Personal Experience Church vs. The World Christ-like This next, short section has little relevance to the validity of Evangelical Christianity, but is the most damning point against Evangelical Christians: unfortunately, in addition to the theological disintegration, my experience has also led me to a lack of reverence for the Christian worldview and its institutions. I am well aware of the Christian defense that, “There are no perfect churches, because there are no perfect humans, and churches are run by humans, so they’re all going to be messed up, but God still uses the church, imperfect as ..read more

I was born into a loving, Christian family. My parents were wonderful people and I had a very happy childhood. During my entire life up through adulthood we went to non-denominational christian churches. These were often smaller churches but the Bible was always taught verse by verse with an emphasis on glorifying God and living for Him. When I was 8 or 9 years old I first gave my life to Christ and believed that I was a Christian. Being young and not understanding exactly how all of this was supposed to work I remember hoping that my profession of faith had “stuck” and would frequently ask Je ..read more

On Jesus I will write very little here, as this will be the most sensitive topic. “Only in the latest of our Gospels, John, a Gospel that shows considerably more theological sophistication than the others, does Jesus indicate that he is divine. I had come to realize that none of our earliest traditions indicates that Jesus said any such thing about himself. And surely if Jesus had really spent his days in Galilee and then Jerusalem calling himself God, all of our sources would be eager to report it. To put it differently, if Jesus claimed he was divine, it seemed very strange indeed that Matth ..read more

I've been out of the church for not quite a year actually. I grew up in the Nazarene church (protestant). Everyone one in my extended family went to Nazarene churches...aunts, uncles and grandparents on both sides. My great grandmother was a founding member of Bethany First Church of the Nazarene in Oklahoma. Our family went to church! I went to a private christian school k-2nd, and homeschooled 3-4th. Then we(I have a twin brother) went to public school for 5th grade on. Let me tell you...I was not prepared socially for a public school. I took my Bible to read during free time! Ugh, I was so ..read more

From A Letter To My Evangelical Friends (findinggoddespitereligion.com) Dear Friend, Whatever you think of us “Deconstructionists”, please consider that many of us who are using that label are just not knowledgeable enough to mean it as anything official, so perhaps we don’t believe the things that you are sure a proper Deconstructionist believes. For at least all the Deconstructionists I personally know, we just mean it allegorically. There are a whole lot of us that were given a whole, ornamented fortress of religion, and were sternly warned, for years or decades, that the whole thing – furn ..read more

From A Retrospective on Faith and Doubt - by Rev. Matt Oxley (substack.com) (This was originally published in 2021, but was started a couple years prior - so the timeline is screwy. I am republishing here as it’s the most succinct retrospective I presently have access to - and is a good way to get to know me) It’s been just over 13 years since I first wrote about losing my faith and leaving Christianity, roughly 15 years since the events unfolded that began leading to that. Lately I’ve been thinking often about the changes I’ve made over the last several years, the impact that losing my faith ..read more

Letter to my wife after telling her I am no longer a Christian (modified): I've been worried you'll be hurt or angry if I say this, so I want to be careful how I phrase it. This letter is a summary of my journey from faith through the deconstruction of that faith over a number of years. I have not been a believer for about 5 years now. Over these past 5 years, though, I was continuing to listen to the Bible in my car, pray, and go to church with attentive ears. Concurrently over those years, I was beginning an investigation on whether the things I was hearing showed themselves to be true in re ..read more