How Gaza Destroyed My Faith in God

A couple of years ago I uprooted my life, moved to Connecticut, and enrolled in seminary school full time to explore what I always felt was a calling to the ministry.

I wasn’t sure what that ministry would look like, but I had this sense of this is what God wants me to do.

Little did I know that within two years, my faith in a loving, all-powerful God would be almost completely destroyed — in no small part because of the events of October 7, 2023, and the genocide that has followed.

The Day Everything Changed

On that day, Hamas launched a brutal, evil attack on civilians, killing over a thousand people — including children — and taking many more hostage.

As sickening and horrific as that attack was, there was this looming sense that what was coming next could be just as bad if not worse: Israel’s response.

I didn’t (and don’t) claim to be an expert on Southwest Asian affairs, but as news started to leak that Israel was planning a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza, my stomach turned.

In a twist of cruel irony, at the same time we were reading and studying the book of Joshua in my Old Testament class — a text that documents a mythical past where ancient Israelites brutally conquered and ethnically cleansed ancient Palestine. (1)

Despite having been the victim of relentless religious trauma in my childhood at the hands of homophobic evangelicals, it was only in the days after October 7th that I began to doubt the efficacy of reading and studying such an ancient text.

I had long ago abandoned the notion that the Bible was some sort of divine message from God with only one clear and honest interpretation (to be sure, a young idea that was the product of the Protestant Reformation). (2)

But I held on to the idea that reading the Bible had at least some redeeming qualities. Thoughtful readers, I believed, could extract wisdom from these ancient stories even as we acknowledged their human origins.

The inescapable fact, however, is that there’s a vocal and violent minority in both Palestine and the United States who see these writings not as they are — a manifestation of an ancient community trying to justify its existence — but as divine instructions for a future waiting to be realized.

The very existence of those who would misuse such a text to justify genocide is enough to nullify any future mass study of such a problematic text.

When the Foundation Crumbles

But the events of October 7th would make me lose faith in more than just studying and reading the Bible — it would make me lose whatever faith I had left in the conventional notion of God.

Before Israel launched its genocide with the bipartisan blessing and financial backing of our own government, I would have said I believed in God as some sort of all-powerful and ultimately good energy or life force that all humans a duty to.

That duty was revealed to us by the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, but also many other messengers, and was naturally obtainable without the help of any religious teaching.

But as I watched Israel slaughter innocent child after innocent child, that belief began to crumble. If God was all powerful, and God was all good, then why would God allow such a horrific tragedy to continue? (3)

The vast majority of human beings see Israel’s actions for what they are: brutal, horrific, illegal, and evil. But because they have our government’s never-ending support, there is no human who can stop them. So where is God?

I recognize it is a point of both privilege and ignorance to only realize this now. There is no defensible justification as to why I only came to this now — evil has always existed, and sadly I think, will always exist.

But sometimes it takes watching the unthinkable unfold in real time, paid for by our own tax dollars, to finally shatter whatever protective theological framework we’ve built around ourselves.

What Comes Next

Needless to say, after a year I left seminary school. I began to realize that what I thought was a divine calling was just subtle manipulation over the years by my own consciousness.

I wanted to prove all those evangelicals wrong. I wanted to set the record straight about Jesus (who I still consider one of history’s great moral teachers, even if I don’t agree with his own theology). I like thinking, reading, writing, public speaking, and helping people. Ministry is a great way to get paid for all five of those things.

Pair all that with the romantic notion that my grandfather was a Methodist circuit rider, and what was really an attractive career option became “a calling.”

But when you can’t say with conviction that there is a loving God who will ultimately win in the end, one shouldn’t in good faith go into a religious ministry. (Needless to say I’m technically on a leave of absence from seminary, though I highly doubt I’ll go back.)

It’s not that I believe there’s not a God. I am not an atheist. I’m just not sure we have any way of knowing if there is a God. My current thinking is much better described as agnostic.

And I’m not here to convince you I’m right. If what you believe works for you, then more power to you!

Because, as I’ve written countless times before, what you believe doesn’t really matter. (4) The only thing that matters is how you treat people. That you fight for justice, that you stand up for the little guy, that you forcefully condemn and work against genocide.

Moving Forward

I’m not sure if I’ll keep witring about Jesus and the bible. Like I said, I still have a deep admiration for Jesus and his teachings. I just have no faith in a conventional God.

Here’s the strange thing though: despite everything I just wrote, I’m happier and healthier than at any other point in my life.

Losing my faith in God hasn’t made me lose my sense of purpose or meaning. If anything, it’s clarified it.

When you can’t outsource justice to a divine being who will eventually make things right, you realize the work is ours alone. And there’s something oddly liberating in that.

I’m working through all of this in a new newsletter I’ve created about finding meaning, health and longevity at midlife. If you’re interested in following along as I figure out what comes after faith, you can find it here.

FOOTNOTES:

1. The book of Joshua depicts a violent military campaign in which ancient Israelites systematically conquered and ethnically cleansed Canaan, slaughtering entire populations in cities like Jericho and Ai — genocide that the text presents as divinely commanded. However, modern scholarship overwhelmingly views this conquest narrative as mythological rather than historical. Archaeological evidence shows no signs of the sudden, violent takeover described in Joshua; instead, evidence suggests Israelites emerged gradually from within Canaanite culture itself. Like the census in Luke or Herod’s massacre in Matthew, Joshua’s conquest was written centuries after the supposed events as theological narrative — to make meaning, not record history. For further reading, see Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman’s The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel (Free Press, 2001) and John J. Collins’ Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, 3rd edition (Fortress Press, 2018).
2. The Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura — that Scripture alone is the sole authority for Christian faith — emerged from Martin Luther’s Reformation and evolved into the modern notion that the Bible contains one “correct” interpretation accessible through plain-text reading. For more on how the meaning of “belief” transformed from relational trust (believing in) to doctrinal assent (believing that) during the Reformation and Enlightenment, see Marcus Borg’s Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (HarperOne, 2006), pages 20–21.
3. This is known as the logical problem of evil, one of theology’s oldest questions. If God possesses both unlimited power and perfect goodness, why does suffering exist? Philosophers and theologians have wrestled with this paradox for millennia, proposing various theodicies (attempts to justify God’s goodness despite evil’s existence), though no explanation has proven satisfying to all. For accessible introductions to this problem, see Bart D. Ehrman’s God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer (HarperOne, 2008).
4. The emphasis on orthodoxy (correct belief) as central to Christianity doesn’t come from the historical Jesus but from later followers, particularly Paul and subsequent church councils. Jesus himself never demanded theological assent to creeds but called people to follow a way of life — to love God and neighbor. The transformation of Christianity from a Jewish movement focused on Jesus’s teachings into a belief-centered religion happened gradually after 70 CE, as Greek-speaking converts reinterpreted Jesus’s message and Paul’s letters became the primary lens through which a new generation encountered Christ. For more on this distinction between the “religion of Jesus” and “religion about Jesus,” see Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited (Beacon Press, 1949) and Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (Random House, 2013), especially pages 170–215.