Building a New Foundation
Guy Mystic- Episode 2
You know how sometimes you outgrow things? That’s exactly what happened with my childhood faith after high school. It started feeling like this tiny cage, and I just couldn’t stay put anymore. There was this whole world out there waiting to be explored, and something inside me kept whispering that there had to be more to faith than what I’d been taught.
So I jumped ship. Looking back now, it’s almost funny how that “big leap” wasn’t really that dramatic. I didn’t exactly throw away my fundamentalist upbringing – I just traded it in for a slightly different model. The Baptist reformed tradition became my new spiritual exploration. Same language basically, just with a different accent. And they weren’t pacifists.
All the familiar landmarks were still there: heaven as the ultimate destination, the Bible as completely infallible, KJV, and this persistent suspicion of anything outside church walls. But something was stirring inside me. I started getting genuinely curious about spiritual stuff, wanting to dig deeper into scripture and really understand theology beyond just Sunday school answers.
(The leap also introduced me to my amazing partner, more about that in Episode 3.)
I was called to Bible college. First, I did a year at this Bible Institute out of state, and then transferred back to this really conservative college – we’re talking hardcore fundamentalist, the kind of place where they had you sign a statement of faith that left zero wiggle room. They had an answer for everything, taught doctrine like it was mathematical fact, and basically viewed the outside world as this dangerous, contaminated place. Don’t get me started on the dress code.
I see now that this was my transition phase. I was trying to balance my growing intellectual curiosity with the comfort of fundamentalist certainty. I thought I was building a stronger foundation for my faith through all this academic study and theological deep-diving.
College years really are a pressure cooker, aren’t they? I threw myself completely into studying biblical culture, historical contexts, theological systems – the works. I learned exactly how to analyze scripture “correctly” and memorized all the right apologetic arguments like I was preparing for the debate team.
But here’s the thing – the deeper I got into fundamentalist theology, the more this uncomfortable feeling grew. The questions just wouldn’t go away. The real world is messy and complicated, and it refused to fit into these neat little theological boxes. The problem of evil especially – none of the explanations I was given really satisfied me. Rigid doctrines started feeling like clothes that were two sizes too small and it was getting hard to breathe.
That little seed of doubt from my childhood? It was turning into a full-blown tree. I was learning critical thinking skills and how to question assumptions – tools they gave me to challenge “worldly wisdom” – but I couldn’t help turning those same tools on my own faith.
I was supposed to use my critical thinking only on “secular” ideas, never on my own beliefs. But I couldn’t help myself. Without even realizing it, I was setting the stage for the next chapter of my journey – one that would take me far beyond the comfortable boundaries of fundamentalism.