f2PointEight

A Family That Prays Together…

When people learn that I have left Christianity, and the reasons why I reject the God of classical theism, they rarely seek to engage the substance of the arguments I offer. The conversation seldom turns on whether my conclusions are consistent with the scholarly consensus on religious history, whether they reflect a more coherent ethical vision, or whether they remain internally consistent with the moral conclusions of Christianity.

Instead, the focus shifts almost immediately to pathology.

What will this do to your family? How will this affect your marriage? What will you teach your children?

I understand the instinct behind these questions. There is something deeply human in wondering how lives remain intertwined when convictions diverge. But the concern is not as neutral as it appears. Beneath it lies an assumption that deserves closer examination, because it mirrors one of my central critiques of faith itself.

What is being expressed here is not simply worry about my domestic stability, but an unexamined theology of human cohesion. It assumes that shared belief is the primary condition for shared life, that moral harmony depends on metaphysical agreement, and that love itself is fragile without doctrinal symmetry. Faith, in this framing, is not merely a lens through which meaning is interpreted. It is the adhesive without which relational bonds fail and intimacy withers.

But if this is true, it is not a testament to the strength of faith. It is an admission of its poverty.

A worldview that cannot imagine intimacy surviving disagreement has already confessed its own insecurity. It suggests that unity is achieved not through shared values, mutual recognition, and ethical commitment, but through enforced theological alignment. Difference becomes a threat. Divergence signals decay. The fear is not that I might be wrong, but that without shared belief the moral architecture of my life must collapse under its own weight.

This anxiety does not arise by accident. It is carefully cultivated.

Christian traditions have long rehearsed narratives of incompatibility. Light and darkness cannot mix. Belief cannot coexist with unbelief. Righteousness must separate itself from doubt. The language of being “unequally yoked” is not gentle counsel offered for relational health. It is a warning against proximity. It trains believers to anticipate fracture wherever doctrinal unanimity fails, and to interpret relational strain as confirmation of theological truth.

In some expressions of this worldview, unbelief is not merely mistaken. It is dangerous. Sometimes unbelievers are to be pitied. Sometimes they are to be feared. And sometimes, especially when they are family, they are to be held at arm’s length.

This helps explain why, when someone leaves the faith, attention is redirected away from the reasons and toward the presumed wreckage. The arguments themselves become secondary, almost irrelevant. What matters is not whether the critique is sound, but whether it is socially survivable. Truth becomes acceptable only insofar as it preserves the existing moral ecosystem.

A belief system that cannot be questioned without threatening relational collapse is not safeguarding morality. It is holding relationships hostage to belief.

My own response to these questions has always been unease. Not because I dismiss genuine concern, but because this fixation functions, intentionally or not, as a deflection. It shifts the conversation from epistemology to consequence, from asking whether something is true to asking whether it is affordable. The cost becomes the argument. And when that cost is imagined as relational devastation, the conclusion is already written.

Whatever preserves harmony must be right. Whatever threatens it must be wrong.

But harmony achieved through intellectual containment is not moral maturity. It is compliance.

If faith were truly the sole foundation of moral life, its absence should produce immediate ethical erosion. Compassion should thin. Commitment should weaken. Love should collapse into self-interest. Yet this expectation rests on a caricature of both morality and human connection. It assumes ethics are imposed rather than cultivated, that love is commanded rather than chosen, and that marital harmony requires constant surveillance by a higher authority.

What this overlooks is a simpler and more demanding possibility. Moral cohesion may arise not from shared metaphysics at all, but from shared vulnerability. What binds people may not be identical belief, but the recognition of one another as ends in themselves. Under such conditions, divergence need not signal fracture. It may instead invite a deeper ethic, one grounded not in certainty, but in care.

Seen this way, the question is no longer why my relationships have not collapsed, but why we were ever taught to expect that they must.

The real tragedy, in this framing, is not that a belief system might be false or even harmful. The tragedy is that someone has dared to step outside it. And embedded in that presumption is a quiet indictment of faith itself. If the only thing preventing love from collapsing is shared belief, then what kind of love was it to begin with?

My values, however, have not changed.

If anything, leaving Christianity has allowed me to live them more honestly. What I shed was not compassion, commitment, or a concern for justice. What I shed was the contortion required to reconcile those values with doctrines that sanctioned exclusion, hierarchy, and harm. I no longer need to explain away divine violence, spiritualised discrimination, or moral systems that elevate obedience above empathy.

Stepping away from organised religion was not a moral collapse. It was an act of moral alignment.

This has been most evident, perhaps unexpectedly, in my marriage.

When my faith began to unravel, I hesitated to speak openly with my wife. Not because I feared disagreement, but because I did not want to destabilise something precious to her. Her relationship with religion is intuitive and lived more than analysed. I was careful, imperfectly so, to let my questions remain my own before asking her to carry them with me.

When I eventually did speak, I did so without framing my questions as a threat to us, and she received them in the same spirit. What she offered was not agreement, but grace. Not answers, but room. The freedom to pursue my questions more openly came not from shared conclusions, but from shared commitment. This, I have come to believe, is what marriage actually is. It’s not the preservation of sameness, but a continual act of choosing one another through change. Commitment is not something that survives despite seasons of growth, it is something that is deepened by them. The real danger to intimacy is not divergence, but stagnation. And stagnation, left long enough, becomes atrophy.

Perhaps it was never true that a family who prays together stays together, but that a family who grows together, who grants one another the dignity of becoming, has a far better chance of doing so.

A Great Disappointment

There is another layer beneath the anxiety about divergence, one that is especially pronounced in fundamentalist Christian traditions. It is a suspicion not merely of disagreement, but of plurality itself.

In these systems, obedience to the authorised expression of faith is treated as the only legitimate form of belief. To be faithful is to be aligned. To be aligned is to be coherent. And coherence is defined narrowly, guarded fiercely, and enforced socially. Anything that does not conform is experienced not as difference, but as contamination.

As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up Seventh-day Adventist. While there are aspects of that experience that are uniquely ours, the deeper psychological architecture is not. Adventism, like many restorationist movements, emerged from a failed prophetic claim. A confident proclamation of Christ’s imminent return that was followed by silence. The field was full. Their eyes were lifted heavenward. And then nothing happened.

This moment in October 1844, remembered as the Great Disappointment, is not merely a historical footnote. It is a formative trauma. And like all communities confronted with the collapse of certainty, the early Adventist believers faced a choice.

They could accept that the prophecy had failed. Or they could preserve the belief by reframing the failure.

They chose preservation.

The prophecy, they concluded, was not wrong. The interpretation was. The event had occurred, but invisibly. What might have been an invitation to humility became the foundation for a culture of interpretive absolutism. Survival no longer depended on openness to correction, but on being right in the right way.

And so, Adventism, like many movements forged in disappointment, developed an intense preoccupation with correct belief and correct practice. Truth became fragile, always under threat, always in need of defence. To be wrong was not simply to err. It was to imperil salvation. To dissent was not to disagree. It was to drift. And to leave was not to change one’s mind, but to place oneself outside the moral and eternal community altogether.

This is why Christians shaped by institutional logic are ill-equipped to narrate departure from the flock neutrally.

When someone steps away from such a system, there is no available language for intellectual honesty or ethical realignment. The only categories left are spiritual failure and eternal loss. “I no longer believe” cannot be received as a reasoned conclusion. It must be reinterpreted as rebellion, pride, deception, or hardness of heart. This is where the familiar manoeuvre appears, the quiet refuge of the No True Scotsman fallacy. The person is reclassified as a backslider, or declared never to have been a “true” Christian at all. Their faith must have been deficient, their conversion inauthentic, their commitment incomplete. These explanations do not arise from evidence, but from necessity. They allow the belief system to remain intact by redefining the boundaries of belonging rather than confronting the possibility of error. The framework cannot permit another interpretation, because to do so would reopen the wound of uncertainty it was constructed to seal.

Plurality, in this context, is not enriching. It is destabilising.

If moral life can persist outside the system, then the system is no longer necessary. If love, fidelity, and ethical seriousness survive doctrinal divergence, then faith is no longer the glue it claims to be. And if people can leave without becoming morally unmoored, the fear that once justified strict boundaries collapses.

This is why syncretism becomes, paradoxically, the Christian’s default posture. Not syncretism as genuine dialogue or integration, but as forced harmonisation. Every experience, every doubt, every external insight must be recontextualised within the existing framework or rejected outright. Other perspectives are not engaged on their own terms. They are filtered, subordinated, and controlled. The system must remain total, because only a total system can protect itself from the implications of being wrong.

Seen this way, the earlier concern about my family takes on a different meaning. It is not simply worry about relational strain. It is existential anxiety. If someone can leave, remain whole, love deeply, and live ethically, then the mythology of necessary belief begins to fracture. The question “What will this do to your marriage?” says less about my wife and more about the system’s need to explain why leaving must be catastrophic.

And when catastrophe fails to materialise, the only explanation left is to defer it. The damage must be hidden. The consequences must be delayed. If not in this life, then the next.

This is the final refuge of a framework built on right belief. When it cannot account for present reality, it relocates judgment to eternity. What cannot be demonstrated now is promised later. Loss is assumed, even if it cannot yet be seen.

And this reveals the deeper problem. A moral vision that preserves itself by denying the legitimacy of divergent lives is not oriented toward truth. It is oriented toward self-preservation.

That, more than my leaving, is what deserves our concern.

A Family That Grows Together

Our one-year-old son was recently blessed at church.

To some, my presence in that moment might seem incongruous. An agnostic standing before a congregation, participating in a ritual saturated with theological meaning. But I did not experience it as a contradiction. Growth rarely announces itself in tidy categories, and shared life does not require shared certainty. As critical as I have been of how Christianity often functions, I have never denied its role as a powerful cognitive technology, nor its capacity to orient people toward meaning, responsibility, and care.

I have never argued that people should stop being Christian. I have argued that they should be better Christians. More honest ones. More ethical ones. More attentive to the consequences of their beliefs. Standing there with my family, I was not offering assent to a creed, but participation in a moment that marked continuity, intention, and hope.

When the pastor asked me to speak, he posed three questions.

How has parenthood changed you? How has it changed your relationship? How has it changed your walk with Jesus?

My wife was anxious, not because our family was fracturing, but because she knew the language of the moment no longer fit me in the same way. Still, I answered the questions honestly, without hedging or performance.

Parenthood, I said, had cost us. It meant less time, less money, and less emotional stamina to spend elsewhere. It had exposed our limits. It had forced us to confront our impatience, our exhaustion, and the ways we fall short of the parents we imagine ourselves to be. But it had also given us more than it had taken. More joy. More laughter. And a depth of love that had no meaningful comparison.

Becoming a parent does something quietly radical. It forces you to reflect on how you were shaped, on what you received and what you lacked, and on what kind of person you now hope to help bring into the world. It demands an ethical seriousness that no creed can outsource. You are no longer dealing in abstractions. You are shaping a life whose journey through society will leave real consequences in its wake.

When asked about my walk with Jesus, I said plainly that parenthood had not changed it. But I also said that if Jesus is taken as an ethical exemplar rather than a doctrinal gatekeeper, his life offers a moral and spiritual vision I am more than willing to affirm in my son’s life. A change-maker who practised radical nonviolent resistance in the face of both religious and political tyranny. An advocate for the marginalised. A voice that challenged abusive systems of power rather than sanctifying them. Why would I refuse to participate in a ritual that, at its best, gestures toward that vision?

If this is what moral decay looks like, it is remarkably indistinguishable from flourishing.

The belief that morality must be anchored in divine command rests on a fragile premise. Without an ultimate authority, ethics is assumed to dissolve into opinion. Without “God said so,” chaos supposedly waits at the door.

But this is not how moral reasoning has ever actually worked.

Appeals to divine authority do not resolve moral disagreement. They relocate it. Which god, which text, which interpretation, which tradition. Even within Christianity, thousands of denominations read the same scriptures and arrive at incompatible moral conclusions. Authority does not remove interpretation. It sanctifies it.

For me, what replaces this is not relativism, but something far more demanding. Relational ethics asks that moral claims be justified not by who speaks them, but by how they affect real people in real contexts. No one is granted moral authority by fiat. Every claim must withstand scrutiny. Every principle must answer to its consequences.

This does not mean “anything goes.” It means nothing gets a free pass.

Systems that require the suffering of innocents are morally bankrupt not because a commandment forbids them, but because they violate the very conditions that allow human beings to thrive. This judgment arises not from revelation, but from empathy, evidence, and reason. It comes from recognising that people are not means to an end, not instruments for a greater good, and not acceptable casualties in someone else’s metaphysical story.

Religious traditions have often struggled here. Sacred texts contain commands to enslave, to kill, to exclude, to subordinate. When these conflict with our moral intuitions, we rarely reject them outright. We reinterpret them. We contextualise them. We spiritualise them. In doing so, we quietly admit that our ethics come from somewhere else, while continuing to insist that God remains the source.

This is not moral grounding. It is moral outsourcing.

Truth about the shared world requires methods that allow claims to be checked against reality. Private experiences may be meaningful, even transformative, but they cannot function as public truth-claims unless they leave traces beyond the mind that experiences them.

This is where the scientific method earns its modest but indispensable role. Not as an arbiter of meaning or beauty, but as a constraint on belief about how the world works. It is incomplete and fallible, but it is self-correcting, predictive, and indifferent to authority. When it is wrong, it changes. That is not a weakness. It is its strength.

Religion offers something else. It is a cognitive technology as ancient as humanity itself. We have always told stories. We have always gathered around rituals. From the half-lion, half-man ivory carvings of the Palaeolithic to modern liturgies, religion has structured meaning, identity, and belonging in ways nothing else has fully replaced.

Perhaps nothing ever will.

But recognising religion’s psychological power does not grant it moral immunity. Institutions, like organisms, prioritise their own survival. Organised religion is no exception. Its first loyalty is to continuity, growth, and authority. The ethical good it claims to pursue is often subordinate to these aims.

This is why plurality matters.

A world that allows multiple moral frameworks to coexist is not weaker. It is more resilient. It creates space for learning, correction, and empathy across difference. It resists the impulse to divide humanity into saints and sinners, insiders and outcasts.

So please, do not miss the wood for the trees.

My leaving Christianity is not the tragedy here. The real question is whether Christianity, as practised and defended, is good. Whether it can endure honest scrutiny without retreating into authority. Whether it can coexist with moral progress without insisting on being its source.

I have not abandoned morality. I have abandoned the claim that it needs a gatekeeper.

And if my family, my marriage, my love, and my ethics are any indication, the ground beneath my feet has not disappeared.

It has simply become shared.

Under the Same Yoke

The warning against being “unequally yoked” is one I heard often growing up. The image is agricultural and ancient. Two animals bound together beneath a wooden beam, expected to pull in the same direction, at the same pace, toward the same end. If one is stronger, or faster, or simply wants to move differently, the result is strain. The plough cuts crooked lines. The work becomes harder. Progress slows.

It is an evocative metaphor, but also a revealing one. As it is commonly deployed, it assumes that difference itself is the problem. That harmony requires sameness. That the only way to move forward together is to think, believe, and pull in precisely the same way.

What is rarely asked is whether the yoke itself deserves scrutiny.

A yoke is not a symbol of intimacy. It is a tool of control. It exists to limit movement, to ensure compliance, and to subordinate individual agency to a prescribed task. It does not ask whether the field is worth ploughing, whether the direction is good, or whether the labour is just. It asks only for alignment.

Perhaps the deeper danger is not being unequally yoked, but being yoked at all.

In my marriage, what has sustained us is not uniformity of belief, but a shared commitment to growth. We are not pulling against one another, nor dragging each other toward incompatible ends. We are walking alongside one another, sometimes in step, sometimes out of rhythm, but always with the freedom to adjust, to slow, to question, and to change direction together. That flexibility is not a weakness. It is the very thing that keeps us moving.

What I have come to see, slowly and without triumph, is that growth is not the enemy of commitment. It is its condition. Nothing living remains unchanged, and nothing unchanged remains alive. Stagnation, by contrast, masquerades as faithfulness. It confuses stillness with virtue and repetition with truth. It does not preserve what we love. It quietly erodes it. Over time, what does not grow does not merely remain the same. It withers. Atrophy sets in quietly, first as rigidity, then as fragility, and finally as decay.

This is true of bodies, of relationships, and of moral frameworks alike. A marriage does not endure because it resists change, but because it learns how to move with it. A family is not held together by shared scripts, but by a shared willingness to become. Growth does not threaten intimacy. It tests whether intimacy is real.

The tragedy I was warned about has not arrived. My family did not fracture. My values did not dissolve. Love did not weaken in the absence of shared metaphysical certainty. What did fall away was the fear that religious difference must be fatal, and with it the belief that morality requires a gatekeeper to survive.

This is why I find the fixation on my family life so misplaced. Whether my marriage survives theological divergence is not the most serious question before Christianity. Whether it can survive honest scrutiny might be. And perhaps this is what unsettles some people most. Not that someone leaves faith, but that life continues, richly and ethically, beyond it. That meaning persists without permission. That commitment deepens without command.

I have levelled other accusations that should provoke far more concern. That Christianity often fails to be good, even as it claims moral authority. That it too often reveals power rather than God, hierarchy rather than holiness, control rather than truth. That it struggles to describe reality as it actually is, preferring a narrative that must be protected from evidence, dissent, and moral progress.

These are not peripheral critiques. They strike at the heart of what Christianity claims to offer. If a religion cannot account for the world we inhabit, if it must deny history, suppress inquiry, and spiritualise harm to preserve itself, then the question is no longer why some people leave, but why others stay.

I have not rejected growth for the sake of certainty. I have rejected certainty for the sake of growth. And in doing so, I have found not less responsibility, but more. Not less reverence, but a different kind. One that takes seriously the fragile, unfinished, deeply human lives we are shaping together.

My leaving is not the scandal. The greater scandal is the insistence that growth itself is betrayal, that change is decay, and that fidelity requires the denial of what we can see, know, and responsibly affirm.

I have not stepped out of a shared yoke into chaos. I have stepped out of it into shared responsibility. Into a moral landscape where love is chosen, not enforced, where commitment is renewed rather than assumed, and where growth is not feared but expected.

If there is any lesson worth passing on, it is not that a family who prays together stays together. Perhaps, instead, it is that if there is a future worth moving toward, it will not be reached by binding ourselves ever tighter to inherited certainties. It will be reached by loosening our grip, lifting our gaze, and learning how to walk together without needing to be restrained into agreement.

Not under the same yoke, but toward the same flourishing. Because growth, unlike dogma, does not ask us to drive immutable flags into bedrock. It asks us to choose one another again and again, without needing to pretend that becoming something new is betrayal.

P.S click here for A Pre-emptive Response To My Christian Friends