In my first blog post, I mentioned that I consider myself a “Recovering Christian.” That rubbed a few people the wrong way, so I clarified in the comments section. Steph says she’s interested in hearing more on this topic, so here goes.

In my initial comments I wrote:

Remember that to recover can mean “get or find back; recover the use of” and in fact that is the first definition of the word… To me it indicates that I am recovering my faith. I am learning not to blame God for human actions… “Former” would indicate I have no ties to Christianity and that simply is not true. But, I cannot bring myself to identify myself as Christian because that was a world of hurt for me.

There are other labels people use to describe separation from a church or creed—lapsed Catholic is the big one (apparently, recovering Catholic is also used.) There are the prefixes “ex-” or “former-,” or even “apostate.” It’s not like leaving a faith is particularly unusual.

The thing about losing one’s religion is that it’s not a sudden thing. I didn’t wake up one morning and decide, I think I’ll stop believing in God today. And the hard thing for me was that I didn’t stop believing in God. I just didn’t like Him much anymore. I didn’t care for His followers–our church had some seriously crazy things going on, and that eventually led my father to take our business elsewhere. We started attending a Lutheran church–his home faith–and I just couldn’t stand the meaningless ritual responses. Church had already been empty for me, and I could no longer fill it from within myself.

So, I stopped going to church. I stopped praying. It felt like a burden had been lifted. My father despaired, blamed my World Religions college course (which Steph encouraged me to take.) He said, “Don’t blame God for what humans do in His name.” What he didn’t understand was, my pulling away from the church was exactly my attempt at doing that. I couldn’t go to church anymore because it was getting in the way of God.

But, because of my upbringing, I can’t stop referring to the higher powers I believe in as anything but “God” and “Jesus.” God is the cranky old man who is a bit like my own dad (we’ll save that Freudian analysis for another day), and is really, really hard to talk to. Jesus is my buddy, the one I talk to when I’ve had a bad day and my grandma’s spirit isn’t there to consult with.

I’ve had a really hard time with calling myself ex-, or lapsed, or former-, because my Christian background is still there with a vengeance. But, I can’t call myself “Christian”–it has too many connotations to the outside world, as well. “Recovering Christian” seems to combine my need to keep a tie to the religion of my childhood, with the idea that I am taking back a part of it for myself.

There seems to be a basic human need to label oneself. It creates a sense of belonging, of identity. In fact, I lifted my label from someone else who has just as much trouble with established religion as I do. Whether Quaker (as I seem to be turning out to be), or UU, or Lapsed Catholic, we tie our past and our present together with words that define us to ourselves and the outside world. And, when there are misunderstandings, or lack of knowledge, about a label, it gives us the opportunity to share that part of ourselves with others.

-GhostGirl