#144 – Giving up God – a personal story

For Sarah Henn Hayward, reading a few too many books, meeting a few too many beautiful non-Christians, and asking a few too many questions, was just too much for her Evangelical faith.

For five years, we’ve been building a community of like-minded people wrestling with a spirituality that didn’t work for us  …. or even harmed us.

We’re all Recovering Evangelicals.

In this episode, we talk to yet another Recovering Evangelical … Sarah Henn Hayward … who just published her deconstruction story in Giving up God: resurrecting a spirituality of love and wonder.

Through her first two decades, Sarah was fully on board with her Evangelical faith, wearing it on her sleeve and actively laboring for it. But she was also a voracious reader, and a critical thinker. Ultimately, we’ll find, she simply asked a few too many questions and read a few too many books, and that led to her leaving that worldview and starting a journey to look for another one.

Going to university to pursue a career in health care immediately began to chip away at her Evangelical beliefs and values. One student she befriended was full of life, joy and goodness: however, he was gay. Another fellow student who seemed to share all of Sarah’s values and deep religious conviction, was a Muslim. Sarah’s relationship with both of them, and others, caused her to question so many ideas that she had grown up accepting fully, and so many parts of the Bible which she thought were absolutely condemning of friends like them. At the same time, Sarah discovered the writings of an Episcopalian Christian mystic — which further challenged many of her Evangelical ideas, especially those pertaining to hell. And then, ironically, the fourth serious challenge to her Evangelical faith was a number of theology courses that she took: learning about how the Bible and Christian dogma were put together by humans was eye-opening, to say the least.

“A world full of blurred lines and shades of grey felt scary compared to the simplistic black-and-white views I’d held before. Now I had a harder time reading the Bible with all this cultural context added in.”

Sarah Henn Hayward

Sarah finished university with a much more liberalized Christian faith. As she began pursuing her career, and a husband, and having kids, she continued going to church. But she was still reading …. and asking questions. Her husband opened her eyes to the disturbing links between Evangelicalism and American politics. Simply looking for some medical information to develop promotional material for her health care clinic had her learning about the evolution of the human foot … and about human evolution in general. We heard the same thing from Paul Enns (“Paulogia”), who told us that simply looking up some basic information about dinosaurs, so he could more accurately draw them in a video he was creating, that opened up his eyes to the truth about evolution … and shattered his Evangelical faith!

And then the COVID pandemic happened.

It forced Sarah to close her clinic temporarily. With her husband now working at home … and able to watch the kids during their nap time … Sarah had hours to go on long walks as she contemplated all this new information, and new perspectives. As well as the racial unrest and deep partisan divisions that were tearing society apart … the crazy things that Evangelicals were saying and doing (and not doing) about COVID … their involvement in politics and the election. A world full of cruelty, hate, racism, murder, cancer, suffering …. couldn’t God have done better? It was all too much.

Ultimately, it was theodicy — the problem of a good God and so much evil — that finally pushed her over the edge. She could no longer believe in God.

In the final few chapters of her book, Sarah describes how she’s trying out a few new hats … new labels for her spirituality: Poetic Naturalism? … Agnostic? … Christian Atheist? Yes, you read that right: that juxtaposition is intentional. Sarah can no longer believe in God, and yet she recognizes that her Christian upbringing has shaped her: she will always be Christian …. “it’s in my cells ….  my DNA.” We heard the same kind of thing from Frankie Schaeffer when we interviewed him last year: Sarah is a Christian who doesn’t believe in God … Frankie said he’s an atheist who believes in God.

In the last few minutes of our conversation, we talked with Sarah about whether it was really the traditional Evangelical conception of God which shattered, rather than other possible conceptions of God. And we asked if she could set aside all this talk of original sin, divine wrath, blood sacrifice, and eternal conscious torment in hell (the Evangelical “Gospel”), and yet still embrace a spirituality that talks about love and liberty, enjoying community and creation (the Christ-ian Gospel). Sarah resonated with that to some extent, but it seems that the baggage related to the Evangelical concept of God is still holding her back.

As always, tell us your thoughts …

Find more information about Sarah and her book at her website.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like similar interviews we’ve had with Frankie Schaeffer and Paul Enns (“Paulogia”).

Episode image used by permission from Sarah Henn Hayward.

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