Is the mind really that fickle?

 My first boyfriend and I bonded over theology. He and his family were part of a home-based, semi-exclusive, Christian church. We met in our last year of school, when we were 17, and he had begun questioning his restrictive upbringing. There were a lot more rules about behaviour in his church than mine. For instance, women were not allowed to wear pants or cut their hair short. The only permitted biblical translation was the King James version. Most relationships outside the church were frowned upon – even relationships with other Christians. One of the core beliefs of his congregation was that they were the only Christians who got it all right; that all other Christian churches were on the path to eternal separation from God. Needless to say, I was intrigued. He was open to talking about it and questioning what he had been taught.

Our theological discussions were usually tilted towards my interpretations of scripture.  After all, I was the one who had been taught to look at the original Hebrew and Greek texts (albeit in a superficial way). My church upbringing was not quite as authoritarian, so I was proud of the way I read the Bible – a way that (I thought) was independent of what anyone told me to believe. I was very comfortable delving into biblical passages and being open to new interpretations. To be honest, I still think it’s easy to poke holes in an ‘exclusivity-focussed’ theology, especially when it contains strange rules and needlessly rigid interpretations of scripture.

Photo by me

For the duration of our relationship, I assumed that I was helping him out of a dogmatic system. I thought that, eventually, he would be able to deconstruct all his rigid beliefs and we could live happily ever after within a more agreeable theology (like mine). At the beginning, he was incredibly open to thinking critically about his upbringing. He had already taken the controversial step of openly dating me – a decision that was generally frowned upon by his church and family (although, I must say, his family were always civil to me). He had criticisms about the circumstances in which his church formed, their exclusive practices, and their attitude towards other Christians. However, he ended up returning to his family’s church.

Our relationship was tumultuous, and it played out during a transitional time of both of our lives – leaving home for the first time and attending university. It was the first serious relationship for both of us and we struggled with the impossible standards of purity culture and abstinence (see my previous posts). He and I are no longer in contact. I don’t think I’ll ever fully know what drove him to return to a theology that he so thoroughly criticised and questioned.

I now empathise with his decision to go back. Committing to eventually leave his church was committing to leave his family and his robust community safety net. What I saw was a young man struggling to adjust quickly to a new normal in which romantic relationships and gender roles were vastly different to what he had always known. I don’t blame him for deciding to go back (it’s a move I’ve thought about taking a few times), however, his decision impacted me greatly.

Up until we went our separate ways, I had thought that the truth about life was clear. I thought that my branch of Christianity was unquestionably one of the most rational and biblical. Everyone I knew, loved, and sympathised with had subscribed to my theology. I had answers to most of life’s big questions. I struggled with the fact that someone like him, whose thoughts and feelings I respected, could turn their back on critical thinking and rationality and return to a dogmatic community. How many other Christians had chosen Christianity out of safety and belonging? Was that the real reason I was a Christian?