Last week, I published an essay called “how i lost my faith.” It was a personal reflection of my deconstruction, and the responses were fascinating. They typically fell into four buckets:
- The Loud Amen: People who celebrated, glad I’d finally “seen the light” and stepped outside the fold.
- The Trembling Amen: People who responded with fear, anxious for my soul, praying I hadn’t crossed the line into the unforgivable sin.
- The Silent Amen: People who responded quietly, “nervous but thankful,” recognizing their own private doubts in words they’d never dared to say out loud.
- The Witness Amen: People who didn’t engage the argument so much as the story, offering their own encounter with God and praying I would have one too.
It’s the fourth group I want to talk to today.
Someone I grew up with — we sang in the same church youth choir — responded to my essay with her testimony. She'd had her own season of doubt, and then an encounter that made God undeniable. She called His name, and He was there. I honestly don’t doubt that she felt something real. But it did raise a question for me.
What if she’d been raised to call a different name?
Her response was very kind — and also very familiar, my mom has repeated a similar sentiment to me — like most of the Witness Amens I’ve spoken with. Usually worded like this: “I know the philosophical and biblical arguments are hard, but I just pray God reveals Himself to you in a personal way. Once you feel His presence, the doubts won’t really matter.”
This response gives us a glimpse of the operating system of modern evangelical faith. The ultimate proof isn’t within the Bible, history, or logic… It is experience that trumps all: the chills during worship, the peace during prayer, or the “still small voice” in the midst of an existential crisis.
The chills and peace are real, and so is the experience. But problem is identification.
The question isn’t whether the feeling exists, but what it means, and how we, as humans, interpret these feelings. As Ann Taves argues, the experience is the raw material; what we do to label it, is cultural work.
So no, I don’t doubt that people experience something; I know I certainly did. My point is that the experience will reliably deliver the god that your cultural context taught you to recognize.
Anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann calls this a “faith frame”: a way of holding the world where invisible others are treated as real conversation partners. It isn’t a delusion so much as a posture — something between imagination and expectation — that becomes emotionally real and tangible through community reinforcement.
If personal experience is the ultimate proof, what happens when everyone else is having the same experience with a different god?
how the room makes god
If you grew up like I did, you know the sequence by muscle memory: the lights dim, the chords loop, the worship leader repeats the line, hands in the air, someone starts crying, and suddenly the room feels thick with presence.
We call it “the Spirit.”
Now, I’m not asking whether or not the room felt full, I know it did.
I’m asking who taught us to call that fullness “God.”
Different rooms teach different names for the same feeling.
If experience is the proof, what would a false positive look like?
What experience could a Muslim have that would make you say, “Okay, Allah is real”?
If none would count, why should yours?
Experience is real; it's just not a fingerprint.
A Christian might say, “God meets people where they are.” Maybe so.
I actually like that idea.
But notice what that implies: if the feeling is universal, but the face changes based on your zip code, then the feeling proves the existence of a spiritual impulse, not the accuracy of your specific theology.
It suggests the “what” is real, but the “who” is local.
And deep down, the people praying for me don’t want me to just find “the divine.” They want me to find the specific name they know. When you say you’re praying God reveals Himself to me, you mean Jesus.
But the feeling cannot validate the name. And the promise that “once you feel Him, doubts won’t matter” is ultimately just an invitation to stop asking.
how the fire is built
For years, I wondered why some people seemed to have a direct line to this experience while others heard nothing on the other end.
T.M. Luhrmann addresses this in her book How God Becomes Real. She argues that the sensation of God’s presence relies on “absorption”: the ability to blur the line between internal and external worlds. The same capacity that lets you get lost in a movie or a novel.
Luhrmann calls this “kindling.” Not an accidental practice, but you practice the cues until the feeling shows up reliably.
You know how this goes: the sermon lands, the room exhales, and then the music starts to gather. The organ hums. The chords circle. Someone says, “I got a praise… I got a praise and I gotta get it out.” And suddenly the air changes. Again, we call it “the Spirit,” as if it just arrived, but often it comes right on cue.
We usher it in.
And you know what typically happens next?
The ask.
Offering, altar call, invitation to discipleship, typically lands at the same moment: when the room feels charged and people are ready to move.
I’m not calling this fake, quite the opposite. It’s real enough that people can learn the language of the rhythm. You can even find church musicians online joking about “instigating” a praise break because they know the patterns that bring the room to that place.
There’s also another layer: what Luhrmann calls “interpretive drift.” As you practice, not only do you feel more, but you also start connecting more dots. Coincidence becomes providence. A thought is read as a “nudge.” A song lyric is interpreted as a message. Numbers become signs.
Again, the feeling doesn’t get less real.
The interpretation just gets quicker.
But to understand why this happens, you have to distinguish the light from the film.
Think of your capacity for spiritual experience as the light bulb in a projector. It is powerful, hot, and undeniably real. But light, by itself, is just blinding energy. To make an image, you have to slide a film in front of it.
Your context is the film.
It’s made up of the stories you were told as a child, the verses you memorized, and the specific emotional needs of your season. When the light of your nervous system shines through the film of your theology, it projects a clear, coherent image of God onto the screen of the world.
If you change the film, the image changes. The light still burns just as hot, but the face on the screen is different.
And if you have the hardware for absorption, you can make the invisible feel tangible. But the projector can only display the film you feed into it.
what necessity builds
You can see the mechanism clearly in American history.
For generations, white slaveholders read the Bible and found a god of law and order. They emphasized the Epistles — verses demanding submission to authority — and the slave regulations of the Old Testament, which, in turn, legitimized the practice. They kindled a faith of hierarchy and restraint, building a god who signed off on their power.
At the same time, in the hush harbors — those secret gatherings deep in the woods — enslaved people used the same book to find a god of liberation.
They looked past Paul’s letters and held on to the story of Exodus. They found a warrior god who’d raise hell and high water to free his people. Their worship precisely matched the god that they needed: shouting, moaning, call-and-response. A faith you could feel in the body, because their bodies were being systematically brutalized.
This wasn’t a theological error on either side, but it was merely a mechanism of necessity. To be clear: these readings are not morally equivalent. One justified cruelty, the other resisted it. But both demonstrate the same interpretive process.
The enslaver weaponized a god to justify his cruelty.
The enslaved clung to a god to survive it.
We build the god we need from the materials we’re given.
This is why Christians read the Old Testament “in light of” the New: it’s the only way to harmonize the violence of Yahweh with the ethic of Jesus. The Bible does not present a single, coherent image of God. It’s a library of competing voices.
This kind of reading isn’t unique to Christianity; every tradition survives by filtering earlier texts through a later authority — whether that authority is the New Testament, the Book of Mormon, or the Qur’an.
And you don't really need to take my word for it, sometimes the contradiction appears in the same chapter. In 1 Samuel 15, God says He “regrets” making Saul king (v. 11), only for the text to declare eighteen verses later that God “does not lie or change his mind” (v. 29).
Every tradition survives by deciding which portrait gets to be the main exhibit.
But here’s a possibility I rarely hear discussed: what if the “problem verses” aren’t the exception, but the portrait itself?
Maybe the text isn’t even broken. Maybe it’s telling you exactly what it means: a deity who changes His mind, authorizes deception, and commands violence. Not because “His ways are higher,” but because the person the text describes.
Many believers tend to start with the conclusion — God is good — and work backward, filtering out anything that doesn’t fit. But if you take the text at face value, you don’t really get a loving Father.
You get a volatile, tribal deity who plays favorites and demands blood — the blood of Jesus included.
Everyone picks and chooses because the library doesn’t speak with one voice. We do it as a way to avoid what the unfiltered text might imply.
the anchor that isn't there
What happens when you try to anchor the feeling to the text without filtering it through later theology?
The God most modern Christians kindle is personal, loving, and deeply concerned with their individual afterlife: the emotionally intimate Father who rescues his believer from hell. Not the storm deity of Sinai or the warrior of Joshua. But scholarship suggests this set of attributes is a later construction.
Take the afterlife, for instance. The God that people feel today saves them from Hell and brings them into Heaven. But the earliest books of the Hebrew Bible describe Sheol: a shadowy underworld where everyone, righteous and evil alike, faded away. Heaven and Hell aren’t the Hebrew Bible’s starting framework, but later additions.
Or take the enemy. Modern believers feel God protecting them from Satan. But in the earliest texts, ha-satan was a prosecuting attorney — literally “the accuser” — who worked for God, not against Him.
So here's the friction point: you have a “personal experience” of a God who loves you and has a place prepared in Heaven, but the text you claim as authority describes a deity who drowns the world and offers no promise of a blissful afterlife.
The personalized heaven-and-hell framework most people feel today isn’t the Bible’s earliest baseline. It’s a later theological construction projected backward onto the text.
what the frame was holding
If the text isn’t what’s holding this together, what is?
I’ve spent most of this essay on epistemology: how we know what we think we know. But people rarely stay in religious communities for the philosophy of it all. They stay because the faith frame does something. It solves problems that don’t really go away when you leave. Trust me.
the problem of isolation.
I titled my previous essay “how i lost my faith” intentionally. It wasn’t “how i left it” or “how I got mad at god.” Honestly, I didn't willingly walk away. The process felt less like rebellion and more like slow, involuntary erosion — watching something I loved so dearly fade away.
But the cost is real.
I feel a strange distance, sadly, with some of my oldest friends. We used to speak the same language: a dialect of prayer and shared assumptions. I could say, “God laid it on my heart,” or “I’m praying for you and your family during this difficult time,” and everyone knew what I meant. Now, I’m bilingual in a language I no longer believe, and my fluency only marks me as a former native.
A lot of us stay in the faith frame because it's what keeps us in the tribe.
I wish it weren’t true. But it is.
the problem of death.
The Christian promise isn’t only that you survive. It’s that you’ll see them again — the specific faces you’re still grieving: your mother who died of cancer, the friend who died too young.
Deconstruction not only takes away your afterlife, but it also takes away theirs — almost like a second grief no one really warns you about.
There’s a phenomenon in psychology called Terror Management Theory. When people are reminded of their mortality — even very subtly — they hold on to their worldview harder and become more hostile to outsiders. The faith frame makes the inevitability of mortality bearable.
That distinction matters: believing someone is “in a better place” is sad but it's survivable. Believing they simply stopped is a wall: no continuity, no reunion.
Just having to sit in the finality of it.
the problem of chaos.
Providence is what you reach for when you can’t make it make sense.
If God has a plan, then the chaos has a script.
The projector is running.
The car accident wasn’t random; it was a “calling home.”
And the job loss wasn’t bad luck; it was a “redirection.”
This is psychologically expensive to surrender because the alternative is that terrible things happen for absolutely no reason at all and to no end. Most of us can’t sit with that reality for too long.
Prayer helps too. When you can’t fix it, surely you can pray about it — and that feels like action; it helps us. Losing that mechanism leaves you with the helplessness that prayer was managing the entire time.
“Once you feel Him, doubts won’t matter” is seductive because it turns uncertainty into a sensation.
what I’m not saying.
I’m not saying faith is merely a coping mechanism. I’m saying it functions as one, and that’s an observation about us — humanity — not a proof against God.
If you’re a Silent Amen reading this, the question isn’t whether your faith meets these needs. It almost certainly does. The question is whether you’ve ever let yourself notice — and whether noticing changes what the feeling proves.
after the asterisk
To the Witness Amens who prayed for my encounter: I believe you. I believe you felt something. I just no longer believe we’re feeling the same thing, or that the feeling proves what you think it proves.
To the Silent Amens, the ones who read the first essay and felt something stir but were too afraid to comment: you aren’t crazy for having doubts, and you aren’t broken if you can’t force the feeling anymore.
Honestly, I still haven't constructed a reassuring replacement for what I lost. I don’t have a new system or a better god. But what I do have is the freedom to stop pretending I know things I don’t.
Again, I’m not denying the experience, only questioning the conclusion.
A feeling can be real and still not be evidence of the thing you think it’s evidence of. And “once you feel Him, doubts won’t matter” is precisely the logic I can no longer accept.
When you’re inside the movie, you don’t see the projector.
I didn’t either. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
And if you’re someone pulling threads, wondering what name you’d have called had you been born somewhere else — welcome to life after the asterisk.