How To Resolve Anger About Childhood Christian Indoctrination

It’s Sunday morning. When I was a child, Sunday morning meant getting up unreasonably early (for a Sunday), getting dressed and heading to our local church with my parents to learn about God, Jesus and The Bible.

The church services felt long and boring with dull music, but fortunately I didn’t have to stay in them very long as us kids could leave part-way through to head downstairs to Sunday School in the basement of the church. Compared to the church service, Sunday School was much more fun. I ran riot a lot of the time, running around the building whenever possible and playing with the other kids. Mind you, compared to Sunday School, I imagined that staying home or playing with my non-church friends was probably even more fun.

In Sunday School I heard stories like Jonah being swallowed by a whale for disobeying God. God’s plan involved Jonah going to Nineveh to tell the people there how evil they were. Didn’t sound like such a great plan to me; who would want to do that?

Or there was Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt for looking back at the city of Sodom being destroyed by fire. I’d probably look back too, if only to confirm that I was doing the right thing by getting the hell out of there. This God always seemed to be telling people to do things that they didn’t want to do, and seemed rather capricious.

Nevertheless, I stuck with the whole Christian/church thing while growing up. As a teenager the evening services were more enjoyable once I could go to church at night without my parents. I made some great long-term friends at church fellowship groups, and some of the church camps were really fun, especially the ones where everyone didn’t end up with dysentery.

I didn’t talk much about church at my all-boys high school. I wasn’t a confident evangelist and I was already the target of enough bullying thank you very much. In hindsight I think a big part of me felt foolish for ever believing such nonsense, so I wasn’t about to start proselytizing to the unwashed masses who were already giving me a hard enough time.

Eventually in my 30’s a painful relationship breakdown gave me the impetus, freedom and opportunity to question everything about what I believed and ask myself:

“What am I doing wrong with my life?”

I started doing more research. The version of Christianity I had grown up with was predicated on the notion that Jesus’s miraculous rising from the dead proved that he was God’s son, was therefore he was the messianic redeemer, and so I’d better believe or I’m going to hell.

I started to question everything. What did it really mean to be swallowed by a whale, or to turn back to look at a city’s destruction, to rise from the dead, to be God’s son, to be redeemed, or to go to hell?

The evidence for Jesus rising from the dead in the gospels was contradictory and wasn’t substantiated outside The Bible. You’d think something like that would be big news with historians, but only the Jewish historian Josephus appears to have even mentioned it. If it wasn’t sufficiently compelling for him to believe and convert to the new sect of Christianity, why should I?

I read books like Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands A Verdict; but it seemed that the quality of evidence that he was willing to accept was rather lower than the quality that I was seeking. I wanted proof. None of this faith business for me.

While the Christians were initially oppressed, eventually Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire so the future of church and state became intertwined. Was this really all about a relationship with God, and if so why didn’t he ever seem to answer my more important prayers?

Perhaps religion really was just the opiate of the masses?

Part of the problem, I realized, was that deep down I just didn’t believe what I had been taught at church. There were too many obvious contradictions in The Bible for it to be infallible and the whole human sacrifice for sins I hadn’t even committed yet because I wasn’t even born sounded barbaric and didn’t make logical sense to me.

So I decided the give it all away, leave the church and learn to live my life on my own terms.

It wasn’t all plain sailing by any means, but at least I figured I wouldn’t have to be burdened down by a made-up belief system that didn’t seem real to me.

However, deciding to abandon my childhood belief system didn’t make all the emotional responses programmed into me by my upbringing suddenly go away. I really can’t completely separate the church indoctrination from the familial conditioning as they both happened at the same time. As an adult, I still felt anxious about other people knowing about my flaws, especially the fact that I experienced unpleasant emotions like anxiety and sadness that plagued me a lot of the time.

During adolescence my true personality pretty much collapsed to meet the needs of my dominant mother who felt cold, stoic and emotionally dismissive to me. Some of the conversations I had with Christians about my newfound skepticism led to very defensive reactions. I felt like I was constantly being told that I was wrong about what I believed, which was very painful in the light of having grown up feeling that I was constantly being told that I was wrong about how I felt by my mother.

It was a difficult time and my reaction was to read more books by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking, and less by Philip Yancey and Max Lucado. Beliefs based on objective scientific observation made more sense to me than ones based on superstition and conjecture.

At the same time, the books on evolutionary biology and cosmology didn’t offer much in the way of guidance on how to live, or more particularly how to get on with other people. In hindsight the communication skills I learned in my family of origin weren’t very effective, and in particular they were terrible at building intimacy, resolving conflict or showing empathy. I could see why a relationship with a perfect all-loving imaginary friend could be easier than intimate relationships with other human beings, who are fickle and require a deeper level of connection than what I was raised to be comfortable with.

But I didn’t believe in this imaginary friend any more.

So I started studying psychology and reading books on communication skills to fill the gap, while at the same time becoming a militant atheist trying to convince every Christian I talked to to see the errors of their ways.

Some Christians I talked to thought they had an ace up their sleeve by asking me questions like: “If there’s no heaven or hell, then what is it like after you die?”, to which I would reply “It’s like before you were born.”

To me, it was a no-brainer. There’s just nothing. Like being asleep when you’re not dreaming.

I still believe that, but I was being a self-righteous pain in the ass about it.

I was angry about being taught a bunch of lies and pointed down the wrong path in life back in Sunday School. There was no evidence to support a belief in an afterlife, and if there was no hell, what was the point of sacrificing this life in following Jesus to get there? He hadn’t risen from the dead, he wasn’t the messiah anyway, and the whole notion of a savior seemed flawed.

What if I could just save myself by accepting myself the way I was?

In hindsight, I would say that self-acceptance, self-trust and self-determination became my new religion.

The only problem was those pesky emotional triggers of fear, guilt and shame installed during my childhood. I embarked on an aggressive program of self-improvement that I eventually documented in The Confident Man Program.

I still wasn’t happy about being lied to though, and that was particularly painful when something in life undermined my sense of self-trust by not going my way.

Recently I came across one of the missing pieces in the form of lectures by Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychology professor who has recently risen to prominence after spending years uploading his undergraduate psychology lectures on his YouTube channel. His no-nonsense admonitions that people should clean up their own rooms before trying to change the world and voluntarily take on greater responsibility to make meaning from their lives in the wake of suffering really make sense to me.

While he says he is a believer in God because he acts as-if God exists, the way he integrates psychology, philosophy and theology makes his lectures compelling viewing even for a hardened atheist like me. He can apply the same level of rigorous analysis to a biblical story as to a Disney movie, and find great truths in each about how to live.

Watching Dr Peterson’s epic series of lectures on The Psychological Significance Of The Bible Stories really helped me put to bed some of the anger about my having been lied to in Sunday School. It’s not just that my teachers were naive and told me things that aren’t true, it’s that the stories in The Bible can be interpreted on multiple levels, and the interpretation that makes sense to a child is going to be different to the interpretation that makes sense to a mature adult.

In my adult interpretation, “God” is a metaphor for how the universe (including other people) respond to us, often in mysterious ways that we might not understand. “Disobeying God” is a metaphor for acting in ways that cause unnecessary and often unforeseen suffering. “sin” is a metaphor for acting in ways that fall short of our true potential. “The belly of the whale” and “The valley of the shadow of death” are metaphors for the dark times in our lives when everything falls to pieces and nothing we do seems to work. “Heaven” isn’t a place your soul goes when you die, it’s a state of mind in which we can live akin to what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called “flow”. “Hell” is pain and suffering, especially when caused by another’s malevolence.

The universe is a complex place that we do not and cannot fully understand. I believe in principle if we had a sufficiently powerful computer at our disposal we could model it accurately enough to predict every outcome of our actions, but such a computer would have to be more complex than the universe it is modelling and we certainly don’t have such a beast in our heads.

We need rules for living that take the limitations of our understanding into account since we can’t analyze the outcome of everything that we do before making a decision, or we would never take any action at all. Hence complex moral questions get reduced to simplistic laws like The Ten Commandments, “Don’t eat pork” or “Everything is permissible–but not everything is beneficial”, because they work in practice.

Whether you believe in God or not, if memories of growing up around Christianity leave you with an uneasy feeling that something just wasn’t quite right about what you were taught, I highly recommend Jordan Peterson’s lecture series on The Psychological Significance Of The Bible Stories. If something comes up for you in the process that you need to talk to someone about, drop me a line.

Tell him I sent you: