Guest post: Why I Left the Catholic Church

A testimony on deconstruction

CW: Mental health struggles, suicide, homophobia, racism

2020. The year I left the Church. The year the Covid-19 pandemic unleashed its chaos on the world. It made enemies between brothers, isolated us all, and killed far too many. It left many of us questioning the state of the world, our jobs (since many of us shifted to work-from-home), our politics, and even our religions.

Though I officially left the Catholic Church that year, my story began earlier.

I was born and raised to parents who devoutly practiced, who chose to homeschool us (for better and for worse), and who attended an extremely conservative, orthodox Catholic parish.

I was sheltered most of my life: emotionally, educationally, religiously, socially, and sexually. My parents' best intentions — to protect us from what they believed to be harmful indoctrination from the "secular world" — meant that I grew up with a thoroughly Catholic education. This shaped me for the better in many ways. I learned so much Catholic theology, and it taught me above all that God is love and that all life is sacred. 

But my education also gave me a very narrow view of the world. For example, historical events I learned about excluded important contextual backgrounds, usually favoring a narrative that put Christianity and the United States in the best light. I never learned about abuses by the Church during the Spanish Inquisition, or the slave-owning backgrounds of many of the founding fathers of the U.S. I never even learned about racism or the Civil Rights movement. Slavery was something touched on briefly, but never fully explained. 

Though I was never taught about racism, some of my parents’ rhetoric bothered me when it came to race, even at a young age. When I heard immigrants called illegal “aliens,” something in me thought it didn’t sound right to call another human being such a dehumanizing word. Or when they spoke in favor of the death penalty, the pro-life values that had been instilled in me let out little alarm bells. Some things I was taught didn’t sit quite right with me. But most of what I learned I still swallowed whole, not knowing what I didn’t know.

Much of the undertone in my education and my family’s spiritual culture was that we Catholics were at war against the world. I was taught how big, bad, and scary it was, where the gays and the liberals of the world preyed upon us, but also needed saving. Our faith needed defending. There was a war between good and evil, between Republican and Democrat, between Christians/Catholics and the non-believers. And we good Republican Catholics must win at all costs. 

Mostly, we would do so by telling everyone else how wrong they were.

I never left the ever-so-carefully protected bubble I grew up in, even as I went on to higher education. I attended a small Catholic private college in Kansas — the one Harrison Butker spoke at. It only served to cement my conservative Catholic upbringing, and I was happy in it. I experienced a rich spiritual life. I prayed and went to Mass daily, stood outside abortion clinics with a rosary in my hand, and attended March for Life in D.C. I was a part of campus ministries and had countless experiences that shaped me for the better. 

Even post-graduation, I still lived in the same bubble. I worked as a writer at the national headquarters of a Catholic missionary organization. As a blog editor and writer there, I learned I had a gift not only for writing, but also for seeing things with the broader vision of an artist’s heart. People told me my blog posts resonated with their struggles, and that my perspectives made them think. 

I learned I liked to write about culture and spirituality in a way that challenged people to consider things beyond what they could see on their own. Maybe I was subconsciously aware that I had been in a bubble my entire life. I wondered about the world beyond my own limited line of sight. Some spirit I can’t fully explain grew in me, and it was slowly expanding beyond what the bubble could hold. 

I liked working there at first. I had a wonderful boss and coworkers. But over time, I started to get little slaps on the proverbial wrist. When I wrote about the movie Spotlight, I encouraged Catholics in my circle to hold the church accountable for its history of sexual abuse, rather than sweep it under the rug. The vice president of the organization had a sit-down with my boss and I to tell me it was perhaps too far, that clergy abuse was a sensitive topic that could potentially lead readers astray. The Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal already had led so many people to leave; no need to stir the pot and cause more doubt for impressionable readers. I needed to help maintain a positive image of Catholics.

A couple of years later, I was working for a Catholic Archdiocese. I was a journalist writing for the diocesan newspaper when Donald Trump was elected in 2016. One of the opinion pieces I wrote — from a politically neutral position about getting through the inauguration day after an emotionally heated election season — garnered a phone call from a displeased Republican donor of the newspaper. This person called the archbishop directly to ask us to take it down because it didn’t portray Trump in an explicitly positive lens. 

I learned that donors of the newspaper — largely conservative — held a lot of power over what was and what wasn’t allowed to be published. In this instance, my editor was on my side and didn’t take it down. But the incident opened my eyes to the reality that maybe the views I had held my whole life were under the influence of money or political partisanship. I slowly began to realize through experiences like this that the narratives that made up the fabric of my belief system had been delicately and selectively skewed towards a completely positive view of Catholicism and Republicanism. Anything that threatened that power or view was to be silenced. 

I grew more bothered by these experiences as I continued working for Catholic organizations. My writing was only acceptable if I didn’t make people in power too uncomfortable. I started to think that maybe parts of myself and the world were only welcome under certain conditions. In my personal life, I had never strayed far from socially proper “good Catholic” behavior, but it was largely because I was afraid of what could happen if I didn’t: I wouldn’t be in good standing among my community. I’d hear whispers from other family and friends about how so-and-so got divorced, so-and-so is gay, or some friend fell away from the Church. Some siblings ventured into recreational drugs, and oh, the drama that caused the family. It was clear to me that if I wanted to feel safe and belong, I had to follow their conditions of proper belief and behavior. I was a “good girl.” I had to be.

During my time at the newspaper, in the early Trump era, I grew more worried about the way Catholics were talking about immigrants. Calls for mass deportation, speaking about these human beings as "aliens" or by even worse names, cries to build a wall around the Mexico border — all these things tore apart the lives of families, individuals and children who just so happened to be minorities. It became apparent to me from the voices of people who raised me or called themselves friends, that the "pro-life" doctrine I had been taught about the supposed sanctity of life applied to the unborn, and no one else. 

Any time I raised these concerns (in conversation with family members in particular, but also on social media), I was met with false claims and defensiveness. For example, I've heard that Catholic teaching says there is hierarchy when it comes to human lives, the unborn being at the top of the list. But thanks to my Catholic college education, I knew there is no such teaching. Clearly, false teaching had a prevalent spot in conservative American Catholicism, and the broader Catholic social teaching was entirely dismissed.

In 2017, I married. In 2018, I was pregnant. In 2019, my world as I knew it changed forever. While I was in the throes of postpartum depression, severe chronic illness, and a baby I couldn’t care for by myself, one of my younger sisters died by suicide. 

Losing her, watching her descend into the darkest depths of mental illness, and feeling like I failed to save her, were some of the hardest things I have ever faced. Many things contributed to her death. 

Before she died, she was outed as queer by my family members. Then, assuming she would try to live according to the Catholic teaching on homosexuality, they told her, “This is a cross you’ll have to carry for the rest of your life,” and, “Your life is going to be so hard.” This was a horrible burden to put on someone, even with the best intentions. My sister felt that she wouldn’t belong if she didn’t live up to this perfectly. She already felt like she didn’t belong in general. 

My sweet sister had been so in love with her faith until that year when she experienced significant traumas. Before then, she had attended youth groups, retreats, and girls camps led by Catholic nuns. She came back from one retreat feeling called to become a nun herself. She later told me it was largely because she felt like it would be the only safe place for her as a queer woman in the Church. 

After my sister was outed, my family’s words to her only added to the unbearable burden church teaching and LGBTQ prejudice put on her shoulders, which compounded the weight of other traumatic experiences and mental illness. She collapsed under that cumulative weight. It killed her. 

I still considered myself Catholic at the time, but by that point I just couldn’t hold onto what this form of “faithful Catholicism” did to my sister. Not when I was face to face with her as we closed a casket and then buried her. 

I will never forget how, not long before she died, she hugged me and told me she was queer, sobbing on my shoulder when she recounted what some of the family had said to her. In the name of Catholicism. It was the final crack in my faith system to see her in this much pain. This wasn’t just about separating families I’d heard about at the border or ignoring abuse victims I saw in a movie. This was about the death of my own sister. I unknowingly decided at that moment that no doctrine was ever worth killing — literally and figuratively — other people. 

2019 and all its horrors may have been the final crack in my faith, but at that time I still couldn’t have imagined what would happen next. 

This brings us back to 2020 — the final rupture.

Death filled the headlines daily, in ever-increasing tolls. My mental health, which still hadn’t recovered from losing my sister, began slipping. I watched isolated friends and family argue over social distancing and mask-wearing as a global health crisis became political. Seeing the way Christians protested about their right to "freedom" (ironically a form of "my body my choice"), so that they didn't have to wear a mask when millions were dying around them, pushed my faith to a near-explosive boiling point. I couldn't understand how the same group that taught me to care for and be aware of my neighbors no matter the cost, was hunkering down and fighting for themselves while others suffered. But maybe it made sense. I had already experienced conservative Catholicism’s capacity to drive people to death. 

George Floyd's murder in the summer of 2020 was the explosion in America that finally broke my former faith wide open. The response of Christians came as a shock. At best, there was utter silence. At worst, their response dismissed his humanity: they called him names, they said he deserved it, they said racism did not exist. The fact that people in my circles felt so uncomfortable or threatened by naming racism was just one of the things that showed me how racism still runs rampant. I made connections between those reactions and what I had witnessed about the treatment of immigrants and refugees.

I felt sick to my stomach watching all this happen and seeing the response (or lack thereof) from the church. These were the people I was raised with. These people who had said such horrible things were my friends. This was my community. This was my understanding of “good Catholics.”

I was so shaken, my eyes finally opened for the first time to something that happened all the time to Black people. I wanted to talk to my closest girlfriends about it. But when I tried to discuss what happened with them, several dismissed it. They either didn't want to talk about it and danced around the horrid truth of what happened, or they denied the existence of racism. One friend claimed that, yes, it was terrible what happened, but he wasn’t a good man, and one instance of a black man dying doesn’t mean the world is racist. I was flabbergasted. For them, George Floyd's past failures robbed his death of significance, as if someone's character flaws made a murder okay. Meanwhile, I began to dig into this history of racism, a topic never broached in my education. I learned about the recent and present-day systems that still keep white people in power. All of it broke my heart.

I didn't know what to do with my family and friends in this reality, or how to respond to any of them. I tried to educate, to engage in discussions. But when someone doesn’t want to see reality that doesn’t fit their biased perception of it, there is nowhere to go. All I knew now was that I was seeing things differently, I was not the same, I no longer fit in. And my questions and protests were not welcome.

My questions only increased in number. If the “good Catholics” behaved this way, was what I was taught the actual truth? How could people preach all of these beliefs about the sanctity of human life, and then turn around and speak and act in such dehumanizing ways, with a MAGA hat and a smile on their face? The good things I was raised to believe, that God is love, that all humans are sacred, that Jesus came and told us to love one another, actually had limits for these people. 

I believed these things — I still do. It's why I left.

I could no longer stomach existing in a religion that said one thing and did another so brazenly. And it wasn't just an, "Oh, these people are just imperfect" kind of misalignment of belief and behavior. It was an obstinate unwillingness to listen when faced with the reality of life — with direct opportunities to show just how sacred all life is. The lack of inclusion and hatred toward LGBTQ people; the dismissal and violence toward BIPOC folks; the dehumanization of immigrants and refugees; the dismissiveness and covering up of sexual abuse in the church. Instead, all of this was denied, dismissed. When you raised concerns, they doubled down. 

In a matter of months, the questions and concerns I had been raising for years came together in a fury, and my world and my faith as I knew it crumbled. Suddenly, my eyes opened to my own religious trauma. And I broke.

I decided not long after George Floyd's murder to take a step back from the Catholic Church. It was the scariest thing I've ever done. Throughout my entire life, I had been raised to believe that everything outside the church would kill me; that the church was the only one, true church, and that being outside of it would mean going to hell, because I would be turning my back on "truth." How could I know Jesus and still leave the church he founded, they'd wonder. What’s the big deal with some imperfect people, why “throw the baby out with the bath water.”

But I could no longer take the two-facedness, the hypocrisy, the outright harm I saw against minority groups from both church leadership and its people in such an obstinate manner. I know what they think, because I thought these things myself whenever I heard about someone leaving. There's even a special word for this: "apostatizing." Leaving the faith — a nearly unforgivable act. Countless people in the church's history had rather died than doing such a thing, earning them martyrdom. And here I was — leaving. 

But I wouldn’t die for this faith. Not after seeing how it could kill.

The God that I knew would be rallying for the “least of these,” not criminalizing and dehumanizing them. He wouldn't be throwing queer people out of church, or shutting out refugees. Jesus was one himself. Jesus was not like what I was seeing from the church, and I was not at peace because of it. There were plenty of good, beautiful people in the church. But as a whole, I felt that if other people didn't belong, neither did I. He would have followed the people who were thrown out and oppressed right out the door. I left because I wanted to be more like Jesus.

Painfully, one of my greatest values is integrity; I don't always live it perfectly, but it showed me I could no longer be a part of something that was completely against what I believed to be sacred: other human lives. Even if leaving meant losing relationships in my life, which is exactly what happened.

I didn't know if or when I was going to tell family or friends — but I decided to start with just one person close to me. She had been a part of my wedding ceremony. She was there for me when I was chronically ill, nursing me a few times during that horrible year. She was there for me when my sister died. So I assumed it would be safe for me to share this vulnerable thing I was experiencing with her. We met with our kids at a park one day, and I told her I was taking a break from the church. I told her how the things that had happened had affected me deeply, that I realized I had religious trauma and felt too triggered to go to church without having panic attacks. I briefly shared some of the questions I had about our religion, and how I was reconsidering my beliefs.

She didn't take it well. She kept asking questions that revealed her own insecurity with my leaving and warned me about "throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” I was surprised. We parted on somewhat good terms; but over the next few weeks, she began ghosting me. Finally, I asked her point blank over text if there was something wrong. She told me we could no longer be friends. She wouldn’t tell me why. But I could guess.

This event proved to me two things. One, that it was not safe for me to tell these people, my people. The loss of this friendship rocked me to my core. With her walking out of my apostatized life, she took with her an entire Catholic community we once felt at home with. With one traumatic fell swoop, I lost so many people in my life — all on top of the other events of 2020.

Second, it proved the truth of the creeping fear I had my whole life, that my acceptance in my Catholic community was conditional. I had to behave the right way, think the right way. I had committed the ultimate crime: leaving the faith. It utterly broke me to be shown that loving someone no matter what they did or believed, as I had been taught, had been a myth. The discrimination I had seen done to others had now been done to me. I was now the outsider. And boy, did they want me to feel it. After one family member found out about my news, he refused to acknowledge, speak to, or even look at me.

After that event, the Great Alone settled in. We were all isolated. There was not a single other soul I knew that had deconstructed — a word I came across on Instagram in that year I left. I fell into a black hole, one where depression consumed me. The abandonment by my ex-friend whispered in my heart how there must have been something wrong with me.

I scoured social media for anyone who could talk to me. I didn’t want to be overcome with depression. I don’t remember how I even stumbled on any of it, but the blessed algorithm and some searching led me to seek out others who also experienced religious trauma. It seemed that there were a few others who had also left the church of their upbringing around the same time I did. I joined a deconstruction small group on Zoom focused on sharing experiences of religious trauma. It was such a new concept, at least as it was known by that word, for that time. I racked my brain, trying to find answers to questions about what I believed, since what I thought I knew was blasted to smithereens.

But my search came to a grinding halt. I couldn’t cope with the emotional and social turmoil in my life, and I ended up in a mental health hospital. Next to my sister’s death, it was the worst place I had been. But hitting that low point saved me. I got the help of therapy and medication. I got help processing. Through just living, I learned that I could live without the religion I had before; I didn't have answers, but something in me said it was okay. Even if I felt like I was still in a black hole of death just trying to climb out, I was still alive. 

My recovery over the next year took on a more peaceful, albeit still very painful, milieu. I was still sick in many ways. My marriage struggled, though my fearless and faithful husband was a rock in all these events. I had to face an addiction to shopping that had grown out of my sister's death. I still grieved what I had lost over those several awful years.

But I healed. Slowly. I realized, after deep diving into the waters of the "secular world" (life outside the church), that the water was fine. I felt so much more at peace than I had ever felt in my entire life — which would only grow as I began recovery for my addiction, stabilized mentally, and worked on my marriage. A new community slowly showed itself in our lives through an LGBTQ-affirming non-denominational church, where my husband got a job. One where even belief was not required to belong; I had never felt so at home than I have in this new community.

I started to slowly find answers to what I believed about certain questions. If you asked me where I stand on certain things now, I have some sort of an answer. But more often than not, questions remain. It became clear to me over time that answers and certainty were not a requirement to live a happy, or even God-filled, life. 

I still believe in a higher power which is Love itself, a divine presence that is not restricted by any one gender. I still believe some of the basic principles that I was raised with, like the sanctity of life. I still like some of the Catholic saints.

Life, belief, and relationships are NOT static in my life; things are ever-evolving. I’ve evolved into someone who can evolve. There is no pretty bow and happy ending to this story of just one chapter of my life. It's just life — in all her messy, gray areas. I still have hard days. My sister is still gone. But the one thing that anchors me, the one thing that survived the wreckage of faith in my heart, is the belief that God is love. That love is me. That I am loved. That I am to show that love to others. That everyone, everything, belongs. A God whose arms open so wide that they swallow the whole world — and no one is left out. True justice is to love others, to honor the dignity that is already theirs, no matter their race, creed, color, sexual identity, gender expression, religion, or political views. I honor my sister in that love.

If that's the only belief left at the end of the day for any religion — or even after you’ve left religion — I think love is a pretty good answer.