I don’t remember hearing spirituality talked about until I was an adult. Prior to that my hair was possibly permanently permed by spewing vehement religious preachers sharing the good news of fiery brimstone.

I think I was about fourteen years old when my family stopped going to small Baptist churches. We stopped not long after visiting another Christian church that didn’t call itself Baptist and people were smiling and happy there. This church didn’t teach their kids the song “Onward Christian soldiers marching as to war!”. The people at this church seemed alive (It was like the “lights” were on in this building or something). I didn’t know how dark the other churches were until I was somewhere with the “lights on”.

This new situation felt better than dutiful and obligatory routine to avoid the fiery hell or angry God, or at worst, BOTH. Maybe there was more to this Christian thing than all of the things I “should” and “should not” do. Maybe I mattered more than what I could do or not do for this god.

I think many people approach religion because they have questions and are genuinely seeking support for life’s challenges. Maybe it’s other reasons too, like their parents and their parents went to church and they also didn’t want to scrub satan’s toilets. I can’t think of a more shitty situation or effective inspiration for getting people to say “the prayer”.

No matter the reason or religion, I have found that common sense and trusting my gut is just as (if not more) valuable for spiritual health. I regret how my own indoctrination supposedly supported some of my decisions in the past, but I have been blessed to recognize some potential traps in my not so distant past. Some spiritual shit is soooo slick (cue visual of me cleaning toilets in hell again).

Come to think of it, it wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I felt like I could engage with Christianity in a way that was helpful rather than only an imagined way out/golden ticket to heaven. It wasn’t “Christianity” that gave me meaning as much as that it was a language I worked with to express and discover more of this love center in my heart. This began when I began incorporating music. I’m pretty confident I would have worked with whatever religion I was born into for a while as well, and that it too would have been adequate for a time to contemplate “spiritual truth”. Now I enjoy discovering and practicing methods I find helpful from varying spiritual traditions.

Even though I don’t identify as “Christian” (it doesn’t take much observation of present or past Donald Trump advocates to understand why) anymore, the word Christianity still comes out of my mouth sometimes because I still care…often begrudgingly and yes paradoxically…I care. Why? because I care about people, and because my spiritual roots began here. Yes, sometimes my words might feel heated and I get upset..but I feel this is appropriate when I’m talking about an institution that people almost quite literally give their lives to and are often manipulated and feel hurt by. I feel like I can’t NOT talk about it after seeing how people claiming “Christian” encourage and empower systems (and “bible-backed" personal opinion Facebook posts) that make it more difficult for people to enjoy what I believe any healthy spirituality encourages…personal revelation, liberation, sovereignty, and life.

-Josh