By fourteen I had worked out that I was not built for church, and I left.
Not in anger and not over doctrine. The other children seemed to understand behavioral expectations that mystified me completely. There was a right way to worship, a right way to interpret Scripture, a right way to live a Christian life, and all of it assumed a capacity for stillness and sustained attention that I did not have.
I concluded I was flawed in a way that made me unfit for spiritual community. That is a heavy conclusion for a fourteen year old to reach on his own, and nobody argued with it, because nobody knew that was the conclusion being reached.
In December 2024 I was baptized.
What was the mismatch?
Between a set of practices and a brain that could not perform them.
Sit still. Pay attention for an extended stretch. Maintain a daily discipline. Be consistent. Every one of those is reasonable, and every one of them is a direct request for the things ADHD does not reliably supply.
The adults around me were not cruel. Their expectations were ordinary and they applied them evenly. That is what made it worse instead of better, because there was no villain and no unfairness to point at. There was just a persistent gap between what was asked and what I could deliver, and the only available explanation was that the failure was mine.
The book on this: The ADHD Christian is the whole account of leaving, staying away for decades, and finding a version of faith with room in it for a brain that will not sit still.
Why does that become a spiritual conclusion?
Because the setting supplies the vocabulary.
In another context, being unable to sit through something is a nuisance. In a religious one it looks like a lack of reverence. Inconsistent practice looks like weak commitment. A wandering mind during prayer looks like insincerity.
None of those readings is intended by anybody. They are simply what is available when the only framework on offer is spiritual and the actual cause is neurological. A child does not have the second framework. I certainly did not in 1971.
So the conclusion was not that church did not suit me. It was that I was unfit, which is a much larger thing and much harder to revisit.
Why did it take decades?
Because a conclusion reached at fourteen does not get reviewed. It becomes background.
I did not spend those years arguing with religion. I was not angry about it. The question had been settled long ago, the answer was that Christianity was not for people who could not sit still and could not focus, and settled questions do not come up again on their own.
They are lost to a quiet conclusion that never gets tested, and they leave without anybody registering a departure.
What changed?
I heard a version of Christianity that had room for people like me, for the first time in decades.
Not a technique for concentrating better and not an accommodation. A different account of what the requirement was. What I finally understood was that God’s love is not contingent on neurotypical behavior patterns, and that the same God who made me made the brain I was apologising for.
I was baptized in December 2024. Not because I had finally got my act together. Not because I had learned to control my symptoms, which I have not. That distinction is the entire point of the book and it is the thing I would have needed to hear at fourteen.
Worth adding, because it is the sort of detail that gets left out of accounts like this: I waited a year to be baptized, because the church’s scheduling process was a high enough bar for my ADHD brain that I nearly did not do it at all. Fifty years of theological distance resolved, and the thing that almost stopped me was an administrative process.
What does this mean for anybody else in it?
That the requirement you think exists may not be the requirement.
If you left because you could not do the practices, it is worth asking what you believed the practices were for. In my case I had treated them as the test instead of the delivery mechanism, and once that flipped there was nothing left to fail at.
I am not going to tell anybody what to believe, and this book does not do that either. What I can say is that leaving because you concluded you were unfit is a different thing from leaving because you disagreed, and only one of those is worth revisiting.
What would I say to a fourteen year old now?
Being unable to sit still is not a moral failing. It is a description of your nervous system.
The practices are a means, not the test. If a particular one does not work for you, that is information about the method.
The conclusion you reach now will not review itself. Whatever you decide at fourteen will still be sitting there at fifty unless something forces the question.
Somebody else has this brain and stayed. I did not know that, and I would have believed the situation was different if I had.
Nothing has to be fixed first. That was the belief that cost me the decades.
Fifty-odd years between the leaving and the baptism. I do not present that as a redemption arc, because most of it was simply a question that never got asked again. The useful part is not that I came back. It is that the reason I left was never true.
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