Today is the first Sunday after my mother and I fought over my atheism

We’d had the discussion where I’d told her I no longer believed in god, Yahweh, the Christian God or any other god for that matter. But she’d brushed it off and told me that this was normal, the “doubt” I was experiencing, that she had experienced it too when she was younger but she continued to “seek truth” and found it in the Lord Jesus.

I was born and raised in a devout Christian family. We went to church every Sunday and attended conferences and prayer retreats, we hosted home cell at our house. I used to be really into to it, I was enthusiastic about the stories, after all, they were magical, I memorised Bible verses and could lead a mini- sermon at home when we did “home- church” which was what we did on the Sundays we weren’t able to go to church.

The fight was last Sunday, I was on my period and I was having the worst cramps. I was in my bed curled up with a hot water bottle breathing through the pain after the tablets I’d taken failed to work. My mother wanted us to go to church, I’d already expressed disinterest in going and then it started to rain heavily so she said we wouldn’t go at all, but that we would do home church. She called for me to join my sister and her in the sitting room and when I refused she said we’d have it in my room instead.

Going to actual church would have been easier because then I could sit away from her and just drift into thought during the service but here we were only three, there was no way for me to mask my disinterest, I wasn’t in the mood to sing the Parise and worship songs that we always led with and I definitely wasn’t in the mood to lead a “sermon” Usually I faked it, after all it never lasted more than forty minutes but that day it was beyond me so I told her that I wasn’t a Christian anymore and that she needed to respect that.

She repeated her mantra about not being lazy in “seeking truth” which drove me over the edge, it trivialized my decision which wasn’t one I’d made on a whim, it was one I’d spent half a year in an existential crisis over. It wasn’t just “doubt”

It’s not easy to choose to leave Christianity after being told all your life that not believeing means burning in hell for eternity, after reading “Seven years in hell, a few minutes in Heaven” and that email that circulated around of a girl who apparently died and went to heaven and hell and saw Micheal Jackson there” those and many other stories and sermons made me stay in the church out of fear.

My sister and I told my mother why we didn’t want to be a part of the church anymore: the homophobia, misogyny, slavery, genocide, the Holocaust, crusades, colonialism and the cultural erasure that came with it, white supremacy etc. I told her that I wasn’t going to change my mind, and that I’d “sought truth” long enough and found it and for me that thruth wasn’t Jesus.

My mother was devastated, which wasn’t what I wanted, my original plan was to just go along with it until I moved out, after all, who wouldn’t be crushed by the ‘knowledge’ that their child is going to burn in hell forever. But I’m glad we had that fight, my mother is the most rational person I know and by the end of Monday she had recovered, and was back to speaking with us like she always did, like she loved us. Which I was glad for because I was worried that her love would be conditional. This Sunday she didn’t ask us to go with her to church, I can tell it still upsets her a little but not as much as I thought it would.

Ironically being atheist doesn’t mean I don’t think of hell occasionally, after all, there is the possibility that I could be wrong, there’s only one way to find out ☠️ but I’m not afraid of hell, even if I knew for a FACT that heaven and hell were real I would still choose to be atheist and that’s how I know that I’ve made the right decision for myself.