Imagine Jesus approaching someone and saying, "I love you so much I've come to save you."

The person asks, "Save me from what?"

Jesus replies, "From what I'm going to do to you if you don't let me save you."

Read that again. Would you call that love? Or would you call it what it actually is—a threat?

This is the gospel I was raised on. God loves you unconditionally, the church said—but there's a condition: believe, or burn. Choose Jesus, or face eternal conscious torment. Maybe if you're lucky, your church taught eternal conscious torment until God annihilates you at some undetermined point in the future. It's salvation with a hell-sized gun to your head, God's grace wrapped in coercion.

The moment I recognized this paradox, everything else about Christianity started to collapse. The history of missionaries arriving with the conquistadors. The hellfire sermons and rapture stories are designed to terrify children into compliance. The churches that turned political litmus tests into measures of faith. This lethal combination shattered whatever faith I had in Christianity's God and the institutions promoting this deity.

When I finally walked away, it wasn't a crisis of belief—it was the opposite. I was choosing integrity over fear. And what I discovered on the other side was anarchism. Not the popular misconception of anarchism as chaos and violence, but anarchism as Merriam-Webster defines it:

A worldview that rejects all hierarchies built on domination, including the religious one my family walked away from.

Growing up, I was taught the 'missional' story about God's adventure to save the world through the spread of Christianity. Missionaries, like William Carey, Hudson Taylor, and Elizabeth Elliot, traveled the world out of love, sharing the good news of Jesus with people who desperately needed to hear it. The narrative emphasized how Christianity grew organically from a room of scared disciples into a global movement, spreading from heart to heart through the compelling power of faith alone.

That story is a lie.

Christianity didn't spread primarily through persuasion—it spread through conquest. And the missionaries often arrived alongside the conquistadors, blessing the violence in the name of God.

For example, as an American of Mexican descent, the story of Christianity for my ancestors is horrifying. In 1492, when Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Americas, Catholic missionaries followed. Pope Alexander VI made this partnership official in 1493, issuing a decree that literally divided the "New World" between Spain and Portugal—on the condition that they spread Christianity. This wasn't charity. This was conquest with a cross.

The Spanish implemented the encomienda system, forcing Indigenous people into brutal labor under the pretense of "religious instruction." Missionaries didn't gently invite people into faith—they arrived to pacify populations for resource extraction. Indigenous peoples were stripped of their languages, spiritual practices, and ways of life through forced conversion. This wasn't a few bad actors perverting an otherwise peaceful mission. This was the church system working alongside the state to exploit 'unreached' people exactly as designed.

Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Spanish Dominican friar who witnessed the colonization firsthand, documented in 1542 how conquistadors subjected Indigenous peoples to 'bloody slaughter and destruction' while missionaries participated in what Spaniards called 'the Spiritual Conquest'—violent suppression of what they labeled heresy and idolatry.

This behavior isn't simply historical; it's still happening today. According to a 2020 Reuters investigation, American evangelical organizations have funneled more than $280 million into anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns in Africa since 2007. U.S. evangelical activists directly shaped Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act, which carries the death penalty for being gay. Contemporary missions still carry colonialism's DNA—the assumption that Western Christianity must be imposed on the Global South.

When I learned this history, I couldn't unsee the atrocities. I also had to reconcile with my own gullibility and trust in what I realized was Christian propaganda masked as history. Christianity didn't conquer the world through the compelling beauty of Jesus's teachings. It conquered through violence, coercion, and the marriage of religious authority with imperial power. The gospel spread at the point of a sword far more often than through the transformation of a heart.

And the church has spent centuries pretending otherwise.

The doctrine of hell was my first crack in the foundation. I remember being taught that God loves me unconditionally—but in the same breath, being told that rejecting that love meant eternal conscious torment. Fire and suffering without end. No possibility of redemption, no second chances, just an eternity of agony because I made the wrong choice in the few decades I had on earth.

That's not love. That's a threat.

Imagine someone telling you they love you, but if you don't love them back, they'll lock you in their basement and torture you forever. What would we call that behavior? We'd call that abuse. How would we describe the person making such threats? We'd call them psychopathic. But when God does it? That's supposed to be grace.

The psychology is deliberate. It's used masterfully in all high-control religious institutions and cults, for that matter. The threat of hell functions as social control—it motivates church attendance, tithes, and evangelism. Fear keeps people from leaving even when they have serious doubts. Children are especially vulnerable to this manipulation. Kids struggle with enough fear and shame at the thought of being on Santa's naughty list. How much worse is it when they are threatened with God's eternal judgment list that doesn't come with a lump of coal, but their flesh burning for all eternity?

This creates lasting damage. Psychologist Marlene Winell, who coined the term Religious Trauma Syndrome, notes that hell indoctrination in childhood can create neural patterns that persist for years or even a lifetime despite rational analysis. Research documents how people who leave Christianity experience intrusive thoughts about damnation, panic attacks triggered by religious imagery, and the persistent fear that "What if they're right?" even decades after walking away. Therapist Andrew Jasko explains that when children are taught to fear eternal torture, it alters psychology at fundamental levels, "hardwiring" fear responses that logic alone can't dislodge.

Let's be clear, churches know fear is a hell of a motivator. Make no mistake, congregations benefit immensely from promoting hell—it fills pews and collection plates. The doctrine creates a captive audience too terrified to question, too afraid to walk away. It breeds hubris by creating an in-group and an out-group. The insiders are those smart enough to have chosen Jesus, while everyone else awaits their just punishment. The paradox is, they package this coercion in the language of love and grace, making it nearly impossible to name the manipulation without being accused of rebelling against God himself.

As if hell isn't bad enough, Christianity ratchets up the stakes through the doctrine of original sin. From birth, you're told you're inherently broken, condemned by default, incapable of saving yourself. So all humanity starts life doomed to hell.

Of course, as providence would have it, the same institution that created the doctrine—the church—is also the one that controls the only cure for the disease. It's the ultimate protection racket: create the problem, offer the solution, and threaten consequences for refusing.

Maybe your church is one of the few that tweaked the original sin recipe. Instead of every human being being born damned to hell, they taught the concept of "the age of innocence." The age differs from church to church, but essentially, from birth until a specific age, children are not seen as rebellious sinners in the eyes of God. This creates a loophole to justify babies and children who die young, avoiding hell.

However, it also creates situations like those of Andrea Yates, where a mother's fear of hell and disappointing God so overwhelmed her that she thought the most loving thing she could do for her five children was drown them so they would be guaranteed entrance to heaven.

Once I saw this pattern, I couldn't unsee it. The foundation wasn't love—it was fear. And I was done living that way. But it would take one more betrayal—this time from the community itself—before I finally walked away.

The final break came when I realized my church wasn't following Christ—they were following Trump.

By 2024, the lines were clear. A 2025 Pew Research survey found that 71% of white evangelical Christians believed God played a role in Trump's 2024 election victory. In many congregations, supporting Trump isn't just politics—it is a litmus test for faith itself. If you question his policies, his character, or his obvious contempt for the vulnerable, you aren't just wrong politically. You were spiritually suspect. The irony is insane: "You're questioning Trump—do you even know Jesus?"

My family experienced this firsthand. Even when churches didn't explicitly condone Trump or Trumpism, they were wholesale operating out of the underlying ideology that makes someone like Trump attractive to begin with. When we called out spiritual abuse in our church leadership, the response was always authoritarian. Be quiet, fall in line, or get out.

When we questioned why "loving your neighbor" meant seeing people of different races and classes hold the same values as upper-class white people, we were treated as radical and a threat. When we refused to equate unquestioned loyalty to church leadership with Christian faithfulness, the response wasn't dialogue or concern—it was gaslighting. Church leaders questioned whether we were really saved. Friends we'd worshiped with for years pulled away. The message was unmistakable: fall in line or get out.

We chose to get out.

What broke me wasn't just the Trump worship and unquestioning of the systems that allow people like him to thrive—it was watching people who claimed to follow the "Prince of Peace" embrace cruelty as strength, greed as wisdom, and dominance as godliness. They traded the Sermon on the Mount for power. They chose the empire over the gospel. And when we pointed it out, they didn't defend their theology. They defended their tribe.

This isn't a bug in the system. It's how the system is designed. Christianity has always been most comfortable when aligned with power—whether that's Roman emperors, European monarchs, or American presidents. The religion that claims to liberate actually teaches obedience to authority, submission to hierarchy, and fear of questioning those in charge. It's built to manufacture compliant subjects, not free people.

That's when I understood: if this is what Christianity produces, I want no part of it.

The struggle is real, and hooks were in deep. I tried to fight and stay within Christianity. I even tried to find a niche within another Abrahamic religion. Being a Christian—being a man of religious faith—was my entire identity. I eventually realized I wouldn't heal by placing different brands of religious bandages on my wounds. I needed to remove the bandages altogether. So I did.

Walking away from Christianity wasn't a loss—it was liberation. For me, my wife, and our children, leaving meant reclaiming our integrity, our curiosity, and our capacity to question authority without fear of eternal consequences.

My deconstruction led me to anarchism, a framework that rejects all hierarchies built on coercion, including religious ones. Noam Chomsky offers a simple definition:

This simple standard exposes Christianity's core problem. Christianity couldn't justify its constraints. The threat of hell, the demand for obedience, the concentration of power in church leadership—none of it could be defended on grounds other than "because God said so." That's not justification. It's capitulation to an illegitimate authority.

Anarchism showed me what Christianity promised but never delivered: a world organized around mutual aid instead of hierarchy, cooperation instead of coercion, solidarity instead of salvation. No one gets left behind because they asked the wrong questions, loved the wrong people, or failed to pledge loyalty to the right leader.

What surprised me was how naturally anarchism aligned with Zen practice. Both reject rigid hierarchies and fixed dogmas. Both emphasize direct experience over blind belief. Both understand that liberation comes through questioning, not submission. Zen taught me to sit with uncertainty without needing cosmic reassurance. Anarchism taught me to organize with others without needing cosmic permission. Together, they offer something Christianity never could: freedom grounded in this world, with these people, right now.

I don't need heaven to justify treating people with dignity. I don't need hell to understand that cruelty is wrong. I don't need a hierarchical god to know that power concentrates in the hands of the few and exploits the many. I can see it. We all can.

If you're questioning the faith you were raised in, if the contradictions are becoming impossible to ignore, if the fear is starting to feel more like control than love—trust that instinct. Walking away isn't rebellion. It's integrity. And on the other side of that fear is a world where solidarity replaces hierarchy, where freedom replaces coercion, and where we build the beloved community together, without gods or masters.

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