Un-Learning

Knowing Before I Had Words

From what I can remember, I knew that I was gay before I fully understood what the Bible had to say about people in the LGBTQ+ community. It was third grade—maybe even second. I knew for a fact, from that young of an age, that I was not interested in girls.

Before continuing, a little bit about my hometown matters. Growing up, the population was under 1,000 people. Most were white, conservative, and Catholic. Translation: I knew I was attracted to guys, but I had no idea what being “gay” even was. At that point in time, I didn’t understand the word. There were no openly gay people in my life, and if anyone in school was, they were definitely in the closet. To be clear, I knew no gay people, had no concept of the idea, and no framework for understanding it.

The second part of this—and it’s equally as important—is how sheltered I was from pop culture. We listened to KJ97, Y100, and K-LOVE. The movies and TV shows we were allowed to watch were appropriate for children. All good things, of course—go mom and dad—just a tad sheltered. All of this is to say: when I discovered that I had no interest in girls, I was not influenced by any person or anything “worldly.”

I knew no person who was gay. No character. I had not seen a gay couple in a movie. There were no references to gay men in TV shows. Nothing. I knew I was gay purely because that’s who I was.

And then began the many, many years of hiding who I was—because of the shame, the judgment, and because of the “eternal consequences” I was sure I would face.

Fear Taught Early

While we lived in a very Catholic community, I grew up going to a Southern Baptist church and am no stranger to the regular Sunday service focused on hellfire and damnation. I was told that any misstep was a sin. I was taught to be constantly in fear of the “enemy.” I was taught that doubt itself was dangerous.

So let’s dive into why I feel like a majority of people believe in Christianity.

From a psychological standpoint, Christianity doesn’t merely present itself as true—it presents itself as the only permissible truth, and it does so early, before critical reasoning is fully formed. Children are taught, often implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that belief determines eternal fate: those who believe are saved; those who don’t are condemned to hell. All of the people who don’t believe will go to hell. If you question, you will go to hell.

Questioning isn’t framed as curiosity or growth. It’s framed as danger. Doubt becomes morally charged. Skepticism isn’t neutral—it’s rebellious, sinful, even fatal.

This messaging is delivered during childhood and adolescence, long before the brain’s executive functions and risk-assessment systems are fully developed. That makes the conditioning exceptionally durable. Fear becomes fused to belief, identity, family, and safety. By the time independent reasoning emerges, the cost of questioning has already been set as infinite.

That’s what makes the indoctrination so powerful. It doesn’t argue its case. It preemptively punishes dissent, embedding obedience at the neurological level before consent or informed choice is even possible.

What Happens When You Leave

If you do make it out—if you start to see the other side—expect to be met with incredible backlash. You have to remember that these individuals have been taught that the person stepping outside of Christianity is going to hell. And if that person is someone they love, they now believe they will spend eternity without them.

That is incredibly scary for them.

It goes against all of the indoctrination and conditioning they have been exposed to. Let’s break it down again: from an incredibly young age, this is all they have been taught. I think we often underestimate the gravity of how powerful that is. It has been built into them. And quite frankly, fear is what keeps them believing.

And this is not unique to Christianity.

Denominations, Division, and Inherited Belief

Indoctrination looks vastly different even within Christianity itself. That fact alone undermines the idea that Christianity presents one clear, unified, divinely revealed truth. Even in my own hometown, in my own family, there were visible rifts between Catholics and Baptists—different rules, different fears, and different beliefs about who was truly saved.

To make this concrete, consider the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Members of the LDS Church generally do not believe that most people—including other Christians—are sent to eternal hell. They believe almost everyone ends up in a degree of heaven, not endless torment. “Hell,” or outer darkness, is reserved for an extremely small group—people who fully know God is real and still totally reject Him. That’s not most humans. From an LDS perspective, other Christians are usually seen as sincere followers of Jesus who have much of the truth but lack what LDS theology considers the fully restored gospel. In other words: you’re mostly right—you’re just missing some pieces.

Now compare that to many evangelical or fundamentalist Christian traditions.

In those traditions, salvation is often framed as narrow and fragile. Believing the “wrong” theology, belonging to the “wrong” church, or rejecting specific doctrines can mean eternal damnation. From these perspectives, Mormonism isn’t simply incomplete—it’s false. And because it’s false, many evangelicals believe Mormons are going to hell.

So within Christianity alone, we have radically different answers to the same questions:

• Who is saved?
• Who goes to hell?
• Is hell eternal?
• How narrow is the path?
• How much doctrine is required?
• How much error is fatal?

And yet, each group claims to worship the same God, follow the same Jesus, and rely on the same Bible.

This is not a fringe issue. There is no single agreed-upon number, but estimates usually place the number of Christian denominations worldwide between 30,000 and 45,000. While some people do move between denominations later in life, social-science research consistently shows that religion tracks overwhelmingly with upbringing.

Family religion is the single strongest predictor of adult belief. Geography matters immensely—Catholic regions, Orthodox regions, Protestant regions, evangelical strongholds. People usually inherit the denomination, worship style, and basic theological assumptions they were raised with.

This is true for Christianity and basically every religion worldwide.

I can speak for myself when I say I truly believed what I believed because of where I was raised and what I was taught. I do not use the words brainwashed or conditioned lightly, but I fully believe that is what this process is.

And the same pattern applies across generations. People raise their children in the belief system they inherited. Their parents were raised that way. Their grandparents were raised that way. This is true for many Christian families across the world—and it’s equally true for every other major religion.

If you weren’t born here, would you believe the same thing?

As strongly as Christians feel about their faith, people raised in Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim cultures feel just as strongly about theirs—because belief is rarely discovered in a vacuum. It is inherited, reinforced, and protected long before it is ever examined.

Closed Systems and Exclusive Truth

Christianity, as presented in the Bible, makes explicit exclusivity claims about truth and salvation. Core passages assert that reconciliation with God is possible only through Jesus Christ and that acceptance of this message is necessary for salvation.

Jesus says no one comes to the Father except through him. Salvation is found in no one else. Belief brings life; unbelief brings condemnation. The message must be spread to all nations. Any different gospel is condemned. Confession of Jesus as Lord is required for salvation.

The Bible presents itself as divinely inspired revelation. Its authority rests on the claim that God authored or guided it. As a result, Christianity’s truth claims are largely self-referential: the Bible is true because it is God’s word, and it is God’s word because the Bible says so.

Within the Christian framework, this isn’t seen as a flaw. It’s seen as divine structure. Outside that framework, however, these claims cannot be independently verified in the same way empirical facts can. Belief must come first.

Christianity therefore functions as a closed theological system in which belief precedes confirmation, and doubt is framed as a spiritual or moral failure rather than a neutral intellectual position.

Islam, as articulated in the Qur’an, makes parallel exclusivity claims. The Qur’an teaches that it is the final, complete, and uncorrupted revelation of God, delivered through Muhammad, and that true submission to God is the correct and intended path for humanity. Like the Bible, its authority rests on divine origin, known because the text itself declares it.

In both traditions, belief is reinforced by strong emotional, communal, and cultural commitment. Most adherents are introduced to their faith at a young age, often within family and community structures that treat the religion not as one option among many but as fundamental truth.

Faith becomes existential.

When Belief Targets Identity

Jumping back to knowing I was gay from a young age—and knowing so without any outside influence—you have no idea what it means to know deep within your core who you are, and then grow up in a belief system that teaches you are fundamentally flawed. That being who you are will result in eternal punishment.

I truly believe you have no right to speak negatively about an LGBTQ+ person who chooses to deconstruct from Christianity.

Just for a second, try to imagine the pain, guilt, embarrassment, shame, and fear a child—a child—has to carry because a book and a church tell them that who they are is inherently evil.

What kind of sick belief system is that?

And maybe you can relate on some level. The church is notorious for telling people that if they don’t hear the “voice of God,” they must not have a relationship with Him. That if they don’t speak in tongues or get slain in the Spirit, they aren’t close enough.

To live your life never being enough.

Many Christians will tell you this motivates them to do more. Yet deep down, I guarantee many feel like failures.

If my words cut deep, know that I intend them to. This is uncomfortable on purpose.

History, Patterns, and Survival

Across human history, belief systems emerge as people try to make sense of suffering, morality, death, and meaning, and they develop within real social and political conditions rather than in isolation. Early religions everywhere were polytheistic, and in the ancient Near East the Israelite tradition gradually evolved—through crisis, exile, and reinterpretation—into exclusive monotheism, forming Judaism centuries before the Common Era. By the first century CE, Jesus Christ was teaching entirely within that already monotheistic framework and is best understood by most historians as an apocalyptic Jewish preacher—one of many at the time—who believed God was about to intervene decisively in history. When that expected intervention did not occur after his execution, his followers reinterpreted events rather than abandoning belief; Paul the Apostle became the most influential of these interpreters, reframing Jesus’s death as the beginning of a cosmic process rather than its culmination and reshaping the movement into a universal faith that became Christianity.

At the same time—and often earlier—other belief systems were forming independently in different parts of the world around historically verifiable figures such as Gautama Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates, each addressing similar human questions with very different answers and no awareness of one another. This pattern of expectation, failure, reinterpretation, and survival is not unique to ancient history. You can see it clearly in modern times. In the 19th century, followers of William Miller predicted the return of Christ in 1844; when it failed, a remnant reinterpreted the event as a heavenly, invisible action rather than an earthly one, eventually forming the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which remains a global institution today. A similar process occurred with Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose early predictions about the end of the world in 1914 and later dates failed but were reinterpreted as spiritual or invisible fulfillments, allowing the movement to persist. More recently, figures like Harold Camping publicly predicted specific end-times dates in 1994 and 2011; those movements largely collapsed when prophecy failed, illustrating the same mechanism without successful institutional adaptation.

Seen as a whole, history shows belief systems developing in parallel, shaped by human expectation, disappointment, reinterpretation, and social reinforcement. Apocalyptic teachers arise, predictions fail, meanings shift, and the versions of belief that best adapt to unmet expectations and changing circumstances survive and spread. Because Christianity follows the same identifiable pattern seen both before and after it—one that continues into the present—it becomes difficult, on historical grounds alone, to argue that it represents a uniquely divinely inspired intervention while other traditions are merely human. History can clearly trace the process; deciding whether anything beyond human interpretation is guiding it ultimately remains a matter of faith rather than evidence. Christianity lasted because it was adaptable, universal, emotionally powerful, socially cohesive, institutionally supported, and capable of reinterpreting failure without losing authority. None of those factors prove it’s true. But together, they explain why it survived when so many others didn’t.

The Cost of Not Fitting the Mold

Historically, harsh religious condemnation of same-sex relationships did not emerge as a universal moral truth but as a context-specific survival strategy within ancient Israelite religion. Early polytheistic cultures in the Near East, Mediterranean, and Asia generally did not treat sexuality—especially same-sex behavior—as a cosmic moral issue. It was regulated socially, not theologically, and often tolerated or ignored. As Judaism developed under conditions of exile, population threat, and identity collapse, sexual behavior became tightly linked to lineage, reproduction, and boundary-making. Non-procreative sex became framed as divine violation rather than human variation. Christianity inherited and intensified these rules, universalizing them beyond their original historical purpose and reframing them as timeless moral absolutes.

So while belief systems across the world developed without focusing on sexuality, my entire life—up to the point when I decided to leave Christianity—was being driven by a system of belief tied to exile, population threat, and identity collapse. A system that labeled me inherently flawed. A system that made it exponentially harder to exist. A system that leads people who “love” and “accept” me to secretly believe their god can make me straight, and that if I continue to “live in sin,” I will spend eternity in hell.

No matter how you explain it, indoctrination that deep will likely never be realized by those inside it.

Growing up believing I was inherently flawed led to anger and deep internal rejection. Christianity works great for those who fit the mold. When you don’t, it is one of the most destructive and defeating systems imaginable—especially for a child.

This was not external rejection. This was internal rejection. Arguably worse.

I kept these truths bottled up for 18 years. Eighteen years of shame, fear, and suicidal ideation—not because I was broken, but because the Christian faith told me I was. Because people in my life spoke negatively about LGBTQ+ people before they knew I identified with that community.

Judgment and hate tied to geography. To family lineage. To inherited belief.

I consider myself lucky enough to make it out. Many people never do. Some live in constant shame and denial. Some build lives that are never truly theirs. Some end their lives altogether.

That is what Christianity does.