i was wondering, since you'd been an atheist for a hot minute, have you lost any friends because of your later belief in god (or your studies, etc.)?
i'm struggling with this, because there's people in my life that i like, that i would even consider friends, but some of them have this deep hate for church and religions in general. (many of them are from poland and i feel like if you're from poland, you either support the church for the most part or you totally distance yourself from it, and i'm not on either side in this case).
and for me, i'm judgemental of the church too, especially the catholic church (i'm catholic), i'm a feminist, not racist, not homophobic, not transphobic. liberal. but i do attend mass and it does feel important to me. whenever this comes up however, i feel like i need to explain myself. that's why i try not to bring up the topic of religion and faith at all.
and i understand where they are coming from and why they would choose to turn away from the church completely, but it's not like i haven't spent hours and hours and hours thinking about what my beliefs are. like this is so big for me and i wish i could be more open about it, but i feel so misunderstood every time.
my only solution would be to find better friends :/ maybe you had a similar experience?
i lost or became distant from a number of friends when i began to explore my relationship to faith more earnestly- it put a lot of strain on my relationship with my partner at the time, and we eventually broke up for reasons that included but were not exclusive to religion. that was almost a decade ago and i've grown a lot: my friends now do i know what they're in for with me, and i'm lucky in how they encourage and support me and give me space to be in dialogue with them. one of my closest friends is an atheist, and we have great conversations about theism.
but i also know, and this is part of growing in my faith, that religion- especially christianity- is the source of a lot of pain for people. a lot of trauma, including for myself, and i try to remember that. if my faith is built on love, then i am here only to love people. sometimes loving them means setting my faith, as big and immersive as it is, aside so that i can better model what it is to them. it can be an opportunity to help them heal in the sense that without talking to them or immersing them in my own journey, i can show them through my actions what faith should be, mindful that their experiences are with systems that are repressive, painful, violent, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, or abusive. some of my closest friends are people who have negative or no opinions about God and faith. part of what makes those relationships possible is that i recognize that i am privileged to have a healthy relationship to faith, that i have one at all, or that i was able to overcome my own religious trauma to a place of healing, where i could redevelop my assumptions from the ground up. that is a privilege and one that not everyone has the ability to take advantage of. to be religious is to be privileged, especially where christianity is the majority, since religion is practiced by the majority and often contributes negatively to systems of oppression (and this is partly why i have difficulty formally joining the church- my ability to take on religious privilege, as a christian in the christian west, only goes so far).
i do not believe in evangelism, but i do believe in lived faith, and weirdly in this way i have watched numerous people around me who previously had no interest in religion end up converting or reverting, or develop more unconventional relationship to something they'd lost through abuse or mistrust- sometimes they've directly attributed that to their relationship with me, and sometimes its more passive, maybe it has nothing to do with me at all. but i like to think that i was able to be something for them. when we talk about self-emptying in faith, when we talk about making room for God in ourselves and our lives, i think this is often what it means. people do not owe us understanding for our relationship with God. but if we are close to God, if we love him, we owe him our emptiness so that we can reflect his light to others, in the way that they can understand, that has nothing to do with ourselves. and if we lose people in that process, it isn't us they're rejecting, and it isn't God either. they're just not meant to encounter the light through us. and it is har to lose people like that, but it also makes space for people who will see the light of God reflected in us and recognize that it makes sense to them.
i hope this makes sense and helps you in your path: ultimately yes, faith is contentious, and not without reason. but i always try to be respectful of people's misgivings about faith, i don't bring it where it's not wanted, and i trust that God will bring me to places where it is wanted and more importantly, needed. such is faith.
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