Do I Regret My Time as an Evangelical?

The Lost Years

“The Gap in my resume? That’s where He carried me.” Tweet by @fake_living

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

If there were a decade of life I could do over, it would probably be my 20s. As someone who left evangelicalism, I often feel like a foreigner to planet earth, like a literal alien visiting this unknown culture. At parties, when people my age reminisce with nostalgia the reckless days of their youth–partying, smoking weed, hooking up with strangers–I pretend I know the euphoria of the wild days of that era, when in my actual 20s, I had only been wildly uptight. Young adults have the gift of time, to dream up lofty goals, to pursue their interests and to blaze their own trails. But from adolescence I had been trained to have a singular mission, to pursue not the desires of my own heart but for the glory of God. To that end, I immersed myself in the study of God’s Word which translated into two higher education degrees in Bible and Theology. I also needed to fulfill the mandate to be a submissive wife and start a godly family, which I did early in my 20s. At the start of my 28th year, when my peers were making their New Year Resolutions to get a promotion! To travel to Iceland! To climb a mountain! I was 5 months pregnant and my resolution was to become a mother for a second time. Practically fully domesticated before 30. 

If my tone sounds like it’s dripping with regret and sarcasm, you’re reading it right. 

Those were my lost years. I want my 20s back. I want to have traveled to Iceland (for fun, not for missions), I want to have interned for a cutting edge company on the cusp of the next coolest thing. I want to have gone to school for a marketable, monetizable skill instead of two theology degrees in a faith tradition I’ve walked away from. I want to have kissed more than one boy, and I don’t know, maybe a girl or two. I want to join in on conversations at parties about how stupid I was that one night and did that stupid thing and not feel like the alien anxious bunny who only ever did right things. I spent so much energy living my life in such a way so that I would have no regrets to end up living a life full of it. 

My family loves it when I get in these moods, basically regretting their existence in my life.

“But you wouldn’t have met me,” my husband coons, desperately trying to coax me away from combusting in rage. He knows it works, the oxytocin effectively regulating my nervous system. I don’t regret my children (some people do, and I think we should make room for honest conversations like this in our culture), even now, with the bodily agency I’ve reclaimed, I would still have chosen to become a mother. What I have in my life, the family I created, feels real and true and beautiful, but it does not undo the damage of the lies and inauthenticity which led me to the decisions I made in my 20s. I wanted to become a mother, but I didn't want to have been a shell of a person, shrouded deep in indoctrination, when I decided to become one. I wanted to be a mother, but I wish I hadn’t been an evangelical. 

“But you wouldn’t have met me.” There it is, again, he’s wearing me down. And it’s true, I always concede. If I wasn’t an evangelical, I wouldn’t have met him, because where I was, deep in the system, so was he. When he says this to me, I, a little bit, project my anger onto him. “How dare you distract me from the spiritual abuse I was subjected to as a child, of what you were subjected to as a child, of the regrets of the decisions I was made to make?" To be reminded of the good things that came from evangelicalism felt to me like an attack on my deconstruction. It makes me feel invalidated, like I’m crazy for regretting what was done to me, and what I had done. 

I know he isn’t gaslighting me. He simply exists–as one of the best men I’ve ever known, the father of my children and the love of my life–who I met in evangelicalism. If I wanted to erase my history, I’d have to erase his as well, and I’d have to erase every moment we’ve shared since then that have inspired, informed, and shaped me to be who I am today. 

The born again, again doesn’t require us to die to ourselves–not our history, not our memories, not our people. I don’t regret my husband or my children and I certainly don’t regret the person I am today in spite of my religious trauma. When my husband whispers in my ear, “But you wouldn’t have met me,” he beckons me to pay closer attention to my body, to ask her the question: What is it that you regret? Do you regret everything? Do you want nothing to do with your past? I decided to google regret. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines regret as this: “Sorrow aroused by circumstances beyond one’s control or power to repair.” 

I had thought regret meant wanting to reset my life. I thought it meant having access to a do over button, which leaves me in a pickle. Because I definitely want a do over, to erase my religious trauma which I did not deserve, but I still want to preserve my husband, my children, and who I am today in this timeline. I want to collapse a couple of timelines in the multiverse, pick out the good bits and discard the bad, do you think Marvel could make that happen? 

But the dictionary tells me regret is sorrow–that it’s mourning incredible depths of sadness. Perhaps instead of making unreasonable requests of the space-time continuum, I can better identify the angst that is squirreling inside of my heart. My regret turns out to be heartrending grief. I am bowled over with grief for the child that I was, enculturated into a system that took away my agency, terrified me with hell, and robbed me of time I could’ve spent having a normal, healthy development into adulthood. I am grieved that I wasn’t given language to understand internalized racism and sexism as a girl of color and instead adopted silence around race and perpetuated racism towards other marginalized people. I am gutted that I ever stood against marginalized people: the gays, the teen who chose abortion, that I bullied some of the most beautiful people I now know to be. I grieve that I didn’t have better luck, have better circumstances surrounding my life, that I encountered evangelical missionaries at such a tender time of my life. I have sorrow that these circumstances were beyond my control or power to repair.

Now, when I feel regret, I remind myself that I am grieving, and I find people and places that are soft places for my mourning self to land. I play the soundtrack of my favorite meditation app, the soothing voice which tells me to notice how I’m feeling and to take deep breaths. As my nervous system settles, and the intense grief, like all intense feelings, eventually pass through my body, I remember that accompanying the grief is also a profound relief that I have found my way out of what had been harmful to me. My friend and religious trauma therapist, Laura Anderson, tells me it’s called the Grief-Relief Sandwich. Without grief for my past, I couldn’t experience relief for what I’ve left behind. And if you flip that sandwich over, it is because I am flooded with gratitude for my life now that it becomes crystal clear how much I have to grieve. It is because I now know what I am worth, how I deserve to be treated, that I lament some of the injustices done to me. 

Honoring my regret means I respond to the call of my body to properly grieve. Dr. Brene Brown, in her book, Atlas of the Heart, says regret is a function of empathy. Regret is the result of the hard work I’ve done to do better, and to ask to be treated better. To live without regret, is to live without reflection, she says. “To live without regret is to believe we have nothing to learn, no amends to make, and no opportunity to be braver with our lives.” 

I’m living my life here in the substance of the Grief-Relief Sandwich, bumping into the bread of Grief whenever Facebook Memories brings up an old status update of mine quoting bible verses oozing with arrogance and self-righteousness, and cozying up next to my Relief side whenever I compare my born again photos to my born again again photos. I mean, the glow-up is real. My born again photos are full of smiles. My born again again photos are filled with joy. My born again photos show a very uncertain young woman, (though I had every certainty of doctrine) my born again again photos are uncertain about everything else except herself. Lastly, and perhaps superficially, I dressed like a missionary in born again, and I’ve been through the baptism of fashion now, okay? I’ve been born again again into some style. Thanks be to the gods. 

I was afraid of regret and then I almost drowned in regret. I understand now that regret is a byproduct of thoughtfulness: when you learn to do better, you realize you had room to grow. And what follows is the relief that, whew, we’re doing better now. It is part of the human condition, indeed, one that we should celebrate and honor. In my born again again, I no longer try to live life without regrets. I live life hoping I’ll have some regrets because it will mean I am continuing to evolve. And when the inevitable waves of regret wash over me, I don’t let it pin me down, I let it tumble me in the natural direction of the current and wait for it to carry me back up for my fresh air of relief. 

If it were possible to do my life in the 20s over, I would. But it is only with the wisdom that I have now that I would know how and what to do over. And if I did it over, I would hope in that alternative timeline, I would grow to harbor deep regrets as well, because the older me in the multiverse had also grown and evolved. So all things considered, especially the part where it’s not possible to reset my life, I think I might be semi-ok with the life that I have, indeed, lived. In fact, when I accept the inevitable tumble between grief and relief, I make room in my mental capacity to hold paradoxical memories. I can remember the egregious missionary practices we were complicit in as well as the stories of wild adventures we had. It’s a bit awkward, but what is life if not weird and complex. If I hadn’t flexed my discipline and grit learning to live overseas in a harsh environment with young kids, I don’t know that I could have developed the discipline to sit here writing with perseverance. If I hadn’t labored over my theological studies, I may not have the academic rigor to think critically about current events. If I hadn’t decided to attend the evangelical college in the Midwest, I would not have immersed myself in the sea of Whiteness and learned how to speak against the way it operates in conjunction with evangelicalism to perpetuate harm against people of color. And I wouldn’t have met my life-long partner. 

Perhaps the lost years have not been lost at all, but to the passing of time. They can be found again in my memory, my stories, in the way I write and speak and breathe my being.