As Francisco said, it can take years to break free from indoctrination.
I was baptized as a child in the Lutheran Church. I first started dabbling in Wicca at 15. Then I became a right-wing, conservation, evangelical Christian and I was baptized as an adult because my first baptism wasn’t a “believer’s baptism.” I was the person on street corners passing out gospel tracts. My team would target malls and large events so we could reach many people at one time. I won’t get into all of beliefs from that time period but let’s just say Southern Baptists were too liberal for me.
I was slated to teach on the book of Revelation in 2010. I’d taught on it before many times but I wanted to do something bigger and more structured. After a year of preparing I’d come to realize my old beliefs on the book were wrong. I ended up teaching something vastly different from the book and we had so many people in the class that we had to keep the door open so the rest in the hallway could hear.
The dispensational views of Revelation were the first dominos to fall. Next to fall was my belief in heaven. NT Wright is a great starting point. I believe he was an angelican priest? He wrote a book called Surprised By Hope that started with me on a journey concerning the idea of heaven. I soon came to realize that the Christian hope isn’t heaven, it’s resurrection. Most Christian teaching on the subject focuses on heaven and ignores the resurrection part but the resurrection part is the part the early Christians hoped for the most.
I’ll skip a bunch because this is getting long but the next things to fall were the concepts of a being called The Devil, hell as a final place of torment, the bible as inherent, and Jesus as eternally God.
Each step along the way I cried and prayed that God wouldn’t lose me, that I would stay his forever and that I wouldn’t be punished for eternity. It was brutal at times because how indoctrinated I became before this journey began, and it took 10 long years for me to finally reach the point that I’ve reached: I’m an eclectic witch that practices what I call “Originalist Christianity.”
I worship Yahweh and the Holy Spirit as The Lord and The Lady. I believe Jesus existed, as do most scholars, and that he died, but my beliefs for why he died on a cross are radically different than Christianity would teach today. I no longer believe he rose from the dead and I no longer believe in heaven or hell, but I do believe in resurrection. I do believe in making the earth a better place and that one day it’ll be redeemed completely from all of the chaos that we’ve brought on it. And I’m finally at peace within myself with these beliefs and my Wiccan practices.
It’s not enough for me to just say these things to you to comfort you. We each need to take our own journey. But we are all in this life together so if you ever want to do your own reading or to chat in a separate post here (or on the discord server) hit me up and we can talk.