The first time it struck me that most of my acquaintances were going to Hell, I was probably about six.
We were driving to Glasgow, where my grandma lived, and my dad mentioned that she wasn’t a Christian. ‘Doesn’t that mean she’s going to Hell?’ I said, terrified.
As far as my six-year-old brain was concerned, Heaven and Hell were stark realities. As far as my church elders were concerned, they were stark realities. When you died, you would either spend an eternity in Heaven praising Jesus (Christians only) or would be cast into Hell for an eternity of torment (everyone else).
Notionally, we all deserved Hell, no matter how ‘good’ we were, due to our nature as fallen beings. Buddhist monk, bank robber, ordinary person muddling along – it didn’t matter. Only through giving your life to Jesus could you avoid your rightful fate.
I don’t think my church really meant for children to spend hours pondering their grandma’s damnation. Like most evangelical churches, it was an upbeat environment – light on fire and brimstone, heavy on tambourines.
We attended every Sunday, with additional meetings in people’s homes during the week, and the leaders went to great lengths to make it ‘fun’.
To me, though, focusing on the ‘good news’ of the Gospel felt a lot like burying the lede (i.e. hiding the key bits of the story).
Science journalist Abi Millar lost her faith when she was 17, left her evangelical church then began a search for true spiritual fulfilment
In her new book Abi tries out 12 practices or belief systems that are growing in popularity, from astrology to atheist churches, reiki to raves
Of course, I was grateful to be going to Heaven. But the possibility of eternal torment – for my school friends, my grandma, most of humanity – struck me as very bad news indeed.
My church was part of Newfrontiers (then New Frontiers International or NFI), a socially conservative network of churches that tended towards biblical literalism. Women were banned from leading, and in some churches wore mandatory head coverings. Being gay, or at least acting on it, was considered a sin. And we were supposed to be spreading the good news to everyone we knew.
Every summer between 1991 and 2001, the NFI churches congregated at Stoneleigh Bible Week, which was held in the National Agricultural Centre in Warwickshire and attracted 28,000 people at its peak.
I was only eight the first time we attended, in 1994, and my recollections from these years are hazy. But I do remember the smell of the cattle sheds where we had our meetings and the squelch of the waterlogged fields where we pitched our tents.
I remember singing a Gary Glitter rip‑off called Do You Wanna Be In God’s Gang?, and listening to a roster of talks for teenagers: How can I save myself till marriage? What should I do if I think I’m gay? Is masturbation a sin?
Most of all, I remember something electric in the air: the buzz of thousands of Christians getting ‘drunk on the Holy Spirit’. Sometimes that manifested as speaking in tongues, or receiving a prophecy or vision. Other times it meant being ‘zapped’ (i.e. swaying and falling to the floor) by the Holy Ghost.
Although regular churchgoers, my parents took the mania with a pinch of salt, and encouraged my sisters and me to do the same.
But as someone who was rarely zapped and never saw visions, I felt I had learned my place in the spiritual pecking order. It confirmed a deeper fear.
Sure, you’re a sinner, whispered a voice inside of me. But since salvation has nothing to do with deeds, and everything to do with belief, it’s your own rebellious mind you have to worry about.
Starting very young, I’d had questions. Vexing questions that weren’t so easily resolved. It began with, ‘What about the dinosaurs?’ If God had created the Earth in six days, 6,000 years ago, what was I to make of Dippy at the Natural History Museum?
From there, it progressed to worrying about Darwinism: how could the theory of evolution be reconciled with a heavenly creator?
By my teens, my doubting tendencies had gone into overdrive. I devoured books of so-called apologetics – books that purported to square the fossil record with Genesis 1, for instance. But to no avail.
No sooner had one question been resolved, than another reared its head. If anyone was going to Hell, then surely I was.
Aged 14, I was baptised in the training pool at our local leisure centre. I found a photo of my baptism recently: I looked so incredibly unhappy, standing waist-deep in the pool in a billowing T-shirt, with one of the church elders beside me. As a painfully self-conscious teenager – who also happened to have a crush on the lifeguard – getting baptised that day was about the most mortifying thing I could have done.
But I wanted to prove my mettle as a Christian. Even when I’m committing all the thought crimes, don’t my actions speak louder than my inner monologue?
Over the next few years, I had a series of mini Damascene moments that became harder and harder to ignore. When I lost my faith for good, aged 17, it felt like coming up for air.
It wasn’t just that I was free to have sex before marriage and swear with impunity; it was more that I could indulge my curiosity without fear of everlasting reprise.
Every week, I headed to the town library, where I read books about evolutionary biology, literary theory, philosophy. It may not have been cool, but it felt joyous.
I went to Cambridge to study English in 2004, then moved to London where I became a science journalist. I didn’t think about God too much; that door in my life was firmly closed. As far as I was concerned, religion was merely a tool for social control, while ‘spirituality’ was wishy-washy mumbo-jumbo.
Yet despite my certainty on those points, in other ways I felt horribly adrift.
Years later, I interviewed the psychologist Dr Marlene Winell, who’d coined the term Religious Trauma Syndrome. She told me that former believers often have to deal with cognitive confusion and developmental delays (i.e. falling behind their peers on life experiences). They may have a flimsy sense of self, having been taught to outsource their intuitions to a holy text, and a strong sense that they were ‘born bad’.
Typically, that leads to anxiety, low self-worth and identity confusion.
That was me to a T. I didn’t know what it meant to trust myself, and I felt aimlessly adolescent well into my 20s.
Although I didn’t miss Christianity, I was clearly missing something. Against my better judgment, I took up yoga and experimented with magic mushrooms, and was aghast to find I resonated with both.
Sometimes, a bottle of wine deep into an evening with friends, I’d admit to having had psychedelic-induced ‘spiritual’ experiences, disclosed with all the contrition of a Catholic at confession, as though I’d admitted to having an affair or being a secret fan of dad rock.
But it wasn’t until the sudden death of my father in 2018 that I started to reckon with my spirituality in earnest.
During the intensity of early grief, when nothing made sense, I also felt a sense of being anchored by something I couldn’t explain. I realised that I truly knew nothing about this world, what we’re doing here, what this all means.
It was all there waiting to be explored, and while I wanted to keep my rationality intact, I no longer felt Richard Dawkins and crew ought to have the final word.
This new-found sense of openness – coupled with my natural scepticism – gave rise to my new book, The Spirituality Gap.
Abi attended the New Frontiers International church every Sunday with her family but said even as a very young child she’d had vexing questions
She’d been a runner for years and in her book, Abi began to consider how endurance exercise might fit the bill for a ‘spiritual’ practice
I began with the idea that spirituality is a real and important phenomenon, albeit one that’s hard to define. It meshes closely with questions of meaning, the stories we tell about our lives, and where we derive hope in dark times.
However, at a time when many of us have rejected religion, it isn’t always clear how we are supposed to harness that instinct.
In my book, I try out 12 practices or belief systems that seem to be growing in popularity, from astrology to atheist churches, reiki to raves.
I didn’t gel with all these practices. Some seemed to require too great a suspension of rationality. But whether it was shamanism or meditation, Tarot or eco-spirituality (a huge category, running the gamut from paganism to wild swimming), I did want to understand what people got out of it.
And on a personal level, I wanted to know if I could appease both sides of myself. Was there a way to embrace something vital at the heart of spirituality while rejecting dogma, wishful thinking and pseudoscience?
One of the most personally meaningful practices I covered was also one of the most down-to-earth.
I’ve been a runner for many years, and it’s been a gamechanger, helping me manage anxiety, overthinking and tendencies towards low mood.
I began to consider how endurance exercise might fit the bill for a ‘spiritual’ practice, too. Most runners will be familiar with the notion of ‘runner’s high’, that elusive phenomenon in which movement feels effortless. You’re immersed in the moment, not thinking about anything other than the present stride. These kinds of highs have a transcendent quality.
But you can’t count on that kind of thing when running – far more likely, the run feels like a painful slog.
To that end, I spoke to a Buddhist teacher, Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, who has hosted running retreats from a mountain monastery in New York State. She talked me through the concept of ‘still running’, a form of moving meditation.
Rather than sticking on a podcast as you set out, you tune in to the actual experience of running, pleasant or unpleasant.
Over time, you’ll learn to treat your thoughts and sensations as fleeting phenomena. You’ll cultivate a clarity of mind that you can take through into other aspects of your life. (I’m still working on that, to be honest.)
Extreme endurance athletes are often very good at overriding the desire to stop. But that’s not so much mind over matter, as mind over mind: as scientists are now discovering, our physical limitations are less determined by the body itself, and more by the way the brain interprets our distress signals.
Through moving beyond those perceived limitations, you may tap into a source of strength that seems to come from beyond you.
‘This is something greater than myself,’ ultramarathoner Miriam Diaz-Gilbert told me. ‘That’s what it means for me to have running be a spiritual experience.’
At the other end of the spectrum was ayahuasca. If a running meditation is something you can squeeze into your lunch break, then an ayahuasca retreat is a monumental experience that might take years to unravel.
One of the most powerful psychedelics known to humanity, ayahuasca is derived from two plants in the Amazonian basin, where it has been used medicinally for hundreds of years. It’s currently illegal in most countries (I did my retreat in Amsterdam during a window of legality) and is not something to be entered into lightly. After taking a shot of the bitter brew, people routinely vomit, see visions and do battle with their deepest fears.
That said, its therapeutic potential is real, as evinced by a growing number of research studies.
It is thought that psychedelics have a profound effect on the default mode network (DMN) in the brain, which plays a role in generating our sense of self.
For the duration of the trip, you have the cognitive flexibility to dislodge old patterns of thinking and let new ones take root. According to a 2018 research paper, up to 86 per cent of participants in psychedelic trials rated their experiences in the top five most meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives.
Although I was appropriately terrified going into my ayahuasca retreat, it was exactly as transformative as it was billed. In among the puking and the terrors (not to mention one particularly gruelling vision in which I turned into a factory-farmed chicken) I did find it intensely therapeutic. I emerged with a sense of peace that was hard to explain.
Six years have passed and a lot has changed in my life, not least the fact I got married and became a mother.
I would still call myself an agnostic. But I don’t think a lack of spiritual beliefs – for instance, believing in God – need preclude a sense of spirituality.
Personally, I find myself most drawn to spiritual practices that don’t require any beliefs as the price of entry (think meditation, even dance). Rather than forcing you to swallow a particular set of dogmas, these kinds of practices are very good at taking you out of your head. What works for others will, of course, vary.
At a time when pre-packaged religions no longer resonate with so many of us, I like the idea that many of us are spiritual seekers, trying to decipher life’s mysteries on our own terms.
- The Spirituality Gap – Searching For Meaning In A Secular Age, by Abi Millar, is published on Thursday (September Publishing, £14.99).
