4 Key Changes I Had to Make to Go from Christianity to Spirituality

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My transition from Christianity to spirituality wasn’t easy. Before I started to consider myself spiritual not religious, I was deeply religious for many years. But I’ve come so far from the mindset I was in back then that when I read journal entries from even the time when I was making the transition, I find that I don’t know the person who wrote them.

That way of thinking feels so foreign to me now. Believing the kinds of beliefs that Christianity instilled in me feels foreign to me. I feel much freer now that I’m practicing a spirituality that feels more authentic to me.

But it was challenging to get to this place. I had to wrestle with deeply held beliefs I once accepted as absolute truth. In fact, when I first started to examine what I believed, my intention wasn’t to leave Christianity. I just wanted to practice my faith in a way that made me feel more at peace with myself.

But the more I learned on this spiritual journey, the more I found myself drawn to spirituality because it allows me to live according to what I believe rather than what other people believe. As someone who tends to prefer the nontraditional or unconventional path, this was not only appealing to me but also felt natural.

While I had to make a lot of changes to leave Christianity for spirituality, in this post I want to highlight four of the key ones I had to make to go from feeling controlled by religion to getting on the path to living my own authentic spirituality.

4 Key Changes That Allowed Me to Go from Christian to Spiritual

1. The Way I View the Bible

   In religion, I learned to take the Bible, or the Scriptures, very literally. And I find that the Seventh-day Adventist religion, the one I was part of for most of the time I was deeply religious, is one that takes an especially literal interpretation of Scripture.
   
   While I will admit that I found comfort and strength in some verses, others felt like daggers. And other verses seemed to be encouraging me to take a passive approach to life, just waiting for God to reveal the plan rather than taking a more active role in moving things forward. The longer I stayed in religion, the less comfort I was finding in the Scriptures. This led me, consciously or unconsciously, to look for another way to read them.
   
   I discovered that way in the book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time by Marcus J. Borg. In that book, the author talks about a less literal way of reading the Scriptures, and that allowed me to stop feeling like I had to take everything written there literally. That left me free to start developing my own version of spirituality based on my own beliefs and experiences rather than the beliefs and experiences of people who were writing in a very different time and place.
   
   If you find yourself struggling with literal interpretations of Scripture, I would highly encourage you to read that book.

2. The Way I See Jesus

   If you see Jesus as the one sent to save humanity from sin, allowing his followers to gain access to eternal life, it can be really hard to leave Christianity. So, shifting the way I view Jesus was also essential for me to make this transition.
   
   Another book by Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, was key to helping me change this view. For anyone who doesn’t want to see Jesus as anything other than the savior of the world, I would suggest you stop reading now. But if you’re open to understanding Jesus differently, feel free to keep reading.
   
   What that book taught me is that there are two Jesuses—a real person who lived many years ago and did some incredible things and the Jesus that person became after the human Jesus passed away. And so, the Jesus we meet in the Bible is not so much the human Jesus but who that Jesus became to his followers after the human one was no longer there.
   
   With this new understanding of Jesus, it gives me a new way to admire him because of what he was willing to do as a human. But with all the mental shifts I’ve made on this journey, I no longer believe in the concept of “sin” anymore. So, I don’t see humanity as in need of a savior. And with this new way of viewing Jesus, I can admire him without feeling like I need to be part of Christianity to do so.

3. The Way I View My Higher Power

   Religion taught me to believe in a God who is an invisible masculine Being “out there” but who can also be here with us. I no longer see my Higher Power that way.
   
   I see my Higher Power as Spirit, as the Divine, as that which is greater than us. And I believe there are an infinite number of ways to experience that Power. You just need to pay attention to when you feel connected to something greater or when you feel deeply moved by something.
   
   I no longer view my Higher Power as a “Being” because I find that view too limiting. And since I believe in a non-judging Higher Power, a concept I learned from Michael A. Singer’s book The Untethered Soul, I find that it’s easier for me to see that Power as non-judging when I don’t give it any human-like qualities. That’s why I also like to refer to that Force as “the universe.”
   
   One of the reasons I no longer believe in the concept of “sin” is because I believe it’s the human mind that judges, which means it’s the human mind that decides what is and isn’t sin. But I don’t believe the universe uses labels. It responds to energy and it doesn’t judge. People decide what’s good and bad, right and wrong. The universe just responds to us. And it’s always loving.

4. My Spiritual Beliefs

   I wouldn’t have been able to change my core spiritual beliefs if not for the first three items on this list. Before transitioning from Christianity to spirituality, I had Christian beliefs based on my understanding of God, Christian texts, and Christian teachings. But once I understood things differently, my beliefs had to change, too, including beliefs about the afterlife.
   
   For some time, I had a list of what I considered to be my ten principle or core beliefs on a wall near my work area so that I could refer to them whenever I needed to. This list went through various changes, though, because as I continued to learn and grow on my spiritual journey, my beliefs evolved with those changes.
   
   I no longer have the list up because I feel more solid in my beliefs now. But when I was still actively deconstructing my faith, it was helpful to have them visible.
   
   (For the record, I only learned the term “deconstruction” when referring to faith after I started the process. I just thought of it as “belief clarification.” But now I prefer to call it “belief and value clarification.” If you would like some guidance on how to get clear on your beliefs while you’re deconstructing, you can check out this post. For guidance on value clarification, feel free to read this one.)

Final Thoughts

Going from Christianity to spirituality was not a simple journey for me. It involved wrestling with deeply held religious beliefs so that I could make the four changes above and more. But these changes and the new beliefs I have allow me to practice a spirituality that feels more authentic to me. And although difficult, it has been a rewarding journey.

~ Ashley C.

P.S. If you’re a Christian who would like to start practicing a form of spirituality that isn’t weighed down by the constraints of religious dogma, I offer spiritual coaching services that might be able to help. If you’re interested, simply click here to learn more.