Week 4 Recap: Can We Still Be Friends?

I had another jam-packed* week in this process.

*Totally not what I said I'd do at the end of my last post. Though to be fair, I'd already scheduled most of these meetings before then, and some travels opened up unique chances to see people I wanted to connect with.

I've kept reading, enjoying my entry into the Old Testament more than I expected. And I got to hear about the faith journeys of new friends and some of my oldest ones.

One particular conversation, while not super representative of my recent focus, feels worth reporting on here.

I talked with a Christian minister who had several friends recently walk away from the faith. I told him I'd been on both sides of that - as the church leader watching people leave our community/faith and as the apostate who left it. I listened as he shared grief, hurt, and fear around these changing relationships. We talked about what a hard thing someone leaving a faith can be for a friendship to bear. It was a chance to witness a dynamic that's been tender and personal in my own life from a more neutral, third-party seat.

Note: While these thoughts were inspired by that conversation, I want to clarify these are my personal reflections on that general dynamic of a friend leaving the church - not meant to represent the specifics of that private conversation or the individuals we discussed.

Faith Break-Ups

For the person who leaves, there's often shame and fear of the unknown - uncertainty about how, or if, newly emerging ideas can fit into the life they'd already built. That person often faces judgment, gossip, and rejection from religious friends. And even if they don't, the fear that they might is enough to push them toward isolation from their Christian community.

On the flip, the Christian is often left feeling abandoned or easily discarded. Believers can get lumped into the idea of "judgmental Christian" that's sometimes built off a few isolated experiences of people being jerks, or even from how social/news media can generalize Christians. That narrative can be cast onto genuine, loving friends just because they share the label "Christian."

Both people, in this dynamic, just want to be seen and known as they are - not filed under predetermined categories of "foolish apostate" or "judgy religionist."

When ideology is at the center of a relationship and then the ideology changes or gets abandoned, the relationship either has to change with it or else die. Either way, there's usually a grieving process involved.

When Religion is the Whole Relationship

I've watched a lot of these situations arrive at the same hard-to-accept reality: the two "friends" never really had anything in common besides the religion. You want to believe the friendship was real, but when the religion gets pulled out out, there's not much left to talk about. That doesn't erase what the connection used to be, and maybe there's a new kind of connection to find, but usually this ends with both people making peace with moving on.

When There's Something Else There

Where there is a real connection beyond a once-shared religion, we can make staying friends harder on ourselves than it needs to be. Both sides can torture themselves about how the other might be judging them, or how they desperately want to save the other in some form (into or out of religion). But that doesn't feel like friendship to me. It's more like viewing the other person, or yourself, as a project.

If you want to move forward with someone in your life that you suddenly find in a different camp than you spiritually, a powerful first step can be reassuring them that you accept them as they are and still want them in your life, even with whatever changes are happening.

Christians can bristle at that, because it can feel like putting your stamp of approval on what you see as the biggest mistake of their life. Some believers feel that reaction is justified, even scripturally required (Matthew 18:17, Romans 16:17). I'm not here to argue doctrine if that's genuinely how you read it. But the Christians I've met who've made peace with non-religious friends tend to describe it as trust that someone's salvation is God's work, not a result achieved from social pressure applied to keep them in line. Maybe making it safer for someone to doubt is actually an act of faith, not a failure of it.

And the doubter or non-believer can feel the inverse - resistance to staying close to a friend whose views you’ve come to see as distasteful or harmful. Again, fair enough if that's how you feel. But it's worth asking whether you're projecting assumptions onto them based only on your experience of faith, without ever giving them the chance to just be who they are.

The bitter irony of judging someone because you think they might be judgmental.

On both sides: ask the other person about their experience before you cast them into a narrative. That can be tough if you're coming from a place of fear - fear of where their life may lead, fear the friendship will fail, fear they'll go to hell. The fear can lead you to avoid asking in case you'd rather not know the answer. But deciding what someone thinks before you've let them tell you is just a more passive way of deciding the relationship is over.

Affirmed in Doubt

I've also gotten to experience some of the opposite of that dynamic. Several of the people I've conversed with in this process have affirmed my acceptance of disbelief. It's made me feel seen and understood, which isn't why I'm doing this but it feels good.

The more antagonistic reaction - when someone gets angry or repulsed by my doubts - has always confused me a little... Like - I'm just telling the truth. I'm not rejecting Christianity just to hurt you broh. What exactly is the alternative here? That I'd pretend to believe just to protect your feelings?

Irritating as that dynamic has been over the years, I've really appreciated conversing with Christians who are secure enough in their beliefs to engage with me even as I'm coming from a different place. It's been a continued blessing from this, that after years of frustrating attempts to discuss religion in a healthy way, this 40 days framing has brought on a series of kind, open hearted conversations.

Worship Music

On a separate note (pun intended!) I've been experimenting with writing worship music. It's an odd but beneficial addition to the experiment. Most of what I've been doing these weeks is information intake: reading, talking, and maybe praying badly or trying to "sit with God" but mostly just sitting there overthinking it. Music has given me a way into a sense of presence that doesn't run through my head first. I didn't expect that, and I'm still not totally sure what to make of it.

More on that later.

Also I recently reposted this semi-accidental worship track I made last year. It's a barely-developed two-minute thing, but I've always liked it.

To wrap up, here's the input from this past week:

• Genesis
• Exodus
• Augustine's Confessions (books 7–8)
• Beloved by Francis Chan