The way out: A light at the end of my journals

The Creation/Evolution journal in the library at UCONN that I wrote about in my last post is like a sacred symbol to me now, because it represents my first glimpse of freedom from the oppressive religion I was captive to for so many years. But there is another "journal" that is the opposite kind of symbol. My personal journals--about ten volumes, are still sitting in a drawer in our bedroom. I haven't gotten rid of them, even though they have become almost repulsive to me. They are a record and reminder of the 20 or so years of my life when I was caught in the net of Conservative Christianity. They don't record my escape, though they record some failed attempts, but they do hint at one of the keys to my final breakthrough.

I started journaling shortly after I started college. I had met a girl at a Christian club on campus. I was really attracted to her, but I knew that my religion wouldn't allow me to have sex with her. So I started to question my religion. That first entry was filled with diagrams and charts analyzing why god would send people to hell for sin and comparing Christianity to other religions like Taoism and Buddhism. 

I had started reading up on these other religions, looking for a way out of Conservative Christianity. But that was not to be for another 20 years, because a staffer from Campus Crusade for Christ helped me reel myself back in and ignore all of my doubts. And that's how it happened, again an again, for twenty-odd years. My journals read like a broken record--cycle after cycle of doubting whether I was "saved," and then reeling myself back in.  Maybe this is how it is with people who are caught in abusive relationships--somehow you keep convincing yourself to stay because you are afraid of the alternative, or maybe because you can't see an alternative.

But the surprising thing for me was that it was the very thing I obsessed about the most that ended up freeing me in the end. "Sin" was the single biggest theme of my journals. I was constantly begging God for forgiveness for some sin, especially the sins of "lust" or of not "sharing my faith" enough, and then trying to reassure myself that God forgave me. It's really pitiful, and these journals are not fun to read, but at the time, it just felt horrible. 

It's also surprising that I had actually viewed sin as the main evidence for creationism vs. evolution. Because sin was such a big part of my life, and because it was also taught by the bible, therefore the bible must be true. I didn't see the circularity of this argument. And as I learned more and more about evolution, I started to realize that evolution had a very good explanation for what I was calling "sin." It made a hell of a lot of sense that male animals would evolve the behavior I was calling "lust." There was a tremendous evolutionary advantage to having males trying to mate with as many females as they could. I won't go into the details of the standard "evolutionary psychology" model of human sexuality, but needless to say, I suddenly saw a major chink in the arguments that had been holding me captive. Rather than sin being evidence for god, it had suddenly become just the opposite.

Unfortunately for me, this was not the end. I reeled myself back in again, this time by a "leap of faith." I returned briefly to young-earth creationism and a kind of extreme determinism, thinking that I just needed to take a leap of faith--that it was all true despite the growing evidence to the contrary. It was a kind of "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" approach. But the damage was done, and the die was cast. It would be a several more years before I finally broke free once and for all, but the way out had been cleared. My new approach was not sustainable. My journals ended around that time, signalling the beginning of the end of my struggle--the light at the end of the tunnel.

Pitiful as they are, I keep my old journals, though I don't know why. They are a symbol, but not a sacred one like the one in the library. They are more of an anti-sacred one--a symbol of my struggle and a reminder of what I escaped from. They inspire in me a mixture of feelings: shame that I ever fell prey to all that, pity for my old self who was held captive for so long, and gratitude that now I'm free. Conservative Christianity served some positive purposes in my life, but it did so as a cruel taskmaster, so I took the lessons it taught me, and escaped.