After None.
Still me, but different. What happens after losing your religion.
I’m trying to avoid starting out like one of those classic, “I’ve been gone, but I’m back!” kind of newsletters/blogs. They reek of a desperate illusion: “You’ve been thinking of me this whole time and wondering where I’ve been, but now I’ve returned with greater, and greater glory!”
(Enter Glenn Close singing Everything’s As If We Never Said Goodbye…)
I suspect much like the cast of the Tony-winning Sunset Boulevard at the top of the second act, you have NOT in fact, been waiting around for my reappearance.
So let’s pretend I didn’t start that way, even though—well, water under the bridge.
Some Other Beginning’s End
I started writing here on Substack to continue an old beginning. I had been writing about faith, as some kind of guide or expert for many years, mostly in blogs, some Bible studies, and then transitioning to a newsletter. I met many of you in that way! So, if for no other reason, I’m deeply grateful.
Children like I was, lonely and often feeling an outsider in the world, are prime candidates for great callings. It is our way of making a world where we can finally belong.
Like so many (white young men) in my generation, we were led to believe that our talents, our passions, our true faith, was only worth having if it could be commoditized and sold for the creation and expansion of the institution that birthed it. We were, the “anointed” ones of our generation, supposed to reinvent a tired faith, salvaging it for the next generation.
I don’t begrudge that sense of “calling.” It led me to many wild and weird places, and taught me lessons I didn’t know were possible. I don’t hold in contempt the characters central in its creation, though some, since then, have done contemptuous things.
Evangelical faith requires a sense of personal destiny. That sense of destiny was a kind of a beginning. But, as I would learn, not a complete story. 2021 would prove to be a kind of beginning’s end.
I spent 25 years chasing down the ephemeral idea that I was supposed to be some kind of Christian who led in some kind of way. I planted my feet hard on the notion that surety about what I believed and how I believed it was the foundation for all that would come next. Until the day I stepped my foot on that foundation, and it inexplicably wasn’t there.
In Freefall
What became an emotional and spiritual freefall began with the return of an old friend. I have been afraid all my life. Afraid of the expectations of others, afraid of my own long line of failures, afraid of all the tomorrows I’d imagined imbued with horrific ends.
Nothing in my faith life or my professional life, though both have been infused with notable high points, had provided a long-term respite for this fear. It has ebbed and flowed in my life with little warning. Sometimes appearing and wrapping my entire world around its old axle.
This time, in the hollow days of the pandemic, it appeared with atomic energy, ready to stake its claim as the prime powerbroker in my life. This is not an essay about anxiety so I’ll save the gory details, but suffice to say, my old friend was settling in for an extended and intense stay.
Anxiety feels like drowning. You are sinking ever faster blow the surface, hoping with no sign of confidence that there is an ocean floor somewhere below that you can press off of to lurch toward the fresh air of the water’s surface.
My long-held Evangelical Christian faith had taught me that the firm floor was safe as a simple song:
Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.
Just place your feet on that rock and it is unshakeable. So, being the reasonable middle-aged man that I am, I went rushing to my old methods and resources when the sinking set back in.
It’s hard to explain but for so many years, I could simply hold the thought “Jesus loves me” in my mind and it would mitigate the fear. Not eliminate, but clear the haze of it, provide a stepping stone back to the light. I’ve even, many times, advised people in times of trouble to hold on to the mantra, “I am radically loved by God.”
Perhaps you can feel where all this is heading, and if so, you may be expecting some kind of abdication of those things. That’s not coming. I don’t question the years those words held for me, nor the many times I advised them to others and they experienced positive result.
I’m tired of telling stories that imply that everything I knew before was wrong and I’ve suddenly come to a truer truth. This is not that kind of story.
This is the kind of story where I went back to my old standing zone. I said the words over and over for days and weeks. I flailed wildly as gravity pulled me deeper into anxiety and loss, trying to find the firm footing of a belief in “God’s love.”
And every time I set the words in my mind, set my foot to that formerly firm foundation, it simply wasn’t there.
What Do You Mean, “It Wasn’t There?”
The responses I’ve imaged to the previous sentence are much of what has kept me from writing this essay. I have lived 42 years in the company of people (and have been one myself) who are very quick to pose a theological short-hand as the solution all of life’s woes. And when that theology fails, it is simply a problem of not believing enough.
I understand that for some people, hearing my story of losing faith in my own faith, triggers their own anxiety about the certainty of their beliefs. Perhaps you are one of those people. Please know that I’m not here to trigger you.
I’m also not here to invite your solutions. You can trust, as a person for whom the security of a loving God has been my only solace through large stretches of a humble life, that I have tried them all.
Let’s break down “It wasn’t there.”
It: The power of the words “God loves me” to feel true enough and big enough to silence my fear. For the first time in my life, the words didn’t sit in my body as self-evident truths, they sat in my as just words. Words that could easily be exchanged for others.
Wasn’t There: When you lose a loved one, you have the very first moment where you think about calling them, or talking with them, or seeing them, and you remember that they are gone. That moment is a layer of grief and loss that is different than everything you go through in the dying and the funerals and such. It is an fully hollow emptiness that is more than an absence. It carries with it all the hope you had put in that person’s presence. All the futures you were going to make together if only you had the time. That’s what I mean by “wasn’t there.”
I thought the anxiety reached to the depths of the ocean. But the anxiety was just the sinking feeling. The sinking took me to the empty places. Places that no theological shorthand could resolve.
Defying Categories
On our theme of musical moments with recognizable divas, a great story would pivot here, like the moment that Idina Menzel defies gravity in Wicked, suddenly imbued with the power flight and cries,
If you care to find me,
Look to the western sky!
As someone told me lately
Everyone deserves the chance to… FLY!
Again, this is not that kind of story. This story requires ambiguity, defying categories, and a willingness to live in undefined spaces. This essay does not end with a pithy point of application. Turns out all my sermon training was for naught.
I sat—in varying states of discomfort, acceptance, and rebellion—with the anxiety and emptiness for weeks leading to months. In the process, I had engaged a new therapist and had increased the time I was spending with my spiritual director. One thing I knew (though there has been almost nothing I KNEW in the past twelve months) was that I wasn’t going to move through this without more support.
One dear friend (thank you, Beth) made clear the need for further resources and I shared as best as I could the state of things with a few friends and made a commitment to transparency throughout the process. What process? That wasn’t entirely clear. One thing that was unanimous among all of my support systems was a long history of self-abandonment, a deep belief in my own unworthiness (deeper than my belief in God), longterm habits of thought, emotion, and body that even the most perfectly crafted theology had failed to resolve.
Off and on I would place my foot where the old faith had been, seeing if it had magically manifested in my absence. Nothing. I finally shared with my spiritual director that I couldn’t claim the old titles any more. I wasn’t an atheist. I wasn’t even agnostic. But I couldn’t check that Christian box on the census form.
I was a “None.” At least for now.
I hate writing “for now,” because it implies that I am trying to be something else. It may give the most religious among you (and the still religious parts myself) the idea that I am on a U-turn path to hardcore religiosity once again.
That’s not what I mean by “for now.”
“For now” matters to me because it acknowledges the unreliability of all things. Particularly the uncertainty of my own perception of this moment in time. Taking my place among the infamous “Nones”—the fodder for Gospel Coalition pearl-clutching and Washington Post prognosticating—gives me no satisfaction whatsoever.
I don’t feel permanently here in any way. In fact, the fight for permanence, the fight to retain the feeling I felt the first time someone called me a “spiritual leader” is a very real piece of what has given my anxiety such power. Anxiety hungers for certainty which is why it prognosticates future tragedies. At least those tragedies are certain, and then we know what to do.
Anxiety will make hell real, if only to avoid the uncertainty of a world where hell doesn’t exist.
You may be tempted to rattle through a bunch of questions of what I still believe:
Do you still believe in God?
Do you still believe in Jesus?
Do you still believe in the Bible?
Do you still believe in heaven? In hell?
Do you still believe in the resurrection?
Do you still believe in the Gospel?
I have rattled the shaker of those questions myself a hundred times. And over and over again, I hit the wall of the words. Not the ideas behind the words, but the words themselves. Words so weaponized (by me and by American Christian culture) to punish our questions into silence.
We are so unwelcoming of our own doubts; we turn words into bloody swords to silence anyone who might awaken them.
I believe there is something that defies our categories.
I believe that anxiety and self-rejection is not the end of my story.
I believe that there is something after “None.”
What Happens Now
11 months ago, I wrestled a post out of me about how we should be able to tell our stories. The truth of what happened to us matters. And as Anne Lamott says, “If people didn’t want to be written about they should have behaved better.”
Not ironically, that was the last post from me for almost a year. Not ironically, it was shortly after that my anxiety flared to its new heights. The most important part of that decision was to care about my own stories.
To use my own power with words (however limited that may be) to bring those stories out of hiding.
To bring to light the themes they might reveal.
The thought of my unpackaged, unspiritualized self roaming about the world scared the hell out of me. And it’s taken me these months to be ready.
Ready for what?
Whatever happens after “None.”
As far as the writing goes, I asked myself a dozen times why I would write such a thing publicly. Why come back to this place? Three reasons come to mind:
I created my newsletter as a place to be confident about faith and life and all the matters in between, to share that confidence with the world. I no longer want to do that. But I do want to write. And so I’m here—to use a religious word—to redeem this space from the surety it sought. To do what I promised in January, tell the stories because they are worth telling.
I know many people are in various stages of disillusion with Christian faith. In no way am I interested in being a champion for that disillusion or what’s popularly known as “deconstruction.” I don’t wish to be a champion for anything. Much of that world is trading one certainty for another. One fundamentalism for another. For me, after “None” there is mystery, doubt, and discovery. Maybe you feel that too. I am writing publicly for me. But also as permission for you. Tell your stories, in all their glorious, doubt-ridden ambiguity.
I have always wanted to write about the connection of disparate things. How Succession reminds me of gardening and how megachurch Christmas spectaculars are a lesson in failed branding. I compartmentalized because I feared all those things couldn’t mix. Until I realized they already do. They mix in me. In my body. In my life.
What happen’s next is the stories of that mix. If that’s helpful or curious to you, or just sounds like a fun hang, stick around.
Nick Richtsmeier
Lexicon Farms
December 2022