Losing My Religion (or Why I Stopped Going to Church)

Coming to the realization that religion isn't for you may be tough. How do we grieve the passing of something so engrained in us?

Aug 16, 2024

Editor’s Note: As a member of Gen X, it was required by law that I incorporate this song and music video into this post.

It was clear to me early on that I had a different upbringing than other kids.

What do you mean you don’t eat pasta twice a week? Like good Italian-Americans, it wasn’t unheard of in our house.

What do you mean you don’t have air conditioning? Half of my family worked for Carrier, which manufactured residential and commercial air conditioning units in Syracuse.

What do you mean you have only been to Disney World once? My aunt Marietta never married or had children of her own, so she would take her sisters’ children to the Happiest Place on Earth every other year. She was a Disney nut and she shared it with us.

What do you mean your family doesn’t have priests come to your holidays? Msgr. Charles Borgognoni was a fixture at nearly every holiday or birthday with the Mancinis.

Father Charles was a local celebrity due to his larger-than-life personality, work with an amateur theatre company and presence at Syracuse University football and basketball games, where he was the teams’ chaplain. Through his relationship with my grandparents and aunt, he was also our in-house clergyman. It certainly made grace before a holiday meal a little more authentic.

For those who haven’t heard this before, I was raised in a pretty traditional Italian-American, Roman Catholic household. We were a very matrilineally-focused family; my mother was Catholic, therefore we were Catholic.

Sundays (mostly Saturday evenings, because suburban convenience) were spent seated in the nave of St. Joseph’s the Worker church in Liverpool. Tuesday evenings? Those were upstairs in the old schoolhouse for weekly religious education classes1. Eventually, Saturdays were added to the mix when I was old enough for the CYO basketball program. While I aged out of that in middle school, I hung around to help out through most of my high school years. I was also an altar server, which was a very greaseball Italian point of pride for my mother.

My choice of college, St. Bonaventure University, had less to do with religion than the reputation of its journalism program. I went to mass semi-regularly2, mostly because my girlfriend3 nagged me. By my junior or senior year, I was less diligent about attending church.

I returned to the green-carpeted sanctuary at St. Joe’s after I was laid off from my first job in college. By then, I was fully engulfed in a cycle of anxiety and panic, and sought relief in the obsessive-compulsive recitation of prayer, as if I could will away the mental anguish through submission to my faith. I didn’t know any better.

I was married in a Catholic church, though not my own. One of the friars from college made the trip as did another family priest that was sort of foisted upon us by my aunt.

My turning point came one Sunday afternoon at a last-chance mass4. My girlfriend insisted on going and pulled me along with her. It was your standard stand-sit-stand-respond-singalong-respond-stand-respond-sit opening run leading up to the homily. Now, for the uninitiated, this is where the priest (or designated homilist) is supposed to connect the scripture of the week to life as we know it. Instead, we got 10 minutes of anti-abortion rhetoric and political grandstanding from the pulpit. I got up and walked out. I was insulted that this was how the time was being used; not to reaffirm faith or inspire, but campaign for a political issue.

I’ve been to weddings and funerals since, but my weekly mass attendance stopped. She continued going until the church burned her (and us).

We started getting questions about the baptism of our first child some time during the second trimester. Naturally, we’d go through my wife’s church because why wouldn’t we? It meant more to her side of the family. Our desire was to do what others did by appointing two godmothers — our sisters — to do the deed as godparents. Both had been confirmed and were officially Catholic adults so no problem, right?

Yes problem. The feudal king and pastor of St. Cecelia’s Roman Catholic Church5 in Solvay refused to entertain the notion because, according to the him, only a man and a woman can parent a child so that must be reflected at the christening6. My aunt called in another priest from the bullpen7 to take care of business for us. And now my wife has turned her back on the church.

We never did baptize the second kid. No one dared to ask our plans when she came along.

I don’t miss the church or going to church, which are two very different things. I stopped taking solace and comfort from religion long ago, and I don’t belief in giving my time to an institution that continually wants to take. I no longer receive the eucharist when I attend a funeral or wedding because it seems hypocritical.

And I’m not the only one. Church membership is down 20% since 2000 and less than half of Americans belong to a church, according to Gallup. The hypocrisy of leadership, rampant child sex abuse scandals across denominations, and the failure to adapt to modernity are all contributors.

If childhood was my Believer Era, then my 20s and 30s were the Cathnostic Era where I believed in a spiritual power while rejecting the institution. Today, I fall quite further into the atheistic camp. I don’t believe a God exists. When there are questions that can’t be answered, it’s simply that no answer exists yet. I also think that you’re welcome to believe whatever you’d like8.

Still, how do you remove such an ingrained part of your being without it leaving a scar? Or, at the very least, feeling some level of grief around the loss of this part of you? I think it’s part of a slow burn. I didn’t just walk away one night at mass; the doubt and skepticism started much earlier.

And now, A Word from My Sister…

My sister, Marlo, went through her own religious awakening as a youth. We spent our youths on the same pews, but she diverted in high school to an evangelical youth group called YoungLife9. It provided community and support to her at her darkest hour — the period when she lived at home as a teenager while our mother was dying. I don’t begrudge any of that; a need was filled at a hollow time in her life. But, like any self-sustaining cult, I feel as if the leadership took some advantage of her vulnerable state. She spent quite a bit of time chasing careers with this organization and others like it before pivoting.

(As an aside, if you had evangelical friends or family during the 1990s, I cannot recommend Jason Kirk’s Hell Is A World Without You enough. Endearing, funny and thought-provoking.)

I posed this question to my sister: When did you decide you were done with religion? This was her response, which I lightly edited for clarity, grammar, etc., and there are facts I never heard previously:

Mass on Sunday. Confession every Christmas and Easter season, religious education classes on Tuesday. Rinse and repeat; that’s the Catholic way. My high school years in the 1990s were pretty normal: trying to figure out who I was, where I belonged, and what hair color I wanted that week. I also had the typical relationship that most teenage girls have with their mother: she was mean and contradicting; I was bitchy with a teenage hormonal angst like no other, and most of our arguments ended with “I’m done with you. Go talk to your father.” But at the end of the week, all was made right again because of that holy hour we spent sitting on hard, wooden pews in the air-conditioned sanctuary that constantly smelled like funeral flowers.

Religion for our family, was built on the convenience of time and checking a box:

Christmas? Midnight mass that started at 10:30 p.m. ✓

A graduation party on Sunday? No worries. There’s 5:30 p.m. mass on Saturday. ✓

Confession during Holy Week? ✓

No one reflected on what we learned or what Jesus taught; we were just checking the box to get to Wegmans before the other churches let out.

When I was 15, I attended my weekly religious education ritual. My teacher was young and cool and excited about religion. And, I slowly noticed that others in my class, and my school, were as well. Curious, I attended his weekly youth group meetings. These eventually turned into two meetups a week, two or three weekend camp trips throughout the school year, and one week away a summer in the Adirondacks.

Long story short, I drank the Kool-aid.

I began to try and practice what I was learning: be kind and serve others, and <gulp> act more like Jesus. (It’s normal for a 15-year-old to sit home and read her Bible instead of going to a party in the woods…right?) The reality of it was I took comfort in it. The idea that THE omnipotent himself was going to look after me and reward me with the best because of my commitment to that biblical life was the most supporting thing that I had going on at that time in my life; my brother was away at college and I was living with my parents — one who worked a lot to barely pay the bills and the other whose health was declining fast from an aggressively-advancing pancreatic cancer.

I was loyal to Christianity for close to a decade. Once I graduated high school, I stayed involved in this group by becoming a leader; in college, I trained others interested in becoming a leader. I spent summers working at their camps located in the Adirondacks and Catskills, and even spent a year at a camping property in North Carolina. I was very committed and was ready for the higher-ups at this organization to realize I was ready for a career in the youth ministry industry, and felt that the amount of time and experience I had gained at this point made it a no-brainer for them to say yes.

HOWEVER, they didn’t and it was because the very teacher I had met almost 10 years prior told them AND me that my faith and commitment weren’t strong enough.

So…when did I lose religion? I’d say it started that day. The day that I was rejected from the ministry I gave my time, efforts, emotions, and money to.

It took me a year to regroup and figure out what to do next. When I got accepted into my master’s program at Stony Brook University, I gladly packed up my life and headed to Long Island, where I was able to start over, build new relationships, and learn more about the person I really am.

With almost 20 years between me and the day I walked away from my faith, I can honestly say that I do NOT miss it and I don’t grieve losing it. The loss that I actually grieve is time: the time I will never get back, when I should have been discovering who I am, testing limits, having experiences, and living.

It’s easy to look around and say, “How can there be a God that ends all suffering when all there is in this world is suffering?” Ukraine. Gaza and Israel. Childhood hunger. The reasons behind thousands of people migrating from Latin America to the United States. Covid-19. Hurricane Katrina. AIDS. Polio. The aforementioned church sex abuse scandals. I can keep going. The 1,300+ Muslims that died while making a pilgrimage to Mecca during the Hajj…died paying tribute to their God.

The answer, for some, is God’s wrath. I mean, Pat Robertson cornered the market as America’s voice on God’s revenge for being gay, though he’s not alone in this belief.

So, where did it start for me? My mother’s death in 1997 got me to question the point of religion. I once heard a priest at my college talk about how his own cancer brought him closer to God because he understood Christ’s suffering for all of us. I suppose you can rationalize anything if you work hard at it and believe enough in it10.

Still, I can’t buy that her death was more than just a biological condition where mutated cells attacked her pancreas, metastasized, and spread throughout her body. I don’t believe that God imbued her with disease so that she could better relate to Jesus Christ; I think it was shitty genes11 and a 40+ year relationship with cigarette smoking.

Cementing it all, though, was working for the Alzheimer’s Association. Working up close with a person living with Alzheimer’s disease is an eye-opening experience that makes you question everything. How do you rationalize a disease that steals your memory and eventually regresses you to the point of being bedridden as anything but the suffering God is supposed to deliver us from? I couldn’t.

And, frankly, I won’t.

So, I walked away.

Final thoughts on finality…

“All that Hell shit,” she said, unzipping my hoodie and handing it back, “isn’t afterlife panic. It’s excuses to abuse people now, like addicts and victims need more bad shit. Because we’re the only way outta Hell, everyone better agree with us on everything. Hell is a world without God? Hell is a Christian president bombing Iraqi babies!”

― Jason Kirk, Hell Is a World Without You

• • •

“I say fuck all religions for all time and forever. The Thing—what IT is—whatever it is that made math, all this hatred, all this judgement didn’t come from it. WE made religion. I don’t know. I don’t know anything really. All I know for sure is that thing loves us. This thing loves us so much that if we were exposed to it, our brains would melt.”

— Mike McGuirk, Strike Four (via Healings)

Losing My Religion (or Why I Stopped Going to Church)

Coming to the realization that religion isn't for you may be tough. How do we grieve the passing of something so engrained in us?

And now, A Word from My Sister…

Final thoughts on finality…

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