Hi everyone! Happy October. My favorite time of year has finally commenced and I look so forward to these final three months every time they roll around. An exhale.
This week, I have a conversation with my friend, author and therapist Matthias Roberts. Matthias has been such an important part of my own journey into self-understanding—I came out on his podcast years ago and he’s been a dear friend ever since. His new book, Holy Runaways, comes out today (Happy release day, Matthias!) and I have the privilege of sharing an excerpt here with you now. I also have a short conversation with Matthias about what this book means to him, and what he hopes it means to its readers.
I was raised in the church, though I left it many years ago now. I recognize that not everyone who reads this newsletter will share my history. A few years after my very painful departure from Christianity, I converted to Judaism and find myself now a very happy, contented Jew—as such, I also recognize that not all of us who have left are still in the mucky middle of leaving. This is good.
But I have had conversations with enough of you—friends and family and internet acquaintances—to know that there are many of you who are in this process of reckoning with the Christianity you inherited; who are realizing, as Matthias puts it, “Everything is not fine.” And for those of you who are stumbling through that very tender, uncomfortable space right now, this is good too—and there are very few people I would trust to illuminate the way more than Matthias. This is why I wanted to have Matthias come chat with me about Holy Runaways today.
This is not a book about saving your faith. It’s also not a book about destroying it. It’s a book about finding a way forward, through the tension and the unsettledness and the misalignment, to something (whatever that may be) that feels like home again. It does not mandate you respond to God, or belief, or the institution of Christianity, in any particular way—rather, it simply offers itself as company and insight for the journey, wherever it leads. If this sounds like the kind of company you need right now, then Holy Runaways is for you.
An excerpt from Holy Runaways by Matthias Roberts
I sometimes nurse the hope of something different, something better, all easily within my grasp by just running away from the current dull, white box I’m in. Why not get a fresh start? Drop all the trappings of my ordinary life and suddenly become something new. Someone different and better, with different and better problems.
These days, I mostly imagine dropping everything and moving to a new city. When life gets particularly hard, or when I’m feeling particularly lonely or misunderstood, I’ll start dreaming and googling. Maybe Denver or Minneapolis. Or maybe back to that little town in Arkansas where I went to college. Oh, look at all the things I could afford far from the West Coast. Look at this charming house I could buy for less than I pay for rent in Seattle. I could drive an Audi. I’d be so much cooler there. Everything would be better. Wouldn’t it?
I don’t think I’m alone in these fantasies. I don’t have any data to back this up, but have you ever noticed the only show HGTV ever seems to play anymore is some version of House Hunters? And all those texts I get from friends—maybe you get them too—imagining sharing a condo they found in Puerto Vallarta or dreaming of being able to afford to remodel a chateau in France, like people they stumbled across on social media. They’re clearly thinking the same thing—how nice it would be to escape. We’d all be wearing loose white linen clothing and laughing into the sunset.
Yes, I know. There’s the fantasy of running away, and then there’s real life—when you run out of cheese sticks.
I imagine you can think of moments in your past when you have become a runaway, when you packed your bags and jumped in the car or bought a bus ticket. Maybe your decision was suddenly forced upon you, and you didn’t even have time to pack a bag.
We all run away, whether from our jobs, our hometowns, or our families. We leave marriages, friendships, and church communities.
In this book, I’m going to talk about how and why we leave our faith and what happens afterward.
As a therapist, I often listen to people tell their stories of running away, and I almost always hear them talk about a nagging question echoing in their heads: Is it me? Is there something wrong with me? Am I the bad one for trying to run away?
Just like I thought I must be a bad son for thinking about leaving my parents as a ten-year-old. Just like I was sure I was a bad Christian for thinking about leaving my church when I was in my twenties.
Do you hear those questions echoing in your mind too, with their anxious follow-ups: Is this suffering I’m experiencing really something I deserve? Are they all right, and I’m all wrong? Maybe all I need to do is change myself, to make myself fit in better?
Or, most painfully: What did I do wrong to make it all go bad?
There’s a yearning in those kinds of questions. A yearning for things to go back to normal. Back to what they were. A yearning to return home to a familiar kitchen table and a familiar family around it.
Each of us runs away in our unique ways, but in the past several years, I’ve heard more and more stories of people who grew up like me—white suburban church kids who are running from their spiritual homes and asking strikingly similar questions. Really big questions like: What happened to the world? What happened to the ideals I learned about in Sunday school? Is this faith in which I once felt comfortable and protected now a tool of oppression and hatred?
In the past few years, people of my generation have watched over 80 percent of our peers, our parents, and the people who babysat us vote against almost every value we were taught, including compassion, kindness, empathy, and love.
And we have heard those people insist that we’re the ones who don’t understand.
We have struggled to make sense of it, and if you’re anything like me, you’ve been completely baffled. Most days feel as if the world has flipped on its head. We’re being told right is wrong, evil is actually good, and Jesus’s instruction to love thy neighbor meant it’s okay to throw kids in cages while singing the national anthem.
Then, speechless, we watched people we love vote for it all again.
Now, as I write this, it feels as if we’re waking up from a weird dream and seeing our surroundings with new eyes. What was once a place of safety, goodness, and so-called purity—a place we called home—has turned out to be a place of harm.
There were good parts in our past, yes indeed. But almost everyone I know has trauma, whether subtle or overt, lodged in our bodies. When we try to talk about it, someone inevitably shuts us down, yells at us, gaslights us. Someone else inevitably steps in and says we need to repent and get back onto the narrow path to salvation.
It’s confusing, to say the least.
How do we find home when our homes have shapeshifted into sinister haunted houses we don’t recognize? When we have opened our eyes from the dream to find ourselves in a wilderness—but it doesn’t feel like we’ve actually moved?
Some people call this process of realization and questioning of faith deconstruction, and I don’t mind that term.
But I prefer to see myself and others as runaways. Whether we were cast out or have run away on our own volition, we are not going blindly. We are all looking for something.
Most of us runaways have tasted deep goodness, and we want to taste it again. We have told ourselves wonderful stories and spent years imagining how different life could be. We want more; we want better.
A place to rest. A place to call home.
So many people I know are in this in-between, running-away place when it comes to their faith. So many of my clients in my small therapy practice are wrestling with questions that, in one way or another, amount to: How do we find our home again?
If any of what I’ve said so far resonates with you, I want you to hear this: I think we are more than just confused, fearful, or misguided runaways. I think we are holy.
Not holy in that stuffy church pew kind of way. But holy in that we are not settling, not satisfied, but always seeking to transcend. We’re setting ourselves apart, searching for something different and better that reflects our faith instead of twisting or mocking it. And ultimately, we are asking our faith to do more about the violence and pain in the world than simply offering thoughts and prayers for victims.
It usually feels awful and painful to leave everything we know behind. But it becomes easier if we know that in our searching, we’re doing something natural, something quintessentially human, and something that reveals the divine spark in each of us. This quest is something we are all meant to do.
We’re holy runaways.
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This is an excerpt from Holy Runaways: Rediscovering Faith After Being Burned by Religion by Matthias Roberts. Copyright © 2023 by Matthias Roberts, published by Broadleaf Books, an imprint of 1517 Media. Used with permission.
Q&A with Matthias Roberts
Q: In recent months, I have had so many conversations right here on The Daylily about tension. I spoke with Kaitlin Curtice about the tension we feel when trying to embrace complexity. I spoke with Courtney Ariel about the tension between life and death, grief and healing. I spoke with Mari Andrew about the tension between stability and sterility. And here I am, once again, noticing threads of tension in your writing.
First of all, I wonder what you make of this apparently recurring theme—if you think it’s something that’s just snagging my attention these days, or if you’ve sensed that seeking ways to acknowledge and navigate tension is something becoming increasingly meaningful to us collectively? Why?
A: I don’t think it’s just you. Arguably, tension has always been part of the human experience, but I think we’re in a collective season right now where the tensions we are having to hold have become more apparent. We are feeling it in our bodies, for example, when we step outside into weather that is unsettlingly different from what we are used to due to climate change. Or, when we have to interact with family members who have voted in ways that are diametrically opposed to the flourishing of all people. We are tripping over these tensions in ways that are impossible to ignore, and we are looking for people who can help us make sense of it. Because it’s profoundly uncomfortable.
Q: Second, let’s talk about the tension in this excerpt—the wanting to escape and the yearning to return, the seeking of adventure and the ache for familiarity, the choosing to become a runaway in search of somewhere that might feel like home.
I feel this tension acutely these days. I look back and see how very few of the identities I inherited as a child are the ones I hold now. I look ahead at the kind of life I want for my son, and I wonder whether I can find it in the place I am now. Do you think these questions (and their often-uncomfortable answers) are always high cost? Do you believe the reward generally makes the cost worth it? Talk to me!
A: I don’t know if these questions are always high-cost, but sadly they often are. I’ve heard some theologians talk about how we are in the midst of an apocalypse right now. Not the kind of apocalypse that I grew up hearing about, with doom and gloom and destruction. But apocalypse in the true meaning of the word: “an unveiling, an uncovering.”
So much of what has been hidden, particularly the violence and corruption within religious and political systems, is being unveiled right now. Thus, we are being forced in deeply uncomfortable ways to reckon with our values. We aren’t as able to sweep things under the rug or pretend that everything is fine. Everything is not fine. The cost is catching up to us. Is it worth it, to refine and attempt to live into our values? I hope so. But, time will tell.
It’s one thing to be able to say “this is not true,” it’s another thing to begin to try to make sense of that and move into something more aligned. This book is for folks who are trying to find that alignment.
Q: Talk to me about the spiritual essence of this book, as I know you’ve shared with me that it is written first and foremost with this sort of Christian exodus in mind. Where are you at these days in terms of your own Leaving? Who did you write this book for? And what do you hope they take from it?
A: I wrote this book for folks who are trying to make sense of being betrayed by the Christianity they were indoctrinated into. For me, as I mentioned in this excerpt, I was told (and deeply believed) that the Christianity I was raised within was a force of good in the world. Yet, to your point in the last question, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that wasn’t true.
It’s one thing to be able to say “this is not true,” it’s another thing to begin to try to make sense of that and move into something more aligned. This book is for folks who are trying to find that alignment. I offer some of my own thoughts about how this alignment may look within a religious, semi-Christian, framework, but I hope ultimately it will help people determine that for themselves. Whether that is within a spiritual framework, or not.
Q: I recently read an article that said the main reason Americans cite for moving abroad is the desire for a new adventure. This is not a question, just wanted to say your observations/suspicions are statistically supported… And on that note, for those who are feeling this unsettledness in one way or another, what do you recommend as a starting place for naming and moving through it?
A: So many of us, myself included, are yearning for change, for something different. It’s natural to imagine that a great adventure will result in fulfillment; however, once the excitement settles we will still find ourselves with ourselves. I am not against adventures, I love an adventure—but if we’re not looking internally at what we are actually yearning for, external change will likely not do much. How do we do this? This may seem cryptic, but I believe it is the truth: Slowly. With great care and attention.
About the Author
Matthias Roberts (he/him) is a psychotherapist specializing in religious and spiritual trauma and the author of Beyond Shame: Creating a Healthy Sex Life on Your Own Terms. He hosts Queerology: A Podcast on Belief and Being and holds two master’s degrees from the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, one in theology in culture, and one in counseling psychology. His work has been featured by O: The Oprah Magazine, Bustle, Woman’s Day, Sojourners, The Seattle Times, and many others. He lives in Seattle.
You can purchase your copy of Holy Runaways here.