I Didn't Lose My Faith: Essays

The title of this book is not a metaphor. It is a statement of fact.I didn’t lose my faith. I outgrew a system that had borrowed the word faith to describe something closer to compliance. When the system fell away, what I found underneath wasn’t absence — it was space. Room to think, to question, to grieve, and eventually to rebuild something that actually fit the shape of my life.These essays were written over several years, mostly in the early hours of the morning, usually while the rest of the house was still dark. Some were written in grief. Some in anger. Some in the particular clarity that only comes after you’ve stopped performing for an audience that no longer has power over you. All of them were written in the belief that saying the true thing out loud matters — even when it costs something, even when the people you’re describing will call it bitterness.It is not bitterness. It is witness.The essays are arranged in six parts. Part One examines the architecture of the institution — how it constructs itself, how it constructs its leaders, and how it constructs the language that holds everything in place. Part Two looks at what that construction does to the people inside it: the psychological damage, the body’s response, the particular ways a high-control system leaves its mark. Part Three takes the actual doctrines seriously enough to examine them honestly — the nonconformity doctrine, the avoidance doctrine, the one-true-church claim, and what the Bible actually says when you read it without the institution telling you what it means. Part Four addresses the institution’s most intimate controls: marriage, courtship, sex, and the particular shape of masculinity it produces. Part Five is about the reckoning — leaving, being pushed out, and the cost of both. Part Six is about what comes after.I want to say something directly to the people this book is most likely to reach: those who grew up inside a system like the one I’m describing, or who are still inside it, or who have just gotten out and don’t yet have language for what happened to them.What was done to you was not love. It was called love. There is a difference. You are allowed to know the difference. You are allowed to grieve what you deserved and didn’t get. And you are allowed to become someone the system never intended you to be.That is not rebellion. That is exactly what healing looks like.Thank you for reading. Read more