http://www.andyfilmsandhikes.com/

andyfilmsandhikes, Prospect, OR (2026)

06/24/2026

The church hurt me. It hurt my family. It hurt people I love. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not going to soften that for people who are uncomfortable with hearing it.

But that is not why I left evangelical Christianity.

That is one of the things people get wrong about my story. Every time I talk about leaving the church, every time I talk about my time as an evangelical pastor, every time I talk about the harm I experienced, someone inevitably shows up to say, “Well, you just let church hurt affect your relationship with God.” And I understand why people say that. I really do. For 15 years, I was a licensed Southern Baptist pastor. I worked in churches in Las Vegas, Southern Oregon, and Northern California. I was a youth pastor, music pastor, associate pastor, children’s pastor. I preached the sermons. I led the Bible studies. I said the same things to people that people now say to me.

Do not let people affect your relationship with God. Do not let the church get in the way of Jesus. Do not let church hurt control your life. I get the sentiment because I used to believe it. I used to say it.

But I need to be very clear about something. Yes, the church played a huge role in me and my family leaving evangelical Christianity behind. Absolutely. The hurt was real. The damage was real. The hypocrisy was real. But that was not the whole reason I left. I left because I no longer believe the chief truth claims of Christianity.

I no longer believe the Bible is inerrant. I no longer believe the Bible is infallible. I no longer believe in the divinity of Christ. I no longer believe the story I spent years preaching is true. I know that sentence is going to make some people cringe. I know some people are already worried about my soul. I know some people are thinking, “Oh no, Andy, you’re going to hell.” And honestly, I understand that too because nine years ago I probably would have thought the same thing. I would have been worried about the salvation and eternal security of the person saying those words.

So when people come from a genuine place of concern, I get it. I really do. But I also need people to understand that this was not as simple as me getting my feelings hurt and walking away from Jesus. The church hurt was not the final answer. It was the beginning of the questions.

Christians say they are the body of Christ. Christians say they are the hands and feet of Jesus. Evangelical churches preach this constantly. We are the body of Christ. We represent Jesus. We are supposed to be different. We are supposed to be changed. That is the claim. The church does not simply claim to be a social club. It does not simply claim to be a nonprofit organization. It does not simply claim to be a gathering of people who like the same music and read the same book. The church claims to be the literal body of Christ on earth. Christians claim they have been transformed by Jesus. They claim they are being sanctified. They claim they are working out their salvation with fear and trembling. They claim they are no longer who they used to be because Jesus changed their lives.

So yes, when the church acts in ways that are cruel, arrogant, abusive, judgmental, dishonest, and deeply harmful, that matters. And I know what people say next. “Well, Christians are not perfect.” Of course they are not perfect. No one is perfect. That is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that when a group of people claims to be uniquely transformed by the creator of the universe, when they claim to have the Holy Spirit living inside of them, when they claim to be the body of Christ, and then their behavior often looks nothing like the Jesus they preach, that becomes more than just a people problem. It becomes a theological problem.

Because the church is supposed to be different. That is what I could not reconcile. I kept seeing pride. I kept seeing arrogance. I kept seeing people justify horrible things. I kept seeing people treated poorly because they were gay, because they left evangelical Christianity, because they made a mistake, because they asked questions, because they did not fit the mold. And let me be clear, when I say “made a mistake,” I am not saying being gay is a mistake. If you are gay, you are gay. That is fine. What I am saying is that even when someone does something Christians would consider wrong, the response I saw so often was not grace. It was judgment. It was shame. It was control. It was exclusion.

Which is the exact opposite of what I read about Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

So yes, my experience with the church hurt me. It hurt my family. It hurt people I care about. It was absolutely part of why I left. But the bigger issue was that the church’s behavior did not match the claims the church made about itself. And that made me start questioning everything else.

Was Jesus really resurrected? Is the Bible actually the inerrant, infallible word of God? Is the Bible without contradiction? What does the Bible actually say about LGBTQIA+ people and relationships? What does the Bible say about creation? How did we even get the Bible? Is the canon reliable? Why were these 66 books chosen? Why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? What about the other gospels?

The more I started asking those questions, the more I realized I had been making excuses. I had been turning a blind eye. I had not been as critical of my own beliefs as I thought I was. That does not mean Christian theology is meaningless to everyone. That does not mean every Christian is bad. That does not mean every person who believes is stupid or hateful or dishonest. I do not believe that.

I know faith is complicated. Religion is complicated. Spirituality is complicated. People believe what they believe for deeply personal reasons. Family history, culture, experience, pain, hope, community, transformation, survival, all of it plays a role. I will never dismiss someone’s deeply held spiritual beliefs just because I do not share them anymore. But for me, I could not keep living inside that dogmatic framework.

Once I started pulling on the thread, the whole thing started to unravel. Even the basic story of the gospel stopped making sense to me. The way I had understood it for years was that God created Adam and Eve, placed them in a perfect garden, told them not to eat from one specific tree, and then a talking snake convinced them to eat the fruit. Because of that one act, sin entered the world. Humanity was condemned. Every person after Adam inherited a sin nature because of something they did not personally do.

Then God had to send Jesus, who is also God, but also the Son of God, and part of the Trinity, which we are told we are not fully supposed to understand. Jesus then had to die on the cross to pay the debt for sin that humanity inherited from Adam. And I know that may sound normal if you grew up in church. It sounded normal to me for most of my life. But once I stepped back and really looked at it, I could not make it make sense anymore.

I could not reconcile it with reality. I could not reconcile it with justice. I could not reconcile it with the loving God I had been taught to believe in.

So no, I did not leave Christianity because I was simply mad at the church. I left because church hurt forced me to ask questions I could not unask. It led me to examine the truth claims of Christianity, the history of the Bible, the structure of evangelical theology, the canon of Scripture, original sin, salvation, hell, the resurrection, and the way Christians talk about love while often practicing exclusion. And eventually, I realized I could not believe it anymore.

That is where I am now. I do not believe I am going to hell. I do not believe I have turned my back on truth. I do not believe I walked away because I was weak or bitter or deceived. I believe I asked honest questions. I believe I followed those questions where they led. And I believe that for me, leaving evangelical Christianity was not an act of rebellion. It was an act of honesty.

There are good Christians in the world. I know that. There are Christians who love people well. There are Christians who love and affirm LGBTQIA+ people. There are Christians who feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, care for the poor, and try to live out the words of Jesus in real and meaningful ways. I am not here to erase those people.

But I am also not going to pretend my story is simply “church hurt.”

The church hurt me. But that is not why I left.

The church hurt me, and then I started asking questions.

And the answers I found changed everything.

06/23/2026

Hey y’all, first of all, welcome. A lot of new people have found this page recently, and I’m genuinely grateful you’re here.

One of the questions I get over and over is, “What’s the best way to support what you do?”

A few things help, but the biggest one is honestly following me on Instagram: .

Here’s why. Instagram is where a lot of my brand partnerships and paid opportunities come from. When companies look at whether they want to work with a creator, they aren’t just looking at follower counts. They’re looking at engagement. Are people watching? Commenting? Sharing? Interacting?

The more engaged my Instagram community is, the easier it is for me to continue doing this work full-time, creating content, speaking, organizing hikes, advocating for mental health and public lands, and showing up in the places where I can hopefully make a difference.

If you want longer videos, definitely subscribe to my YouTube channel too. It’s the same name there: Andy Films and Hikes.

I always tell people that Instagram is kind of my front porch. It’s where most people first meet me. It’s a little more advertiser-friendly because, well, it has to be. But once you get to know me through YouTube or here on Facebook, you tend to get a little more of the unfiltered version of me.

So if you’d like to support what I’m building, give me a follow over there, say hi, and engage with the content when something resonates with you. It genuinely makes a difference.

Instagram: www.instagram.com/andyfilmsandhikes
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Thank you all. Seriously. None of this exists without you.

06/23/2026

There are a lot of reasons I eventually left evangelical Christianity, but people usually assume it was because of theology, politics, science, or some intellectual argument. Those things certainly played a role, but when I look back, some of the moments that had the biggest impact on me were much simpler than that. They involved real people. They involved actual teenagers. They involved watching churches respond to kids who were looking for safety, belonging, friendship, and trusted adults who cared about them, and realizing that a lot of the time, the church was more interested in protecting itself than loving the people right in front of it.

For fifteen years, I served as an evangelical pastor. Depending on the church, I was a youth pastor, worship pastor, associate pastor, technology director, podcast producer, and about a dozen other jobs that somehow got rolled into one position. In some churches, I even worked a second job at Starbucks because ministry didn’t provide health insurance or enough income to support a family. One of the churches I served was a small Baptist church in Smith River, California. If you have never been there, it is the last little town on Highway 101 before you cross into Oregon. It was a tiny church in a tiny community, but something interesting was happening in our youth group. Teenagers were showing up.

Not just church kids, either. Not just the kids whose families already attended on Sunday mornings. We had students coming from difficult backgrounds. We had students who were struggling at home. We had students who felt like outsiders. We had students who did not fit neatly into the boxes many churches expected them to fit into. Some of those students were LGBTQ+. At the time, I still considered myself an evangelical Christian, and looking back, my views on LGBTQ+ issues were still fairly conservative, though they were beginning to change. I had already started questioning some of the things I had been taught growing up, but I was not where I am today. What I did know was that these students kept showing up because they felt safe.

My youth leaders and I worked hard to create an environment where teenagers felt welcomed and cared for. Were we perfect? Absolutely not. There are things from my ministry years that I still regret. There were times I handled situations poorly. There were times I judged teenagers when I should have shown more grace. There are conversations I wish I could go back and redo. I still carry guilt for moments where I thought I was being spiritually serious, but really I was being harsh to kids who needed patience. But one thing I genuinely cared about was making sure students knew they mattered.

One week, I was meeting with my pastor. We had regular Tuesday meetings where we discussed the church, upcoming events, worship, technology, the podcast, youth ministry, and whatever else I was somehow responsible for that week while not being paid nearly enough. I remember excitedly telling him about a student who had started attending regularly. She was a le***an teenager from a difficult background. She had found community in our youth group. She was connecting with leaders. She was bringing friends. My wife and I had gotten to know her and several other students because we lived in Crescent City, where a lot of the students were from, and it felt like exactly the kind of thing youth ministry was supposed to be about.

I expected my pastor to be excited. Instead, he looked at me with concern and asked a question I have never forgotten. He asked, “She’s not coming on the youth retreat to Portland, right?” I was confused. I asked him what he meant, and his response was that she could not come because of the sleeping arrangements. Students would be staying together in a shared space, and his concern was that because she was a le***an, “we don’t know what she’ll do.”

I was stunned. Even at that point in my life, when many of my beliefs were still evolving, I remember thinking, “Do you hear yourself right now?” This was a teenager who had done absolutely nothing wrong. She was not causing problems. She was not creating conflict. She was not making anyone unsafe. She was simply a teenager who happened to be gay, and somehow, in my pastor’s mind, her sexual orientation immediately made her a potential threat.

I remember trying to explain how absurd that reasoning was. LGBTQ+ teenagers go to school. They participate in sports. They use locker rooms. They exist in shared spaces every day without incident. But none of that mattered because the issue was never really evidence. It was fear. And that conversation stayed with me long after it ended, not because it was the first time I had encountered anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes in the church, because it was not, but because it revealed something deeper. I was talking about a teenager who had finally found a place where she felt safe, loved, and accepted. My pastor was talking about how to keep her at arm’s length. We were not having the same conversation.

Before long, I left that church and moved to another ministry position in Medford, Oregon. At first, I thought the new church would be different. In many ways, it was more progressive than the church I had left, but some of the same patterns kept appearing. Again, we had students from difficult backgrounds showing up. Again, we had LGBTQ+ students attending. Again, we had teenagers who did not fit the mold. And once again, not everyone was happy about it.

I remember hearing complaints that I focused too much on unchurched kids. Some parents worried their children were being exposed to students who came from rough backgrounds. Others felt uncomfortable because their teenagers attended Christian schools and were not used to interacting with kids whose lives looked different from theirs. I remember thinking, “What exactly do you think youth ministry is supposed to be?” The entire point should have been helping teenagers find community, support, and belonging. Instead, it often felt like the goal was protecting a bubble.

One conversation from that period has stuck with me as well. I asked one of our LGBTQ+ students why she attended youth group every Wednesday but rarely came on Sundays. Her answer broke my heart. She said it was because she felt safe on Wednesday nights, but she did not feel safe on Sunday mornings. Think about that for a moment. The church service was the place where she felt unsafe. The youth group was the place where she felt accepted. That should have caused deep reflection within the church, but instead, many churches seemed more concerned with preserving culture than caring for people.

Looking back, I can see how much of evangelical youth ministry was built around isolation. We were told to protect teenagers from the world, protect them from secular culture, protect them from public schools, protect them from universities, protect them from different ideas, and protect them from people who believed differently. I even remember being instructed to encourage graduating students to attend Christian colleges because public universities might cause them to lose their faith. What made this particularly strange was that the pastor telling me this was also a committed Calvinist who believed in predestination and once-saved-always-saved theology.

I remember thinking about the contradiction. If God is truly sovereign and someone’s salvation is secure, why would attending the University of Oregon be more dangerous than attending Bible college? If faith cannot survive exposure to different ideas, how strong is that faith really? Questions like that kept piling up, and over time, I began realizing that much of what I had been taught was not actually about helping young people grow. It was about control.

It was about producing the next generation of culture warriors. It was about making sure teenagers became the right kind of Christians, voted the right way, believed the right things, and stayed inside the approved boundaries. The focus was often less on loving people and more on preserving institutions, less about compassion and more about conformity, less about helping teenagers heal and more about making sure they did not challenge the culture of the church.

That realization was one of many things that eventually led me away from evangelical Christianity. Today, I no longer identify as a Christian. I no longer work in ministry. I would describe myself as an agnostic pantheist. But despite everything, I want to be fair. Not every person I served with was motivated by fear. Not every youth leader was trying to control people. Many of the volunteers I worked alongside genuinely loved those students. They cared deeply. They sacrificed their time. They wanted teenagers to know they mattered. Some of those leaders have also since left evangelical Christianity. Others have remained.

But what I remember most clearly are the students. The teenagers who were searching for safety. The teenagers who were looking for acceptance. The teenagers who were trying to figure out who they were. The teenagers who simply wanted to know they were loved. Those students taught me far more than I ever taught them, and in many ways, they were a major part of the reason I started asking questions that eventually changed the course of my life.

06/23/2026

How did I end up here?

06/21/2026

One of the questions I get asked most often is, “Andy, what changed?” What made a former evangelical pastor, lifelong conservative, and Republican voter completely rethink his views on LGBTQ+ people, politics, faith, and so many of the things I once believed? The answer is not as dramatic as people probably expect. It was not one book, one debate, one political argument, or one perfectly crafted theological takedown. Ultimately, what changed me was kindness.

I grew up deep in evangelical Christianity. Both of my parents were preacher’s kids. After my parents separated, church became even more central to my life. I went to Christian school, attended church constantly, accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, got baptized, and eventually became a pastor myself. By nineteen, I was already working in ministry. I went to Bible college. I spent fifteen years serving in churches. I was also incredibly conservative. I went to Young Republican meetings in high school. I voted for George W. Bush twice. I believed all the things a lot of conservative evangelical kids were taught to believe, not because I had examined them deeply, but because that was the world I was formed in.

Looking back now, I can see that the version of Christianity I was raised in was deeply tied to politics, fear, and judgment. Christianity itself is not the problem, but the strand I came from was judgmental, homophobic, xenophobic, chauvinistic, and more than a little racist. It taught me that certain people were dangerous, certain people were sinful, certain people were threats to the family, the church, and society. LGBTQ+ people were absolutely included in that list. I believed things about q***r people that I now deeply regret, and I believed them without ever really listening to the people I was judging.

During those years in ministry, I also worked at Starbucks because, like a lot of pastors, I needed health insurance. Starbucks was really good at the time about offering benefits if you worked enough hours, so while I was preaching and serving in churches, I was also making coffee with people from completely different backgrounds than mine. I worked alongside people of different races, different religions, different political beliefs, women who challenged the way I had been taught to see gender, and people from the LGBTQ+ community. Most of them knew who I was. They knew I was an evangelical pastor. They knew I was Southern Baptist at the time. They knew what I believed. And still, they showed me kindness.

One night, I was closing at Starbucks with a coworker I’ll call Jay. It was pouring rain in Las Vegas, which does not happen very often, and Jay took the bus everywhere. I had only recently gotten a car, and I knew the bus route he would have to take meant standing in the rain, transferring, and probably spending an hour and a half just trying to get home. I could get him there in about twenty minutes, so I told him I would drive him. He lived on a completely different side of town from me, in a part of Las Vegas where, if I’m honest, a lot of white people like me were taught not to hang out. But it was raining, he needed a ride, and it was the obvious thing to do.

When we got to his apartment complex, he paused before getting out of the car and said something I have never forgotten. He said, “Andy, you know, you and I are a lot alike.” And I remember thinking, “What are you talking about?” Jay was a Black gay man. I was a straight white evangelical Christian pastor. In my mind at that time, we could not have been more different. But then he told me his story.

Jay had grown up in the church. He loved God. He wanted to serve God. He had even been preparing for ministry and was being mentored by his pastor. But he was also gay, and in the world we came from, that meant he was taught to hate a part of himself. He tried to pray it away. He tried to become the person his church told him he had to be. Eventually, he went to his pastor and admitted he was struggling and wanted help. Instead of receiving love, kindness, empathy, or support, he was rejected. He told me they called him an abomination. His church kicked him out. His family kicked him out. He was on his own.

What broke me was not just the cruelty of what happened to him. It was what he said after that. He said, “All I wanted to do was serve God.” I sat there realizing that everything I had been taught about people like Jay did not match the human being sitting next to me. He was not dangerous. He was not trying to destroy anything. He was not the caricature I had been handed by church culture and conservative politics. He was a person who had loved God, wanted to serve, and had been thrown away by the very people who were supposed to love him.

I wish I could say I changed completely in that moment, but that would not be honest. What happened was that something cracked. My certainty cracked. My assumptions cracked. The stories I had been handed about LGBTQ+ people started to fall apart because now I had an actual person’s story sitting in front of me. And not just Jay. Over and over again, the people I had been taught to fear kept showing me kindness. They knew what I believed about them, and they were still kinder to me than I had been in my theology, my politics, and my assumptions.

As I continued in ministry, that change kept growing. I had q***r teenagers come into my youth groups, and I let them come because they were kids who needed safe adults, community, and support. Some church leaders did not like that. I remember one openly gay teenage girl who was coming to youth group. She had a difficult home life, but she felt safe with us. She was finding positive adults and a place to belong. When we were planning a youth retreat, a pastor told me she could not go because she was gay and would be sleeping in the same quarters as other girls. The implication was ugly and unfair, and even then, I remember thinking, “Dude, what are we doing?”

The more I listened, the more I realized how wrong I had been. I had accepted stereotypes instead of stories. I had accepted fear instead of relationship. I had accepted a version of faith that talked about love while making entire groups of people feel unsafe, unwanted, and disposable. And the people who helped me see that were not people yelling at me from a distance. They were people who let me close enough to see their humanity, even when I did not deserve that grace.

So when people ask what changed me, that is my answer. It was the kindness of q***r people. It was the kindness of gay people, trans people, LGBTQ+ people, women, people of color, and people from communities I had been taught to judge before I ever knew them. It was the kindness of people who knew what I believed and still treated me like I was capable of becoming better. I did not deserve that kindness, but they gave it to me anyway.

That is why I try very hard now not to demonize people who are different from me. I know what it feels like to live inside a worldview built on fear. I know what it is like to believe harmful things because everyone around you tells you they are true. And I also know what it is like to have your life changed because someone you were taught to fear chooses to show you compassion.

I am not saying everyone has to leave Christianity. I am not saying everyone has to stop believing in God. But I am saying that if your faith requires you to treat people without dignity, love, and respect, then something is deeply wrong. Who someone loves, how someone identifies, where someone comes from, or whether they fit neatly inside the box you were handed should never determine whether they are worthy of being treated like a human being.

We are all worthy of dignity, love, and respect. No exceptions. And the people I was taught were the most different from me turned out to be far more like me than I ever imagined. Their kindness changed my life.

06/20/2026

Vote!

06/20/2026

The Fear of Hell Doesn’t Just Go Away

One of the things nobody tells you when you leave Evangelical Christianity, or really any high-control religious environment, is that the fear doesn’t just disappear.

People sometimes assume that when someone leaves religion, they simply stop believing and move on with their life. They imagine a dramatic moment where a person wakes up one day, decides they no longer believe, walks away from church, and suddenly feels free. The reality is usually much more complicated than that. You can change your beliefs, reevaluate your theology, leave the institution, and build an entirely new life, yet still find yourself wrestling with fears that were planted decades earlier.

I know because I still do.

My name is Andy Neal. I am a former Evangelical Christian pastor. I grew up around Christianity. Both of my parents were preacher’s kids, and while our family’s church involvement ebbed and flowed at different times throughout my childhood, Christianity was always present. It shaped how I saw the world, how I understood morality, how I understood politics, and how I understood my place in the universe.

Eventually, I went far beyond simply attending church. I graduated from Bible college, became a licensed Southern Baptist pastor, worked in ministry, taught Sunday school, led youth groups, and devoted years of my life to serving in churches. By the time I left Evangelical Christianity in 2017, it wasn’t just something I believed. It was the framework through which I interpreted almost everything around me.

Before I go any further, it’s probably worth explaining what people mean when they use the word “deconstruction,” because it gets thrown around a lot and means different things to different people. For me, deconstruction wasn’t about waking up one day and deciding Christianity was false. It wasn’t a rebellion and it wasn’t a crisis of faith. Deconstruction was the process of examining beliefs I had inherited, asking where they came from, questioning whether they were true, and deciding which ones still held up under scrutiny. Some people deconstruct and remain Christian. Some become progressive Christians. Some leave organized religion entirely. Some become atheists, agnostics, or something else altogether. Deconstruction isn’t a destination. It’s the process of pulling apart the framework you were given and deciding what, if anything, deserves to be rebuilt.

For me, that process started long before I ever left.

Looking back, my deconstruction probably began sometime around 2005 or 2006. At the time, I didn’t have the language for what was happening. I was still deeply involved in church life. I was still committed to my faith. I was still preaching, teaching, and serving. But there were questions I could no longer ignore. There were contradictions that didn’t make sense to me. There were people I loved who didn’t fit neatly into the theological boxes I had inherited. There were experiences that challenged the worldview I had been taught.

The strange thing is that while those questions were growing, my involvement in Christianity was growing too.

During those years, I graduated from Bible college. I became a licensed Southern Baptist pastor. I worked in ministry. I taught Sunday school. I led youth groups. I preached sermons. I devoted my life to something I genuinely believed was true.

That’s one of the reasons I push back when people assume that people leave Christianity because they want to sin, because they’re angry, or because they simply stopped caring. That wasn’t my story at all.

I didn’t leave because I hated God. I didn’t leave because I wanted an excuse to do whatever I wanted. I didn’t leave because I was looking for a way out. I left because after years of wrestling with questions, studying, observing, and trying to reconcile what I was being taught with what I was seeing in the real world, I could no longer honestly remain where I was.

By the time I finally left Evangelical Christianity in 2017, the process had taken more than a decade.

What I wasn’t prepared for was what came next.

I assumed that once I left, the fear would disappear.

It didn’t.

Nine years later, it still hasn’t.

Recently I was in Washington, DC, attending Trending Up. If you’re not familiar with it, Trending Up is a gathering of creators, advocates, organizers, and digital storytellers who use their platforms to engage with issues ranging from mental health and public lands to reproductive rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, racial justice, disability advocacy, voting rights, and environmental protection.

The conference brought together an intentionally selected group of roughly 260 creators and advocates from around the country. It wasn’t a giant convention. It was a curated space filled with people who care deeply about their communities and about making the world better.

As I sat in those rooms, I found myself reflecting on how different my life looks today from the life I imagined for myself twenty years ago.

Growing up in Evangelical Christianity, I was taught a very specific narrative about the world. The world was dangerous. Secular people were dangerous. Progressives were dangerous. People who challenged traditional Christian beliefs were dangerous. The message wasn’t always delivered explicitly, but it was woven into sermons, church culture, youth conferences, Christian media, schools, and countless conversations. There was always the underlying idea that people outside the evangelical bubble were trying to pull you away from God.

So there I was in Washington, DC, surrounded by people I genuinely liked. People I respected. People who cared deeply about others. People who were working to make their communities healthier, safer, and more compassionate.

And out of nowhere, something happened.

A wave of fear crashed over me.

It wasn’t logical. It wasn’t based on anything anyone had said. It wasn’t even connected to something I consciously believe anymore. But suddenly there it was.

What if they’re right?

What if I’m wrong?

What if this is exactly what they warned me about?

What if I’m going to hell?

I wish I could tell you those thoughts disappeared years ago. They didn’t.

There are still moments when they show up. Sometimes it’s during conversations about politics. Sometimes it’s when I’m advocating for LGBTQIA+ rights. Sometimes it’s when I’m speaking out on issues that would have been controversial in my old circles. Sometimes it appears completely out of nowhere.

That’s the thing about fear-based systems. They don’t just teach you what to believe. They teach you what to fear. And fear has a way of lingering long after the beliefs themselves begin to fade.

I grew up immersed in evangelical culture. I attended Christian school. I participated in Awana. I memorized Scripture. I learned apologetics. I learned theology. I learned the rules. And from a very young age, I learned about hell.

Not as a metaphor. Not as one possible interpretation among many. I learned about hell as a literal place of eternal conscious torment. A place of unimaginable suffering. A place where people would spend eternity if they got it wrong.

Looking back now, it amazes me how normal those conversations seemed.

Adults would describe eternal punishment to children as though it were completely appropriate. Have you ever burned your hand on a stove? Have you ever gotten a really bad sunburn? Imagine that pain forever. Imagine it never stopping. Imagine being separated from God for eternity.

Then immediately after describing that horror, we’d present the solution.

Accept Jesus.

Pray the prayer.

Believe the right things.

And you’ll be saved.

As a child, that doesn’t feel like a choice. It feels like survival.

The reality is that many of us were introduced to concepts of eternal punishment long before we had the intellectual tools to evaluate those claims critically. We accepted them because we trusted the adults around us. Those ideas became deeply embedded in how we understood ourselves and the world.

As I got older, I became part of that system. I taught those lessons. I led those conversations. I participated in a culture that believed fear was an acceptable pathway to faith. Not because I was trying to manipulate people and not because I was malicious. I genuinely believed it was true.

That’s one of the hardest parts of reflecting on my past. Most of the people who taught me these things weren’t trying to hurt me. Most of them sincerely believed they were helping. They believed they were saving people. They believed they were protecting people from eternal suffering.

I know that because I once believed the same thing.

But sincerity doesn’t erase impact.

When children are taught that eternal torture awaits them if they get the wrong answer to a theological question, that fear has consequences. It shapes how they see the world. It shapes how they see themselves. It shapes how they relate to people outside their community.

Over time, I came to realize that hell wasn’t just a doctrine. It functioned as a mechanism of control.

If people fear hell, they are less likely to question authority. They are less likely to challenge the system. They are less likely to explore alternative viewpoints. Fear becomes the guardrail that keeps people inside the boundaries they have been given.

What I also began to notice is that fear rarely remains isolated to one issue. Once fear becomes a primary organizing principle, it starts expanding into other areas. The same communities that taught me to fear hell often taught me to fear liberals, fear LGBTQ people, fear immigrants, fear secular culture, fear higher education, fear questioning, and fear change.

The specific targets changed depending on the time and place, but the pattern remained remarkably consistent. There was always something to fear and someone to blame.

One of the most transformative experiences of my deconstruction was getting to know the very people I had been taught to fear.

When I attended Southern Oregon University, I found myself surrounded by people from vastly different backgrounds. I had gay and trans friends for the first time. I developed friendships with people who weren’t Christian. I met people who had entirely different worldviews from my own.

What I discovered was that they weren’t the caricatures I had been warned about. They were people. They cared about their families. They cared about their communities. They wanted meaningful lives. They laughed, struggled, loved, and dreamed the same way everyone else did.

The more relationships I built, the harder it became to hold onto the narratives I had inherited.

And yet, despite all of that growth, despite all of that learning, despite nearly a decade outside of Evangelical Christianity, those old fears still occasionally show up.

That is what I want other former Evangelicals and people leaving high-control religions to understand.

If you still struggle sometimes, you’re not alone.

If you still have moments where old fears resurface, you’re not broken.

If you occasionally hear that voice telling you that you’re doing something wrong, that you’re disappointing God, or that you’re somehow risking your eternity, it doesn’t mean you’ve failed to heal.

It means you’re human.

The truth is that deconstruction isn’t simply about changing your mind. It’s about untangling years or decades of emotional conditioning. It’s about examining fears that were introduced long before you were capable of questioning them. It’s about learning to separate your own voice from voices that have been living in your head for years.

Today, I don’t claim certainty about what happens after we die. I have ideas. I have questions. I have thoughts that continue to evolve.

What I do know is that I no longer want fear to be the primary force directing my life.

I don’t want fear deciding who deserves dignity. I don’t want fear determining who belongs. I don’t want fear controlling who I stand beside. I don’t want fear dictating what questions I am allowed to ask.

For most of my life, I was taught that fear was evidence of faithfulness. Today, I believe compassion, curiosity, empathy, and courage are far better guides.

The fear still shows up from time to time.

But it doesn’t get to drive anymore.

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06/24/2026

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