Finding Spiritual Freedom After Religious Condemnation

Posted on November 29, 2025

When organized religion condemns your soul, they expect you to accept it. They expect you to bow your head, repent for whatever sin they've decided you've committed, and come crawling back on their terms. They expect their condemnation to be the final word on your spiritual worth. I'm here to tell you it doesn't have to be.

I was a preacher for 19 years. Then I had a falling out with my local church pastor, and suddenly I went from singing "Amazing Grace" to being damned and locked out of the building in the span of one week. That condemnation was supposed to destroy me. It was supposed to make me question everything about myself until I submitted to their authority again. Instead, it set me free.

If you've been condemned by your church, if you're carrying the weight of their judgment, if you're wondering whether your soul really is as damaged as they claim, then Disorganized Christianity is for you. Freedom is possible. I know because I found it.

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The Weight of Religious Condemnation

Condemnation from organized religion hits differently than other forms of rejection. When your church damns your soul, they're not just saying you made a mistake. They're claiming to speak for God. They're declaring that the creator of the universe has judged you and found you wanting. They're telling you that your eternal fate hangs in the balance and they hold the verdict. That's a heavy burden to carry.

For me, the condemnation came quickly. One week I was part of the community. The next week, I wasn't even allowed in His building. No process. No conversation. Just judgment. And here's what makes religious condemnation so insidious: it doesn't just attack what you did. It attacks who you are at the deepest level. They don't just say you were wrong. They say your soul is damned. They don't just disagree with you. They claim God disagrees with you. They don't just ask you to leave. They declare you unworthy of salvation itself.

As a malignant cancer survivor, I know what it feels like when something attacks your body. But religious condemnation attacks something deeper. It goes after your sense of spiritual worth, your relationship with the divine, your hope for anything beyond this life. It's designed to make you feel small, broken, and desperately in need of their approval to be whole again. That's exactly how they want you to feel. Because as long as you believe their condemnation has power over you, you'll stay under their control.

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The Decision to Find Out for Yourself

After being condemned and shut out, I had a choice. I could accept their judgment, assume they spoke for God, and spend the rest of my life trying to earn back their approval. Or I could do something radical: I could find out for myself if they were right. I decided very quickly to reread the Bible with a different set of eyes and a different heart. Not as a preacher looking to confirm what I'd been taught. Not as someone trying to justify myself to the church. But as someone who genuinely needed to know: was organized religion correct in its damnation of my soul?

This is the turning point for finding spiritual freedom after religious condemnation. You have to be willing to question whether their judgment is actually valid. You have to be brave enough to examine the scriptures they used against you and see if those scriptures actually say what they claim. For 19 years, I taught what organized religion told me to teach. I preached their interpretations. I defended their positions. But when my own soul was on the line, I couldn't just take their word for it anymore.

So I studied. I read scripture without the filter of institutional dogma. I looked at the verses they'd used to condemn me and asked: what does this actually say? Does it really support their position? Or have they twisted it to serve their agenda? What I found shocked me. Organized religion was not even close to being able to defend its damning position against me. The scriptures they claimed supported their condemnation didn't actually say what they told me they said. The interpretations I'd been taught for two decades fell apart under basic examination.

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Reclaiming What They Tried to Take

Here's what organized religion doesn't want you to know: their condemnation only has power if you give it power. Their judgment only matters if you accept their authority to judge. Their claim to speak for God only works if you believe they actually do.

When I studied scripture for myself, something shifted. I stopped defending myself against their attacks and started teaching them scriptures. I showed them—at least in my own study—where their positions contradicted what the Bible actually said. I found truths they'd never taught me, either because they didn't know them or because those truths threatened their control. In the process, I recaptured my soul.

That's not a metaphor. When you realize that the condemnation you've been carrying isn't based on scripture but on manipulation, something profound happens. The weight you've been dragging around suddenly has no foundation. The fear that's been controlling you loses its grip. The shame that's been defining you evaporates. I created a little study guide to help myself fend off the relentless attacks on my soul by mean-spirited and intolerant Christians. I needed something tangible, something I could refer to when the voices of condemnation got loud in my head. I wrote down what scripture actually said versus what organized religion claimed it said. That study guide grew into Disorganized Christianity. What started as self-defense became something bigger: a way to help others find the same freedom I found.

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What Freedom Actually Looks Like

Spiritual freedom after religious condemnation doesn't mean you stop believing. It means you stop letting an institution define your beliefs for you. It means you base your faith on what you've discovered for yourself, not on what you've been told you must believe. We converted non-Christians now see the real darkness of organized religion's dogma, and we are no longer bound by its condemnation. That's what freedom looks like. Not the absence of faith, but the absence of fear. Not the rejection of scripture, but the rejection of manipulative interpretations designed to control you.

When I studied without religious bias, I discovered things that completely contradicted organized religion's teachings. I found that Eve NEVER sinned in the Garden of Eden. I discovered the biblical fact that Jesus CANNOT be the Messiah. I learned about events like angels having sex with Eve's daughters and the possible origin of the Antichrist's number 666—things organized religion either ignores or explains away because they don't fit the narrative. These discoveries didn't destroy my faith. They freed it. They showed me that scripture is far more complex, far more challenging, and far more interesting than organized religion wants to admit. And they proved that the condemnation I'd received had nothing to do with what the Bible actually teaches.

Freedom means you can read scripture and draw your own conclusions. Freedom means you can question doctrines without fearing for your eternal soul. Freedom means you can reject the treatment of women, the justification of slavery, and the condemnation of homosexuals that organized religion tries to defend with cherry-picked verses. Freedom means their condemnation no longer defines you.

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Your Soul Belongs to You

If you're reading this while carrying the weight of religious condemnation, I want you to know something: your soul doesn't belong to them. It never did. They claimed authority over it, but that claim was always false. Your relationship with truth, with scripture, with the divine—that's yours. No institution can take it away unless you let them.

The church that condemned me expected their judgment to be final. They expected me to accept their verdict and either submit or despair. Instead, I studied scripture for myself and discovered they were wrong. Not just mistaken—fundamentally wrong about major doctrines they claimed were essential to faith. You can do the same thing. You can examine the scriptures they used against you. You can question the interpretations they presented as absolute truth. You can discover for yourself whether their condemnation has any biblical foundation or whether it's just another tool for control.

I'm not telling you what you'll find. I'm telling you that you have the right to look for yourself. And I'm telling you that freedom is waiting on the other side of that search. The condemnation you've received doesn't have to be the end of your story. It can be the beginning of something better: a faith that's actually yours, built on what you've discovered rather than what you've been told. A spiritual life free from the manipulation of mean-spirited and intolerant Christians who claim to know God's will for your soul.

That's the freedom I found. That's the freedom I'm offering to others through Disorganized Christianity and the books I'm working on now. Because too many people are suffering under condemnation that has no scriptural basis. Too many souls are being attacked by religious systems that profit from fear and control. You deserve better. Your soul deserves better.

If you're struggling with religious condemnation or if you're ready to start finding freedom for yourself, I want to hear from you. Reach out to me via email. Let's talk about reclaiming what organized religion tried to take from you.

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Questions About Freedom?

Have questions about Disorganized Christianity? Curious about what I discovered in scripture? Thinking about your own path to freedom? I'd love to hear from you. Fill out the form below and I'll get back to you soon.