Why I Can No Longer Honestly Call Myself a Christian
I need to come clean:
I do not think I can honestly call myself a Christian anymore.
I know what that sentence sounds like, especially coming from me. I grew up drenched in “Full Gospel” Pentecostal Christianity. I fronted a christian band that began in youth group and toured nationwide. I spent years leading worship for growing churches. I preached, sang, and prayed with certainty. I watched rooms full of people raise their hands and hearts in surrender.
Christianity was the water I learned to swim in, not an occasional Sunday activity.
So I understand why someone might hear me say, “I’m not a Christian,” and assume I have walked away from Jesus.
I have not.
I have not stopped loving the person and teachings of Jesus. I still believe something happened in him that was historical, political, deeply human and somehow divine.
The problem is not that I no longer believe in Christ.
It is that I can no longer defend the religious system I was told I had to accept in order to belong to him.
Its beliefs came as one tightly woven structure. As Weezer put it, pull one thread and the whole thing seemed ready to unravel.
Eventually, I pulled anyway.
Not because I wanted an easier religion, permission to sin, or an excuse to be seduced by “the world.” I questioned it because my understanding of God increasingly looked nothing like the Jesus I was trying to follow.
What collapsed was not Christ, but the box I had placed around him.
I did not lose faith so much as certainty in one explanation of reality. Beneath it, I found mystery: a salvation larger than legal acquittal, a cross that did not require divine violence, and a God whose love had never left.
For a while, the collapse left me cynical. For several years, I called myself an atheist. But beneath the anger, grief, and religious exhaustion, something remained alive.
Eventually, I stopped trying to force the old structure to stand.
I started asking whether it had ever been large enough for the God Jesus revealed.
So when someone asks, “Are you still a Christian?” I struggle to answer.
A simple yes feels dishonest.
A simple no leaves out the most important part.
This essay is my attempt to answer as fully as I can in one sitting.
What Do I Mean by “Christian”?
Christianity is not one thing, and I want to be fair about that straight from the rip.
The tradition is older, stranger, wider, and more diverse than the evangelical world in which I was formed. It contains contemplatives, mystics, liberation theologians, Anabaptists, universalists, monastics, and ordinary believers whose lives bear the unmistakable fruit of mercy and love.
Many people carry the word “Christian” with humility, courage, and integrity.
I’m not interested in taking it away from them.
There is also American evangelicalism, fundamentalism, Christian nationalism, institutional religion, and empire wearing a cross necklace.
Sometimes those things overlap with the Way of Jesus.
Often, they do not.
When I say I can’t call myself a Christian, I am not making a universal declaration about everyone who uses that word. I am talking about what the word meant in the world that formed me, and what people generally assume when they apply it to me.
Where I grew up, being a Christian meant more than being captivated by Jesus or attempting to follow his Way. It meant affirming a particular doctrinal package:
• The Bible was literal and flawless.
• Adam and Eve were literal historical figures.
• Every person was born guilty of sin.
• Jesus suffered the punishment that we deserved.
• Christianity was the only true religion.
• Confess and Believe the right things in order to be saved.
• Everyone else? Hell. For all eternity.
These beliefs functioned like a spiritual security checkpoint.
A person could be compassionate, humble, generous, and deeply transformed, but if their theology set off the alarm, their faith was treated as suspect.
Meanwhile, someone could be cruel, arrogant, obsessed with political power, and largely uninterested in the teachings of Jesus, yet stroll through as long as the doctrinal luggage was packed correctly.
I no longer pass that checkpoint.
I have a radically different understanding of God, Jesus, salvation, and the sacred reality moving beneath it all.
If being a Christian requires me to reject those convictions, then I’m not one.
But if the real question is whether I still feel the gravity of Jesus pulling my life toward mercy, truth, justice, surrender, and divine union, the answer is yes.
Absolutely.
I may have stopped trusting the map I was handed, but my feet keep turning toward Jesus.
That map began with a story about humanity beginning in a garden.
Are We Guilty?
Original Sin.
That’s the name of the idea that humanity’s deepest problem began with Adam and Eve. Their disobedience introduced sin into creation, and every human being born afterward inherited a corrupted nature.
Before we choose anything, we are guilty.
Before a person can speak, reason, love, harm anyone, or even locate their own feet with any reliability, they already stand condemned before God.
I can’t begin the human story there anymore.
There is something spiritually damaging about looking at a child covered in applesauce and deciding that the most important truth about them is that they are offensive to God.
When sinful, depraved, or wicked become the first words spoken over humanity, shame masquerades as humility. People learn to distrust their deepest selves. They may spend the rest of their lives trying to earn relief from a verdict handed down before they were born.
I do not think that is the good news Jesus came to announce.
I’m not dismissing sin or the story. I love the opening chapters of Genesis. They are beautiful, strange, ancient, brilliant, and deeply revealing.
The garden account understands how desire becomes grasping, how mistrust leads to hiding, and how quickly frightened people learn to blame one another. The man blames the woman. The woman blames the serpent. The serpent wisely declines to release a public statement.
The story is true because it reveals us.
In Hebrew, adam is connected to adamah, the ground from which humanity is formed. Adam is the earthling: the human creature with mud under his fingernails. Eve is Chavah, life, the mother of all living. Humanity is formed from earth, animated by divine breath, and placed within a living world it did not create. These characters are more than two private individuals tucked away in a garden at the beginning of history.
They carry the human pattern.
We wake up inside a world we did not create. We reach for control. We mistrust the Source of our life. We become ashamed of our vulnerability, hide from love, and blame one another for the distance we feel.
Genesis is not offering the answer to, “Who were the first two biological humans?”
It is asking why all of us keep becoming Adam.
Reading Genesis as sacred myth does not make it fictional. Myth can carry truths too large for ordinary reporting. Nobody demands the prodigal son’s mailing address or birth certificate before receiving the parable. We understand that a story does not need to be literal history to reveal reality.
And Genesis reveals something very real.
Sin is real.
I have seen it in myself, in churches, in governments, in businesses, and in systems that turn greed and domination into ordinary life. I’ve watched people baptize ego as spiritual authority and cruelty as faithfulness. I have also spent enough time in traffic and on social media to know that humanity does not require much encouragement to become unhinged.
But sin is not the truest thing about us.
Even Genesis doesn’t begin with guilt.
It begins with goodness.
Image.
Breath.
Blessing.
Humanity is not introduced as a divine mistake or a contaminated species. We are earth filled with the breath of God, creatures made in the divine image and declared very good before we have achieved, believed, or proven anything.
Whatever sin does to us, it does not come first.
Belonging comes first.
And if guilt is not the foundation of the human story, separation is not our deepest reality either.
Did God Turn Away?
I was taught that sin placed humanity on the wrong side of God’s holiness.
God loved us, but His justice stood between us. Something had to happen before relationship could be restored.
That idea shaped my imagination more deeply than I understood. God was distant, humanity was guilty, and Jesus was the one who made it possible for God to welcome us again.
But when I look at Jesus, I see the opposite.
I see him touching the religiously unclean, eating with the wrong people, forgiving before anyone could affirm a creed, and walking directly into places holiness was supposedly too pure to enter.
Jesus did not behave as though human brokenness was contagious.
He behaved like love was.
In one of his most famous stories, a son leaves home, wastes everything, and rehearses a speech designed to earn his way back.
The father does not wait with folded arms.
He runs.
No punishment is demanded. No sacrifice is needed before the father is free to forgive. The speech is ignored entirely. The son had left home, but the father had never stopped being his father.
The relationship was wounded.
The love was not withdrawn.
Sin still has consequences. Sin alienates us from one another, creation, ourselves, and the love in which we already live. It fills us with shame, fear, hiding, domination, and blame. It can make us feel abandoned even while love is moving toward us.
But alienation is not the same as abandonment.
If Jesus reveals the heart of the Father, then God was never the one who needed to be persuaded to love us.
We’re the ones who need to be persuaded that love never left.
The gospel I inherited told me Jesus came to overcome God’s distance from humanity.
The gospel I now see tells me Jesus came to heal the void we experience in ourselves, and to reveal that God has been running toward us all along.
But if God never turned away, what was the cross actually doing?
Do I Still Believe Jesus Died for My Sins?
No.
I do not believe Jesus died because God required payment for my guilt. I do not believe divine justice demanded suffering before divine love was free to forgive. I do not believe God needed blood.
I was taught Penal Substitutionary Atonement: humanity deserved punishment, God’s justice required it, and Jesus took the penalty in our place. Once the debt was paid, God could forgive us.
I understand the emotional power of that story.
I sang songs about that blood with genuine tears running down my face. I stood on stages and led thousands of people into those words. I was not manipulating anyone, and I was not secretly doubting every lyric.
I believed what I was singing.
But eventually, I could no longer ignore the moral problem at the center of the explanation.
If God requires violence before forgiveness, then violence is not defeated at the cross.
Violence becomes the mechanism through which God saves.
Jesus tells us to forgive our enemies freely, repeatedly, and extravagantly. He tells us to love those who harm us and to become merciful as our Father is merciful.
Yet the worldview I inherited said that the Father could not forgive until someone was punished.
God expects us to forgive without repayment, but cannot do so himself?
I know the standard answers. God is holy. God is just. Evil cannot simply be ignored.
I agree that evil matters. Forgiveness is not pretending harm never happened, and mercy does not erase accountability.
But if a human father claimed he could forgive his guilty children only by punishing an innocent one, we would not call him perfect. Projecting that story onto God does not suddenly make it beautiful.
It makes God look less merciful than Jesus.
I have come to believe Jesus did not enter history as the final sacrifice God required.
He came to expose the sacrificial logic itself: the human belief that blood must be spilled, a victim must be chosen, and someone must pay before peace can be restored.
At the cross, I do not see God demanding a sacrifice before love can move.
I see humanity’s violence directed at the clearest embodiment of divine love.
Empire kills those who threaten its authority. Religious institutions silence prophets. Frightened communities create scapegoats. Human beings destroy what exposes the systems that keep us comfortable.
Jesus did not die because God needed blood.
Jesus died because human beings spill it, then place God’s name over the wound.
The cross shows us what we do to love when love refuses to serve power. It exposes our violence, accusation, fear, religion, and endless need to find someone else to blame.
Then, from the center of that violence, Jesus forgives.
The cross is not the moment God becomes forgiving.
It is the moment humanity sees that God has been forgiving all along.
We killed Jesus.
God raised him.
That is where I find the good news.
The resurrection is not God announcing that the blood debt has been paid. It is God declaring that violence, sacrifice, accusation, and death do not get the final word.
Human violence meets divine love at the cross, and divine love refuses to become violent in return.
Jesus absorbs the worst we can do and rises with peace still in his mouth.
So no, I do not believe Jesus died for my sins.
I believe Jesus was killed by the forces sin creates: domination, fear, scapegoating, religious certainty, political power, and our willingness to sacrifice others to preserve the world as it is.
The cross does not show me what God needed to do to Jesus before God could forgive us.
It shows me what humanity does when God appears among us as vulnerable, liberating love.
And the resurrection shows me God’s answer:
Not vengeance.
Not another sacrifice.
Peace.
Letting go of divine punishment didn’t empty the cross.
It revealed the end of sacrifice.
Now, on a lighter note, let’s talk about hell.
What About Hell?
I grew up believing it was obvious. Hell was a real place of endless fire and conscious torment for those who died outside salvation. I was taught that Jesus went there after he died. Our church even built a Hell House to make sure no one missed the point.
But when I studied the language and history for myself, that certainty didn’t hold. The single English word hell gathers several biblical words and images into one doctrine, and Christians have never spoken with one voice about what judgment means or whether suffering lasts forever.
That does not prove every comforting answer true. It does mean eternal conscious torment is not the plain, uncontested biblical fact I was told it was.
I no longer believe God preserves people in suffering forever. If hell burns eternally, evil is not defeated.
It’s only maintained.
Rejecting that idea doesn’t make sin harmless, though.
Sin has consequences now. It hurts people, distorts communities, exploits the earth, and deforms the person committing it. Sin does not make God unable to be near us. It makes us less able to recognize and embody the love in which we already live. It trains us in fear, scarcity, shame, domination, and blame.
We do not need to wait for another world to see hell taking shape.
We build and inhabit versions of it here.
I have seen it in addiction, abuse, war, greed, and systems that consume lives for power or profit. I have seen it in churches where people sing about God’s love while being taught to hate themselves.
I have felt it in my own mind.
I still believe in judgment. I understand it as truth bringing what is hidden into light and love confronting everything opposed to love.
I have come to read divine fire less as an instrument of endless torture and more as an image of exposure and refinement: what is false burns away, and what is true remains.
In that sense, fire is not the opposite of love.
It is love refusing to leave us unhealed.
For years, I believed otherwise because I thought the Bible left me no choice.
The Bible After Certainty
You might think that questioning these doctrines means I no longer value scripture. The opposite is closer to the truth. I love the Bible more now that I have stopped forcing it to behave like something it never claimed to be.
The Bible isn’t a rulebook or a divine answer key dropped from the sky. It’s an ancient library of poetry, law, myth, lament, argument, wisdom, history, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse. It preserves humanity’s encounters and understandings of God alongside our confusion, fear, violence, hope, and gradual transformation.
Its humanity does not make scripture less sacred. Incarnation suggests that God is not embarrassed by the human.
The Word became flesh, not a doctrinal spreadsheet.
The Bible wrestles. Job dismantles simplistic theology. Ecclesiastes distrusts easy certainty. The prophets reject worship that ignores justice. The Psalms contain prayers most churches would quietly remove from the Sunday set list. Jesus himself says, “You have heard it said, but I say to you.”
Scripture contains tension, protest, development, and voices speaking from different stages of human understanding.
The Bible is not frightened by this.
Fundamentalism is.
I no longer approach every verse as though it has the same genre, purpose, authority, or picture of God. I read scripture through Jesus because I believe he is the clearest revelation of what God is like.
If a doctrine makes God look unlike Jesus, I question the doctrine.
If an interpretation requires me to violate the spirit of Jesus in order to defend the letter of a passage, I question the interpretation.
That is not a rejection of scripture.
It is a refusal to use scripture against the Word made flesh.
I do not worship the Bible.
I listen through it for the living Word.
When I hear love confronting power, mercy crossing boundaries, truth setting captives free, and forgiveness from a cross, the Word sounds like Jesus.
Once I stopped asking scripture to defend the old machinery, I could finally ask what salvation might mean beyond punishment, separation, and fear.
What Is Salvation?
For most of my life, salvation was a destination.
Humanity was headed for hell. Jesus provided the way to heaven. The important thing was to believe the right message before death, or at least before Jesus returned and caught you red-handed.
I still believe in salvation.
Salvation is healing from everything that distorts the image of God within us. It is freedom from shame, fear, ego, violence, accusation, and the need to dominate. It is awakening to the truth that we already belong to God, then learning to live as though that is true.
Salvation is not God forgiving us for the terrible mistake of being human.
It is becoming fully human.
I once imagined grace somewhere ahead of me. I was broken at the bottom of a hill, while Jesus waited at the top. Faith was the long climb upward.
But you cannot climb toward the ground already holding you.
Grace is not the destination.
Grace is the ground.
I begin in God. I am held, breathed, and sustained by a Presence I did not create. The problem is not that God is absent, but that I am often asleep, buried beneath fear, religious conditioning, inherited trauma, cultural programming, and the general confusion of being a mammal with Wi-Fi.
Jesus does not wait at the top of the hill.
He enters the valley, touches my eyes, and tells me to wake up.
Salvation is learning to see again.
It is the false self loosening its grip. It is becoming free enough to forgive, courageous enough to tell the truth, and whole enough to stop needing someone beneath us in order to feel secure.
It is resurrection beginning now.
It is heaven taking root in us until we stop manufacturing hell around us.
Salvation is not merely where we go after death. It is divine life becoming visible in us before we die.
Who Is Christ?
Jesus is the historical person: a first-century Jewish teacher, healer, prophet, mystic, and revolutionary presence who lived under Roman occupation and was executed by the machinery of empire.
Christ is larger than a surname attached to Jesus.
Christ names the eternal divine reality revealed through him: the Word through whom all things come into being, the life in whom creation holds together, and the pattern of self-giving love at the heart of reality.
I do not believe God is a distant being outside the universe, occasionally reaching into creation to perform supernatural interventions. I understand creation as existing within God, saturated by divine Presence without ever exhausting the mystery of God.
Everything is in God.
Nothing exists outside the Source from which existence continually flows. Yet God is not simply another name for the universe. Creation lives within God, but God remains infinitely more than creation.
Christ, then, is not a divine stranger dropped into a godless world.
Christ is the divine life already present within creation, made unmistakably visible in Jesus.
In him, humanity and divinity are not enemies. Spirit does not rescue us from matter. The Word becomes flesh, not to teach us to escape our humanity, but to reveal its capacity to bear divine life.
Jesus embodies Christ in a particular body, place, and time: under empire, among the poor, at shared tables, in the wilderness, beside the sick, on a Roman cross, and beyond the grave.
Love gets skin.
Calling Jesus the Christ means that in him we see both what God is like and what humanity is capable of becoming. His uniqueness does not reduce the rest of us to spectators. It opens a path of participation.
Jesus does not merely ask us to agree with statements about him.
He says, “Follow me.”
To follow Jesus is to participate in the life of Christ: forgiving enemies, surrendering our addictions, telling the truth, serving the vulnerable, resisting domination, welcoming the excluded, and allowing the false self to die before the body does.
Christ is not merely someone to worship from a safe religious distance.
Christ is a life to enter.
A pattern to embody.
A way of seeing and being shaped by union with God, until the love revealed in Jesus begins to take form in us.
In this gospel, God is not the problem Jesus solves.
God is the love Jesus reveals.
Why I Am Not Replacing One Label With Another
There are forms of Christianity expansive enough to hold much of what I now believe. I am grateful for the Christian mystics, theologians, pastors, and ordinary believers who kept windows open inside the tradition while others were building walls.
But I am not interested in finding a new label strong enough to replace the certainty I lost. Words such as mystic, universalist, panentheist, or follower of the Way can help describe where I stand, but none of them can contain it.
I am more interested in participation than possession. I would rather follow Christ than define the exact boundaries of who belongs to him. I would rather be transformed by truth than convince myself I own it.
The word “Christian” also carries particular weight in the United States. It has become entangled with nationalism, political power, exclusion, anti-LGBTQ theology, institutional protection, and a version of faith often more committed to dominating culture than embodying Christ.
I know this does not represent every Christian. But these are no longer minor associations, and I cannot pretend the word communicates something simple or harmless.
I am not distancing myself from Christians because I think I am better than them. I still attend church. I still love people inside the tradition. This is not an angry exit letter or an anti-church campaign.
I am simply trying to be honest.
I no longer want to defend doctrines that make us afraid of God or excuse cruelty because it comes wrapped in a Bible verse.
I don’t want to fit inside Christianity.
I want to become more like Christ.
A Father’s Faith
Fatherhood made all of this more urgent.
It is one thing to inherit a theology. It is another to look at your children and decide what you are willing to place inside their imagination of God.
I want my children to know Jesus without learning to fear the Father he revealed.
I want them to encounter scripture without being taught to distrust compassion, science, history, their bodies, or their honest questions. I want them to know reverence without coercion and mystery without manipulation.
I do not want the foundation of their spiritual lives to be the belief that they were born offensive to God and that someone had to die before God could safely love them.
I want them to know they are earth filled with divine breath. That God is not far away. That love is stronger than death. I want them to encounter the sacred in prayer and mercy, music and meals, nature and laughter, grief and ordinary life.
I want to give them a God they do not need to recover from.
That sentence has become one of the clearest measures of my theology.
If a religious idea makes them less compassionate, less honest, less alive, or more afraid of the God Jesus called Father, they have permission to question it.
Even if someone attaches a verse.
Especially then.
The Door Is Open
So this is me coming clean.
I cannot honestly call myself a Christian, at least not in the way the word was given to me.
But I have not left Jesus.
I still believe Christ reveals the heart of what we call God, resurrection is the shape of reality, and love will have the final word over violence, fear, and death.
For years, I thought faithfulness meant following the religious map.
Now I think it means putting the map down and walking the Way.
This is the soil from which The Way of the Source is beginning to grow.
It is not another denomination or doctrinal checkpoint, but a path rooted in the life of Jesus, seeking truth and wisdom wherever it bears the fruit of love, and grounded in the divine Presence within all things.
It is for those who cannot return to the old answers but still feel something holy moving beneath the ruins. For the faithful and doubtful, the wounded and wandering, those who still pray and those who no longer know how.
This is not an invitation to trade one certainty for another. It is an invitation to become present: to ask better questions, recover wonder, practice compassion, tell the truth about what harmed us, and become the kind of people through whom love can move freely.
It is an invitation to a table around which we might recognize the divine light in one another.
I do not know exactly what form this will take. I only know something is taking shape.
So while I cannot honestly call myself a Christian without explaining what I mean, what I no longer believe, and what I am still becoming… I am still following Jesus.
Maybe you are too, even if the old words no longer fit, your faith has become more question than answer, or you were told that leaving the system means leaving God.
The doorway is open.
See you along the Way.
