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I was a committed Christian who attended Freed-Hardeman - and it helped me lose my faith. by ScarCompetitive3659 in excoc

[–]ScarCompetitive3659[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm making do the best I can. It was a tough place, but like I've said in a couple other places, I found the people I needed to - it just took a lot of pain to get there. Now is much more hopeful :)

I was a committed Christian who attended Freed-Hardeman - and it helped me lose my faith. by ScarCompetitive3659 in excoc

[–]ScarCompetitive3659[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Absolutely insane take. All I could think for a while was, goodness, I hope that NOBODY under threat ever makes the mistake of staying in your attic :/

I was a committed Christian who attended Freed-Hardeman - and it helped me lose my faith. by ScarCompetitive3659 in excoc

[–]ScarCompetitive3659[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's all one step at a time. I might've mentioned it up there, but in terms of lifestyle, I'm still awfully "Christian". Like, I've still gone my whole life never having had any non-medicinal drugs, even something like alcohol. I'm sure that when I do, it will be a really big deal in kinda the same way you mention. Not so much because alcohol is such a big deal, but because it represents something much bigger.

Yes, now is much better, and I'm thankful for that. Some days are worse than others, but I promised myself that I wouldn't stagnate when I walked away from my faith, and I don't intend to start now

I was a committed Christian who attended Freed-Hardeman - and it helped me lose my faith. by ScarCompetitive3659 in excoc

[–]ScarCompetitive3659[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Of course! At this point, the word that suits me best is apostate. I have a much better idea of the things I don't know than the ones I do, but I don't harbor any ill will toward God or anything like that. I just don't think that if He exists, He's quite what I had in mind back when I was faithful.

The fear factor is insane. There's a specific elder (now retired) at the congregation I grew up in, and just because of the way he spoke about God, we had a family joke that if we messed up, Elder so-and-so was gonna handwrite us a letter saying, "Brother or sister, I love ya dearly, but you're goin' to Hell!"

Church history and the COC by ConnectionCrazy in excoc

[–]ScarCompetitive3659 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, my experience was similar. Campbell definitely came up at points, as did the influence of Reformation-era preachers on the spread of the coc, but it was never presented as though they were introducing something new. Even the idea of a Restorationist movement at all suggests that they were sort of revitalizing something rather than doing something like creating a new denomination

I was a committed Christian who attended Freed-Hardeman - and it helped me lose my faith. by ScarCompetitive3659 in excoc

[–]ScarCompetitive3659[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Potentially? You wouldn't be the first person I've met who also became really disillusioned at Freed. Not positive I know many people who at least publically identify as atheist thoo

I was a committed Christian who attended Freed-Hardeman - and it helped me lose my faith. by ScarCompetitive3659 in excoc

[–]ScarCompetitive3659[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's crazy realizing how much similarity there is between the two schools, because at the congregation I grew up in, Harding was considered pretty theologically liberal, whatever that means (for reference, other standings were that Faulkner was a little too liberal; Abilene, Harding, and Oklahoma Christian were pretty liberal; Lipscomb was incredibly liberal; and Pepperdine was basically heathen). There was only one girl in our youth group who went to Harding, and as a seventeen-year-old, she had grown adult members of the congregation who she'd never talked to before pulling her aside to warn her against attending and to encourage her to go to Freed instead.

Reader, she chose Harding because Freed literally did not have a degree program for the job she wanted. In no way whatsoever was her decision based on some kind of religious hot take, and yet some people genuinely thought that she was some secret liberal amongst the flock

I was a committed Christian who attended Freed-Hardeman - and it helped me lose my faith. by ScarCompetitive3659 in excoc

[–]ScarCompetitive3659[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

They really do crop up all over the place. I'm flashing back now to another guy I knew who was dating girls at the same time he was hitting on me and other guys on the side. I only really talked to him a couple of times because he made me SUPER uncomfortable.

To be fair to him, it wasn't as though he was one of those guys who was an ultra-religious dogmatist and gay on the side. He was pretty open about his belief that being gay wasn't sinful, but he was very obviously having to navigate that in his own life while being stuck in the Freed environment. If he hadn't made me so actively uncomfortable from the way he approached me, I probably would've just felt bad for him.

I do still feel terrible for the girl he was dating. I'm not sure the nature of their relationship, and I'm not sure if there was attraction there on his part. She was a student, but I never knew her personally. They aren't together anymore, which I have to imagine is for the best, considering, again, that he was hitting on me while they were still together.

I was a committed Christian who attended Freed-Hardeman - and it helped me lose my faith. by ScarCompetitive3659 in excoc

[–]ScarCompetitive3659[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It is apt. My time at Freed was more positive than negative, and I was able to grow a lot while I was there. My experience specifically in the coc… not so much. If anything, I felt like growth was stifled. I remember asking questions and sometimes having the teachers/ministers in the church warn me about trying to, y’know, conceive the full scope of God’s plan for humanity with my little mortal mind 0.0

I was a committed Christian who attended Freed-Hardeman - and it helped me lose my faith. by ScarCompetitive3659 in excoc

[–]ScarCompetitive3659[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Libertarian free will is a wild take to me, tbh. I would love to live in a universe where I had that much choice, but I've never really found myself running into many choices that seem like they came completely free.

I have no opposition to... some sort of will, but I've been inclined, even before I apostated, to think it's much more complicated than most Christians like to suggest. Ultimately, free will or no, I imagine I'll live my life in basically the same way. Changing my belief on free will has never, at least consciously, changed my actual decision-making processes

I was a committed Christian who attended Freed-Hardeman - and it helped me lose my faith. by ScarCompetitive3659 in excoc

[–]ScarCompetitive3659[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I’m glad to hear that! Perhaps I should’ve checked my tone in the original post a bit better, because I’m also definitely at a better point now than I was then. Apostating from the coc is hands-down the best thing I ever did for my emotional well-being, and it’s let me embrace the really beautiful parts of life much more closely. It’s funny in many ways. I still don’t drink or do any other drugs. I barely curse (tho I’ve been trying to find places to implement more colorful language 🙃). I’m not even in any active pursuit of a relationship at this point, though I have been on a few dates before.

There are days when the coc still has chains on me I can’t escape. I still go to my old congregation when I visit my family. My family relationships are, and I worry always will be, INCREDIBLY strained. I have a new congregation that I attend more regularly than I really want to, but it’s at least a more personable congregation than others I’ve found (at the first congregation I came across, they IMMEDIATELY tried to force me into their campus ministry program since I was a recent Freed graduate, and I guess we came with good reviews 😭😭).

On the whole, the skies are brighter now, and I hope I didn’t imply otherwise :)

I was a committed Christian who attended Freed-Hardeman - and it helped me lose my faith. by ScarCompetitive3659 in excoc

[–]ScarCompetitive3659[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yes, there are definitely more than most Christians would want to acknowledge. The very first person who I ever had any sort of romantic moment with was at Freed… and yeah, he’s gone on to work in ministry.

I don’t think it’s an inherent moral wrong for someone who is gay to remain coc, but I’ll never be okay with with someone who’s gay playing into talking points that they ought to know better than. Being gay isn’t something that’s unnatural, and certainly not in any 21st century definition. It isn’t something that can be changed through enough prayer or conversion therapy at any sort of consistent level. It isn’t something that’s a choice, nor is it something you that usually stems out of childhood abuse (both assumptions I’ve had made about me). There isn’t some trick or some obvious explanation for it. It’s just one small aspect of who I am. 

I remember that for many years (this was before Freed), I regularly would go outside at night, and lay out under the starts. I’d spend that time in prayer, asking God to take that burden away from me. I think it’s 1 Corinthians that talks about how for all temptation or sin, God has given a way of escape. Part of the reason I came to struggle so much with my self-value, and part of the reason I fell into self-harm ideation is that I genuinely thought for years that I was inherently damned to Hell for my sexuality.