Table of Contents
* The Math (https://grief2growth.substack.com/i/221374529/the-math)
* The God With A Marketing Problem (https://grief2growth.substack.com/i/221374529/the-god-with-a-marketing-problem)
* What I Was Really Taught (https://grief2growth.substack.com/i/221374529/what-i-was-really-taught)
* The Evidence I Couldn’t Unsee (https://grief2growth.substack.com/i/221374529/the-evidence-i-couldnt-unsee)
* What This Means For Shayna (https://grief2growth.substack.com/i/221374529/what-this-means-for-shayna)
* So Where Am I Now? (https://grief2growth.substack.com/i/221374529/so-where-am-i-now)
* Where Are You? (https://grief2growth.substack.com/i/221374529/where-are-you)
I grew up in the church. Everybody I knew was Christian. Everybody on my street, everybody at my school, everybody in my family. There were probably some Catholics around, but nobody made much of it. They weren’t really identified. I thought they were pretty much the same as we were.
Then my cousin married a Catholic girl.
That’s when I heard it, said out loud at the dinner table. Catholics weren’t real Christians. They hadn’t been baptized properly. They hadn’t received the Holy Ghost.
I was 13 years old. One word popped into my head: “What?”
My mind went somewhere it had never gone before. If Catholics weren’t saved, who else wasn’t?
That question cracked something open. For the first time I realized that my experience of almost everybody being a Christian was not how the world was. It was how my little corner of it worked. The majority of people on this planet were something else. Less than 30% of people are Christians. This blew my mind.
A billion or so Muslims. Hindus. Buddhists. And what about the “good” atheists, the ones who loved their families, told the truth, and showed up when somebody needed help?
Where did they all end up?
I was taught there was one true religion. Now I started counting the people who weren’t in it.
The Math
Here’s what I mean by one true religion. Catholics had it wrong, so they were headed for hell. Jews? Well, Jesus was a Jew, but unless you accepted him as the Messiah, hell for you too. Muslims honor Jesus as a prophet, but he isn’t the begotten Son of God (and that word “begotten” is doing a lot of work). Hell for you too. Atheists had no shot. And on and on.
I knew I was lucky to be born into a Christian family. Practically born Christian. My grandparents and their grandparents were all part of the right faith.
Lucky.
Sit with that word for a minute, because it’s the one that broke it for me.
If I was lucky to be born into the right family, in the right country, in the right century, then what exactly was luck doing in a story about eternal salvation? What if I had been born in India? Surely I’d be a Hindu. What if no missionary had ever reached my village? What if I clung to the faith of my parents and their grandparents just as tightly as I was taught to cling to mine? I was taught not to give it up to anyone, for any reason.
I had spent my whole childhood believing the question was “Which religion is true?” I was told I had chosen wisely. At 13, at that dinner table, I realized I hadn’t chosen at all. I was chosen. I had won the spiritual lottery.
If salvation depends on believing the right thing, and belief depends almost entirely on geography and birth order, then heaven and hell aren’t really about faith at all. They’re about luck.
That’s a hard thought to hold when you’ve built your identity on being one of the right ones.
The God With A Marketing Problem
The God I was taught about apparently had a delivery problem. Great message. But lousy distribution.
Billions of people, across thousands of years, never heard the “correct” message. They didn’t refuse it. It never showed up. God chose to give his message to one guy in a small town, to a people under occupation. Sure, it had spread. But so many didn’t receive it.
Picture a woman born in rural Nepal, centuries before any missionary arrived. She never had a chance to accept Jesus as her personal savior. Picture a boy born into a devout Muslim family in Marrakech, who is taught from his first breath that the Trinity is a corruption of pure monotheism. He loves God with exactly the sincerity I was taught to love by my faith. Yet, somehow people say his God, Allah, isn’t the same as mine.
Is the Nepalese woman condemned for a mission trip that never happened? Is he condemned for not abandoning the faith of his father, and his father, and his father?
If yes, then what we’re describing is a rigged lottery with eternal stakes.
If no, then something is wrong with the framework I was handed.
I’ll also say this, because I know many of you were raised in the faith, and you love it. I’m aware that plenty of Christians hold much wider views than the ones I grew up with. In fact, I hope most. Some believe God’s mercy reaches far beyond the church walls. I’m not writing about them...
