What If I'm Wrong?

Week 5 of What Do We Do After Deconstructing Fundamentalism

This is week 5 of a new series on what do we do after deconstruction. This won’t be an exhaustive list or a formula for what to do. This is based on my own life and observations of others I’ve walked with. I hope you find this helpful.

There was a point near the end of my deconstruction when I honestly thought the hardest part was behind me. I had spent years questioning the theology I inherited, rethinking passages of Scripture I had once considered settled, and letting go of a version of Christianity that no longer made sense to me. I had learned to be comfortable saying, “I don’t know,” and that felt like real progress. Looking back, I thought the work was mostly finished. It turned out I had only been dealing with the part of my faith I could see.

The fear was still there.

It didn’t show up while I was reading theology or listening to a podcast. It didn’t wait until I was sitting in church. It found me in ordinary moments when my guard was down. I’d be driving somewhere, lying awake in bed, or working in the yard when the same thought would quietly make its way into my mind. What if you’re wrong? It wasn’t asking whether I had misunderstood a difficult passage of Scripture. It was asking whether I had spent years dismantling my faith only to discover I had been walking away from God the entire time.

I can remember a specific time when this felt really overwhelming. I was walking our dog on a lovely fall evening. I was letting him lead and sniff whatever he found interesting. I’m sure I was listening to a book or podcast, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. While we walked, a thought slowly crept its way into my thinking, and soon enough it was all I could think of. I stopped hearing whatever it was I was listening to and started hearing nothing but this thought… What if hell really was waiting for people like me? What if I wasn’t just risking my own eternity? What if I had spent years leading other people there too?

It took a moment before I was able to breathe or think again. Fear has a way of convincing us that whatever it says must be important simply because it feels so overwhelming.

When Your Brain Knows Something Your Theology Doesn’t

One of the most helpful things I learned during that season had nothing to do with theology. It had to do with how the brain works.

We sometimes imagine changing our beliefs is like replacing one book on a shelf with another. Once we decide something is no longer true, we expect the old belief to disappear and the new one to take its place. That might be how ideas work on paper, but it is not how people work.

I started reading about how kids actually form their beliefs, and it changed so much for me. Children don’t fact-check the adults around them. They can’t. They survive by trusting the people who raise them, and they learn to pay closest attention to whoever seems most confident, most familiar, most safe. That’s not a flaw in how kids think… it’s the only way childhood works. None of us began life independently investigating every claim our parents, teachers, and religious leaders made. We depended on them to tell us what was real, what was safe, and what deserved our fear.

That means a child who is repeatedly told that hell is real, doubt is dangerous, and questioning religious authority could separate them from God does not receive those teachings as one possible theological interpretation. The child receives them from the people responsible for explaining reality. When those messages are repeated at home, in church, during altar calls, at youth camps, and in sermons delivered by trusted adults, they become connected to belonging and safety. The theology is being taught at the same time the nervous system is learning what danger feels like.

That’s where fear conditioning came in, and once I understood the term, I couldn’t stop seeing it everywhere in my own story. When the brain learns to associate something with danger, it can begin producing a fear response before we’ve consciously evaluated what’s happening. An experience, image, thought, or question becomes wired to a frightening outcome.

That helped explain why a question about hell could still make my heart race even after my theology had changed. Intellectually, I could reconsider the doctrine. But my body had spent decades learning that getting it wrong could mean eternal punishment. That fear didn’t need me to consciously affirm the old belief before it started doing its thing. It had already learned the route, and it knew how to run it without asking for my permission.

The part that surprised me most was learning that you don’t overcome a fear like that by deleting it. What fear researchers call extinction sounds like it should mean the old fear gets erased. It doesn’t. What actually happens is that the brain builds new learning that competes with the old association. The brain learns, in effect, “this doesn’t have to mean danger,” while the original fear memory stays intact underneath it, like a layer that never fully goes away.

That explained something I couldn’t get past: why the old fear kept coming back even after I thought I’d moved past it. It turns out that’s just how conditioned fear behaves. It can resurface even after years have passed, when life gets stressful, or when you run into the feared subject in a new setting. Its return didn’t mean the danger was real after all. It meant the old learning had never actually been erased. It was just outvoted, for a while, by something newer.

Understanding this changed the way I understood what was happening to me. The sudden question What if you’re going to hell? felt powerful because it was tied to an old fear, not because it was revealing some hidden truth. The physical reaction didn’t settle the theological question. It just showed how deeply that question had once been wired to danger.

The image that keeps coming to mind is an old oak tree. When you look at an oak, the trunk is what probably gets your attention. It feels massive and permanent. What you can’t see is the root system spreading beneath the ground. Cutting down the visible tree is difficult enough. Removing everything that has grown underneath it is another kind of work entirely.

Deconstruction felt like cutting down the tree. I examined the doctrines I had inherited and stopped believing many of the things that had shaped me. I expected the fear to fall with them. Instead, I discovered the roots were still buried deep beneath the surface.

Learning about habit and repetition gave me a more compassionate way to understand those roots. The more a pattern gets used, the more automatically the mind returns to it… with less and less conscious effort required each time. A theological belief is more complicated than a habit, but the underlying principle still applies: the brain gets efficient at retracing roads it’s traveled many times before.

That doesn’t mean the brain is stuck forever, though. Our brains have this amazing ability to never stop changing through new learning or experiences. It’s called neuroplasticity. New patterns can form. Old responses can lose their grip. Researchers have even found that fear memories can sometimes be updated under the right conditions. The hopeful part wasn’t that healing happens instantly. It was that the brain never loses the capacity to do all this.

For me, that new learning happened slowly. Every time I questioned something without being punished, the new pathway became a little more familiar. Every time I encountered uncertainty and discovered I was still safe, fear lost a little of its authority. Every time I experienced love, belonging, or grace outside the boundaries fundamentalism had drawn, my brain received new information about the world, and about God.

The old pathway didn’t disappear overnight. It had been reinforced since childhood by people I trusted and by a community that connected certainty with safety. Uprooting something that old was never going to happen just by changing my mind once.

That realization helped me stop treating the persistence of fear as evidence that I was doing something wrong. My theology had changed faster than my nervous system could learn that I was safe. What I once interpreted as a divine warning could be understood more simply as old learning resurfacing under stress.

The fear was real.
The conclusion it was pushing me toward was not.

The Weight of Being Responsible for Everyone Else

Looking back, I don’t think I was only afraid of being wrong. I was afraid of what my being wrong would mean for everyone else.

Fundamentalism has a way of placing enormous responsibility on people who teach. I had spent years believing eternity hung in the balance every time someone stepped behind a microphone. If I misunderstood Scripture, it wasn’t just my soul at risk. Other people’s souls were tied to mine.

This is why I used to treat my sermons like performances. It wasn’t because I wanted people to think they were good, or that I was some amazing preacher. I wanted to keep them out of hell.

Every sermon I wrote was crafted to bring about an emotional response. And I was really good at it. I’d spend hours shaping it to produce that response. I knew how to make you laugh or how to make you cry. I knew exactly when I needed to do those things for maximum impact. I knew when to speed up or slow down. I could raise the volume of my voice at just the right moment and make it feel as if God themself was speaking directly to you.

I became adept at moving around the stage to keep you locked in, and if I wanted something to feel really tense, I’d move to the front of the stage and bend down like we were sharing a secret.

Like I said… I was really good at it.

That may sound awful now, but imagine what it felt like to stand in front of hundreds of people believing their eternal destination depended on how you presented the gospel. I didn’t do any of that for the sake of performance, and I wouldn’t have called it that at the time. The idea of performing didn’t even cross my mind. I had to make the sermon powerful enough that someone would be snatched from the clutches of hell. Anything I did to prevent you from an eternity of torture was worth it.

It took me years to realize I had accepted a responsibility no one had ever asked me to carry. Somewhere along the way, I had become convinced that another human being’s eternal destiny rested on whether I found the perfect illustration, landed the emotional climax just right, or preached with enough passion to move someone toward a decision. Looking back, that’s an impossible burden to place on any person.

Over time I started asking a different question. If God is actually like Jesus, why would honest searching be treated as rebellion? Why would sincere people trying to love God with their minds be punished for admitting they don’t have everything figured out?

What Healing Looked Like for Me

People sometimes ask when I finally stopped worrying about hell.

I don’t know that there was a single moment.

The fear gradually became quieter. Those questions still surface once in a while, but they no longer carry the authority they once did. I don’t automatically assume every anxious thought is carrying a message from God. Now, I recognize it as an old pathway my brain learned long before I ever questioned the theology attached to it.

That understanding has made me much more compassionate toward people who are deconstructing. It takes years to build a worldview around fear. It shouldn’t surprise us when it takes just as long, if not longer, for our nervous systems to believe we’re safe.

I also want to be careful here. I’m not suggesting my path should become anyone else’s. I know people whose healing led them deeper into Christianity. I know others who found healing in different faith traditions. I know people who found peace only after walking away from religion altogether. I’m not interested in prescribing a destination. I’m simply trying to describe the road I’ve walked.

For me, the turning point came when I stopped asking, How can I be certain I’m right? and started asking a different question.

If there is a God, what would I expect that God to be like?

That question kept bringing me back to Jesus.

Bradley Jersak opens his book A More Christlike God with a question that has stayed with me ever since I read it the firs time: “What if God is Christlike?” It isn’t offered as a proof. It’s an invitation to see God through a different lens. That question helped changed the direction of my faith.

For most of my life, I thought healing would come when I finally knew I was right. Instead, healing came when I stopped believing that being wrong was the thing I needed to fear most.

I stopped needing to solve God before I could trust God. The pressure to arrive at perfect theology slowly gave way to the freedom of continual learning. I no longer felt like every unanswered question was a threat to my faith. Some questions simply became invitations to stay curious.

I don’t know exactly what waits for us on the other side of this life, and I no longer pretend that I do. What I do know is that if there is a God worth trusting, I can’t imagine that God looking less loving, less compassionate, or less gracious than the person I meet in Jesus. I still have questions. I just don’t believe fear deserves to answer them.

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