How I Almost Lost My Faith

The power of sin to challenge faith

I must confess: I’ve been living in total sin and degeneracy for the past month. About a month ago, I failed to resist temptation and chose to give into my disordered sexual desires, which stem ultimately from a paraphilia called autogynephilia, or love of oneself as a woman.

This paraphilia, a form of concupiscence I believe, is what drove me down the transgender pathway for 8 years starting in my late twenties. Eventually, I detransitioned but remained ensnared into my crossdressing fetish addiction until I finally experienced a conviction from God about abusing my body with such perverted forms of masturbation and sexual indulgence.

This conviction led me to convert to Catholicism earlier this year, and I was confirmed this past Easter. It’s been a true joy to be a discipline of Christ, and Catholicism has brought such deep purpose into my life, and entering into the liturgical life of the Church has been so meaningful.

Nevertheless, despite the graces of confirmation, confession, and the Eucharist, I remained ensnared into the habitual sin of my crossdressing fetish, a temptation that so strongly screamed in my mind that I felt at times utterly powerless to combat it, like an automaton of sorts.

Since my conversion, I’ve drifted in and out of mortal sin, getting into a cycle of sin, confession, sin, confession, endlessly repeating. I will go through periods of maybe a month maximum where I can stay out of mortal sin but inevitably, out of weakness, I cave to temptation.

However, over the past month, I descended into a depths of sin like never before. I completely gave myself over to my basest impulses.

And whereas previously I had always known I was going to go straight to confession after engaging in mortal sin, this time I had a strange lack of contrition. My heart was hardened to the conviction of the Holy Spirit and I stopped going to Mass, stopped going to adoration, stopped going to confession. Because after all, I had hardened my hard to continue to keep on sinning in a very intentional way. It was all clearly incompatible with any pretension to “intend to sin no more.” And at this point, I was clearly and definitely intending to keep sinning, to the point where I was fantasizing about a whole new lifestyle of sin completely out of step with my newfound Catholic identity.

I began fantasizing about retransitioning and returning to a crossdresser/transgender lifestyle so I can more or less indulge my kink 24/7. In the literature, this is called “paraphilic escalation.” Once you indulge a little bit, it eventually snowballs and gets completely out of control.

And yet despite this total hardening of my heart, I knew in the back of my mind that my behavior and fantasies was completely out of alignment with God’s will.

Thus, if I was going to keep indulging in this sin and go back to the kink lifestyle, I would have to square the circle of my belief that (1) God exists (2) God disapproves of my behavior and (3) There are (eternal) consequences to sin.

But I have done so much investigation into the apologetic defense of Christianity that I never really wavered in my intellectual conviction of the truth of theism and Christianity.

So I faced a real sense of cognitive dissonance. I knew that the only way for me to go back to a sinful lifestyle was to abandon the worldview that said the lifestyle was sinful in the first place. That is to say, to embrace this life once more, I would have to go back to the secular humanist liberal worldview that celebrates sexual freedom in the name of consent and autonomy.

But again, intellectually and spiritually, I knew that the secular worldview was vacuous and empty. I knew that a life of hedonism pursuing pleasure would only lead to temporary, fleeting happiness.

So I was faced with a choice: embrace my hedonistic desires or embrace the Will of God.

It’s crazy to me that I was seriously considered abandoning my faith so I can rationalize my sinful lifestyle. I was actually seriously planning in my head how I would deal with all the various social consequences of abandoning Christianity and returning to liberalism. That is the power of sin. That is the power of the Devil. To get you to be so totally addicted to the pleasures of the world that you are willing to abandon the truth of God for a temporary hit of dopamine. Oh but how good that dopamine rush feels though!

This is partially why I’ve become convinced that many atheists and nonbelievers don’t actually struggle with the concept of a transcendent Creator God; what they struggle with is sin. That is to say, the choice to believe in God is made difficult by the snares of sin. If believing in Christianity didn’t entail giving up sin, I don’t think many of the theological or philosophical hangups people state as obstacles would be as big of obstacles to belief. The real obstacle to faith is sin, and the hardened refusal to turn from sin and live a new life in Christ according to His Holy Will.

Thanks be to God, though, He sent His Spirit to convict me of my sins, and I felt the sting of conviction once again. But still, it’s wild to me the power of sin. The Devil is the ruler of this world. Him and his demons are powerful. Spiritual attack is real. My biggest temptation is lust and Satan always uses your biggest temptation against you in just the right way to undercut your spiritual defenses. He knows just the right things to whisper in your ear to rationalize sin. “One last time.” “It’s no big deal.” “You think God really cares?” “God is merciful, you’ll be ok!”

But these are all lies. Satan excels at rationalizing sin. That’s what he does best. And he will make it seem as if it’s just our own minds listening to our own thoughts giving us seemingly good reasons for why we should turn from God and sin. I think too often we confuse our own inner monologue with the whispers of the diabolical, who absolutely can influence our emotions, imagination, and twist our memories of sin to tempt us.

But by the Grace of God, I have turned once more back to Christ. And I hope, again by the Grace of God, that I continue to live a life of virtue and sanctify and be a witness to the power of Christ to transform lives.

Becoming Catholic has obviously not turned me into a perfect saint. But the one thing it has done is give me a strong sense for the reality of sin. Whereas previously, I could have gone on sinning lustfully and not really felt much guilty about it. But now, I absolutely cannot sin without feeling the pains of spiritual hypocrisy.

Because I have such a strong intellectual belief in God, and I know intellectually that if the Christian God exists then he does place normative moral demands on us, I cannot in good faith continue sinning without feeling the pains of contradiction in my heart. And thank God for that.

So what is my new spiritual battle plan for fighting temptation so this whole cycle doesn’t repeat endlessly? Well, when our Lord Jesus Christ was tempted by the Devil, he turned to Sacred Scripture to combat Satan. Seems like he was giving us a spiritual lesson. So my plan is to spend way more time in God’s Word. And way more time thinking about spiritual things. Idle hands are the playthings of the Devil, as they say. I’ve realized the only way for me to combat temptation is to just completely immerse myself in all things God. I needed to get obsessed with God. Obsessed with the Eucharist. Obsessed with studying His Word. Obsessed with Jesus. So that’s the plan! Pray for me please.