Deconstructing from Religion Doesn’t Have to Lead Anywhere

Deconstructing from religion doesn’t have to lead you to a specific destination. Spirituality, being human, doesn’t operate on a spectrum. Contrary to what you may have been taught, the opposite of being a ‘insert religion here’ isn’t a devil worshipper.

I walked away from Christianity at 17, after growing up in a cult like version of it. To give you the full context on everything I witnessed and experienced would take a few chapters of a book, so I’ll top line it here. I spent years trying to arrive somewhere. I never did. And I’m glad.

I saw people in the church self-identifying as prophets and as God himself, convincing others of that, then using that power to abuse people, financially, sexually, spiritually, emotionally, all of the ways. I saw victims of this become shells of themselves; lose their personalities, their voices, convincing themselves they were experiencing this because they were sinners, and somehow chosen by God to be punished in this way. I saw their self-care slip, I saw people fall into debt, and I saw domestic violence used to maintain order. As a child I saw a lot. I always had questions that weren’t answered and was made to feel difficult for asking them. Before the age of 16 I had witnessed coercion and manipulation, and had figured out how to maintain an awareness that kept my mind as safe and protected as a child can manage.

So at 17, whilst registering for college, I was handed a form. On it, a question I had answered many times before: select your religion. I stared at the word ‘Christian’ and I just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t say that I was anymore, it didn’t feel right. So I ticked ‘other’. That was the beginning.

That day was a strange one. I couldn’t focus on anything else. I kept coming back to the decision to tick ‘other’ and what it meant. I felt untethered but somehow free at the same time. It was the first truly adult decision I had made for myself, now I think about it. It lightened me in some ways, but I also felt the weight of not being able to call myself something. I was existing in the in-between unsure of how to think about my decision, and unsure of how to talk about it to others. Most people around me were a devout something.

In the months that followed, I talked myself into choosing another religion. ‘If you want to still go to heaven you need to be devoting your life to something,’ I felt. So I studied and studied and studied. I went to my local youth centre and spent hours researching on the internet, in 2004/5, mind you lol! Buddhism, Rastafarianism, and more, printing pages and pages to take home and highlight the things that resonated with me from each one. I was locked in. At the time I was quite close with a Black Muslim family. I spent a lot of time at their house, in their home music studio with the brothers, getting my hair braided by the sisters, sometimes just chilling with their mum. They were Jamaican Muslims, so I got to see first-hand how my culture interacted with a religion I was completely unfamiliar with. I stayed nights at their home, woke up for prayers. I committed to it, but it didn’t pull me in.

A year or so later, in 2006, I fell ill on holiday in Jamaica and ended up in a coma for a week. When I was well enough, I returned to England, and that’s when the pressure to choose a religion intensified. I had just had a near-death experience, and prayer circles from all over the world had flooded in (if you know anything about how they travel, you’ll know I’m not exaggerating). I was told repeatedly that Jesus had brought me back from the dead, and so I had to give my life to him. In theory that made sense, but I’ve never had the kind of brain that just accepts things, and from the childhood I had, religious guilt and shame were never effective enough tools to make me do anything. So I prayed about it.

Ironically, after everything I had lived through, I never questioned the presence of a higher power in my life. I only questioned the organised way I had been forced to practice. I prayed that if any particular religion was meant for me, it would be placed on my spirit in such an obvious way that I couldn’t ignore it. I continued to research, attended church and other religious spaces when invited, and over time became aware that the conviction I had prayed for never came.

It was a good few years before I gave up my pursuit of religion. I had genuinely tried to convert to something, as wild as that may sound. I was tryna be recruited, lol! But in that time I had learned so much from other faith systems and beliefs. So many beautiful things that deeply resonated with me.

One day after work, a Hindu colleague offered to drop me home. While we were driving, we got talking about her beliefs, heaven, hell, what happens after. I had already started questioning the concept of heaven a few months prior. My thinking was that all of the insane behaviour I had witnessed as a child was carried out by adults who were hell-bent (no pun intended) on getting into heaven, willing to do almost anything, even sacrifice their own children, to get there. So the promise of heaven, and the way it compromised people’s behaviour, was very much up for discussion for me.

She told me about Nirvana, that in her belief, people reincarnate on Earth as many times as they need to until they’ve learned whatever soul lessons they came here for. When a person completes their lessons, they no longer need to return, and when they die, their evolved soul joins the ‘energetic current’ of the universe. That energetic current, she said, is what people experience as God/Nirvana. Well. That blew my mind. I can’t say I believed it in that moment, but it made far more sense to me than a place in the sky you get to live in forever for being ‘good.’

In the 20 years since, I’ve had many more conversations like that with people from all different walks of life, religions, and belief systems. People have shared things with me that stopped me completely in my tracks.

One that took me years to process came from a Rastafarian woman I used to work with. I was ranting to her about my mother one day and she looked at me dead in the eye and said, “You know you chose your parents, right?” I was speechless. I genuinely don’t remember responding. She carried on and explained that before we come to earth, we choose our soul lessons, our bodies, our life experiences, our families, essentially everything we need in order to grow in the way we’re meant to. She said our higher self makes those choices, and when we arrive here, we forget. Our life’s work is about remembering why we came, so we can fulfil those lessons.

It was a lot. How could I have chosen this life? The coma, the abuse, I don’t feel like I would have signed up for that. But the reason I didn’t immediately dismiss it was because of how she shared it. She could have indulged my rant, used it as an opportunity to pry. Instead, she offered a perspective that reframed everything. Something about her doing that felt noble. Like she was sharing it because she felt I needed it. I’ve reflected on that conversation for years, and it’s now a belief I hold for myself, with the full understanding that most people would refuse the idea entirely. Which is fair. This journey is deeply personal.

Over time I started to genuinely love not having to align myself to any one religion. I enjoyed that I could keep having these kinds of conversations, ones that challenged me, expanded me, made me think. I let go of the pressure to be something, and leaned into the human experience of just being. The last 20 years have been exactly that: a quiet, open welcoming of wisdom, wherever it comes from.

I’ve often thought about the fact that there are thousands of languages in the world, and that language and culture tend to reflect the dominant religion of a place. There’s a beauty in that. There’s something lovely about people being able to connect with God, if they believe in a higher power, in a way that genuinely makes sense to them. And I like the idea that so many avenues to wisdom exist. Yes, even for the tarot, witchy, spiritual babes, I have absolutely dipped my toe into that world and only had positive experiences.

I’ll be honest, on this ‘I’m not a Christian’ journey, letting go of what I’d been taught about psychics and mediums was hard. Christians tend to say that prophets channel from God and psychics channel from the devil. I disagree. I believe a God who creates everyone with gifts also creates people with psychic and prophetic ones. It’s just language. Source is source. I don’t believe darkness has dominion over anyone involuntarily. Does darkness exist? Yes, everything has polarity. But I believe you invite darkness or light in. The fear I carried at the start of this journey was the idea that I had no choice, that if I put myself in certain spaces or around certain people, darkness would just come. Religion works hard to strip you of your agency. It tells you to ‘lean not on your own understanding’ and offers an interpretation of that which encourages you to hand your critical thinking over to people outside of yourself.

But here’s what I want you to know: you can gather information and reflect on it. You can choose to move. Choose to stay still. Choose to learn more. Choose to sit in silence while you process. Your deconstruction, and wherever it takes you, is yours alone. The destination, if there ever is one, is simply to be at peace within yourself, with beliefs that feel true to who you are. If that connects you to a higher power, beautiful. If it doesn’t, and that feels right to you, that’s equally fine.

The systems at play in the world have done a number on disconnecting us from ourselves. Coming back to yourself is not easy. Patriarchy, white supremacy, religion, all of them play a part in telling us who we are before we’re old enough to decide for ourselves. It’s entirely normal to pause and take another look at how those systems serve you, and how they don’t.

So on your deconstruction journey, be kind to yourself. Take your time. You’ll get wherever you need to be, when you get there. The deconstruction isn’t the gap between who you were and who you’ll be, it is the becoming.

Enjoy the journey my loves 🫶🏾