A Short Cut to Reconciling One’s Cognitive Dissonance Between the Church and Their Faith

A Short Cut to Reconciling One’s Cognitive Dissonance Between the Church and Their Faith

A couple of months ago, I went to a friends Church service…

Now, it’d been, God knows how long, since the last service I’d been to. While there, I barely listened to the sermon being given and just thought about all of what lead up to my conscious choice to stop going to Sunday morning services…

But, as many of us know, the Church for many young adults resembles nothing but a diabolical ball of confusion and deceit. It feels many times that Church leadership has inflicted phenomenonally grotesque and unending amounts of abuse… Things involving [but not nearly limited to] the repeated sexual abuse of children, pedophilia, theological maltreatment, and ignorant white supremic values; all the while, seemingly attempting to atone, or push aside, these sins by absolving them with a pseudo-type-of-penance shown through halfway given public apologies.

I mean, just briefly reading up on the typical evangelical apology, we see that they’re nothing but these awkward and, seemingly, uneducated juxtapositional responses, that are at best surmised as: “Sorry, not sorry.”

It’s confusing, disorienting, and troublesome all at the same time.

It’s this feeling of which leaves far too many of us wondering: “How long can I keep this cognitive dissonance going between my relatively positive experience of faith in Jesus Christ, and the mounting evidence that the institution that has transmitted and supported that faith is tragically flawed[1]?”

It’s this thing called Cognitive dissonance…