Page 65 of The Confidant
Funny how I hadn’t even seen tithing as buying my way into heaven untilafterI left—no matter that the church already had billions of dollars that sat in their overstuffed bank accounts, gaining interest instead of being used to help those in need.
“We stopped attending because our beliefs have changed,” I said, finding nicer words.
“But how? How could your beliefs have changed?” She furrowed her brow, looking hurt and confused. “You guys were so strong—one of the strongest families in the whole congregation. How did this happen?” She shook her head and glanced down briefly before looking back at me with so much sadness in her eyes. “Were you guys just faking it this whole time? Did you ever even believe?”
“How can you even ask that?” I pulled my head back, her words hitting me like I’d been kicked in the gut. “Of course we believed, Scarlett.” I sighed heavily, my chest sinking in because I could feel that I was already losing her. “Do you think I would put so much time and effort and tears and sleepless nights into figuring this out if I didn’t actually believe? You think I could pretend for seventeen and a half years, go to all the meetings, do all the things…just for show?”
Of course she couldn’t know everything I’d done to fight for my belief in The Fold, since it wasn’t something I’d felt safe or comfortable talking to anyone about while I was going through it. But there had been so many nights where I’d just pleaded with God to make me feel something. To send some sort of sign that would tell me that everything was okay. That I hadn’t been tricked. That the version of God I believed in and had felt to be real actually existed.
That somehow this was all just a big misunderstanding and everything I’d discovered could be explained away with one simple piece of information that I was missing. That if I just looked hard enough, I could find it and all would be well.
I could go back to the safety of believing the same things as my tribe and not worry about being discovered in my disbelief and shunned.
But instead of being comforted whenever I prayed, I had felt nothing. There was only silence.
It wasn’t until I took a step back and stopped trying to fit everything into my “the church has to be true” box was I able to see how everything had actually come together.
How piece by piece the great High Priest had built his kingdom. How he’d put a mirror here, added some smoke there, and built a beautiful shiny fortress that would distract the trusting members from what was actually going on within its walls.
He’d done a fabulous job of duping my ancestors who’d sacrificed so much for what they believed in—and the generations after that who continued down the same path because they’d been indoctrinated from birth, and it was the only thing they’d known.
But the blind obedience would stop with me. I would not be passing the spiritually abusive traditions of my ancestors down to my future children.
“Well, how did it happen?” Scarlett asked. “Did Sebastian get to all of you? Did he show you some of that anti-Fold material? Did you get caught up in all the lies?”
“Bash didn’t show me anything,” I said, offended she so easily latched onto the rhetoric The Fold gave her about people who stepped away. “I did my own research.”
“Sounds like you got some pretty faulty information.” She crossed her arms. “I can’t believe you’re throwing it all away. Throwing away your eternal salvation because of lies.”
“It’s not lies, Scarlett,” I said, growing more and more frustrated. “And just so you know, my research started on The Fold’s own website.”
“What?” The blood drained from her face.
I nodded. “I read all of the church history essays. Every single one of them. I thought they would make things better and satiate the questions I had, but they only brought up more questions. So then I started looking at all the footnotes in the essays, reading all of the source material. And I found out that a lot of The Fold’s history had been whitewashed. It had been made to look pretty. But the truth wasn’t nearly as pretty as what we’ve been taught. And that led me down the rabbit hole.
“You know how I was always reading something on my phone over the summer and during downtime this fall, and you teased me about having a secret social media addiction?”
She gave a small nod.
“That was just me researching The Fold,” I said. “I spent so much time reading everything. I’ve never read or studied so much in my life. For six months I ate drank and slept church history. Read biographies of Samuel Williams and the other High Priests after him. Journals from the people in the early church. It was basically an explosion of new information. And the more I learned, the more questions I had.”
“The more lies you read,” Scarlett cut me off, her body trembling from how upset she was becoming. “It’s so crafty, Hunter. Satan is crafty and he got you. He got your whole family.”
“No. That’s not it at all…” I tried to say, but she wasn’t listening anymore—the cognitive dissonance was too much to allow her to actually hear me through.
“Stop trying to lie to me, Hunter.” She stood from her chair and took a step back, like my disbelief was a contagious thing. “You got your parents, but you’re not going to get me.”
Before I could say or do anything that might salvage this conversation, she turned and walked away. And all I could do was sit back on the bench with my shoulders slumped and think that this conversation had not gone how I wanted at all.
But it was impossible for someone to hear the truth if they had been warned their whole life not to listen to people with opposing views.
Just like Mark Twain had said, it was so much easier to fool someone than to convince them that they’d been fooled.
Leaving The Fold was like running from a burning building and trying to tell your friends and family that it’s on fire.
But it was usually pointless. They rarely ever listened.
Because all they could feel was its warmth.
