The position
What if the distance you feel from God has been reinforced by the very system that promised to bring you close? By religion, I mean the machinery that adds layers between you and God: obligation in place of intimacy, cold tradition in place of the Spirit’s voice, and pressure to perform instead of freedom to listen, trust, and walk with Him. The problem is not devotion to God. It is a system that makes dependence on itself feel like dependence on Him.
When the trusted framework breaks
My search did not begin as an abstract objection to church. Near the summer of 2009, a con artist gained my spiritual trust through friends and stole over $50K through my credit cards in just over three months. I lost my business, many friends, and much of my ability to know what was true. Lies had become so mixed into what I trusted that sorting them felt like trying to separate yeast from dough.
I threw everything out. For roughly two years I became a nihilist and an agnostic while I slowly rebuilt. That was not an easy liberation story. I was terrified. I had grown up hearing that rules kept me safe: do the godly things, avoid the sinful things, and stay inside the boundaries. Without those rules, what would keep me on the straight and narrow?
But I wanted truth more than I wanted the comfort of a familiar explanation. Over the following years, God gently nurtured me toward hope and freedom. The question that remained was simple: why? Nothing inherited was exempt from examination. What emerged was not the disappearance of God, but a relationship no longer confined by the system I had mistaken for Him.
Naming the separation
Jesus gives a concrete picture of the burden religion creates:
“And they tie up heavy burdens and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger.”
— Matthew 23:4, NASB
A system can use God’s name while loading people with obligations that obscure His nearness. That is why the distinction matters. If the machinery itself is producing distance, simply becoming more faithful to the machinery will not solve the problem.
The word religion does not mean the same thing to everyone. Some use it for love, devotion, and care. James puts the emphasis somewhere very different from religious performance:
“Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”
— James 1:27, NASB
That is love made practical. My objection is to the substitute: a structure that teaches us to strive, conform, and depend on its approval instead of knowing God.
Keep the living water
Leaving that separation does not require calling every spiritual encounter in your past false. God met me in church. The encounter was real even when the surrounding mixture was not His heart. The mistake was crediting the system with what Jesus had given.
Freedom means carrying the true encounter forward without keeping every layer wrapped around it. The question is no longer how successfully I can protect an inherited framework. It is whether that framework leads me into living relationship—or keeps persuading me that God remains somewhere on the other side of it.
Discussion
- What specific rule, teaching, or practice taught you that God was distant, and what changed when you examined it?
- Which parts of your spiritual experience would you carry forward even if the framework around them changed?
Adapted from Chris Drake’s Dismantling Religion, Introduction; Chapter 1, “Awakened”; and Chapter 13, “The Real Gospel.”