This week a letter came in my mailbox from a high school and college friend. When we were close in time and distance we enjoyed being in Bible studies, weekly fellowship gatherings and occasional retreats. Since then we’ve exchanged Christmas cards and that’s it. A few months ago she reached out to me with a friend request on Facebook. It has been a long time since I would allow myself to reconnect with friends like this one because it was just too easy to become offended and too easy to offend on my end.

The letter I received was in response to my communication with her about my present life. I wanted to accept her request but wanted her to know I was not of the same mind as she expected I was. Her letter was sweet as could be but emphatic that she was distressed to learn I had turned away from Jesus. She went to great lengths to encourage me to return to him. I decided it was time to write a more meaningful reply to her. She had somehow come to the conclusion that my perceived departure was the result of a political candidate. It struck me that anyone imagining I would abandon a cherished religion because of the man in the White House was clearly not apprised of my real life and the reality that though I detest the man with every fiber of my being, hate what his influence has done to so many naive believers in Jesus Christ, there is no way he could be so powerful as to dislodge my personal worldview, only life lived in the crucible of reality was strong enough to re-smelt the ore that embodied my life’s perspectives. I sat down and wrote her back. I think it was one of the best renderings of the process that took me out of one place and into another so I decided to share it here, altered to fit the post.

Dear Friend,

At this stage in my life I just want to be honest with those I stay connected to. I am simply no longer an Evangelical Christian. My reasons for that are many and if I mentioned a political candidate – as in Donald Trump at all, it was meant to be that my journey out of Evangelical faith was solidified by his rise to power and the alarming (to me) embrace of him by the Evangelicals believers in my life. Where Jesus is concerned, I still believe I experience a vital connection to God through his life and its message. I am still learning how to articulate my perspective and often do not do a very good job of it. I have been contemplating writing an actual memoir of my journey for a long time if for no other reason that to make it clearer to me. I have written a lot about it but don’t have it put together in any kind of cohesive way just yet.

First let me say that I too am so grateful for the youth group we were a part if. The group gave me a solid place in the world at a vital time in my life. At 16 and unaware of it, I was living in a state of continual trauma at home. My parents were incredible people who came into their marriage as survivors of poverty, abuse and neglect from their own parents. The home they made for my brother and I was like heaven on earth in comparison to what they knew growing up. Nonetheless, traumatic events have a long reach into the future and because they both suffered incredible trauma as children, that trauma was always present in our home. Economic prosperity can ease the experiences but it cannot remove them. Youth Group was a place of refuge for me as my parents attempted to make their way through their own difficulties. I also joined the Southern Baptist church and they followed me there. Dad passed away in January of 2025 but was a faithful member there until his death. Mom is still there. My break away from the Evangelical worldview came through my daughter’s struggle with an eating disorder and her other mental health struggles.

When Hannah first brought to my awareness her battle with bulimia, I immediately sought help from the medical professionals in our Evangelical community. I took her to a Christian dietician who at first seemed like a good fit but as time when by almost became an adversary. Her clinical understanding of eating disorders was way more than the average person in town but it was near light years away from what my daughter would need to recover. Eventually we sought treatment for her in Omaha. I was teaching at the small Christian school connected with a church that was formed after it split from the Baptist one. I was in the thick of Evangelical life.

The short version of my break away is that after 12 weeks inpatient in Omaha we were told we had to get our daughter residential treatment or she would die. That was when we sent her to Utah. She chose that facility from the five recommended to us. Her psychiatrist shared with us that if we sent her to the Christian facility it was very likely going to backfire on us because of her unique traumas associated with religion. We were so hurt and confused by that but honored this woman’s expertise because she genuinely understood our child and the eating disorder.

Our daughter’s mental illnesses are directly related to my traumatic pregnancy and her premature birth. Her brain literally did not develop like a normal child who would have experienced the last three months in the womb in safety and been born and bonded with her parents. Her ability to cope with stress was greatly altered and had absolutely nothing to do with her relationship with God, Jesus or Satan. Her struggle broke my husband and me open in ways that forced us to face reality in ways that our Evangelical worldview had not allowed us to before. We had to acknowledge that it was a worldview that was actually preventing her from the ability to heal and recover to a place where she could live her best life. As she was taken into the places of trauma in her own life and processed those with a skillful therapist and treatment team, she also had to be placed on powerful psychotropic medications just to return her brain to a sane place. The entire concept of a spiritual realm with angels and demons etc. just blew up in our faces and made absolutely no sense to us anymore. We began to rethink everything.

As someone who came into the Evangelical world through The Four Spiritual Laws gospel presentation, when I revisited the booklet I could no longer imagine how it could be so simple, so concrete and binary. Everyone I knew believed that if you said the prayer of salvation and meant it, Jesus entered into your life and you were saved. And then I revisited the Holy Spirit booklet and realized that it was actually saying that having Jesus in one’s life saved them for eternity but that unless Christ was on the throne of the life, that person’s circumstances would be out of order and chaotic. The instant I saw that, I realized that I could no longer subscribe to it because real Christian life is just not like that. There is no way to successfully enthrone Christ in one’s life in such as way as to order one’s circumstances like that. Once my mind stretched out of that pretense, it could never return.

As my understanding of human growth and development and its impact on one’s mental health continued to grow, I grew away from Evangelical life. I cannot tell you how painful it was for me in the Christian world to try to understand the enormous suffering my daughter had endured as a pre-born and premature infant and its impact on her mental health. Almost no one, including theologically trained pastors and teachers could allow themselves to view my daughter as a human being with a damaged brain vs. a sinner disobedient to God. Youth leaders further traumatized her with one she trusted and confided in actually telling her that her problems were a direct result of having turned her back on God. We knew that was absolutely not true.

The pressure was intense when we were trying to live as good Evangelicals while learning these realities about our child, how our church community and friends were not seeking to understand her or us but to contain us and keep us within the pale of what it meant to be an Evangelical. It finally broke us completely. We picked up everything, left home in 2005 and moved to Northern Utah. We had no idea what our faith journey would be like especially living in an area where 85% of the people are Mormon. Evangelicals think Mormons are going to hell but at that point I couldn’t fathom it. It turned out to be the most instructive place we could have ever lived at that time in our lives. The parallels to the founding of the Mormon church and our church were incredible. The beliefs Mormons hold dear and why they do, equally parallel. Since then it has been a continual journey away from the Evangelical Christian worldview.

It really will take a book to share the rest of my story with you but for now this is the gist of it. I would add that we found tremendous solace when we spent time in Utah as Presbyterians and then as Methodists in Cambridge, Minnesota, but we are at a place in our journey where active participation in a church doesn’t make sense to us. That said, it may some day. Who knows?

I appreciate your friendship and wish you nothing but the best.

Love,

Jane

As always your feedback is appreciated.