Can I still believe in God if I'm done with church?

This question gets asked by people who have figured out that they can no longer pretend to be at peace with the church they grew up in, and want to know whether that means they have to stop believing the rest of it. The honest Christian answer is that those are two separate things, and the Bible itself is much more careful about the distinction than many modern Christian communities are.

A short, honest answer

Yes. The Christian God is not located inside the institution that hurt you. The opposite, actually: large parts of the Bible are the story of God repeatedly distinguishing himself from the religion that bore his name.

A few terms first

For readers without the background:

• The Bible is the collection of Jewish and Christian sacred texts. The Old Testament is the older, longer part; the New Testament is the first-century AD writings about Jesus and his followers.
• The gospels are four short biographies of Jesus' life — Matthew, Mark, Luke, John — written by his followers within decades of his death and now part of the New Testament.
• Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish religious teacher who lived in first-century Palestine and is the central figure of Christianity.

What Christianity itself claims about this

1. God is not in the building.

One of the foundational scenes in the gospel of John has Jesus, talking to a Samaritan woman, telling her that an argument about which mountain to worship on — Mount Gerizim or Mount Zion (two specific sacred sites in the ancient Near East) — is being made obsolete. "The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth." The geography of faith is not the building you used to go to.

2. The Bible takes a sharp tone toward religion that has lost the plot.

A short verse from the New Testament letter James: "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." That is the verse the New Testament gives you for "what makes religion real." If your old church scored badly on this — and many do — the Bible would agree with your judgment, not the church's.

3. Jesus' definition of "church" is much smaller than most Christians think.

Jesus, in the gospel of Matthew: "Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." That is the floor. A church, by Jesus' definition, is a small enough thing that you could potentially be one with two friends and a Bible at a kitchen table. The institutional structures most of us think of as "the church" are downstream of that. They are sometimes a useful expression of it, and sometimes a parody of it.

4. God reads people, not religious performance.

A line from the Old Testament — God's correction to the Hebrew prophet Samuel, when Samuel is impressed with the wrong man: "People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart." And Jesus, in the gospel of Matthew: "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven." Jesus' direct statement is that not everyone who used religious language correctly will turn out to have known him. The Christian doctrine is that God is reading you, not your attendance.

5. The Bible is harshest on people who used religion to harm others, not on people who left religion that was harming them.

The longest sustained denunciation in the gospels — Matthew 23 — is aimed at the Jewish religious authorities of Jesus' day who hurt vulnerable people. Whatever else that chapter teaches, it teaches that God's anger over religious abuse is much greater than his anger at the people walking away from it.

What this does not mean

This is the part where we have to be honest about what Christianity does and does not say.

Christianity does not teach that you can do this completely alone for the long haul without consequences. The biblical assumption is that faith is sustained in some kind of community — even a tiny one. That is not the same thing as "you have to go back to the place that hurt you." It is just an honest note about what tends to happen, over time, to faith that has nowhere to land.

A practical version of this: most people who have been deeply hurt by church and who eventually keep their faith do so by finding some form of community — sometimes very small, sometimes very different from what they left. A handful of friends who pray together. A subreddit that turned into a Zoom call. A spiritual director. A monastic retreat once a year. The form does not have to look like what hurt you. The function — being known and known with — does need to exist somewhere, eventually.

That is not a guilt trip about going back. It is what people in your shoes report, over decades.

What about right now

You do not have to figure out the long term to be okay in the short term. You can hold God and "I am not going back there" together for as long as it takes. Most of the long-haul Christians who came through something like this describe years in that exact place before anything else changed.

If you want to talk it through with someone, our chat is free, private, and in your language.

Where this comes from in the Bible

• John 4:21–24 — God is not located in any one building or tradition
• Matthew 18:20 — church, at minimum, is two or three
• James 1:27 — the Bible's own definition of "real religion"
• 1 Samuel 16:7 — God reads the heart, not the outside
• Matthew 7:21–23 — religious correctness does not equal knowing him