01/31/2026
I didn’t set out to question the church.
Like many people, I went there looking for meaning, grounding, and community. I believed—sincerely—that if I showed up in good faith, told the truth, and tried to live with integrity, the church would be a safe place to do that.
But once again, it wasn’t.
What’s hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced this is that the pain isn’t just interpersonal. It’s spiritual. When harm comes from a church, it doesn’t feel like an ordinary disagreement or misunderstanding. It feels like something sacred was used against you.
And here’s the realization I keep coming back to—slowly, reluctantly, but clearly:
My faith wasn’t what failed me. The institution did.
Faith, for me, is about honesty, humility, love, and a willingness to face reality as it is. Institutions, on the other hand, are built to protect themselves. When those two come into conflict, institutions almost always choose survival over truth, order over compassion, and control over curiosity.
That doesn’t make everyone in the church bad. It doesn’t even mean the church has no value. But it does mean that questioning the institution is not the same thing as abandoning God, Jesus, or faith itself—no matter how often those things get conflated.
I know I’m not alone in this. Many people I respect have quietly stepped away, not because they stopped caring about truth or goodness, but because they cared too much to keep pretending.
Over the coming weeks, I want to reflect—carefully and honestly—on some of the ways American institutional Christianity goes wrong, and what faith might look like on the other side of that disillusionment.
This isn’t an attack.
It’s an attempt to tell the truth without losing my soul.
More to come.
