why i left the church (and also my recent medical history in a nutshell)
oh, hell yeah, we're going there.
Welcome to my substack.
I figured I’d start at a full-on 10 instead of easing into things, so I’m going to share a brief overview of the past few years in spirituality/health terms so that you can better understand my perspective:
1992-2010: I grow up in the church in Dallas, Texas. Idyllic childhood. Oldest of 5 kids. Parents still together after all these years. I’m #blessed.
2010-2014: I attend private christian college in Abilene, Texas. There are three. I went to the big one.
2014: I move to NYC the spring semester of my senior year, where I will live on and off (but mostly on) until 2020.
2015: I marry a guy from aforementioned college at the ripe age of 22 years old.
2016: I get pregnant (unintentionally) and have my first miscarriage at 10 weeks. I have a D&C at Mt. Sinai on the Upper East Side. I still don’t know the doctor’s name who did it.
2016-2018: I bury intense grief for years like a normal, healthy person. I finally open up to a relative and say “I think I’m depressed” and she cleared that up for me quick by telling me “no you’re not.”
2018-2020: Nothing changes. COVID-19 Pandemic hits. We let go of our NYC apartment and hang out in Dallas.
2021: I get pregnant (unintentionally) and have a miscarriage a week later. I finally start seeing a doctor and a therapist. I am quickly diagnosed with clinical depression and start medication.
2022: Early summer, I get pregnant and miscarry astonishingly fast. I get pregnant again immediately after. I carry him for 16 perfect weeks until his heart stops one day in mid-October. He was big enough that I had to go to the hospital and deliver. In an instant, I am an entirely different person.
2022-2023: I have several other miscarriages in early pregnancy that are a blur. I try anything and everything: holistic therapy, herbs, acupuncture, exercise, IVF, screaming into the void. In the meantime, my career starts doing some of the things I had really wanted it to for years. I win some awards. I travel the world. It doesn’t matter because I am also: battling suicidal ideation, getting prescribed harder drugs, doing therapy and psych evals every other week. At the end of 2023, my first IVF transfer fails to the tune of $20,000. Well, actually, the transfer worked - I, of course, miscarried about 10 days later. I quit my job. I tell everyone “I need a new life.”
Note: at the height of all of this chaos, I am juggling appointments with 5 different doctors: OB-GYN, Fertility Specialist, Talk Therapist, Clinical Psychiatrist, and Acupuncture/Holisitic Fertility Specialist. And none of them can give me answers. On paper, I am the healthiest person alive. So was my son.
2024: I have a failed IVF transfer. I hobby myself into oblivion to cope with the pain (bottle cutting, candle making, sewing, painting, plumbing). In addition to my freelancing, I start a new job in fashion and fall head over heels in love with it. Right when things are starting to feel comfy again, I get pregnant. For a couple weeks, things look good. Until, of course, they don’t. I go into my doctor to check things out and within an hour I am being rushed into emergency surgery for an ectopic. When I wake up, my husband is standing over me. He says, “So that didn’t go well”.
My doctor went into surgery looking for an ectopic pregnancy in my left fallopian tube. Instead, she found cancer.
I will be sharing more about cancer and chemo in-depth down the line, but it’s most important that you know I am fortunate to be in remission as of January 4th. I’m not allowed to get pregnant for a year. So I guess I’m just going to write about all of this bullshit to try and make it all make sense. And you can read about it if you want.
Now, let’s get into the God of it all.
Today, I am not a member of a church. A few years ago, I dropped my membership at the one I grew up in after accepting that the leadership was fine existing in a gray area in terms of affirming members of the LGBTQ+ community. For a year or so, I let myself feel guilty about my lack of “church home” but I just don’t anymore. The truth is, I don’t think today’s church is even remotely what Jesus had in mind. I hate how much money is involved in it. The intersection of God and commerce has always made me so fucking uncomfortable and I don’t think this is coincidence - I think it’s spiritual.
I don’t want to give Trump any air time in my newsletter, but I’d be lying if I said Christian Nationalism wasn’t a huge puzzle piece in all of this, too. My “deconstruction”, if you will, was moving at a modest pace in my young adult life…the state of democracy in the United States accelerated said deconstruction by about 10x.
I always struggled with church growing up. I didn’t like going. Aside from finding the Bible to be completely un-believable, I thought most of the people at our church were very, very weird. I didn’t have behavioral problems in school (like, at all) but I did at church. I have a core memory from 8 or 9 years old where I was bawling my eyes out whilst trying to argue with my mom, who was giving me the “you have to obey adults” speech for the millionth time. Between gasps for air, I kept screaming “but what if I know they are wrong?”
At 32 years old, I’ve come around to validating my inner child. I’m an adult with the other adults now. And, yes, they’re wrong.
The other adults can’t make sense of their own belief system, so they wield it as a weapon. Hypocrisy is as natural as oxygen. I think a well-defined clavicle on a woman is so hot and, well, so do young men and now it’s your fault that his salvation is at stake. Burn the spaghetti straps. Burn the gays. Burn Planned Parenthood.
I stand in the eye of the storm equipped with an unfathomable medical history and years of doubt…and I still believe in this. Just not exactly the way I used to.
Things aren’t as they should be because of sin in the world: this is the common ground I share with adults I politically and spiritually disagree with.
We get sideways when they can reason that they aren’t going to hell because of their divorce, their divorce is a result of sin in the world. But the doctor who performed an abortion on a 10 year old who was raped by her step-dad is definitely going to hell. Along with the step-dad. And the 10 year old.
What in the actual fuck?
Is there sin in the world or not and did God redeem it with Jesus or not?
We were guaranteed that life would be uncomfortable and I am a living testament. I am anything but comfortable over here with my box of dead baby pictures in lieu of a living, breathing child but it’s how the chips fell for me. It’s a result of sin in the world. I don’t believe it would’ve happened in a world without sin and I don’t think it’s what God intended for me. Sure, I think there’s more He can do about it but that's for a different newsletter - this one’s already getting lengthier than I intended.
So here’s what breaks their brains: in a world without sin, I have a 2 year old this year (and also a 9 year old, but who’s keeping track). In that same world, the hypothetical 10 year old* doesn’t have a baby or a step-dad.
It’s a hard pill to swallow that in God's perfect plan the baby-conceived-in-rape or the baby with a condition that is incompatible with life that the church and far-right will force a woman to carry, even when it's extraordinarily detrimental to her physical AND mental health, wouldn't actually exist. Because the sin that caused the conception wouldn't have occurred in the first place.
But, ya know, keep yapping. Everything beautiful in its time.
Okay, cool! So this is my substack, I can’t promise it will always be this warm and fuzzy but here it is. Praise and thanks to God and Al Gore’s internet for giving me this platform.
XOXO,
Ally
*this is actually not hypothetical at all
Are you also dealing with recurrent pregnancy loss, cancer, doubt, deconstruction, or crippling depression? That sucks! I don’t claim to be on the other side of any of this, but here are a few books that have been wonderful tools on my journey:
Miracles and Other Reasonable Things: a story of unlearning and relearning God by Sarah Bessey
The Ministry of Ordinary Places: Waking Up to God’s Goodness Around You by Shannan Martin
I may earn a small commission through purchases tracked through links I share in this newsletter. Don’t scoff. At the very least, shouldn’t I get a cut of Bezos’ money for all of this trauma dumping I’m doing out of the goodness of my ice cold heart? Thanks for supporting me.
The church and its Christians are missing the point. They are all so worried about getting to Heaven (and avoiding Hell) that they neglect the Kingdom.