It’s Holy Week again.
The calendar is a mirror, and depending on when you look into it, you may see an entirely different life in its reflection.
I know all too well what's happening inside the buildings this week, as well as the “Seven Last Words of Jesus” Good Friday sermons. The weight of sitting in a sanctuary, believing a cosmic transaction is happening just for you. I know it because I participated for many years, but now I just view as a spectator.
When I was in middle school, I went to a Wednesday night youth Bible study. It wasn’t my home church, but was kinda more of a hangout spot that had a good youth program where a lot of kids from my school went. I showed up specifically for those Wednesdays.
The teaching one evening was a simple ranking system for Christian living: God first, others second, I’m third.
I remember going home and telling my dad about it. He doesn’t really go to church, never really cared to be bothered with it. So neither did he have the theology to articulate what was wrong with teaching a kid to put himself last, but he could feel something off it. He just kinda raised an eyebrow — the natural skepticism of a man outside the system.
I picked up a doctrine of self-denial on a random Wednesday and let it run who I was for two decades. It felt like a “biblical”, spiritual principle, but in practice, it was a blueprint for making myself small. It trained me to suppress my own needs, avoid friction, defer to authority, and treat my own boundaries as a symptom of selfishness.
The church didn’t just make me a people pleaser, but it also gave me a theology that made putting myself last a godly virtue — not a flaw to be ashamed of nor corrected, but it was just obedience.
This is the story of dismantling that hierarchy.
god first
It started last Holy Week with a simple question about a donkey, a pulled thread that unraveled everything: the theology, the messianic prophecies, the history, the origins of Yahweh. It all came apart when I actually sat down with the scholarship instead of the apologetics. By December, when I published the essay about how I lost my faith, I had dismantled the supernatural claims and walked away.
But I landed somewhere specific at the end of that piece. I wrote that I could still follow the wisdom of Jesus without bowing to the deity. That was where the first step of the hierarchy ended.
I removed God, but I kept the apocalyptic teacher on the shelf.
others second
For most of my life, I organized my relationships around a shared faith. When you remove God from the top of the list, the “others” inevitably shift too, breaking the framework.
Telling my family, the people who raised me in this belief system, that I had left it was just what it took to be honest. It isn’t a triumphant story of unconditional acceptance, neither is it a dramatic story of being disowned, just somewhere existing in the murky middle. Relationships didn’t necessarily end, but some did change shape.
I was on the phone with my mom, finally telling her I didn’t believe in the god of the Bible. My wife was sitting right next to me. I had already told my wife about my loss of faith, but I hadn’t yet called myself an “atheist” out loud. She heard me use the word for the very first time on that call with my mother, and it scared her a bit, and I know my mom felt the same way.
They could both hold space for doubt, but the word itself cut through the room as if it were profanity. The theology was something they could process, but the identity was a defining line.
In that moment, it felt like we stopped speaking the same language, while I was stuck holding a phrasebook to a country I had just emigrated from.
i'm third
Turning the lens on myself was the hardest part.
That Wednesday night sermon became the anchor point in my therapy. My therapist and I keep returning to it as we untangle people-pleasing, boundary issues, and the guilt I feel about advocating for myself. The deconstruction of my faith and the deconstruction of my people-pleasing were one in the same, but when the deity disappeared, the habit of deferring to an external authority remained.
Unlearning that means flexing a new muscle. I can say I'm an atheist out loud now without flinching. It shows up in subtle ways, too, like switching from an iPhone to an Android despite the friction it causes in blue-bubble group chats.
It's a small thing, but the social mechanics are pretty similar. You're either in the group or you're not, and leaving makes everyone else's experience slightly worse, so they pressure you to come back.
It's a refusal to let someone else's comfort dictate my choices.
I define myself on my own terms now. And once I stopped deferring to everyone else, I noticed there was still one figure I’d never really turned the lens on.
Jesus.
I remember talking to someone who had also left the faith, sharing how I still wanted to keep Jesus as a model, a secular humanist who happened to preach good ethics. He told me that he'd had to take issue with Jesus too. It was honestly the first time I'd heard anyone say that.
Most people I knew who had deconstructed, even the ones who didn't believe any of it anymore, never had a problem with Jesus himself, just the institution that came after. But that conversation planted something, because, if I was being honest, I had never actually looked at him. I had just kept him on the shelf because everyone else did, believers and nonbelievers alike.
Taking a critical look at the teacher wasn’t a separate intellectual project, but it ended up being the final place I was still making myself small.
When I stopped making excuses for Jesus’ highlight reel and read the full text, I found a teacher who, in Mark 7, initially refuses to help a non-Jewish woman’s daughter, comparing her to a dog begging for scraps. The progressive Jesus conveniently skips that passage.
I found a prophet who built an ethical framework for a short emergency, promising in Mark 9 that some standing there wouldn’t taste death before the kingdom came in power. Well, they’re all dead, and now what was supposed to be an interim morality became a permanent religion.
Most unsettling of all, I found a leader using the high-demand rhetoric of a movement that demands you cut off your social bonds. In Luke, he tells crowds that anyone who does not hate their father and mother cannot be his disciple.
When a grieving man asks to bury his father first, Jesus tells him to let the dead bury their own dead. When his own mother and brothers come looking for him in Mark, he looks at the crowd and says whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother — replacing his biological family on the spot.
In Matthew, he says it pretty plainly: I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother.
This was the exact logic I was unlearning in therapy: a system demanding you put yourself and your relationships beneath a higher authority.
God first, others second, I’m third.
Jesus modeled and demanded this hierarchy.
And it was this “gentle” teacher who is credited with inventing the most psychologically violent concept in Western religion: the weeping and gnashing of teeth, the unquenchable fire. The inspiration for eternal conscious torment is a Jesus problem, not a Yahweh one.
Again, I wasn’t angry, but there’s a quiet disappointment in realizing you’ve spent your life defending someone who didn’t actually need your protection. I respected him enough to look closely. What I found was just more complicated than what I’d been told.
I wanted to keep him, but I just couldn’t.
Which brings us back to Holy Week, and to the cross.
Good Friday is the day Christians celebrate a god who needed blood to forgive. A god who required the torture and execution of his own son to manage his own wrath. The teacher becomes the sacrifice in a system of divine violence, and the tradition demands we look at a brutal execution and call it love.
I don't believe that anymore.
after the asterisk
As it turns out, the sermon was right.
I am third, but I just didn’t know what that meant.
The pastor meant third as a position of permanent self-denial, but I am third because I was the last to be found. I had to go through God first, then through the fallout with others, and only then did I arrive at myself.
The order was right, but they were just wrong about what the order meant. I didn’t arrive at myself last because I was least important. I arrived at myself last because I had to clear everything else out of the way first.
I am here, through the valley of the shadow of death and out the other side, having traded eternal life for an actual one.
And for the first time in a very long time, I am entirely myself.