Many Christians have developed a compulsion to skip or otherwise take shortcuts through the spiritual journey. The root of this tendency is highly damaging.
It is no wonder we are compelled to skip or shortcut the spiritual journey, going along with such compulsions is highly rewarded in the modern Christian landscape. Furthermore, resisting such compulsions is shamed and in some cases punished.
Often I ask strangers how they can be so sure the Bible is fully endorsed by God, or how they can be so sure the spirit guiding them is the Holy Spirit, or how they can be so sure the god they encountered was actually God. Almost every time I am answered with an insistence that the right thing is to believe first and ask questions later; this is supposedly how we trust God.
There is a journey to be had to potentially reach those conclusions, but the expectation is that you will adopt a conclusion before you have taken the journey to reach it.
Additionally the new Christian who proclaims conclusions about the Bible’s inspiration/inerrancy/infallibility, Jesus’s divinity, the existence of the trinity, a literal six day creation, the existence of hell, and everything else with such high charisma and yet has not studied them, often is treated as a more mature Christian then the one who does not proclaim those things and yet has studied the Bible for years or decades (many may even invalidate the latter's choice to identify as a Christian).
Throw in the fear of hellfire for not professing the "correct" conclusions and most Christians will proclaim conclusions about God and the Bible while their Christianity is still in its infancy, or while they themselves are still children, and once you have made these proclamations, God forbid if you ever backpedal. Potentially world shaking and relationship ending is the grief you will be met with if you come to realize that you made these proclamations before you had good reason to do so.
How tempting it can be to avoid having to go back and take that journey when you can instead turn to your spiritual experiences as assurances that your assumptions were correct and need not be reassessed.
How tempting it is to hang onto those conclusions you assumed when you go back such that you can curate your spiritual journey to lead you back to the same “correct” conclusions and not to wherever else it might have taken you.
It's the “wherever else” that I think is the driving factor behind all of these compulsions to skip, shortcut, and peer pressure. Christians fear a spiritual journey where no conclusions are assumed or favored because they fear that journey may lead them or others to unacceptable conclusions.
Ironically, it is in our attempts to trust God that I find the real lack of trust in God comes in. Christians don’t trust God to guide their spiritual journey to the “correct” place. So we feel the need to establish conclusions before we reach them, proclaim certain tenants as absolute no matter how little you know about them, and pressure other people to do the same.
We are not allowed to be uncertain. We are not allowed to refrain from proclaiming conclusions before we have reached them (proclaiming conclusions, or “truths”, as they are called in church, as a congregation is a common practice way to pressure people into skipping/shortcutting the journey). We are not allowed to reach different conclusions from the denomination of the church we have grown socially dependent upon. There is an expectation to assume certain conclusions and a mentality that you are not a “real” Christian worthy of a position of influence within a church until you have. This all needs to change.
The mentality of fear that many Christians have towards an authentic, thorough, and unbiased spiritual journey is highly damaging and unacceptable.
I write this in part from personal experience but mostly in light of all I have learned speaking with thousands of theists and atheists over the last eleven years.
I am one who had skipped and shortcut much of my spiritual journey. My recognition as to the extent to which I had done this has been an incremental process over a long period of time and is ongoing.
Apart from those who seek out my content on this blog and other platforms, I have explicitly shared a portion of the reality that I am dropping many of the conclusions I once assumed and arriving at other conclusions with very few people.
To the credit of those few with whom I have explicitly shared my journey, while there was initial turbulence, most of them have explicitly expressed that they have come to trust that God will guide me on my journey.
My thanks to those who made space for my journey instead of driving me away. I would love nothing more than to see this space made in the heart of every Christian in addition to overcoming the fear of things like uncertainty, skepticism, and a diversity of conclusions in recognition that we are all limited and flawed beings each on a unique spiritual journey.
