L’Abri
When I was 23 years old, I packed up my things and moved from my beige-carpeted, dirt cheap Southeast Portland apartment to an ornate 18th century chalet in the Swiss Alps at a study center called L’abri. I had only just moved to Portland from Alabama a year earlier, and on the outside, I looked like so many other millennials who flocked to Portland from their dreary conservative hometowns in the early aughts. On the inside, I was still trying to figure out how to square my devotion to Christianity with my increasingly liberal worldview. L’abri was where I went to sort this out.
The little village of Huemoz where L’abri is located
I still count my months in the Swiss Alps as one of the happiest times in my life: the homemade meals on a giant porch overlooking the mountains, the chiming bells of the old church as I trudged through the snow to the chapel on Sunday mornings, the days spent drinking cheap wine and picknicking on the banks of Lake Geneva. I look back on pictures and I see myself with a group of friends smiling on a grassy lawn, our faces pink with the flush of midday wine, and high altitude sun. There are photos of my shoes, propped on the ornate balcony of a chalet, the Dents du Midi mountains glistening in the background. Those mountains were my backdrop for everything from doing laundry to reading about three views on hell. But I wasn’t there to drink wine with my friends by a lake or gaze at the world famous Swiss Alps. I was there to study, to try to answer questions I had about Christianity – the religion that I had subscribed to whole-heartedly, sincerely, and – as Christians like to say – “with fear and trembling,” pretty much my whole life.
I had heard talk of L'abri (French for “the shelter”) for years before I ventured off there myself. Raised in an evangelical household, my family began attending a reformed Calvinist church when I was a teen. (If you’re not familiar with Calvinism, it’s a sect of Christianity where they believe that there is no free will, and God has decided ahead of time who will go to heaven and who will go to hell.) Francis Schaeffer, who founded L’abri, was an American Calvinist theologian who moved to the Swiss Alps with his wife in the 1960s and started L’abri as a Christian refuge for backpackers and seekers. At the time, there was an explosion of (mostly Western) young folks backpacking across Europe and seeking truth (or maybe even Truth with a capital T, a distinction they loved to make at L’abri). Schaeffer and his wife positioned themselves as sort of missionaries in disguise, opened their gorgeous Swiss chalet up to travelers, and offered a space that was supposedly open to those who were questioning and searching (though in reality, Schaeffer was preaching the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy and belief in Jesus as the only salvation from eternal damnation in hell). His speciality was debating philosophers of postmodern thought, though in retrospect, I'm pretty sure he didn’t read any actual postmodern philosophers, instead relying on short synopses of their beliefs and falling back on dogmatic arguments about absolute truth.
Students at L’abri in 1973 from photographer Sylvester Jacobs
Growing up, my parents had read Schaeffer, and one of our family friends had been to L’abri in the 1970s where he got saved, wrote a book about it, and eventually became a missionary. So my adolescent years were steeped in the lore of the place, and in retrospect, I think I found the supposed ideological openness quite appealing. While these days I doubt many backpackers are somehow stumbling across L’abri, it’s still alive and well. For a few thousand dollars, you can live in a sort of Christian commune/study center in the heart of the Swiss Alps. You would spend your days split in two: half the day dedicated to work (anything from cooking dinner to pruning apple trees) and half the day studying a subject of your choice (related to Christianity).
I’ve been contemplating L’abri lately because I’ve been thinking about how I went from a devout Christian to an atheist. I was raised in rural Alabama where I was homeschooled until 10th grade; I went to something called “creation science camp” where we learned that evolution isn’t real; I was a youth group leader in college; I went on mission trips; and when I was 23 and had some cash to spend on travel, I chose to move to a Christian study center in Switzerland and learn about Biblical views on hell. So yeah, Christianity wasn’t a casual passing fancy for me. I was was a true believer and took it all really seriously. While I’ve been out of Christianity for years now, I never really had a community to process this change of belief with when it actually happened. Up until recently, it felt safest to simply keep it to myself. I eventually “came out” as no longer Christian to my immediate family, and we’ve maintained a good relationship despite the fact that I know this revelation was hard for them. And if I’m being honest, it always felt a little embarrassing to talk about my former belief system with all my secular friends. I was in graduate school for Literature at the time I stopped believing, and I was reading a lot of Neitzsche (I know, I know), so it felt positively silly to discuss the fact that I had, until pretty recently, believed in an ancient god whose main selling point was saving you from eternal punishment for breaking the rules that he made up. So for a decade, I’ve just glossed over my movement from Christian to atheist as if I were one of those cool teenagers who stopped going to church as soon as they were allowed, saying things like “I was raised religious,” implying that religion had been merely a parental imposition rather than something I fully embraced into adulthood. But here I am 12 years out, and I’m finally taking the time to reflect on my departure.
The main reason for this late-coming reflection is the exvangelical movement, an ever growing cohort of mostly millennials who are leaving the evangelical church and “deconstructing” their belief system (a term they seem to have co-opted from French post-structuralist thinkers, but is totally unrelated and seemingly hated at this point). I learned about this movement from a couple of my last remaining Christian friends who now no longer count themselves part of the fold either. I was delighted to learn that unlike when I left 12 years ago, there’s now a robust community of defectors. And they’re really into picking apart their experiences with the church, their problems with its beliefs, and their journey towards something else. Truth be told, I was a little jealous. I hadn’t had a giant online community to process with and talk about #religioustrauma. But I also knew I’d gotten by fine without it because once I walked away, I mostly felt a sense of relief and freedom. I didn’t really want to pick apart what I had believed and why. I wanted to revel in the freedom to think and talk about other things, to live a life that wasn’t defined by denial of self and repentance for sin.
But despite my change in beliefs, my memories of L’abri never soured. They remained a set of crystallized moments on which I could impose a slightly softer and more liberal memory of Christianity. As years passed and I became a little more comfortable talking about the fact that I had been very religious very far past my childhood, I brought L’abri back into my own narrative about myself. In these stories it was the liberal and open last stop where my leaving began. But I tended to leave it there: a beautiful place where I could freely examine the hang-ups I had with the Christian faith. At L’abri I pulled a thread, and over the years that followed, it unraveled.
The L’abri library, photo by me
And this story is mostly accurate. I came back from L'abri, still a Christian, but a pretty angsty one who didn’t believe in hell, rejected the church’s views on LGBTQ+ rights, and hated American evangelical culture more than ever. I tried attending Imago Dei (the same church I had attended before I left) for a brief period, but it just didn’t do it for me anymore. Everyone looked like they were a member of Mumford and Sons (it was the early aughts after all), and the theology was as conservative as the Baptist church I was brought up in in rural Alabama: no women in leadership, homosexuality is a sin, hell is a real place. So I defected, heading over to an Episcopal church with a lesbian pastor and a focus on social justice. I liked it there and I felt like it reflected my values, but what was the point? It had been years since L’abri, and I was holding onto a few threads of belief that sort of made me a good candidate to identify as Christian, but mostly I didn’t believe any of it anymore. For me, the transition was smooth. I ripped off the bandaid and moved on. The secular world welcomed me with open arms, and I devoted my time and energy to things I cared about rather than trying to embrace a belief system I was no longer able to justify.
As I’ve discovered the exvangelical movement over the past few years, I’ve had a hankering to revisit my time at L’abri in the context of my so-called deconstruction. I decided to pull up the website to see how things were looking these days, and felt a wave of nostalgia when I saw the photos of people eating dinner al fresco with the alps in the backdrop. But as I perused the site, I found myself a little taken aback: it was all so evangelical. Sure, it was still touted as a place for people to “search for answers,” but it struck me that they were also very clearly pushing a single right answer. It was right there on the site: the inerrancy of scripture, the role of prayer. This wasn’t a liberal place for seekers at all. Had it been this conservative when I had gone? Surely not, I told myself. Maybe the more liberal cohort from my days had been superseded by leaders with a more conservative worldview. But logically, I knew this probably wasn’t the case. I knew that L’abri had always been this conservative. It was my own perspective that had changed. It was a Christian outreach center and I no longer believed in Christianity or “outreach.” They appealed to questioning liberal believers, sure, but the goal was to usher them back into the fold.
Most evidence about persuasion and deradicalization shows that it happens over a long period of time in slow and steady waves. My story is no different, and it’s why I’m able to hold several truths about L’abri at the same time. Despite the fact that it clearly embraces much of the singular ideology of white evangelical Christianity, it was also, for me at least, a place that genuinely encouraged intellectual curiosity and also a contemplative life. And these are the things that ultimately facilitated my departure from Christianity and they’re things that I still value deeply.
I teach a writing class now that focuses on persuasion, and we read several stories of people who are deradicalized: namely, Derek Black and Megan Phelps Roper. Studying deradicalization has helped me to process my own movement away from the belief system I was raised in. It’s why I don’t engage much in attempting to persuade people on social media or get too hung up on persuasive rhetoric in my conversations and writing. I know that it’s a long game, and I know that if someone is curious, the most impactful thing is just letting them explore. I’m grateful to have had the privilege of dedicated time and space to explore the beliefs I was raised with and choose something else.
Here’s me in a village in the French Alps in 2019, much more happy and carefree than on my first trip.
A few years after I had left christianity, I was walking in my old neighborhood and saw the words of a Mary Oliver poem carved into the concrete of the sidewalk: “What is it you do with your one wild and precious life?” I had probably read the line before – it’s very famous to the point of being cliche – but at this particular time in my life, it really moved me. The worst thing about a fundamentalist religion is that your life isn’t your own. You’re taught to die to yourself, ignore your feelings, and police your own thoughts and desires constantly. While at first I was a little jealous of all the recent exvangelicals and their dozens of podcasts and chat rooms and meme pages to help them process their departure from the Christian faith, I am also kinda grateful to have made the leap without any of this. I have spent enough time ruminating on Christianity, and once I left I was ready to expend my intellectual energy on something else. Because the chances are, if you made your way out of a fundamentalist religion, you did it partly because you are a curious person. And one beautiful thing about not subscribing to Christianity anymore is that there’s so much in the world to be curious about, and now I get to decide what to do with my one wild and precious life.