Every few weeks, I rise early and attend a 6:30 Mass. I no longer go every day or even every Sunday. The early weekday liturgy is easier for me: fewer people, fewer occasions to display conviction. No one observes whether I know when to stand or kneel, and no one inquires about my parish or my absence. I enter while the church remains quiet, sit through the familiar sequence of prayers of the Novus Ordo, and leave before the day has properly begun. I do not attend because I possess the faith the liturgy assumes. I go because the silence of the modern Mass still gives form to a half hour that would otherwise remain formless, because my body recalls the responses after my mind has ceased to affirm them, and because some part of me still waits, despite the judgment of another part, for Jesus to speak. That lingering expectation also makes my unbelief hard to explain. I am not sure Christianity is false, and I am not sure the God it describes does not exist. My struggle is not so much about whether God is real—but about the demand to worship him. I do not know how to call that God “good” or “loving” anymore. My conviction is now that I cannot give myself to a being whose silence brings eternal consequences, or who allows suffering I would condemn in anyone else, with the power to stop it. I still want Jesus to be “true,” so I keep going to church and waiting. But wanting has not made belief possible, and waiting has not made him speak.
It’s comical; I did not expect to tell this story. Public accounts of religious renewal among young people often end at the church door: a person raised without much faith grows dissatisfied, discovers tradition, and learns to kneel. The return is treated as the conclusion. However, my experience bucks the trend. I entered the Church, accepted its disciplines, and remained—just until the claims that first attracted me became the source of my refusal.
I was baptized and confirmed Catholic, so the Church would not call me a convert. Formally, I was a Catholic who returned. Still, “failed convert” describes the experience more accurately than “lapsed Catholic.” See, I did not lose a warm childhood faith; I had almost none.
As a child, Catholicism meant CCD, paperwork, and mornoic obligations imposed by adults. I thought religion was old-fashioned and mostly pointless. Confirmation was something my parents wanted completed. I went through with it partly because my grandfather cared deeply about the Church, and because disappointing him seemed worse than enduring classes I had already decided did not matter. I received the sacrament having settled whether I did not believe any of it, or at least I didn’t care.
By high school, my negative indifference had become a real question. It happened during a conversation with my mother, when I realized for the first time that Catholicism was just one religion among many. Other families inherited different beliefs, just as I had inherited Catholicism. Other children learned different prayers and heard different stories about what the world is and how it works. I started to wonder: Why should the faith passed down to me be uniquely true? The fact that so many people disagreed did not prove that all religions were false, but it did make inherited certainty feel less convincing and a little hollow. I didn’t become agnostic out of any rebellion or dramatic break—I just furthered my reason to affirm what my family had handed me. The beliefs I grew up with no longer felt like answers, only like traditions I was expected to continue.
Then I arrived at the University of Oklahoma in 2021 and began going to the Catholic student church.
I cannot identify a single cause. There was no vision, no private voice, no argument that overturned my disbelief. I liked the liturgy. I liked some of the people. I liked the possibility that it might be true. Perhaps I also wanted a place in a new social world. As a college freshman, I was looking for friends and order, and religion offered both. This return did not happen all at once. At first, I went only a few times during the second semester of my freshman year. My attendance increased gradually as the semesters went on, until going to Mass became a regular part of my college life. That did not make the return insincere, however. Most convictions come through people before they become propositions we defend alone.
My Catholic and Protestant friends argued, sometimes fiercely, about Scripture, authority, grace, and the Church. I listened and argued back, drawn in by the energy and conviction of their debates. At first, I was mostly a bystander. Still, as I kept joining these conversations, I found myself attending more regularly and feeling less like an observer and more like a participant. Catholic claims gradually seemed less arbitrary than they had in high school. A church that could trace its disputes across centuries appeared more substantial than a faith someone assembled on their own. More than that, Christianity also gave me a figure I wanted to love. Jesus seemed to offer a kind of mercy that did not depend upon achievement. He knew the worst in people and still moved toward them. The possibility that love governed the world became more attractive than the thin agnosticism I had carried into college.
Once Christianity became plausible, I wanted the form least reducible to personal preference. That desire drew me toward older Catholic traditions and eventually to the Latin Mass. I did not understand every word, which was part of the appeal. The liturgy did not require my comprehension or approval. It had survived before me and would continue after me. Its age, silence, and inherited gestures seemed like evidence. Looking back, I sometimes mixed up endurance with truth. Still, I think historical continuity matters, especially for a religion that makes big claims about history. I wanted to belong to a faith that had truly inherited something lasting—not one that just changed to fit the people in the room.
I was also drawn to conservative Christianity, especially pre-Vatican II Catholicism, because it spoke with confidence. At first, Christian political identity seemed like a refusal to apologize for belief—a willingness to stand firm. The idea of a Christian nation, or a society shaped by Christian truth, didn’t seem threatening; it actually felt logical. If Christianity was true, why shouldn’t public life reflect that? I realize now that I sometimes confused certainty with real courage, and took harshness for seriousness. Eventually, I saw that the same intensity that made this version of Christianity so appealing also made its cruelty much harder to ignore in the long run.
From the fall of my junior year through the end of my senior year, a friend and I committed ourselves to daily Mass. At 6:30 in the morning, we walked to the university church while much of campus remained asleep. On winter mornings, it was still dark. The day had not yet filled with assignments, arguments, and the low-grade noise of college life. The Mass was quiet and repetitive. That repetition made belief feel less like an opinion and more like an order into which I had entered. Afterward, friends remained. Conversation carried us from the church into the day. The social life mattered, but the practice was not only social. I went when I was tired. I went when I felt little. I went because I believed obligation had value beyond emotion. Catholicism taught me not to treat religious feeling as the measure of fidelity, and I accepted that lesson. Attending Church only when belief feels vivid turns feeling into a god.
Yet beneath the routine, I kept asking for something the routine could not provide. When I prayed the rosary, I did not usually ask for success or comfort. I asked God to make himself knowable. I wanted some disclosure that would let me distinguish faith from the force of habit, friendship, inherited texts, and my own desire for the story to be true. I was not asking for the sun to stop or a voice to shake the walls. I was asking for enough to know that I was not speaking into an empty room.
Nothing came that I could recognize as an answer.
Some of my Protestant friends spoke of encounters with God with an ease that unsettled me. They described being addressed, led, corrected, or suddenly known. Catholicism gave me reasons not to envy them. The Church does not promise every Christian a dramatic experience. It warns against making private feeling the foundation of faith. It has a language for dryness, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes dryness as a difficulty faced even by those who sincerely want to pray. That answer prevented me from turning every quiet prayer into an accusation. For a time, it taught me patience.
Patience can become indistinguishable from indefinite postponement. The silence stretched across years of practice. I constructed historical arguments for the Resurrection. I explained why social formation does not disprove belief. I defended sacramental theology and apostolic succession. I described why human beings need ritual, authority, and a story larger than the self. Yet I could not turn those explanations into an encounter with the God they concern. I became capable of defending Christianity academically while becoming less capable of worshiping.
Philosophers call one form of this problem “divine hiddenness.” J. L. Schellenberg’s argument concerns the existence of nonresistant nonbelief: people who are open to relationship with God, and perhaps want it, but remain unable to believe. A perfectly loving God, the argument proposes, would not remain unavailable to a person capable of relationship and unwilling to resist it. I do not know whether my experience proves Schellenberg’s conclusion. I know only that his category named what Christian arguments often denied: Unbelief is not always a chosen refusal. Sometimes a person wants the door open and cannot find the door.
A Christian can answer that God has already revealed himself. He has spoken through creation, Biblical Israel, Christ, Scripture, the Church, and the sacraments. To demand another revelation may look less like seeking than setting terms. I understand that objection because I made it against myself. I received the Eucharist. I read the arguments. I attended Mass when feeling had disappeared. The problem was not that Christianity supplied no alleged revelation. It was that I could not tell whether those things disclosed God or only disclosed what human beings had said about God.
By my senior year, the silence had begun to take its toll. I was still attending daily Mass, still praying, and still defending Christianity in conversations with friends, but the practices no longer carried the meaning they once had. They continued to order my life while becoming increasingly difficult to connect to a living God. Mass could structure a morning, prayer could discipline my attention, and doctrine could supply arguments, yet none of them could assure me that there was anyone on the other side of my devotion. Religion began to feel less like a relationship than an elaborate way of enduring absence.
This slow drift from relationship to routine might still have remained just an intellectual sorrow, something I could live with, if Christianity hadn’t attached ultimate stakes to belief itself. Divine silence became cruel to me because that absence stood beside judgment.
Catholic teaching is more careful about hell than many Christians, including some Catholics, allow. The Church does not teach that every person who lacks explicit Christian belief is automatically damned. The Catechism says that those who do not know Christ through no fault of their own, yet sincerely seek truth and follow conscience, may attain salvation. It teaches that ignorance, fear, habit, psychological conditions, and social factors can diminish responsibility. It describes hell as definitive separation from God through a free refusal of divine love, and insists that God predestines no one to it.
These qualifications matter. Any criticism that ignores them criticizes a crude religion rather than Catholicism. But for me, they did not settle the question from inside my doubt. What counts as refusal when belief itself cannot be summoned? Where does innocent inability end and culpable resistance begin? How is the person living through disbelief supposed to know whether his failure is invincible ignorance, wounded pride, moral evasion, or some mixture no one but God can parse? Further, these questions led me to reconsider what it really means to talk about exclusion or separation from God. The phrase “self-exclusion” also began to sound incomplete. A person can exclude himself only from a reality he can recognize well enough to accept or reject. If God remains hidden, eternal separation cannot be explained simply as the result of a clear choice. It may still be free in some theological sense unavailable to me. But the moral burden then falls on mystery, and mystery is a thin foundation for terror.
These doubts brought me back to why I was first drawn to Christianity in the first place. I had been attracted to Jesus because salvation seemed unlike an ordinary exchange. Grace could not be purchased. God did not demand wealth, intelligence, or even social rank. But over time, faith itself began to feel like the price. Believe, trust, worship, obey. The demand was described as freedom because love cannot be coerced. Yet eternal consequences made that freedom difficult for me to recognize. A choice made beneath the possibility of endless loss does not resemble the unforced love Christians say God desires, especially when the evidence needed for the choice remains ambiguous. The strongest Christian response to this is not the cheap claim that suffering is secretly good. Writers such as Eleonore Stump have argued that suffering must be understood within the possibility of personal union with God, and that the meaning of a life cannot be read from one episode isolated from its full story. Christianity itself places an innocent victim at the center of history, however. It does not promise that love prevents pain. It claims that God enters pain and can redeem what appears destroyed. I do not dismiss that answer. It is deeper than the slogans about free will that contemporary Christians often reach for before the sufferer has finished speaking. But redemption is not prevention. The promise that God can bring good from suffering does not explain why an omnipotent God permits horrors from which no human freedom seems worth preserving.
During my first year of graduate school, seeing images from the conflict in Gaza made these questions impossible to keep abstract. I don’t want to use the suffering of others as a prop in my own story—their pain is not here to serve my doubts. But what shook me was how real and undeniable that suffering was, and how far it felt from any explanation I could accept. I saw destroyed buildings, bloody children, parents carrying bodies. Then I would hear Christians talk about God’s providence, and the gap between those words and what I was seeing felt unbridgeable. I knew the usual explanations: people choose evil, leaders make decisions, history is marked by sin, and God’s permission isn’t approval. But for me, these answers stopped making sense. An all-powerful God isn’t just a bystander who wants to help but can’t. The problem for me became that God doesn’t cause every horror; it’s that such horrors keep happening in a world Christians insist is ruled by love.
Eventually, my questions changed. I stopped asking only whether God existed, and started to wonder if power alone deserved worship just because it was called divine. Around this time, a close friend noticed the change in how I talked about faith. One day, they asked me directly if I thought I was smarter than God. But that wasn’t the issue. I didn’t think I was smarter than God. I just believed that if we use words like “good” for God, those words should still mean something. If an action that looks cruel is called good only because God does it, then the word “good” loses its meaning. It just means God’s actions can’t be questioned. I understand that mystery is part of faith—humans are limited, and we only see pieces of the whole. Good theology, as a result, should stay humble about what we can know. But worship, for me, has to be more than just admitting God is more powerful or knowledgeable. It’s about trust. Mystery can help us be humble, but it can’t make us trust when God’s actions no longer make moral sense.
As my faith shifted, my political views changed too. I used to defend conservative Christianity and even felt some pull toward Christian nationalism. But after Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, I saw far-right Christianity grow more openly contemptuous and harsh. Part of the change was in me: what I once saw as strength started to look like people using faith as an excuse to be mean. Defending “Christian civilization” seemed to matter more than asking if Christians were acting with kindness. The way gay people were treated, for example, became another turning point for me. I had accepted restrictions because the Church claimed authority. Still, once I stopped seeing that authority as automatically good, the suffering those teachings caused couldn’t just be written off as the price of faith. I also knew Christians who were gentle, thoughtful, and stood against nationalism. Several close friends responded to my doubt with real patience instead of anger. They showed me that not all Christians are cruel. But even so, the politics and sexual ethics I once defended started to feel less like hard truth and more like harm that was being justified by religion. These objections alone didn’t make my faith collapse. Politics was not the main cause—I still wrestled with questions about God’s silence, hell, and suffering. Instead, politics confirmed that something deeper in me had changed. I could no longer accept that an institution’s claim to speak for God automatically made its teachings good. The same seriousness that once drew me to authority now made me ask harder questions about what that authority actually produced.
Because of all this, I did start to leave the Church gradually. During the second semester of my graduate studies, I stopped considering myself a Christian. Actually walking away was not dramatic—it was quiet and slow. But leaving did bring some relief. I felt less guilt. Choices that once seemed loaded with fear became ordinary decisions. I no longer had to inspect every desire for signs of rebellion. Any honest account of deconversion should admit that freedom can be pleasurable. Some Christians see that pleasure as proof that the unbeliever only wanted to sin. They are partly right—moral release is real. But that is not the whole story.
The freedom did not cure me. It did not resolve depression or replace the meaning Christianity had supplied. It placed distance between me and friends whose lives remained ordered by the faith I could no longer share. I worried that they saw me differently, perhaps as proud, wounded, or morally compromised. I had lost not only doctrines but a common language. When Christians spoke of grace, vocation, sacrifice, or hope, I still understood the words. I no longer knew whether I had the right to use them. That is why the language of liberation does not fit. I did not escape a faith I hated. I lost a faith I wanted to be true. Catholicism had given time a pattern and suffering a possible end. It gave me friends, practices, and a way to imagine that goodness was more than a temporary human agreement. When belief receded, those goods did not reveal themselves as frauds. They became losses.
My story makes the current talk about a Gen Z religious revival more complicated. There are signs that some young Americans are getting more religious. For example, a Gallup poll from April 2026 found that the number of young men who say religion is “very important” rose from 28 percent in 2022–2023 to 42 percent in 2024–2025. But other surveys, like Pew and PRRI, didn’t find a clear national revival, and regular church attendance among young people stayed about one in five. So, while people are talking about a “revival,” that word can oversimplify things. It groups very different stories together. Sociologists can count how many people join or leave, but they struggle to describe people like me who stay near the edge—neither fully committed nor totally separate. Some young people find tradition and stay. Some show up for discipline, beauty, friendship, or to resist modern life. Some truly believe. Others get more serious about faith, only to find that the doctrine gets harder—not easier—to accept.
The failed convert, as I now put myself, is not always the person who found Christianity too demanding. He may be the person who accepted its demands so fully that he could no longer keep its moral contradictions at the edge of belief. For me, hiddenness was not one objection among many. It changed the meaning of every other doctrine. Hell became more frightening because the God who judged remained silent. Suffering became harder to reconcile with love because the promised relationship was absent. Authority became suspect because I no longer trusted the goodness behind it. I remain open to the possibility that I have misunderstood all of this. I am young. Years of practice are not a lifetime. Christianity has survived more serious objections than mine, and Christians have inhabited spiritual darkness without turning it into disbelief. Perhaps what I call silence is a form of answer I lack the capacity to recognize. Perhaps Iwanted God to satisfy an evidentiary standard no personal relationship could meet. Perhaps pride has concealed itself inside moral protest.
But those possibilities do not produce assent. A person cannot decide to believe by admitting that he may be wrong. Nor can he worship honestly by repeating words whose object he has come to distrust.
So I still go to Mass sometimes. I choose the early one. The church is quiet enough that I do not have to explain why I am there. I listen to the prayers addressed to a God I cannot deny with confidence and cannot praise in good conscience. When the congregation says, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof,” the words return without effort. My body has not forgotten what belief once required.
Then the host is raised, and I look toward it. I do not know whether I am looking at God, at bread, or at the place where desire continues after conviction has failed. I wait through the silence. Nothing happens that I can name.
I keep listening.
References
Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd ed. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997. Paragraphs 847, 1033–1037, 1735, and 2728–2731.
Howard-Snyder, Daniel, and Adam Green. “Hiddenness of God.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 2016.
Schellenberg, J. L. Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Stump, Eleonore. Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Gallup. “Rise in Young Men’s Religiosity Realigns Gender Gaps.” April 16, 2026.
Pew Research Center. “Religion Holds Steady in America.” December 8, 2025.
Public Religion Research Institute. “New PRRI Data Rebuts ‘Religious Revival’ Claims.” April 15, 2026.