take it lightly, and I didn’t arrive here quickly.

I’m writing this for my family and friends who’ve witnessed most of my life—people who saw my faith from its inception. I’m also writing this for the people who are a part of my life now, and for the future. Some of you have asked about my story, and this is my way of filling in the blanks.

But mostly, I’m writing this for me: to tell the truth as I understand it, with as much care as I can.

Before anything else, I want to say what I’m not trying to do here. I’m not writing this to win an argument, or to embarrass anyone, or to attack your faith. I know Christianity has been a source of comfort and meaning for many people I love.

This is simply my story of how the beliefs I once held with confidence became beliefs I could no longer honestly hold.

For me, deconverting from Christianity was like finding all of your baby teeth in your mom’s nightstand drawer. One day, you’re comfortable in the knowledge that the tooth fairy exists. The next day you’re forced to confront an uncomfortable truth. 

I was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on July 8, 1976. I grew up not far away in Orange City, Iowa—a town of about 5,000 people at that time, the vast majority of them descendants of Dutch immigrants who settled there around the turn of the twentieth century.

If you aren’t acquainted with this particular brand of Dutchiness, here’s some context.

The Dutchmen who came were devout Calvinists and they tended to migrate in clusters—in many cases, whole villages. They left the Netherlands for various push/pull reasons: economic pressure, social upheaval, fear of losing their way of life, and the sense that modernity was eroding something sacred. When they arrived, they found other birds of a Calvinist feather and stayed that way.

Orange City was one of those Dutch deposits where, a century later, faith wasn’t merely a personal belief. It was a community identity. It was the central hub around which life revolved. It was the filter through which every thought and action was passed and evaluated.

There were a handful of churches in town, and most were derived from the Dutch/Reformed/Calvinist tradition (there was one Catholic church in neighboring Alton, but we don’t talk about that). There were four Christian Reformed churches and a couple Reformed—split by distinctions that, from the outside, can look tiny. But from the inside, those distinctions weren’t so insignificant. They were part of how people located themselves in the moral map of the community.

As a Christian Reformed kid, there were expectations. Morning service was essentially mandatory. Evening service was mostly expected, but if you didn’t show, people understood. That’s not to say that if you drifted too far from the pattern, you might get a visit from the elders. It wasn’t always harsh—it could be caring—but it did communicate something clearly: faith wasn’t a private matter. It was communal, and there was significant pressure there. 

We had our own schools. I attended Christian school from first grade through high school. We even had our own version of Boy Scouts called “Cadets,” where we did nearly everything Boy Scouts did, but with a Christian twist. We tied knots for Jesus and raced pinewood derby cars for god’s glory.

At the time, I thought nothing of it. It was just the world.

One might expect to find a higher standard of Christ-like behavior in a Christian school, but that was definitely not the case—at least in my experience.

The teasing and bullying I faced was…damaging, to say the least. Perhaps I should call it abusive. I still struggle daily with issues related to those experiences. It didn’t help that I had ADHD and didn’t know it. It was a relatively little-known disorder then, so while I can understand not being treated or medicated, I’ve never been able to fully get past how little support I felt from the adults around me. I wish someone had stuck up for me. I wish someone had taught me how to handle bullies. I wish someone had said, plainly, “This is not okay.” Some of the hardest bullying also came from my older brother. He has apologized to me more than once, and I believe he means it. I’m not brining this up to blame him- I’m bringing it up because those experiences shaped my nervous system, my self-worth, and my need for safety.

When you grow up lonely and targeted, you become a student of belonging. You learn what gets you tolerated. You learn how to shrink yourself so you won’t be next. You also learn—quietly, without meaning to—that acceptance is a kind of oxygen.

Religion can feel like a shelter for a kid like that. It offers rules- like the command to love others as yourself. I kept hoping that particular lesson would land on the hearts of those who tormented me. Religion offers certainty. It offers a story that explains why the world hurts and promises that someday it won’t.

I don’t say that to sneer at faith. I say it because it’s true for me, and because it matters later when I had to admit how much of my “faith” was also about trying to feel safe in a world that didn’t.

In 1988, our family moved to McBain, Michigan. Like Orange City, McBain was also a bastion of Dutch Reformed-ness; it had that same Dutch flavor to me (what flavor, you ask? Why, almond paste, of course).

Unfortunately, the same problems followed me there—and the teasing was worse this time. I was in my teens, participating in all the requisite activities: school, sports, youth group, Christian retreats. Like a shadow, the bullying followed me everywhere. I was socially awkward, lonely, and desperate for acceptance, love, and popularity.

The only friend I felt I had was Paul (pseudonym), who was subjected to the same treatment. We were two kids trying to survive the social weather.

Then came one of those moments that seems small in the moment and enormous in hindsight.

In spring of 1992, I joined a group of teens on a mission trip to Mississippi. I was hoping the close quarters might inspire somebody to become my friend—hoping I could finally be a normal person in a normal group, not the odd kid orbiting on the edge.

The bus ride is a blur now—the particular smell of vinyl seats, fast food, the way laughter can either invite you in or remind you you’re out. What I remember clearly is a girl named Bella.

Bella showed me a kind of compassion I’m not sure I’d ever experienced before: she listened. Not politely, not briefly. She looked at me like what I was saying mattered. I don’t even remember what we talked about. I remember what it felt like: accepted. Like I could exhale.

From that moment on, Bella was my friend, and I was so happy about it. Looking back, I can see I wasn’t necessarily the kind of person she would normally hang out with. We didn’t do a lot together besides talk once in a while. But her presence in my life did something I didn’t know I needed: it told me I was worth something to someone.

We had a talent show while we were there, and Bella encouraged me to sing “Amazing Grace” while she accompanied on the piano. I can still picture the scene: the slightly too-bright lighting, the nervousness in my throat, the strange mix of fear and relief when you’re about to be seen. I had sung before, but this was different. This was someone handing me courage.

When I started, I don’t think I understood how much my voice would become part of me—how it would later carry grief, joy, and the need to connect. But in that moment I felt something I didn’t usually feel: supported. Not teased. Not tolerated. Liked.

On a Saturday in December of 1993, I was upstairs in my room when I heard the phone ring. My mom called me downstairs shortly after and told me that Bella and her mom had been killed in a car accident on their way to Traverse City to go Christmas shopping.

I can still feel the shock of that sentence hitting my body, like a physical thing. I was stunned. I didn’t know what to feel at first. I went back up to my bedroom and stood by the bunk bed, pressing my forehead into the top mattress. I knew I should be crying, but if I did, I would have had to force it, which didn’t feel right somehow. It was like my mind knew what had happened but my body hadn’t caught up.

I don’t know how long I stood there. I eventually went out into the woods behind the house and just…walked. I remember feeling badly that I couldn’t cry, I knew that that was what one could expect in such a situation, but…nothing.  

Over the next few days, wave after wave of loss hit. That’s something you don’t experience until you lose someone important to you- it cycles, washing over you again and again. It wasn’t until three days later in the school library—reading the local paper and coming across Bella’s obituary—that I really began to cry. I don’t know why it was only then the tears could flow. Maybe it had to do with it becoming real, in ink.

That grief didn’t politely resolve. It became part of the landscape inside me. And even if I couldn’t name it at the time, something in me started looking harder for a world that made sense. A world where loss didn’t feel so arbitrary. 

Faith, for a long time, promised me that kind of world.

In the summer of 1993, I was hired to fill the combined role of lifeguard and landscaping/janitorial guy at a local bible camp.

It was an amazing, emergent summer—filled with a new-found popularity and a profoundly deepening faith.

Though the camp was only about twenty miles south of my home territory, it was far enough away to feel like a different universe- the type of christianity practiced there was more exuberant- it was a baptist camp, after all. Very different from the church of my culture. I found that I could try on a different version of myself. I could practice making friends without the same old social history dragging behind me.

And for the first time in my life, I felt truly accepted—like people actually wanted me around. I wasn’t bracing for the joke. I wasn’t scanning faces for that familiar smirk. I was just…there. Included.

Camp life has its own sensory world. The constant movement. The sun on your shoulders. The smell of lake water and sunscreen. The sound of kids yelling. The whistle around your neck. The long, half-sacred exhaustion at the end of the day when you’ve been “on” for hours and your brain finally goes quiet.

I was introduced to something foreign called “praise and worship” music, and I became bolder in my singing and deeper in my faith through the practice of it. I started wearing blatantly Christian t-shirts like “God’s Gym” (a play on Gold’s Gym) and a faux-FBI shirt (Firm Believer In Jesus Christ). I think it made my family a little uncomfortable to see that kind of open evangelicalism. Maybe it looked like I’d turned the volume up too high.

But from the inside, it wasn’t about showing off. It was about being alive. It was about belonging. It was about music—music that made feelings feel allowed, music that made hope feel communal, music that made loneliness feel temporarily cured. Most importantly, it gave me hope.

Looking back, that’s one of the most important truths of my story: sometimes we confuse belonging with truth. Sometimes the warmth of being wanted feels like evidence that the beliefs wrapped around that warmth must be right.

For the next couple of decades, I was confident in my faith. I felt like I knew the truth. I grew up in the church. I worked at Bible camp in high school. I went to Christian school and later Christian college. I toured for a year with a Christian music missions group. I was even a youth pastor for a few years—until the inevitable burnout.

So when the first serious cracks appeared, they didn’t start as rebellion. They started as discomfort.

From what I can tell, the turning point happened at a church service at my then-church of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan. Our pastor Rob Bell was presenting a series called “Calling All Peacemakers,” in which he put up a bunch of disturbing statistics—about suffering, injustice, poverty, violence. The facts were hard to ignore. They did something to me. I began my journey into social justice.

It didn’t instantly “convert” me into something else. It just made me do something that evangelical culture often treats as dangerous: it made me research. 

Around that same time, I went back to school to pursue a degree in history. I began learning things that didn’t fit the clean version of Christianity I’d inherited. I learned how scripture developed, how texts get transmitted, edited, translated, and interpreted. How much of the bible was written and chosen by committees. I learned about copying errors and the fingerprints of human bias. I learned how often powerful people have claimed “god says…” to sanctify what they already wanted. To wield power. 

And in my history studies, I kept running into the ways religion has been used to justify harm and violence. Not in a simplistic “all religion is evil” way, but in a sobering “humans will use sacred language to excuse themselves” way. My major changed to anthropology and things became even more clear. I learned about the subjectivity of truth. How every religion thinks it’s the one wielding the truth alone. 

I tried to respond in the most sincere way I knew how: I began subconsciously distancing myself from church culture and focusing more on the teachings of Jesus. I wanted whatever was best in it—compassion, peacemaking, mercy. I began to hold the concept of “truth” more and more loosely. Who was I to claim that I alone knew the truth?

But here’s the irony: the more I leaned into that kind of expansive love, the further and further I found myself getting from what my subculture considered “right.”

The world got bigger. The old walls got smaller.

Just before Christmas 2010, my then-wife told me she was thinking we might need to get a divorce. In the months that followed, the situation unfolded in a way that felt reckless and brutal. While I was dedicated to fixing it, she was cheating on me with a number of other men. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life. Looking back now, I understand that this divorce was a blessing in disguise. She was not a good match for me and the relationship was not healthy. At the time, I still believed love was just something you felt. Everything took care of itself after that. 

So I fell back on my faith, weakened as it was, and I prayed like I’d never prayed before.

I was on my knees a lot. I was reading and re-reading the Bible (especially James) constantly. I watched the movie Fireproof at least six or seven times (one of my most embarrassing moments). I was sure—absolutely, 100% sure—that god couldn’t possibly let her leave me if I was faithful enough. I thought I was receiving signs that things were going to be okay, and I took heart. Those signs reinforced my confidence. The verses in Matthew and Luke about “knocking and the door shall be opened unto you” were particularly comforting- and disillusionary when proven wrong. Theologians would tell me that those verses can be interpreted in various ways, and that it doesn’t mean what it says, literally. All I can say is, I took it literally and internalized it like I’ve never embodied anything before. 

But the divorce happened anyway. 

I was forced to reevaluate the whole framework: the “signs,” my certainty, my confidence in prayer, my lack of any agency in the situation, and the god I thought I knew. And as I did, the god I believed in began to feel less like love and more like cruelty—or worse, like absence dressed up as meaning.

I stopped going to church regularly. I lost the only friends I had in the divorce —our small group bible study associated with Mars Hill. I’d helped found the group, and now they were communicating to me that they didn’t really care about what my ex had done; they wanted to be friends with both of us. 

I want to be fair here: I can understand why people try to stay connected to both sides. Some of that is conflict-avoidance, sure, but some of it is also an attempt to be gracious. I don’t think they meant to hurt me.

But at that time, I felt abandoned. And I couldn’t be part of a group that included her. So I said goodbye.

A year after the divorce, I nearly died from an infection sustained from an esophageal tear. That didn’t reinforce my faith either. Life felt so fragile. All because of a crusty piece of bread. 

By then, I was moving further and further left in my values. Stepping outside the church and looking back, I now realize that I felt betrayed—not only by individuals, but by the package itself. I felt like I’d been handed an inherited faith and then told to adhere to it simply because of where I was born and in what culture I was raised.

Was my faith mostly the product of geography and tribe? If I had been born elsewhere, would I have been just as certain about something else?

Once that question appears, it tends to reproduce.

In March of 2014, World Vision came out as LGBTQ-affirming in regards to their employees. The organization lost around 10,000 sponsorships in a matter of days. I was outraged at the by how quickly compassion collapsed into punishment. This, from people who claimed to follow the love of Jesus. Some people close to me took a stance that felt cruel and dehumanizing. saying hateful things publicly. I won’t rehash it here. I just remember the clarity I felt: I’m not safe in this room right now.

So I narrowed my world. I blocked a lot of people and restricted my interactions to a smaller, safer group- I desperately needed a safe space, and I found support in online progressive Christian spaces for a while. I didn’t have strong enough boundaries then to explore and doubt without being pulled under by other people’s certainty.

And this is where I want to be careful and intentional about bridge-building, especially for my family: I’m not claiming that Christians are uniquely bad or uniquely hypocritical. People are people. Every group has its failures. I’ve had many of my own.

What I am saying is that in the version of Christianity I was formed in, doubt wasn’t treated as a normal part of being human. It was treated as a threat. And the more my questions grew—about history, scripture, suffering, and prayer—the less room I had to ask them out loud without social consequences.

Over time, through my anthropological and psychological studies, I began to see how much religion can function as an anxiety-management system. Humans worry about death, chaos, the future, whether we matter. Certainty is soothing. If you grow up with a god you can appease—pray the right way, believe the right things, stay within the lines—life can feel controllable. The chaos is held at bay, and everything is explainable under the hegemony of deity.

But once you notice that your certainty is being fed by fear, it gets harder to call that certainty “faith.”

Somewhere along the way, “Christian” stopped fitting honestly. Eventually, I stopped believing in god as I had been taught to understand god. Eventually, the simplest accurate label became the one I had once used as a warning sign.

I’m an atheist now. I don’t believe in god.

That doesn’t mean I’m certain about everything. In fact, I’m more comfortable living with unanswered questions than I used to be. I don’t have a strong fear of hell anymore. I don’t believe in heaven or hell anymore.

What I do know is this:

I care about truth more than comfort.

I care about compassion more than tribal belonging.

I’m no longer willing to outsource my conscience to an institution.

I want relationships and community that can hold honest questions without punishment.

If you’re a christian reading this, I’m not asking you to become me. I’m asking you to try to understand me.

And if you can’t understand, I’m asking you at least not to reduce my story to rebellion, bitterness, or “wanting to sin.” That narrative doesn’t fit. The truth is harder, and I think more human: I changed because I couldn’t keep pretending. I changed because questions kept coming, and the answers I was given required that I stop questioning.

I don’t want to live that way anymore.

And I want to be clear about something else: I didn’t leave Christianity and become a blank slate.

I kept a love for music—especially the way singing can hold longing, grief, hope, and joy all at once. I also kept a strong desire for compassionate community and communal love. 

And I kept something I still find beautiful in the story of Jesus: the idea of an expansive love that moves toward people instead of away from them. Whatever else I believe now, that impulse—toward compassion, toward the outsider, toward mercy over purity—still feels like one of the best things I inherited.

I’m still figuring out who I am on the far side of faith. I’m still learning and I always will be. The world feels bigger now—more complicated, more beautiful in unexpected places, and sometimes more painful because I can’t wrap it in easy answers.

Who knows where I’m going? I sure don’t.

And that’s okay.