The Heretic in the Pews
Every Sunday, I wake up my husband as well as my partner. The three of us make coffee and pick an adorable outfit for the baby. Then we all pile into the car around 10:30 (often closer to 10:55) and make our way to church for an 11 a.m. service. I can’t speak for our 12-month-old, but although the three adults were all raised in Christian traditions, none of us are currently believers. Nor have we been for many years.
Growing up, my partner and I both spent time in Catholic schools, and my husband attended a Seventh-day Adventist school. If these schools were meant to instill religious faith and devotion, they failed spectacularly. My partner emerged culturally Christian at best. And while my husband’s brother went on to attend seminary, my husband himself embraced his bisexual, polyamorous self, left Christian school early, and never looked back. When I met him, he was 23 and proudly anti-theistic. Still recovering from his time as a Seventh Day Adventist, he’d tell anyone who would listen that religion is the root of most of the world’s problems. Although he’s mellowed over the past nearly 20 years, he still considers his childhood to have been dominated by a cult-like religion, which to be fair, it was.
Although less adamant, I also feel pretty confident in my atheism. That being said, I have come to embrace some of the more abstract conceptions of faith and god. Not the God I was sold as a child, nor even the notion of any kind of literal being, but the idea that, as humans, we owe it to ourselves to imagine a better world and a universe that is bigger than us.
It was that lack of ability to imagine or dream beyond the mundane that initially turned me off of the Abrahamic religions. I must have been seven or eight when I listened to a children’s sermon talking about the book of Genesis. The world was created in six days, and God rested on the seventh. Nothing especially groundbreaking. But, like many kids, I was obsessed with dinosaurs, and Genesis is severely lacking in conversations about dinosaurs.
After church, I asked my mom where dinosaurs fit into this equation. My mother, who is simply the best, gave me a few options to answer the troubling dinosaur question. She said that some people think Genesis is just a story — that the Earth was created through random physics and that life (including dinosaurs) evolved just as randomly (though no less miraculously). Some people think that the Bible is a metaphor for God’s actions. Maybe it wasn’t a literal “seven days”, but it was just an easy way to communicate that God created the world. Maybe he did so by guiding evolution and the random movement of space dust and stars, or maybe he took a more hands-on approach that included dinosaurs, but spanned millennia. Finally, she said, some people think that God buried dinosaur fossils in the earth to test human faith — that the Bible is the literal truth and the bones are just there to lead us sinners astray.
I thought about this a lot. The whole metaphor thing seemed useless to me. I was far too literal-minded a child to entertain this for a moment. The last option — that God was testing us — seemed downright psychopathic to me. Who would think up something as objectively awesome as dinosaurs and then just use that great idea to trick a bunch of people into burning in Hell? Even if that were true, there is something deeply wrong with this God, and I owe them nothing. That left me with the third option. I decided that we lived on a godless Earth where dinosaurs had once roamed, and that that was pretty cool.
As I grew into an insufferable, navel-gazing teenager, my lack of faith became more militant, and then as I aged, it became more relaxed again. But I never returned to God. I sometimes missed the ritual of church, but sleeping in on Sundays seemed like a fair trade-off. Maybe it was dinosaurs that caused me to lose my faith, but as I got older, my bisexuality, my premarital sex, and my poly family all made it clear that the church was not for me.
This worked just fine for me for decades. Then Donald Trump was elected for the second time. In a day, my entire world shifted. I watched Trump’s political rise in the 2010s with a vague fascination and then, as it became clear he was the 2016 Republican nominee and then president-elect, utter horror. After surviving the first term, I had hoped we were safe. But his reelection shook me to the core, and I was not okay. Losing my faith in God was nothing compared to my complete loss of faith in humanity. I’d just had my daughter and lived with my two partners in a very rural and conservative area in California. My county of 25,000 people voted for Trump.
The day after the election, there were impromptu Trump parades in the streets, and it felt like the world was turning upside down. I had always known that this tiny, mostly working-class city was conservative and that I didn’t share the beliefs of the majority of the residents, but I also knew that the people I interacted with were by and large perfectly friendly. I knew that many people here don’t have the time or energy to care about politics. Knowing all of this didn’t make me feel any better. Every Trump flag just made me want to run and hide.
I knew that my fiercely anti-Trump family (including my mother-in-law, who lives with us part-time, and my veteran parents who live a few minutes away) was not alone in our community, but I didn’t know how to find like-minded people, and it suddenly felt much scarier to be honest about myself in public. I was spiraling and not sure how to stop. Did we need to move? Financially, that would be very difficult, plus I also love where I live. Maybe we should just hole up? That felt like waving the white flag and just accepting that there is no space for us here. Do I just shut up whenever I leave the house? There’s not enough willpower in the world to make that happen.
I realized that I need to turn away from my news-obsessed, doom-scrolling, podcast-listening ways and surround myself with people who did accept me. But how to find those people? I started saying yes to everything, which has been great on many fronts, and one of those things was going to church with my best friend.
The United Methodist Church is the only LGBT-affirming church in the area; they even host the Pride festivities every year. And so I found myself sitting in the pews with my bestie and our kids. Right about the time we said our weekly prayer for the federal workers facing job insecurity, I knew that I’d found my home — but I couldn’t imagine I’d ever get the rest of my family through the door.
Before communion, the reverend assured us that you don’t need to be baptised in the church to take communion, nor do you need to believe in God. You simply need to believe that the works of Jesus were good. She left it ambiguous as to whether or not Jesus is a metaphor. And so I got my amazing nibble of homemade sourdough (take that, flavorless communion wafers), sang some songs, listened to a very thoughtful sermon, and enjoyed a magnificent potluck where I met plenty of lovely and welcoming people.
I am sure that there are people in the congregation who don’t agree with me on everything, but by and large, we agree that acceptance, kindness, and generosity are values that we strive to embody. After the shenanigans of the prior months, it was so healing to be somewhere I could just be. And so I kept attending, and I brought my partners and my mom and one of my partner’s moms, and somehow my house full of heretics became churchgoers.
And it turns out we’re not alone. There is some evidence showing that after years of declining church participation and the rise of the “nones” — those who mark “none” for their religion in surveys — the trend has slowed or even slightly reversed. Gen Z may actually be heading back to church, albeit not in significant numbers. In the UK, reports of a “Quiet Revival” have found that young men especially, are finding their way to church.
Source: Bible Society/YouGov.
I am hardly surprised by this. Since before the pandemic, we’ve been hearing about a loneliness trend impacting much of the population. In 2023, the surgeon general of the United States went so far as to declare an epidemic of loneliness. That same year, a widely-reported longitudinal study found a very strong link between social isolation and a number of negative health outcomes. I also can’t help but wonder if the isolation isn’t why so many of us have embraced the politics of hate and division.
Many people have lost the casual community we once took for granted. We often don’t know our neighbors’ names, we work from home, and we conduct our human interactions online or through social media (which exposes us to algorithms designed to enrage us, it seems). We are increasingly self-isolating and avoiding offline exposure to those who don’t think and act like us. This is a thing I am also guilty of — I don’t want to expose myself to all those gleefully waving Trump flags — but I also don’t want to limit my world to only those who are exactly like me.
Communities used to be smaller: we all went to church, school, and work together. We volunteered at the same service organizations and often participated in the same clubs. This could be profoundly claustrophobic and made it very hard for those who didn’t fit the mold or conform to the community’s norms. But it also created a supportive and social place for those who did. There’s no going back to the past, but as a society, we certainly need to find a way forward.
The thing that initially turned me off of church is not going away any time soon. Yes, dinosaurs were the sticking point, but I was also rejecting such a limiting worldview. Rather than imagine that these magnificent creatures existed, people make up some insane stories about fake dinosaur bones that test our faith. People would rather believe that their deity goes through elaborate plots to trick them into going to Hell than believe that something they can’t see or even fully understand existed long before humans. But the kind of worldview I rejected — and still reject — is about so much more than dinosaurs. It’s a worldview that says, “I am not attracted to the same sex, therefore anyone who is must be evil,” and “My parents were monogamous, therefore everyone should be.” It says, “I’ve never met someone who doesn’t look like me or think like me or talk like me and therefore those people shouldn’t exist.”
While I found a church that embraces acceptance, joy, and magic, this same church just went through a significant schism. Through the 2020s, thousands of churches disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church over, among other things, the ordination of LGBT people and same-sex marriage. The schism is still ongoing.
In 2015, the US Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, and public approval started to climb across the board. 10 years later, about 70% of the country supports same-sex marriage, which is great. But if you dig deeper into those numbers, it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t such a linear story. Gallup polls show that about 55% of Republicans supported same-sex marriage in 2021. In 2025, that number is closer to 40%. There is a real shift on the political right that is causing American conservatives to become more homophobic and, as anyone on Twitter (sigh, “X”) can tell you, more willing to talk about it in the grossest ways. I’m glad I found my post-schism space, but I also acknowledge there are real reasons people are avoiding churches, even if they need community. Many of these communities are not the welcoming haven I found. Instead, they are just another expression of an incredibly hateful and homophobic arm of our society.
Source: Gallup.
There have been a number of attempts to create secular “churches” or nondenominational communal and spiritual spaces, such as the Unitarian Universalist Church and groups like Sunday Assembly. People clearly recognize that there is value to gathering once a week, singing some songs, telling some stories, and drinking mediocre coffee afterward. These have had some success, and I’m glad that folks are trying to create welcoming spaces where anyone can just take a breath and feel safe, especially when LGBT acceptance — and just being a decent human — is declining in conservative circles.
I found my safe haven in a congregation that dates back to 1854. Teenage me would have scoffed at munching away on the opiate of the masses, but teenage me had no time for social niceties. Still, I sometimes sit in the pews feeling like a fraud. Do I belong here if I don’t believe in the literal truth of the Bible? Am I robbing this community with my lack of traditional faith? But then I reflect that I have come a long way since my angsty youth. I believe in science and not in a divine or even historical Jesus. I also believe that we could all use more kindness and acceptance in our lives and that there is enormous value in spending an hour a week in the company of others, pondering something bigger than myself. Does this make me a heretic in the pews? Maybe, but I’d like to think it just makes me a new kind of churchgoer.
When our supremely talented music director (who happens to be in a relationship with our bisexual lady pastor) casually quoted the late, great (and militantly anti-theistic) journalist Christopher Hitchens while introducing the week’s music program in front of our congregation the other day, I chuckled. Seems I’m not alone.
Published Oct 13, 2025
