All my adult life I have been challenged about my Christian faith.
Not by atheists. Not by people who reject the whole idea of God. By Christians. By people inside the same tradition I grew up in, who decided that the way I hold my belief is wrong — too quiet, too private, too far outside the lines of how it is supposed to look from the outside.
I have been told I am not a real Christian because I do not worship the way they do. Because I do not talk about it the way they do. Because I do not perform it.
And I want to say something about that plainly, because I think there are a lot of people reading this who have been sitting with the same thing for a long time without saying it out loud.
My faith is personal.
Not secret. Not absent. Not weak. Personal.
It is the thing I carry closest, which is why I do not wave it around. The things that matter most to me are not the things I put on display. That is not a flaw in my character. That is how I am built.
I have watched people wear their faith like a costume. Loud on Sunday, something else entirely the rest of the week. I have watched it used as a weapon — to judge, to exclude, to establish rank. I have watched people who could recite scripture chapter and verse treat other human beings in ways that had nothing to do with anything Jesus ever said.
That has been my experience with Christians, more times than I can count. Not all of them. But enough that I know the pattern when I see it.
And what I learned from watching that pattern is what I did not want to become.
There is a version of faith that is about belonging to the right group and signaling that membership correctly. Saying the right words. Attending the right services. Expressing belief in the approved manner so that the people around you can confirm you are one of them.
I do not have that version.
What I have is quieter and older than that. It is a private accounting between me and God that does not require an audience and does not need to be validated by anyone else’s standard. It has sustained me through things that the performative version would not have touched. It has been there in the long, hard, unglamorous stretches of life when no one was watching and there was nothing to perform for.
That is not nothing. That is, in fact, the whole thing.
I understand that my way makes some people uncomfortable. People who have built their faith around community expression and shared doctrine find the private version hard to read. If you are not performing it the way they recognize, they assume you do not have it.
That assumption is wrong.
And I would push back gently on the idea that the loudest version is the most genuine version. The history of faith is full of people who held their belief quietly and lived it seriously and never made a production of either. Some of the most genuinely faithful people I have known in my life said almost nothing about it. They just lived in a way that told you everything.
I am not asking anyone to believe the way I believe.
I am not challenging anyone else’s expression of faith. If yours is loud and communal and joyful and public, I am glad for you. Genuinely. That works for you and it is yours.
What I am saying is that mine is different, and different is not the same as wrong.
My faith is personal. I keep it close to my heart. I do not wear it on my sleeve or use it to measure other people or announce it to rooms that did not ask.
And after a lifetime of being told that makes me less than — less devout, less serious, less Christian — I want to say clearly:
It makes me exactly who I am.
That has always been enough.
A New Category: “AI Baseline Governance”
Michael Faust writes at intelligent-people.org.
“Intelligent People Assume Nothing” | Michael S Faust Sr. | Substack
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