[exchristianjoy]

My writing is for people deconstructing or deconverting from Christianity. I'm a former Christian who writes and illustrates comforting content for people leaving the faith.

I started this blog when I was rereading the New Testament from an apostate's perspective and started crossing out verses and rewriting them with positive messages:

For I know that nothing good dwells in me.

For I know that you are something worth fighting for.

More about me:

Allison

mid-30s

they/them

past faith: evangelical/charismatic

Check out chapter drafts for my Un-Devotionals and other behind the scenes content on my Patreon!

[exchristianjoy]

excited to reach the point when i've spent more of my life out of church than in it!

[aenigmatica]

thought crimes dont exist yay forever

[exchristianjoy]

doubt like a grain of mustard seed 💜

[gracious-midnight]

Being an ex Christian is weird

I dont believe in that stuff anymore but I just have this random biblical knowledge sitting in my head taking up space

[exchristianjoy]

my plumbob as a christian was♦️

[exchristianjoy]

dancing with exchristian joy!

[exchristianjoy]

i love casually finding typos in my notes about bible verses

they would have horrified me when i was a christian

the fear of god made me such a perfectionist

but now i can just giggle

Lebiticus

[exchristianjoy]

i exist in the most wonderful place

(anywhere out of god's grace)

[exchristianjoy]

Free post on my Patreon where I give a general update and share a bunch of sketches from my Ick Tract drafts!

Bonus: Early attempt at short form video creation, featuring the MBMBaM podcast audio where I play all three McElroy Brothers (pictured above, I play Travis in my rainbow glasses).

[radicalgraff]

"Defund God"

Seen in Seattle

[gallusrostromegalus]

The 1969 Easter Mass Incident

Content Warnings: Religion, food, symbolic cannibalism, symbolic gore, penis mention, Blasphemy, SO MUCH BLASPHEMY, weapons, war mention.  Mind the warnings and your health always comes first. Its a HILARIOUS story, I promise.

As always, all the names have been changed to protect people’s identities.  This is a long one, so Press J now if you want to skip it.

When my dad was a young man and still a practicing catholic, he participated in a small church communion that nearly got him and six other people excommunicated.

Father Patrick ran a small church outside of California Polytechnical and tended to be… rather more liberal in his interpretations of scripture than most of the church was, which made him something of a hit with the local students and liberally-inclined populace.  Pat went to all manner of civil demonstrations, condemned the shit out of the vietnam war and the politics that lead to it and so on.  In January of 1969 a series of incidents lead him to start exploring “nontraditional” means of holding Mass as a means of reaching out to his community and exploring his own faith, which ultimately culminated in the 1969 Easter Mass Incident.

For those of you who weren’t raised catholic, Communion is this ritual where you become one with Jesus by eating a really horrible bland wafer cookie and taking a shot of wine (called hosts), which then *literally* become the flesh and blood of jesus in your mouth, allowing him to become one with you.  It’s big McFucking deal, and you have the opportunity to take communion at every mass.  All this had to be explained to me second-hand because after this and Dad’s 51 days in the army, Dad decided he wouldn’t inflict religion on any children he might have in the future.

*

“Hey dad,” Six-year old me asked the first time he told me this story after my practicing friends were talking about getting wine at church. “Isn’t that cannibalism?”

“We’re getting to that.”  He waved.

Keep reading

[exchristianjoy]

it's wild how long it took me to see that god is entirely defined by his relationship to us

what do we know about god, really?

everything i thought i knew about him is actually about us: our creation, our salvation

what are god's hobbies?

how does he spend his time when he's not obsessing about us?

who would god be without us?

it makes so much more sense that we created him and not the other way around

[exchristianjoy]

gotta start believing in me more than i used to believe in god

[exchristianjoy]

sometimes when i take the lord's name in vain, my spouse says "who?"

[exchristianjoy]

flavor blasted Christ on a cracker

[exchristianjoy]

What do you think the relationship might be between modern toxic positivity and Christianity's insistence on always being joyful? I'd be very surprised if there weren't a link.

I'm sure there's a huge overlap between the two in Christian-dominated cultures. They definitely have a lot in common, even if the stakes are different.

I think the main goal of toxic positivity is to keep things running smoothly. Pretending there are no problems is much easier than solving problems. It's a cheap (and very disrespectful) shortcut.

Toxic positivity is not a good long term solution to anything and it can degrade trust in relationships and communities. Constant affirmations can just feel depressing to hear if real problems are never addressed. If people express negative feelings, they are punished or ignored. The squeaky wheel can't get any grease because toxic positivity doesn't allow wheels to be squeaky!

Toxic positivity is already bad. Adding in the high stakes of heaven and hell doesn't help. When you're being joyful for people, you might get a moment to yourself to drop the mask and recover. An all-seeing god expecting constant joy is too much pressure for anyone to live up to.

Christians are also supposed to live as beacons of Christ's love to draw others to him. Joy-as-ministry can be emotionally crushing. If you failed to express the right joy at the right time for the right person, that soul could be lost to hell. There's a lot of pressure from all sides with a constantly surveilling god and billions of souls in danger. Trying to be joyful in that situation can feel impossible. That's how it felt to me.

I know it's funny for me to answer this, considering "joyful" is in my username. I am a joyful exchristian. I am also an angry/sad/disappointed/frustrated/anxious/overwhelmed exchristian sometimes. Being able to express my emotions genuinely, good and bad, has helped me build my emotional skills after the strict emotional deprivation of Christianity.

Thanks for this question!

[princesspink48484]

Ok so I’m 100% sure that all of this is based off your experiences in the church but that’s not quite how the Bible says it works. The world tends to treat joy and happiness like synonyms and some churches can end up doing that too but there is actually a supposed to be distinction between joy and happiness in Christanity. Happiness is feeling good and positive about things (like pleasure with zero possibility of sin). It is also dictated by the world. Joy, on the other hand is something that comes from God and is a remembrance that he is always in control. Joy comforts us while we are feeling sad, angry, and any other negative emotion. And yes Christians are always supposed to be joyful, but not that though their own strength.

[exchristianjoy]

My joy does not come from a god.

How many people would have to share their negative experience with Christianity for you to accept that there might be something harmful about it?