On Consent, and Identity

The Letter

For the last week, a letter has been sitting on my desk.

Every evening I decide it's finished. Every evening I read it one more time, notice another sentence that doesn't quite say what I mean, and open the editor again. If someone were watching from across the room, they'd probably assume I was having second thoughts. That's the obvious explanation. People revise when they're uncertain.

The strange thing is that I'm not uncertain at all.

The conclusions have barely changed since I wrote the first draft. What keeps changing is my confidence that the document actually expresses those conclusions faithfully. Each revision strips away something that, while emotionally satisfying, no longer survives closer inspection. Sarcasm was the first casualty. It felt good to write, but it contributed nothing to the argument except the temporary satisfaction of saying something sharp. Then went the rhetorical flourishes, followed by entire paragraphs that I gradually realized existed only because I hadn't yet identified the principle they were all trying to express. The document has become noticeably shorter, but I think it's become more honest as well.

That process doesn't feel unusual to me because it's remarkably similar to how I approach engineering. People often imagine software development as the act of writing code, but a surprising amount of the work consists of discovering that the code you already wrote is describing the problem poorly. You rename variables because the old names implied something that isn't actually true. You delete entire functions because they're solving the same problem twice. You simplify interfaces because complexity often hides assumptions that nobody noticed when they were introduced. The goal isn't merely to make the software work. It's to make the implementation correspond as closely as possible to the system you're actually trying to model.

I thought I was editing a letter.

It turns out I was debugging a description of my own life.

The letter itself is a formal declaration of apostasy addressed to the Catholic Church. I don't intend to publish it. It was written for a specific institution, concerns matters that are deeply personal, and belongs in that context. What surprised me wasn't the content of the declaration itself but what happened while I was writing it. Somewhere between the first draft and the latest revision, the document quietly stopped being about why I reject Christianity and became an investigation into a completely different question. I didn't notice the transition while it was happening. I only realized it afterwards, when I looked back over the revisions and saw that every meaningful change had been pulling in the same direction.

The Sentence That Wouldn't Stay Written

The turning point was a sentence that looked so ordinary I almost overlooked it.

Every draft contained some variation of the phrase, "I left the Catholic Church." Every draft eventually rewrote it. At first I assumed I was doing what every writer does when a sentence feels awkward. I tried different verbs, rearranged the clauses, shortened it, lengthened it, and generally blamed the prose for refusing to cooperate. None of those revisions solved the problem because none of them addressed what was actually bothering me. The sentence wasn't failing stylistically. It was failing descriptively.

That distinction took me an embarrassingly long time to recognize.

One of the habits engineering encourages is the tendency to distinguish between symptoms and causes. Software has an annoying way of presenting bugs in places completely unrelated to where the underlying mistake was made. A user clicks one button and an error appears on another screen. You can spend hours fixing the visible symptom only to discover that the actual bug lives somewhere entirely different. Eventually you learn to distrust first impressions. When a problem refuses to disappear, it's often because you're trying to fix the wrong thing.

The sentence behaved exactly like that.

No matter how I rewrote it, the discomfort remained. The more I stared at it, the less convinced I became that the issue had anything to do with writing at all. The problem was the quiet assumption hidden inside the word left. Leaving something implies that you once belonged to it in the relevant sense. That's such a natural implication that most people never stop to examine it. I certainly hadn't. I'd described myself as someone who had left Catholicism for years without giving the wording much thought.

Then I had to defend it.

Once I tried to explain precisely what I meant, the sentence stopped making sense.

Following the Bug

The obvious response was to ask a question I had somehow managed to avoid.

Did I ever actually believe?

That's a surprisingly difficult question to answer honestly. Memory is reconstructive, and anyone writing about childhood has to resist the temptation to retrofit the past into a story that conveniently supports the present. It's entirely possible to become an atheist at thirty-five and accidentally convince yourself you were always destined to become one. That's not what I'm interested in doing. If anything, the process of writing this declaration has made me more suspicious of simple narratives rather than less.

What I do remember is not a series of dramatic moments of doubt or rebellion. There wasn't a decisive argument that suddenly shattered my faith, nor was there a single experience that transformed my worldview overnight. What I remember instead is something much quieter. I remember noticing, even as a child, that religion seemed to operate according to different epistemic rules than every other subject I encountered.

When I learned mathematics, I was expected to understand why a proof worked.

When I learned science, observations mattered.

When I learned history, evidence and interpretation mattered.

Religion felt different.

Certain conclusions were presented as starting points rather than destinations. Questions were welcome up to a point, but there always seemed to be an invisible line beyond which inquiry gave way to acceptance. I couldn't have articulated that as a child. I didn't know words like epistemology, and I certainly wasn't consciously comparing standards of evidence across disciplines. I simply remember feeling that the game had changed without anyone acknowledging that it had changed.

Looking back, I don't think the core of my thinking has changed nearly as much as my ability to describe it.

That realization forced me to distinguish between two ideas I had unconsciously been treating as identical: participation and belief.

They are not the same thing.

Participation and Belief

I was baptized. I attended Catholic schools. I received the sacraments. I participated in Catholic traditions because they were the traditions into which I had been born. None of those statements is controversial, and none of them tells us very much about what I actually believed at the time.

Children participate in institutions long before they understand them. They attend schools chosen by their parents, celebrate holidays whose history they couldn't explain, and follow customs that simply constitute the background of everyday life. Participation is often involuntary in the ordinary sense of the word. It tells us about circumstances, families, cultures, and environments. Belief is something else entirely.

The more carefully I separated those two concepts, the stranger the sentence "I left the Catholic Church" became. It compressed biography and conviction into a single verb, as though they had always been the same thing. I don't think they were.

Perhaps that's an obvious observation. It certainly feels obvious now. But obvious conclusions often become visible only after you've spent an unreasonable amount of time chasing a problem from entirely the wrong direction. That's another engineering habit. Sometimes the solution looks embarrassingly simple in retrospect because simplicity was impossible until you had first untangled the assumptions that were obscuring it.

Once I stopped thinking in terms of leaving a belief system, I started thinking in terms of rejecting an assigned identity.

That is a very different question.

And, unexpectedly, a much more interesting one.