Reasons Why I Left Christianity.

PART 1

Whenever I mention that I no longer believe in Christianity, there is usually an assumption lurking somewhere in the background.

That I never really gave it a chance.

If only I had read the Bible more. Prayed harder. Met the right pastor. Been raised in a better Christian home. An endless list of “if onlys.”

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

What I find interesting, though, is that these explanations often begin with the assumption that disbelief must be caused by a lack of something. A lack of faith. A lack of effort. A lack of understanding.

Rarely does anyone consider the opposite possibility. That perhaps a person arrived at disbelief not because they thought too little, but because they thought a great deal about it.

Before I explain my reasons, however, I should probably start at the beginning.

Because if there is one thing I have learned from these conversations, it is that people are often curious about how someone arrives at disbelief, but they are usually even more curious about where that person started.

In my case, I started exactly where you would expect.

I was born to Christian parents. Christianity was my first and, for a long time, my only encounter with organised religion.

My dad is a Baptist, raised that way by his parents. My mum is a firm zealot of the popular “Die by Fire” church in Nigeria.

In other words, Christianity was not something I observed from a distance. It was simply the world I grew up in.

I learned its stories, adopted its language, feared its hell, defended its ideas, and eventually preached its message.

Which is why, when people assume my skepticism comes from a lack of exposure to Christianity, I cannot help but find it slightly amusing.

If anything, my doubts emerged from taking the faith seriously enough to follow its ideas wherever they led.

My relationship with Christianity went through three distinct phases.

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Phase 1: The Fear of Hell.

From birth until around the age of fourteen, my belief in the Christian God rested largely on one thing: the fear of hell.

Hell, as described by the pastors I grew up under and the early-morning preachers around my area (mostly Yoruba women with microphones), was where God sent sinners who died without repenting. It was a place of unquenchable fire reserved for liars, fornicators, adulterers, disobedient children, and just about anyone unfortunate enough to die before asking for forgiveness.

As a child, I took this very seriously.

Eventually, I noticed what I thought was a loophole

Since repentance before death was what ultimately mattered, then the obvious solution was to make sure I was never too far away from my last apology.

So I created something close to a system.

Every five minutes or so, whether I had committed a sin or not, I asked God for forgiveness. The reasoning was simple: if I happened to die unexpectedly, there was a reasonable chance I had repented within the last five minutes and could therefore avoid eternal damnation.

Looking back, I cannot help but laugh at how absurd this was. Though in fairness, I still find it difficult to call a choice truly free when one option carries consequences so disproportionate that refusing it ceases to be a realistic possibility.

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Phase 2: I Became a Believer

At around fifteen, I gained admission into university.

One afternoon, after spending hours reading vector calculus, I decided my brain had suffered enough and went out for a stroll.

I met this guy halfway through my stroll , lets call him Mr. David.

He stopped me to ask how I was doing, and gradually drifted into preaching Christ. Normally, I would have told him I was already a Christian and saved both of us the trouble. But there was something different about him.

Mr. David was the first Christian I had met who seemed to approach the faith intellectually. In the space of thirty minutes, he was explaining biblical passages through historical context, cultural background, and sometimes even Greek etymology. Whether he was right or wrong was beside the point. The man clearly knew his stuff.

As much as I wanted to continue listening, I had to leave. My stomach was already rumbling and I needed something to eat.

Before I left, he asked for my number, which I gave it to him.

That turned out to be a mistake.

Or perhaps the opposite.

Over the following months, Mr. David became something of a mentor to me. As you can probably imagine, I had no shortage of questions, and I threw them at him relentlessly. To his credit, he tried answering every one of them. Looking back, I think he did the best anyone could have done. The problem was that sometimes an answer only creates a better question.

One misconception I remember him correcting was my understanding of salvation.

Ephesians 2:8–9

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith... not by works, so that no one can boast.”

According to Mr. David, Christianity was not a religion of moral scorecards. It did not matter if you were 51% good and 49% bad, or vice versa. Christianity openly acknowledges that no one can earn salvation. In fact, the very recognition that you cannot merit it is what leads you to faith in Christ. What ultimately mattered was belief in Jesus, his death, and his resurrection.

I cannot lie, I heaved a sigh of relief.

It meant I could finally retire my five-minute forgiveness routine( i still hadn’t dropped it). No more constantly checking whether I had recently apologized to God before an untimely death. Salvation was much simpler than I had imagined.

Believe in Jesus.

Accept his death and resurrection.

You’re saved.

Forever( voila✨).

It probably sounds trivial now, but at the time it meant a lot to me. For the first time, salvation seemed almost too good to be true and heaven was practically assured.

I spent the night pondering on this new found truth, but something interesting began bothering me.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that a faith-based system seemed to favour the bad guys more than it did the good ones.

Take this hypothetical example.

Suppose someone like Osama bin Laden, after a lifetime of causing suffering and being responsible for the deaths of thousands, became genuinely remorseful, sought forgiveness, and accepted Jesus before he died.

would he be saved?

Christianity’s answer seemed to be yes. [Luke 23:39–43 (the thief on the cross) and Romans 10:9]

I then compared this to a devout Muslim who spent his life helping others, trying to live honorably, and doing what he sincerely believed was right, but never accepted Jesus simply because he could not bring himself to believe(Even after being preached to).

Would he be condemned?

Again, Christianity’s answer seemed to be yes.

John 3:18

"Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God's one and only Son." (NIV)

I found this deeply unsatisfying.

But I quickly pushed the thought aside. At the time, thinking about it further felt unnecessary.

After all, I was saved.

What happened to everyone else was not yet my problem.

Despite the reservations I had buried in the back of my mind, I continued progressing in the faith.

I started going to church four days out of the seven we have in a week. I spoke in tongues too (or so I thought, more on that someday). I preached to people, had a disciple I was teaching about the faith, read the Old Testament and most of the New cover to cover, and spent hours at a stretch praying.

In hindsight, it is almost funny.

The same person writing this newsletter once spent his evenings explaining Christianity to other people and trying to convince them it was true.

I was not sitting on the fence.

I was all in.

Which is why what happened next surprised me more than anyone else.

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Phase 3: I Started Asking Questions.

One important thing I have come to learn is that certainty thrives in motion.

As long as you are busy, whatever busy may mean to you, whether it is attending church, listening to sermons, praying, preaching, or simply surrounding yourself with people who share your beliefs, it becomes surprisingly easy to live with unanswered questions. Not because you are deliberately avoiding them, but because there is rarely enough silence or space for them to fully unfold before they are dismissed and life moves on.

This is not a matter of backsliding, though.

Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, observed that is the mark of an educated mind to seek the appropriate level of clarity for whatever it is examining.

In other words, subjecting your beliefs to scrutiny(Asking contrarian questions) is not a sign of weak belief, despite what many African parents would have us think. It is simply what happens when a person takes an idea seriously enough to examine it properly.

It’s not as though these questions were not already there. Some of them had been there for years.

I had simply learned to live alongside them.

That changed when I moved to Epe.

Like every second-year engineering student in my school, I had to leave the main campus for the Engineering campus. An unintended consequence of that move was that I no longer saw Mr. David as often as I used to.

More importantly, however, the move gave me something I had never really had before.

Time, distance, and silence.

To this day, I have not found many places quite like Epe(The serene environment of the campus).

There were trees everywhere. The evenings were beautiful. Most days were unusually quiet. For the first time in my life, I had both the solitude and the habit of mind to sit with my thoughts and follow them wherever they led.

The trouble with thinking is that it rarely stops where you expect it to.

One question becomes two. Two become three. Three become ten.

I found myself wondering whether other people had wrestled with these same questions before me and, if they had, what answers they arrived at.

That curiosity led me to books. Lots of them.

Looking back, the most valuable thing those books gave me was not knowledge, but a way of thinking. They taught me to look at things as they are, not as I wished they were, and to resist the urge to explain away an uncomfortable conclusion simply because I disliked where it led.

Naturally, the first place I turned that habit toward was the place where most of my unanswered questions lived.

My religion.

And it was in trying to answer those questions that my problems with Christianity truly began.

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Question 1: Why Am I a Christian and Not a Muslim?

This was the first question I turned my new habit of honest thinking toward, and it began with a simple thought experiment.

Permit me to drag you along.

Suppose a Muslim approached me while I was still a Christian and told me that the only path to salvation was through Allah, and that unless I accepted Islam, I risked eternal punishment.

Would I abandon Christianity and follow him?

My answer was a very firm “hell no.”

Why?

Because Christianity was already promising me the very same thing: eternal salvation. So from my perspective, I had no reason to leave. More importantly, I was simply not convinced.

But that answer immediately raised another question.

If that is how I would respond to a Muslim preaching Islam, why would I expect a Muslim to respond differently when a Christian preaches Christ?

He already belongs to a faith that claims to possess the truth. He already believes he is on the path to salvation. More importantly, he is no more convinced by my claims than I am by his.

And if I cannot honestly expect to be converted by a Muslim preaching to me, I have little reason to expect a Muslim to be converted by me preaching to him.

This realization bothered me more than I expected.

Both sides seemed to be using the other’s lack of belief as grounds for eternal punishment, yet both sides found themselves in exactly the same position: unconvinced.

The Christian says the Muslim rejects the truth.

The Muslim says the Christian rejects the truth.

And neither sees himself as doing anything unreasonable.

At this point, the common Christian response is usually that Christianity is uniquely persuasive because Christ rose from the dead. Because of the resurrection, Christians argue that Jesus possesses a unique authority to speak about life, death, and what lies beyond both.

I understand the argument.

But the difficulty remains.

A Christian finds the resurrection compelling. A Muslim does not.

Likewise, a Muslim may find Islam’s strict insistence on the oneness of God more compelling than the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

What persuades one person does not necessarily persuade another.

And that is precisely the problem.

The question is not whether Christians have reasons for believing. Clearly they do.

The question is whether a person deserves eternal punishment for failing to find those reasons persuasive, especially when Christians themselves fail to find the reasons offered by other religions persuasive.

The more I thought about it, the less just it seemed.

Now, a Christian might object, much like I did at the time, and ask:

“What about Muslims who converted to Christianity after becoming convinced by the claims of Christ?”

And they would be right.

Such people exist.

But to that I simply reply: what about the Christians who converted to Islam?

They exist too, do they not?

The reason we do not think about them as often is that we are usually drawn to stories that confirm what we already believe.

Christians hear testimonies of Muslims finding Christ. Muslims hear testimonies of Christians finding Islam. Each side points to its converts as evidence that it possesses the truth while paying far less attention to those who travelled in the opposite direction.

A Christian convert is presented as evidence that Christianity is true.

A Muslim convert is presented as evidence that Islam is true.

But both sides cannot appeal to conversion as proof while simultaneously dismissing conversions in the opposite direction.

At most, conversion tells us that human beings can be persuaded by different arguments, experiences, and ways of seeing the world.

It does not tell us which religion is true.

And that brought me back to the same difficulty.

We are all convinced by different things, yet both Christianity and Islam make eternal consequences depend on being convinced by the right thing.

I found and still find that deeply troubling.

Because if I do not blame myself for remaining unconvinced by Islam, I struggle to see why a Muslim should be blamed for remaining unconvinced by Christianity.

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Now, this has already become much longer than I intended. The original plan was for this to be a short newsletter, but I quickly realized that before explaining my reasons, I first had to explain the path that led me to them.

The reasons themselves are many, and I have only touched on one of them here. In the next newsletter, I will continue with some of the others.

Before ending, however, I think one clarification is necessary.

The reason Christianity features so heavily throughout this piece is not because I hold any particular animosity towards it. It is simply the religion I know best. It is the religion I was born into, practised, defended, preached, and spent years trying to understand. Had I been born into a Muslim family, this would probably have been about Islam instead.

I also did not write this to convince anyone to abandon their faith. People believe what they believe for all sorts of reasons, and I have long since accepted that reasonable people can arrive at very different conclusions.

What I am trying to make clear is something much subtle.

When someone tells you they no longer believe in a religion you hold sacred, the most honest response is not to immediately assume they are rebellious, lost, arrogant, hardened, or that they simply have not prayed enough.

Most of the time, they have thought about it far more carefully than you imagine.

You may disagree with where they arrived.

You may even believe they are mistaken.

But disagreement and ignorance are not the same thing.

Sometimes disbelief is not the absence of thought, but the consequence of it.

And whether one agrees with the conclusion or not, I think that deserves a little more grace than it is often given.

Until next time.

Talk to you soon.

— Abimbola