How I Left the Catholic Church
I was born and raised in the Roman Catholic Church, from birth up to college. And I was pretty devout, though I was never confirmed because my parents couldn’t afford it. Sure, sometimes the Church took positions I didn’t understand, but they were the Right Church, so it must be right, right?
I never really loved Mass. It was one of those things that you do because you have to, but religion isn’t really meant to be enjoyable, right? It’s just a means to an end - you go, so that you can check that box and you don’t end up burning in hell. I never really felt like God acted directly in my life, but I assumed that it worked that way for everyone.
I started reading fan fiction in high school. And at first, I rolled my eyes in moral indignation at homosexual relationships in fan fiction, because it was a sin, right? But for some fandoms, the most interesting stories only come in slash-flavored romance, so I read them “for the story.” I particularly remember an old Phoenix Wright fic that turned the main characters into superheroes. And, over time, I found myself wondering - what, really, was so different about these relationships?
Enter college. I went to a Protestant-affiliated college, much to my parents’ delight, because Protestant was better than Secular. My roommate was a Methodist who turned out to be the best friend I could imagine. Sure, we always had our differences, but I found that I could rely on her even where I couldn’t rely on my parents.
At this Protestant College, I also took a lot of Bible classes (because they were required). And, you know, reading the Bible and learning about its history means you actually start to learn something about the historical and linguistic nuances of the text. And over time, I began to question some of the things I’d always been taught - where did we get the idea of some particular threshold of sin that meant God no longer wanted you? Where did we get the idea that homosexuality was someone worse than all the other sins that were legal? What justification was there for condemning unbaptized babies? Could infallible authority ever be safely vested in one human being? If I could violate other laws in the Old Testament, could I get a tattoo? Were there circumstances where abortion could be morally justified?
And, over time, I stopped going to church, until I started going, just part time, whenever I felt like it, to the church my friend attended. First just to hang out, then to help with VBS, then to help clean up the nearly-abandoned children’s wing. And then, slowly, every week, as we started teaching the church’s handful of kids, and we started running VBS when the previous children’s director stepped down, and we started running new events to encourage the church to grow.
And teaching kids about the Bible taught me more about my faith than I could have imagined. For once, I could go to church, and feel like God was actually there, actually watching, actually participating. I felt a little like a child, bringing the class’s accomplishments to a parent - This child understood the lesson about fairness, God! Look at how good they’re doing!
Eventually, we asked about how General Conference worked in the Methodist church, because my friend and I were curious. And to our surprise, we were invited to be Annual Conference delegates - the previous regular delegate had resigned for health reasons. The only requirement was that I officially join the church, so I did. And we went, and I found myself living off the feeling of being immersed in my religion, not in an abstract sense, but in a real, concrete sense - I could talk about what, in concrete terms, God was directing me to do. It was intoxicating.
