Faith Without Performance
I’m not particularly religious, or at least that is what I say, but I do recognize this; faith, when practiced with care, humility, and action, can be a powerful and necessary thing.
I am not speaking of performative religion. I am not speaking of judgment. I am not speaking of control. I am speaking of the kind that actually looks like Jesus, or honors the same moral good found across many faiths, which is compassionate, grounded, and lived out in how we treat others and ourselves.
What many people don’t know about me, and why would they, is that any connection I have had to God did not come from pressure or indoctrination. Many people also don’t know I have any connection at all, because for a long time I denied it. I will get to that later.
Faith Chosen, Not Taught
As a child, I felt a deep, internal pull toward God and toward Jesus, and that choice was mine alone. My parents were not churchgoing or outwardly religious. They were both raised Catholic, but religion was never forced on us. We never went to church.
What my mother did give me was something more meaningful; exposure and permission to think for myself. She showed me prayer. She showed me the Bible. She made it clear that belief was my decision and mine alone. She also told me about other religions and belief systems.
And I chose to believe. Not because someone told me I had to. The people around me were a mix of believers, skeptics, and nonbelievers alike.
This matters, because my faith was an expression of free will. A child choosing, on her own, to try to follow the teachings of God and Jesus Christ.
The Child Who Wanted More
I didn’t really ask adults about Christianity or religion. I remember reading parts of the Bible on my own. I was young, very young.
By the time I was eight/nine years old, I had become serious about it, as serious as an eight-year-old can be. From what I had gathered, I believed I should probably be going to church.
I understood, even then, that prayer and a private relationship with God could be enough, but I wanted to show devotion. I wanted to do more. At one point, I even planned to become a nun. That was what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I asked my mother if I could go to the church across the street. She didn’t protest. She simply made sure I was certain about what I was asking. I was.
So my younger brother, a friend, and I put on our Sunday best and walked across the street. We went inside, sat in the front pews, and listened to a man preach.
I can’t tell you what he said. I don’t remember that part. What I do remember is adults standing up, praising the Lord, shaking, and speaking in tongues.
I didn’t know what speaking in tongues was at the time, so as an eight-year-old, my only conclusion was that these people were possessed. Still, I stayed calm. I observed. I prayed.
Then a door opened to the side of us. A girl peeked her head out and motioned for us to come over. She was maybe thirteen, with a younger brother around ten. They gave us coloring pages and candy.
She talked about how much she hated it there and how much it all “sucked” and wished her family had never moved. Her father was the preacher.
I remember thinking that I wanted to know what was happening in the church. I wanted to hear what was being said. That I was missing out. But I had manners, so I stayed where I was placed and listened politely.
I never went back to that church, not because of the speaking in tongues, which actually intrigued me, but because I realized something important. I was a child, and I would always be placed with other children. I would be taught faith in softened, simplified pieces, when what I wanted was to hear it as adults heard it. I didn’t know how to explain it then, only that I was hungry for something more serious, something deeper than I was being offered.
After that, I never asked to go to church again. I never found nor had a church home.
When Faith Stopped Making Sense
I continued on my religious journey until I was about fourteen. Up until then, I still imagined dedicating myself to the church in some form, as a nun, a sister, a minister, a missionary, a chaplain, something.
But I also always heard people say, “You’ll feel the Holy Spirit.” They described it as warmth, light, something unmistakable. Through all of it, I never felt anything like that. God never spoke to me. Jesus never spoke to me. I wondered if I wasn’t doing enough, if I needed to pray more, or pray harder.
Everyone else seemed to have experienced something I never had.
I started asking myself why I believed at all. Who did this benefit. What was the point.
Walking Away From Religion, Not Values
I didn’t need religion to be a good person. Too many horrible things had happened to me and around me, to people I cared for and loved. This was also the time of the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks.
I began to feel that religion was a way to control people, to keep them passive, and at times to justify hate, judgment, violence, and even murder. The people who claimed to feel the Holy Spirit often appeared to be the most judgmental, hypocritical, and harmful people I knew, particularly Christians. I wanted no association with that.
I was told I would go to hell because I wasn’t baptized. That that reason is why I did not feel what Christians do, because I was living in sin by default.
I saw hypocrisy everywhere.
So I began presenting myself as nonreligious, sometimes even as a nonbeliever.
The music I connected with reflected what I carried inside me. If you know Judith by A Perfect Circle, then you understand the anger, grief, and resistance I felt toward religious certainty that demanded reverence while offering no compassion for suffering.
Privately, though, I always prayed, even when I no longer knew who I was praying to. I simply stopped seeking a relationship with the Judeo-Christian God. I stopped reading Scripture. I stopped searching. I stopped caring, or at least I told myself that I had.
What never left me were the values of love, humility, accountability, mercy, and care for others. I knew you don’t need to believe in Jesus, or in any God, to live that way. You don’t need faith to be compassionate, honest, or humane.
There are over three thousand religions in the world. In that sense, we are all limited in our understanding. For a long time, I convinced myself that all the worry I had as a child about God and salvation was simply something I had taken far too seriously. And none of it mattered now.
When I Became the Asshole
I stayed away from religious people. When I couldn’t, I mocked them. If they insisted on engaging with me, I challenged their beliefs.
I questioned why they believed what they believed. I pointed out contradictions, fallacies, and hypocrisy. I reminded them that if they had been born in India, they likely would not be Christian at all. I pointed out that pride, even pride in religion, is warned against in their own scriptures. I threw everything at them. I used their words against them. I always had a gotcha ready.
I didn’t seek these moments out, but once I was in them, I was often unkind.
And yet, I never ended those conversations by taking faith away from them. I always ended the same way; a reminder that no matter what anyone argues, faith remains. Faith does not disappear simply because logic challenges it. For the person who holds it, faith is not undone by debate.
That contradiction eventually caught up with me. Why make someone feel small, only to end by offering them grace? Why dismantle what they believed, only to remind them that belief still mattered? I couldn’t answer that.
So I stopped.
Not because I hadn’t been listening before, but because I needed to practice it differently.
I practiced listening without the need to make a point. I practiced restraint instead of sharpness. I practiced letting people hold their faith without testing it.
The Seed I Would Not Admit
Ironically, many people I interacted with believed I was a Christian. When I told them I wasn’t religious, they were shocked.
“You’re so kind. So respectful. The way you speak..”
No. I’m just a person. Years passed like that.
Then an older woman once told me, after I said I didn’t pray or believe in God, that one day a seed would be planted inside me, and I would feel it grow, and I would know God was real.
What I didn’t tell her, or anyone, was that this had already happened years earlier. When I was a young kid.
The seed had grown and flourished for a time, but it had been damaged by something very human; the need to be right. The kind of certainty that tells a child they are going to hell because they aren’t baptized. The kind that mistakes conviction for wisdom.
Still, even among the decay, there remained a small trace of life, hope, belief, and faith.
I recognized it in myself, but I wouldn’t admit it to anyone else. I was close to what Scripture calls the unforgivable sin; rejecting truth while knowing it.
Free Will, Finally Understood
Then, years later, shortly before Easter, while reading about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, something I had encountered many times before and that had always unsettled me, something finally aligned.
Free will.
Now it is so very obvious. Then not so much.
I had always understood the concept intellectually. I knew the language. I knew the arguments. What I had never done was fully integrate it.
God created human beings with the capacity to choose. Love, faith, obedience, and goodness only have meaning if they are freely chosen. Without free will, morality collapses into compliance. We would not be moral beings; we would be programmed ones.
Choice was the point.
Evil and suffering are not evidence of God’s absence. They are the cost of freedom. Even the Son of God was not spared harm, not because God was indifferent, but because human beings were allowed to choose, even when those choices were violent, cruel, or unjust.
What struck me was not the theology itself, but the clarity of it. This wasn’t a new idea. It was one I had circled for years without ever being guided to its center.
What troubled me most was realizing that no one had ever helped me see it this way. Not because they lacked intelligence or knowledge, but because so many were more invested in certainty than in understanding.
It reminded me that faith, if it is to mean anything, requires work. Reflection. Humility. Depth. Not just repetition.
All those years. All those conversations. Some with people who were genuinely wise, genuinely learned.
And yet, not once had anyone helped me connect these pieces.
And not once did anyone help me see this. Not even hint at it.
When it finally clicked for me on my own, my reaction was very simple and very human; what the hell. How did it take me this long to see it.
Witness, Not Dweller
So even now, I still have my issues.
People still ask why I’m not baptized (truth versus symbolism) They ask how I can guide others toward God, Jesus, Christianity, good works, towards a church, while not claiming the label myself.
My answer is simple.
I am not a dweller in faith. I am a witness to it.
Scripture itself shows that not everyone walks the same path or fulfills the same role. There were teachers, prophets, witnesses, servants, doubters, and believers, all at different stages of understanding.
And I believe some of us are meant to hold the door open for others, to offer light, patience, and space for free will to do its work.
Sometimes that means being a questioner rather than a preacher. A thinker rather than an authority. Someone who makes it clear that curiosity is allowed, doubt is not condemned, belief does not require fear of judgment, and faith can be approached without shame.
Grace Without Permission
The experience I once believed I would never have did come, but not in a way that fit religious expectations, not through ritual, church, or moral correctness.
It came wrapped in contradiction, forcing me to confront how narrow my understanding of grace had been.
It taught me that God is not limited by our definitions of holiness, and that free will, real, costly, human free will, still stands at the center of faith.
If you’re looking for Scripture
These passages frame faith as something freely chosen, not inherited or enforced.
- Deuteronomy 30:19
- Joshua 24:15
God’s Rejection of Performative Religion
Scripture consistently condemns religious performance without justice, mercy, or humility.
- Matthew 6:1–6
- Isaiah 1:11–17
- Micah 6:8
Outgrowing “Milk” and Hungering for Depth
Desire for seriousness echoes Scripture’s call to mature understanding.
- Hebrews 5:12–14
- Proverbs 2:3–5
Doubt, Anger, and Questioning Within Faith
The Bible makes room for grief, protest, confusion, and unresolved questions.
- Psalm 13
- Psalm 22
- Psalm 88
- Job (especially chapters 3–42)
- Mark 9:24
Moral Integrity Beyond Religious Labels
Scripture acknowledges goodness and moral law operating outside formal religious identity.
- Romans 2:14–15
- Matthew 7:16–20
Condemnation of Weaponized Certainty
Jesus’ sharpest rebukes are aimed at religious certainty without compassion.
- Matthew 23
- 1 Corinthians 8:1
- James 3:1
The Warning About Hardened Rejection of Truth
The “unforgivable sin” is framed as willful resistance to known truth.
- Matthew 12:31–32
- Mark 3:28–30
- Luke 12:10
Free Will as the Cost of Love
Human freedom is central to both love and suffering.
- Genesis 2–3
- Luke 23:34
- John 3:16–17
Witness, Not Authority
Scripture affirms roles of witness, presence, and humility rather than domination.
- John 1:6–8
- 1 Peter 3:15
- Ecclesiastes 3:11
Grace That Arrives Without Permission
Grace consistently precedes qualification, repentance, or belonging.
- Luke 15 (The Prodigal Son)
- John 4 (The Woman at the Well)
- Romans 5:8
Meaning, Mess, Mercy 
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