The TikTok search for "realizations about life" is flooded right now. Those videos where someone sits in front of the camera, quiet for a second, and then says the thing that changed everything for them. I've watched about forty of them in the past week because HEATHEN HYMNS came out and a lot of people are asking me: when did you know? When did the whole faith structure come apart?
So this is my video. In blog form. Because I needed more than sixty seconds to tell it right.
The short answer is: I took a break from church in my mid-twenties and I read the Bible cover to cover, alone, with no apologetics commentary, no pastor footnotes, no concordance written by someone with a seminary degree and an agenda. Just me and the text. Genesis through Revelation. Every chapter. Every verse. No skipping.
And somewhere in the middle of all that reading I pulled one thread. And the sweater came apart in my hands.
the setup: I was the best kind of believer
I want you to understand who I was before, so you understand what it cost to change.
I was not a casual Christian. I was front-row, every Sunday, notebook in hand, annotating the sermon. I knew my Bible. I could find verses. I participated in the discussions. I led a small group for two years. My faith was not peripheral, it was structural. It was the frame the rest of my life hung on. God was real. The Bible was true. Jesus died for my sins. I believed all of it with my whole chest.
I also had questions. I always had questions, that's just who I am, I'm constitutionally incapable of not interrogating things. And every time a question got uncomfortable, there was a system for managing it. The pastor had an answer. The commentary had an answer. There was always a framework to soften the sharp edge of the text. Historical context. Metaphor. Divine mystery. Trust.
I trusted. I deferred. I moved on.
Then I took a break. Not a dramatic exit, just some space. Life got complicated. I stopped going for a while. And in that quiet, I thought: I should actually read this thing all the way through. I've been living by it my whole life. I should know what's actually in it.
Reading Without a Filter
Here's what's different about reading the Bible without pastoral guidance: you read it in order. You don't skip to the comforting parts. You don't get someone else's explanation before you've formed your own impression. You just read.
Genesis was mostly familiar. Exodus had some rough patches but I'd been through those in study groups, the plagues, the hardened heart. Though I'll note: reading Exodus 7-11 straight through with no one to soften it, that story of God hardening Pharaoh's heart specifically so he'd refuse to let the people go, so that God could demonstrate his power through ever-escalating plagues... reading that without a mediator is a different experience. Who is being punished for a condition God created? The Egyptians. Including their children. Including their animals. For a heart that was intentionally hardened. I sat with that for a while.
Leviticus: I knew about the dietary laws. I didn't know about Leviticus 19, which in the same section that gives us "love your neighbor as yourself" also discusses selling your daughter into slavery and the rules for doing so humanely. The proximity of those two things, the profound and the horrifying in the same chapter, I couldn't unsee it once I'd seen it.
Numbers 31 is what broke something in me. I have a whole post about this, the women nobody named, so I won't go through every verse again. But reading that chapter alone, at my kitchen table, with no one there to explain it away: Moses commands the killing of every Midianite man, woman, and older child after a battle. He then commands his soldiers to keep the virgin girls for themselves. This is framed as God's instruction. I read it three times. I put the book down. I walked around my apartment for twenty minutes.
I'd been in church my whole life and nobody had ever mentioned that chapter. Not once.
The Thread That Pulled
Here's where we get to the realization. Not just "the Bible has disturbing passages," I knew that at some level even before. The realization was deeper and stranger and more destabilizing than that.
The realization was: I had been selectively handed this text my entire life. Not by accident. Systematically. Every week, the lectionary or the sermon series chose the passages that reinforced the theology. The uncomfortable ones were either skipped, softened, or filtered through an interpretive framework that required trusting the interpreter more than the text itself. I had been given a curated Bible and told it was the whole thing.
That's not just a theological problem. That's a trust problem. That's the institution telling me: we will decide what you need to know.
And once I saw that mechanism, I saw it everywhere. I saw it in how women's roles were justified from scripture (1 Timothy 2, headship theology, complementarianism) while other passages about women leading and prophesying were footnoted into irrelevance. I saw it in the genealogies: Matthew 1 traces Joseph's lineage back to David, Luke 3 also traces Joseph's lineage back to David, but through completely different people, with different names, different numbers of generations. Both can't be right. And yet nobody talked about it. I saw it in how Judas died: Matthew 27:5 says he hanged himself, Acts 1:18 describes him falling headlong in a field, his body bursting open. Two irreconcilable accounts of the same man's death. The Bible I was raised on said it was inerrant. Those two passages are not reconcilable without creative interpretation that goes well beyond what the text actually says.
None of this meant the people in the pews were liars. Most of them were just as selectively informed as I was. My problem was and remains the pulpit, the institution, the system that decided what version of the text I was allowed to encounter.
What the Unraveling Actually Felt Like
People imagine it as this dramatic moment. A lightning strike of atheism. it wasn't. It was slow and it was terrible and it felt like grief because it WAS grief.
The faith structure I had wasn't just theology. It was community, identity, comfort, a whole framework for making meaning out of difficult things. When my grandfather died, when I was scared, when I didn't know what to do, that structure caught me. Losing it didn't feel like freedom at first. It felt like the floor disappearing.
I cried a lot. I was angry. Not the clean, righteous anger I can write about now but a scared, messy anger that didn't know where to point itself. I grieved the community. I grieved the certainty. I grieved a version of God I had loved, actually loved, in the way you love something you believed in completely.
That grief is in HEATHEN HYMNS. Not the conclusions, those came later and they're steadier, harder, mine. But the grief of the unraveling is in the music. The ache of the front-row girl who read the thing she'd been given and couldn't un-read it.
What I Have Now Instead
I get this question a lot: what do you have now, if not faith? And I think people expect me to say "nothing" or to go into some nihilistic spiral about meaninglessness. that's not my answer.
What I have is a life that belongs to me. A moral framework I built from evidence and empathy rather than received from an authority I could no longer trust. An understanding of the Bible that is deeper and more honest, and more devastating, than the one I was given in church, precisely because I actually read it without someone standing between me and the text.
I have the knowledge that I can survive the destruction of something I believed in completely. That's not nothing. That's actually the most useful thing I've ever learned about myself. I have a suspicion of anyone who tells me to trust them about what a text says instead of reading it myself. That suspicion has served me well in every domain, not just religion.
And I have Lazarus the pothos, who has now survived four years of my inconsistent watering schedule and is, improbably, thriving. I feel a kinship with that plant I can't fully explain.
Look. I don't need you to walk away from your faith. That's not what any of this is about. My problem was never the people sitting in the pews. My problem was the system that decided what they were allowed to know. If your faith community is honest with you about the difficult parts, if they sit in the discomfort of the full text alongside you, that's different. That's something. I just never found it.
What I'd ask, of anyone, believer or not, is this: read the actual thing. Not the curated version. Not the devotional version. The actual text, in order, including the parts nobody puts on the inspirational poster. See what you find.
Whatever you find, it'll be yours. And that's worth something.