Flat Tires and Monkey Traps and My Story of Deconstruction
A guest essay by Jason Boyett | The Religiverse
Jason and I grew up in the same Southern Baptist church in Amarillo, TX. We heard the same sermons, sang the same songs, and were shaped by the same faith tradition. He went one direction, and I went another. But I've been thinking a lot lately about how we talk about honoring people of different faiths but rarely extend that same dignity to people who walked away from faith entirely. Jason did the hard, honest work of following his questions all the way to the end, and I think that deserves honor. This is his story, and I'm grateful he trusted me with it.
I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church and attended for much of my adulthood. I left Christianity for good around age 35. (I still write about religion and create content about religious news and data.)
Most people don’t step away from faith because of a single thing. It’s not One Big Question that gets in the way of continuing along a familiar, comfortable religious path.
We sometimes picture the loss of faith like a tire blowing out on a highway, leaving debris scattered everywhere and causing a vehicle to shudder and veer off the road. But I think, in a lot of cases, it’s just a slow leak. The air gradually exits until the tire is too flat to move forward safely. That was the case with me. In writing this essay, I considered trying to pinpoint exactly what triggered that flat tire, as if there were a single cause. But it’s not that simple.
Committed to Truth
I know how the flat progressed, though. I grew up a faithful and active church kid in the late 1970s and through the culture wars of the 1980s. I was always the one who asked questions—Why aren’t there dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden story? Who did Adam and Eve’s children marry? Why did God kill all those creatures and people during the Flood? Why did all the Canaanites have to be murdered?—but distinctly remember the lack of good answers. Fifth-graders really aren’t supposed to be asking those kinds of questions anyway.
At the same time, my Sunday School teachers and my youth pastor and traveling revival preachers kept telling me how important it was to pursue the truth. Absolute truth exists, they said, and Jesus was the eternal representation of it. “I am the way and the truth and the life,” Jesus said.
That’s why I kept asking! I was all-in on my commitment to truth, because I knew the truth would stand up against honest questions. And I was DEVOUT devout. I read the Bible every day. I prayed. I was writing and leading high school Bible studies as a high school student. I wrestled with my faith, sought the Lord with all my heart, served my church and community. I read voraciously in my daily “quiet time,” which is what we called our personal morning devotionals. In high school, that reading looked like books by Charles Stanley and Chuck Swindoll and Max Lucado. Those led to reading outside my Evangelical faith tradition, including Catholic authors like Brennan Manning and Henri Nouwen, and those works led to church historians and much deeper theology. I read all the apologetics books. I read the Bible, front to back, multiple times. I memorized lengthy passages. I was choosing to read Jaroslav Pelikan as a 17 year-old, for crying out loud.
I was desperately seeking answers because I HAD SO MANY QUESTIONS.
The tire of my faith was constantly leaking air. I kept airing it up, but just couldn’t figure out how to patch the hole. From around age 15 to 35, I used energy and effort to keep moving forward. My faith was being propped up by my willingness to work hard, to seek God, to pray for more faith and to engage with theology in search of certainty.
A List of My Problems
For the purposes of this essay, I figured I should make a list of those questions. These were the religious problems, logical inconsistencies and hurdles I spent decades with, unsuccessfully trying to find my way around them. It was never one thing. It was all the things.
(A quick note: I’m not listing these as “gotcha” questions, but as examples of the things I wrestled with for 20 years. These aren’t new to anyone, and I know that apologists have answers. I know those answers. I did the work. I never found the satisfaction I sought.)
A quick list:
● The existence of suffering: Human suffering, yes, but even within the animal kingdom. Every creature created by God and designed for this world is doomed to die, likely in a violent and painful way. Is life that cheap? The suffering of sentient creatures was something I could never reconcile with a God who called Creation good, even after the Fall. What kind of divine being intends or allows a world like this?
● Biblical contradictions or historical inaccuracies: I grew up being taught we should take the Bible seriously and literally, but I kept seeing things in scripture that didn’t match other scriptures. I began studying the Bible seriously to find my way past these errors. Reading it in depth only uncovered more. If the Bible is God’s truth, why was so much of it clearly untrue?
● Church history is ugly: Things like colonialism, racism, slavery, complicity in abuse. These didn’t match the teachings about the life-changing power of the Gospel. Jesus clearly wasn’t transforming humanity for the better, at least not at the institutional level. I began studying this academically and found disappointment around every corner.
● Prophecy and faith healing: I wanted this kind of prayer and miraculous outpouring of God’s presence to be real. I was a Southern Baptist kid who wanted desperately to have a charismatic experience. But no one honestly reckoned with these failures of prophecy or fake healings. The stories of dramatic examples “from Africa” fell apart on investigation. People were always getting healed of back pain or blood diseases, but no one ever regrew an amputated limb.
● Science and faith: From Copernicus to Darwin, these felt genuinely irreconcilable, particularly when it came to evolution or cosmology. Science kept explaining things that we previously got wrong or attributed to divinity. Every time science filled a gap that faith had previously occupied, I kept waiting for that to feel like an attack on God. But it just felt like learning.
● The atonement: Atonement theory is so central to Christianity, and of course I know that there are other Christian ways to wiggle around the preposterousness of atonement theory. But I spent so many of my teenage years just secretly wondering why this was the way it is. Why does an all-powerful God require blood to forgive? If God created these rules of justice, couldn’t God simply change them? Why couldn’t an omnipotent God find a less violent solution? Why would God design a redemption system that structurally excludes most humans who ever lived? How are we supposed to worship a father who says, “I love you unconditionally, but someone has to be hurt before I can forgive you”?
● The canon: Sweet Moses, I have spent SO much of my time reading about the development of the canon. If God’s primary method of communicating truth to all of humanity across all of history is the Bible, a collection of texts, then the reliability of those texts matters enormously. The stakes couldn’t be higher. But even the most surface-level study of the canon shows it was assembled, edited, and canonized by humans with political interests. That was so unsettling to me, especially after I realized historians and Bible scholars have been wrestling with this for centuries.
● One-way prayer: Again, I sought God seriously and legitimately and faithfully for 20 years. I prayed for faith. For understanding. For his presence. I got nothing. When we pray for something and it happens, it becomes a testimony. When we pray for something and it doesn’t happen, we excuse it. It’s all confirmation bias, and it works the same whether you’re praying to the God of Christianity, to Allah, to Ganesh or to Thor.
● Other world religions: I couldn’t shake the question of why Christianity gets default truth status, or why the eternal destination of a human soul was based so much on geography. And the exclusivity of it! The idea that billions of people who never heard the Gospel are condemned through no fault of their own. I kept thinking that, if I had been born in Saudi Arabia, I probably would have been a Muslim. Was the fate of my soul attributable to the luck of geography?
● Hell: The idea of eternal conscious torment disturbed me so much as a kid. I had nightmares. So many traveling evangelists harped on this reality. I had so much fear that my faith wasn’t real and that eternal burning was my future. Later I began to realize how the doctrine felt morally incompatible with a loving God, and how most of what I understood about hell developed outside the Christian tradition—from the ancient Greeks to Dante.
● Anxiety: As an adult, I realized how much of my anxiety was tied to my faith, from my attempts to follow and live within God’s will to the eternal status of my soul. Where was the “peace that passes understanding”?
● Divine hiddenness: If God desires a relationship with everyone, why is God’s existence not more obvious? The “God wants us to choose him freely” argument in response sounds satisfying for about thirty seconds before it starts falling apart. Awareness and coercion are not the same thing.
● Cultural context: The Bible’s endorsement or tolerance of slavery, genocide, and treatment of women as direct commands bothered me, even as a teenager. The argument against this sounds reasonable on the surface (of course, ancient texts reflect ancient cultures!), but you can’t tell me God is the source of objective truth and morality but also he accommodated these terrible ancient moral intuitions. If that worked, then why can’t God accommodate today’s moral intuitions? Speaking of…
● Moral progress outside the church: From environmentalism to women’s rights to racism to LGBTQ+ acceptance, I kept noticing the church ending up on the wrong side of what felt to me very much like moral progress. This was the institution supposedly following the source of objective truth and morality, yet I consistently found it taking sides that felt morally wrong to me—someone whose morality was formed by my Christian upbringing.
That’s enough of those questions. There are many more, and I’m sure spelling them out doesn’t matter. The apologists have answered them all! They are easily reconciled! Except for me, I guess. I spent years with them swirling in my mind, at various intensities.
If the arguments didn’t work, I was taught to find comfort in the fact that “God’s ways are higher” than my ways. My own heart is “deceitful above all things,” you know. I should trust in the Lord and lean not on my own understanding. In isolation, these aren’t bad ideas. But developed systematically they train people to distrust the cognitive tools God supposedly gave us—the tools that help me evaluate whether a belief is true.
Two Assumptions
People who know that I deconstructed have assumed one of two things. First, that something bad must have happened to me. That’s not true at all. All the best parts of my personality were forged in my church upbringing. Church people are my people. I am still invested in learning more about the Bible. I love Christian history and the idea of religion, period. I just am not working so hard to believe it anymore.
Second, people wonder if the intellectual nature of my questions mean I “read myself out of faith.” Maybe that’s accurate, but let me tell you what I was reading: The Bible. Biblical commentaries. Church history. Apologetics. Theology. Should I not have been reading that stuff? I was expressing the values the church taught me: that absolute truth exists and that we should seek it with our whole heart. I did. I pursued it right out of faith.
I didn’t lose faith because I stopped caring about truth. I left because I kept caring about it.
This reference will be lost on younger generations, but in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig writes about the South Indian Monkey Trap. Villagers would catch monkeys by hollowing out a coconut, filling it with rice, and chaining it to a post. The hole was just big enough for a monkey to reach in with an open hand, but too small to pull a closed fist back through once it had grabbed the rice. The monkey makes a fist inside the coconut and won’t let go. It’s not trapped by the coconut. It’s trapped by its own stubbornness.
When my kids began reaching the age where they were asking the same questions, I realized I had held on to faith for too long. I fought. I struggled. I ignored my intuition because accepting the simplest answer—Maybe this whole thing just isn’t true?—was too uncomfortable.
Here’s why: The entire system is designed to make letting go feel like loss. If you release your grip on inerrancy, you’re on a slippery slope. If you question the atonement, you’re questioning the gospel itself. If you sit with doubt too long, that’s a spiritual problem, not an intellectual one. Every question had a cost attached to it. Every loosened finger felt like betrayal.
But at some point I understood the threat only works if you keep your fist closed. The moment you open your hand and let go, the trap has no mechanism. I just had to allow myself to ask whether what I was holding onto might actually not be accurate, or coherent, or good.
So I let go. I walked away.
On the other side, outside the trap, I didn’t encounter all the things I’d been told to expect. Sin or debauchery. Meaninglessness. Nihilism. Despair. What I found instead was that the values my faith had built in me—curiosity, compassion, a hunger for truth—didn’t require that faith to survive. They were already mine. I still care deeply about how I treat people, and tried to teach those values to my kids. I still find the world astonishing. I still think ethics matter enormously. And this surprises some people: I am still very pro-religion. I find the world’s religious traditions, in all their variety and contradictions, to be among the most revealing things humans have ever produced about what it means to be human.
But mostly what I found was personal peace. When you spend 25 years wrestling, it feels really, really good finally to not wrestle.
Jason writes about religion on his Substack, The Religiverse with Jason Boyett.
He is also the author of 12 Major World Religions: The Beliefs, Rituals, and Traditions of Humanity’s Most Influential Faiths.
You can also find Jason on TikTok & Instagram (@religiverse)
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Excellent essay by Jason. I can identify with his struggle with and eventual abandonment of the church. As a teenager, I left the Episcopal church and all religion in the late ‘60’s/ early ‘70’s. It was the slow leak process described by Jason.
Social commentary, politics, biographies, and history became my primary reading material and my educational source to help answer:
What is good?
What is evil?
From where do they originate?
In what forms/actions do they manifest?
How do the world’s religions exacerbate or neutralize good & evil?
Is suffering the only consequence of evil actions that actually grabs the attention of humankind and motivate us to act (hopefully) for good?
I began to formulate a belief in a Universe that always attempts to achieve balance.
About 6 or 7 years ago, I began reading Buddhist writings and authors I was fascinated! The basic tenets felt familiar and logical. I found His Holiness, the XIV Dalai Lama, a prolific writer and believer in both science and Buddhism, to be the example of a thoughtful and progressive religious leader. Karma made sense. I still read Buddhist-themed writings.
Against what I would say were all the odds, Buddhism actually lead me to dip my toe into the Episcopal waters again. I had certainly changed over my 50 year absence & I was pleasantly surprised to find the Episcopal church had also. It had become more Progressive, welcoming, and is finally emphasizing a focus on the teachings and actions of Jesus.
Reconciliation rather than judgement. *
A model for living rather than an object for worship. *
And while we may never be perfect, walking and living our lives following The Way may be enough for right now.
(* See Philip Gulley, “If The Church Were Christian”)
I wrestle with these same questions every single day. Sometimes I feel like I’m loosing my faith. Sometimes I feel like God can handle my questions and isn’t threatened by them, other times I feel like he is distant because of my doubts. I’ve had people tell me I’m not a Christian and that my true god is myself because of my pride, all because I don’t take the Bible at face value anymore and because I’ve questioned it. I’m glad I’m not the only one has been through this because it is deeply painful and feels hopeless sometimes. I appreciate your writing more than you know. Thank you, friend.