I have been spending a lot of time on Reddit doing research for my essay on soul-body dualism. It’s a tough subject, because there are so many views on the matter. I am mostly limiting myself to Christian ideas, since I am writing in a mostly Christian country, but even Christians don’t agree on the nature of the relationship between the soul and the body. Some are outright substance dualists, like Descartes (who believed in God, after all). Some are almost holists who believe that we are inherently embodied beings in this life and after the resurrection, although maybe not in between. Some are even physicalists who think the mind/soul is generated by the brain.
I have mostly been looking for people writing about their experiences believing themselves to be a soul that has a body. I haven’t found that many accounts of that experience as such, but I have found a lot of material about Christians being made to feel shame over their bodies. I’ll get into that in the essay.
One interesting subreddit I stumbled upon is r/exchristian. There a lot of people talk about leaving Christianity in a process of critical reasoning that many call “deconstructing.” I’d never heard that term, which was originated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida for rather different purposes, used in this context, but then, I don’t spend much time with either Christians or ex-Christians. I thought I would offer an informal summary of what I saw on that subreddit.
I never was a Christian or a theist of any kind. I have had relatives who converted to Christianity or New Thought religions, but pretty much not while they lived under the same roof as me. I am what has been called a “natural atheist”: I was raised without religious belief, and so I had nothing to deconstruct. I’ve never had a crisis of faith. At most I was an agnostic for a time, but Nathaniel Branden cured me of that.
One thing that is striking about the posts on Reddit, especially r/exchristian, is the amount that people who used to believe in Christianity suffered from it. Their separation is not primarily for intellectual reasons. The subreddit seems slanted toward ex-evangelicals (or “exvangelicals” as they’re sometimes called) and ex-fundamentalists, and I can imagine that those might be among the more unpleasant groups to have belonged to. Since I’ve been researching the soul-body relation, much of what I have seen is pain over sexuality. I knew Christianity was hung up over sex, but I had no idea it was this bad. Of course (and I did know about this) gay and trans people are often made to feel sinful or disobedient to God’s intentions for their body, etc. But the people who seem to have suffered most are young women who were subjected to “purity” culture. More on that in the soul-body essay.
The ex-Christians, at least those on Reddit, seem to have their own subculture. At least they have their own lingo. Along with “deconstructing” and “exvangelicals” they sometimes speak of the “FOG” of Christianity that they left behind, where FOG stands for Fear, Obligation, and Guilt. (The last term comes from psychotherapy, but many ex-Christians use it.)
I’m not sure what this all adds up to, not in itself and not for what I have to say, but it certainly is interesting. Although my book will be atheistical, I do not want to make atheistic arguments. I’m not a militant like the so-called New Atheists, whose arrogance I find hard to take. I hope to reach some Christians, since they are the largest camp of dualists, at least in my own country. I don’t want to offend anybody, at least not more than necessary. I want to learn.
One thing that feels strange in reading the ex-Christians’ testimony about why they got out is how their reasons for ceasing to be Christian are so different from the reasons I encountered from atheists for not being one. I’ve spent a fair amount of time with philosophical arguments for the existence of God, many of which are quite rationalistic (“I can imagine a perfect being, and since I can’t imagine anything more perfect than what exists, there must exist a perfect being, which all men call God.”). During the one period where I had any real doubts as to my atheism, I did delve into a book that purported that Biblical prophecy had been fulfilled, but that was easily debunked.
None of this seems to matter to the ex-Christians whose posts and comments I read. The only classic atheist argument that a large number of them care about seems to be the “problem of evil.” “Evil” in this context primarily means misfortune and suffering, not malevolence. The problem is that it seems impossible for an all-powerful, all-good God to allow this kind of evil to exist. One redditor mentioned diseases and parasites among children. A god who would cripple children must be a bad god—or no god at all.
Some of the ex-Christians mention a specialized variant of the problem of evil: How can a just and loving God send bad people (whose sins are necessarily finite) to an infinity of torment in Hell?
Of course, faithful Christians have answers to these questions, although sometimes the answer is just that suffering is part of God’s plan for you, and that it is not God who sends you to Hell, but it is you who send yourself by rejecting his grace. The ex-Christians do not even seem to take these rebuttals seriously enough to discuss them, at least not anywhere I’ve seen to date.
No, so far, I’ve haven’t seen a lot of ex-Christians who left their religion behind for philosophical reasons. Maybe I would need to check out r/atheism for that. I have seen a few who said that they left because they read the Bible (which as a Christian you’re supposed to do) and found it to be incoherent and at odds with history and science.
Other ex-Christians have strong feelings about their former church’s attitudes toward LGBT+ people (but only a small number said they themselves were gay or trans). From looking a bit at r/exchristianwomen, I got the sense that more than a few regarded Christianity, or at least the Christianity they were brought up in, to be patriarchal and oppressive. Some in this subreddit had been wounded by purity culture. Several women and at least two men wondered whether their upbringing in purity culture made them asexual (or “ace” as a few called it). Several talked about problems with sexual response even though they wanted to have sex.
A recurring complaint about the Christians they left behind is that they are hypocrites because they do not practice the love they preach. Of course, by itself this is not an argument against Christianity itself. I know some people who ostensibly share my philosophical beliefs but aren’t very good about implementing them. Some are even repellant. That doesn’t shake my convictions in the least. But I think many ex-Christians left the fold for social or even political reasons as much as for abstract reasons. They had bad experiences with the Christians they grew up with, and that turned them off of the whole religion, although a few were disappointed by God not answering their prayers rather than by their fellow Christians.
A visitor to r/exchristian from r/christianity opined that the ex-Christians were never really Christians in the first place. And apparently it says that in the Bible. I have seen no reason to doubt their sincerity. And don’t assume that all ex-Christians become atheists. Some find other religions. I saw a few on Reddit who labelled themselves as pagans and one who called himself a Satanist, although I hope he was just being provocative.
This has been a fascinating tour of uncharted territory for me. I had far greater acquaintance with mind-body dualism along the lines of Descartes, because I’ve implicitly incorporated some of it into myself and because I studied it in school. So, I can’t write about soul-body dualism from experience, but I hope I’m getting enough exposure to do a credible job writing “from the outside.” There’s more research to be done.
Ex-Christian communities use the word "deconstruction" in a different sense (as you noted) from the academic one. I don't know where exactly it came from. You mention other jargon terms which I haven't encountered before.
There are people who call themselves Satanists. The most prominent organization I know of is the Satanic Temple, based in Salem, Massachusetts (where else?). They appear to be secularists who like pagan symbolism and give it a provocative wrapping.
I was brought up Christian. My exit, during my college years, was philosophical and not fraught with much drama. I went through a series of concepts of God that were successively more remote from the issues of life that in the end God just didn't matter very much and the arguments for his existence were insufficient.
The worst feature of Christianity, from which most of its harm comes, is the doctrine of salvation by faith and damnation by its lack. This tenet makes people afraid to think, because thought might bring them down the same path I followed. It creates a deadly us-them conflict, as non-Christians not only live in deadly peril for their souls but can put other souls into danger. At best they're deluded, at worst they're enemies to be silenced or destroyed. Many modern Christians reject or work around this idea, but evangelicals and fundamentalists consider it the core principle of their religion.
A nice essay showing your curiosity and openess to weird data as you explore your theme and develop your theory. However, conflicted Christians won’t be more than a detour, for a good Christian is one with God, not “dual” in their being. Thus, your theory, since it tends to reject multiplicity in the self, devolves into a kind of Christian style “oneness”, which is probably not the result you’re looking for. But I like your open and confessional style of writing. Keep it up!