How I Rediscovered the Real Truth of Jesus

A story of detransition, fetishism, and wrestling with the ontology of sin

I grew up homeschooled and fundamentalist Southern Baptist but deconverted in high school and became a hardcore atheist and materialist for around 15 years, until my early thirties. Then, upon a sudden epiphany, I became a metaphysical idealist, rejected materialism/physicalism, and then spent several years exploring various esoteric spiritual traditions in the Perennial tradition, including Advaita Vedanta, the Western Esoteric Tradition, Buddhism, paganism, and all kinds of various spiritualities. I was the quintessential American spiritual eclectic Seeker.

Then I discovered the contemplative, mystical side of Christianity that I had no clue existed when I was growing up in Protestant evangelicalism, which usually saw any kind of mysticism, including just simple breath meditation, as a doorway to the demonic.

I discovered the work of people like Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, Meister Eckhart, James Finley, Cynthia Bourgeault, Thomas Keating, the Desert Fathers, and the whole contemplative, monastic, wisdom tradition that has existed as a minority strain in Christianity for 2,000 years. I also discovered the Jesus Prayer, which was the first time I had ever realized meditation and breathwork is endorsed by Christianity.

Nevertheless, my appreciation for Christianity was not fully theological for I framed everything from the fundamental perspective of Jungian archetype theory, where the supernatural really becomes a product of the Imagination interacting with reality through the lens of the archetypes of the collective human consciousness.

While arguably Jung himself was a true metaphysical idealist, for Jung, the collective human consciousness is in some sense a necessary ontological foundation for God, rather than God being the necessary ontological foundation of consciousness.

While the Jungian approach was certainly more theological than naturalistic materialist atheism, it was never properly doctrinal or orthodox, and to some extent the theological oomph was taken out of Christianity and it never quite had the power to fundamentally reshape my cognitive orientation; I remained “lukewarm” in my spiritual seriousness, as the Baptists say.

I would attend Church and listen to the Creeds. I would say them, but I would not truly believe them. I viewed them as Jungian myths. “True” but only metaphorically true. “Metaphorically true” is not merely linguistic, but esoteric in nature, dealing with the truths of wisdom. Nevertheless, the Creeds were not objective statements about reality that I truly believed because, for me, the notion of objectivity itself was interpreted through the lens of Jungianism, rather than more traditional theism.

It is difficult to explain the path from going from a Jungian to a “true believer” but, to the best of my recollection, this transformation started with a fundamental recognition of the reality of sin as a true metaphysical category of explanation.

My whole life previous I never truly believed in sin. Sure, I believed in ethics and metaethics defined in terms of philosophical theories like deontology or utilitarianism. But I completely rejected the Biblical concept of sin in terms of rejecting via freewill God’s moral law. My beliefs about ethics were always grounded in my own naturalistic intuitions about ethics. But I fundamentally did not wish to submit myself to the higher authority of God’s moral commandments.

One of the obstacles to this was the Biblical conception of sexual sin. I more or less believed in the secular hedonistic philosophy of desire, the philosophy of “if I desire it, and it harms no one, then it is good.” It was a philosophy of self-centered self-authenticity stemming from the Nietzschean proposition that all value ultimately derives from the biological drives of individual organisms. The thought of an objective morality defined by God’s Will as written in the inspired Word, or otherwise determined by the essence of God’s Nature as the Highest Good, was total anathema to me.

But when I detransitioned in late sprint of 2023, I began to run into problems with my philosophy of hedonism. I had this inner desire within me for crossdressing fetishism. As testosterone returned to my body, I felt myself becoming addicted to my masturbation life once again, just as I had been prior to my original gender transition all those years ago, which was also grounded in my crossdressing fetishism.

But as a married man, relearning what it means to be a good husband, I began to feel a deep incompatibility between excessive indulgence of my fetishistic desire and what I perceived to be a moral obligation to be the best possible husband I can be to my wife. I began to recognize there was a conflict between what I sexually desired and what was truly Good and what was truly moral. I recognized that I could not have my cake and it eat it too. To truly fulfill the morally binding obligations to my wife, I would have to self-sacrifice, to some extent, my desires for fetishistic indulgence.

But this raised a dilemma. Did I have the strength for such self-sacrifice? For many months I struggled with trying to “integrate” my fetish into my life as a husband and as a man, but it was not working. The more I “integrated” the more I felt myself drawn into sexual addiction and lustful indulgences that prevented me from having a fully healthy sex life with my wife. The more I gave in to the cravings of my fetish, the less I was desirous of my wife. I could not fully give myself to her and also give into these cravings.

Seemingly, I felt I had to choose: either love my wife as fully as possible to fulfill my husbandly obligations based on what I promised her, or continue to have a secretive life of fetishistic and selfish masturbation that detracted from my natural attraction to my wife.

These thoughts were swirling in my head when I visited my family in during Christmas of 2023. I never really took my Dad’s fundamentalist Christianity that seriously. I never respected it intellectually (and I still don’t, especially insofar as it insists on absurd things like Young Earth Creationism.) But when he recounted his own conversion story and told me that when he gave himself to Christ when he was 35 (I am 37) he was able to give up a serious addiction to pornography and sexual sin. This was a revelatory concept, as I immediately felt an inner calling to give myself to Jesus in a desperate attempt to see if I could also conquer my sexual problems. But that required first believing in sexual sin as a metaphysically real category. And for that, it required a more robust sense of absolute normativity and beyond what wishy-washy Jungianism is capable of delivering.

And so, on the long drive back home Jan 2nd, 2024, I decided to devote my life back to Jesus, to give my life up to Him, to truly have faith that He died for me, that traditional Christian doctrines are absolutely true and not mere archetypal Jungian myths.

The most important factor in my decision to devote my life to Jesus again was the recognition of myself as a sinner within the metaphysical category of “sin.”

In my atheism days, this had always been a sticking point for me because I didn’t like the theological concept of sin. Sure, I might have told the occasional lie here or there or acted out of hostility and ignorance, but overall, I considered myself a good person.

And more importantly, when I was a secular atheist, I didn’t believe in the concept of sexual sin. Pretty much everything was permissible. Everything was possible provided there was consent. And of course I could consent to my own self-pleasure. After all, who was I hurting? I followed the logic of hedonism to its limit, engaging in the most elaborate rituals of masturbation focused on my crossdressing and desire for hedonistic pleasure. Wasn’t pleasure a good thing? This is the logic of hedonism.

But on the long drive home, late into the night, I realized that my use of porn and masturbation was selfishly taking away my ability to give pleasure to my wife. I was less intrinsically horny for her. Less stimulated by her. She couldn’t compare to the hyper-erotic pleasures of my personal masturbation life. I realized I was failing as a husband, failing to live up to my moral duty to develop a healthy, positive sex life with my wife.

I suddenly realized I was a sexual sinner.

And for the first time since childhood, I was able to admit to sin in a genuine and heartfelt way. I prayed with true conviction the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Sure, I had prayed that prayer before, but I always left off the “a sinner,” part, because it rubbed my secular ethics the wrong way. I didn’t like to think of myself as a sinner, and always resented the metaphors from my Baptist upbringing about being a totally depraved sinner so far off the mark, a wretched, dirty rag in the eyes of God, saying our essential nature as humans is fundamentally bad, born corrupted, with even stealing as much as tiny paperclip damning us to eternal conscious hellfire forever.

Initially, I believed that the power of the Holy Spirit would be able to completely and immediately sanctify me to give me the power to completely abstain from fetishistic indulgence. That has not turned out to be true. And I have also subsequently wrestled with the idea that salvation and atonement require a hardline legalistic and bureaucratic perfection in how I repent and have come around to the perspective that to some extent these desires are a part of me, and wracking myself with guilt for being unable to completely rid myself of them was probably not ideal, leading to a tortured theological consciousness, rather than resting in the mystery and peace of God’s Grace.

Instead, I now believe that regardless of whether I can perfectly abstain from this indulgence forever until death, the more important point is that I continue in prayer life and scripture reading through the Daily Office of the Book of Common Prayer, continue partaking in worship with fellow believers, partaking in the liturgy and sacraments, asking for forgiveness of my sins, receiving the Eucharist, striving for sanctification, striving for theosis, union with Christ, and letting the mystery of atonement work through faith, and not overly worrying about legalistic perfection in abiding by a strict normative sexual ethic based on a dubious natural law theory about the proper function of sexuality within the context of married life and a handful of scripture verses isolated and spun into an absolutely binding, culture-free categorical imperative derived from Biblical hermeneutic approaches that are by no bounds free from prior presuppositions and doctrinal axioms that cannot simply be assumed but must be positively argued for.

Which is not to say that “anything goes,” or that I believe it’s healthy to just completely give in to all hedonistic pleasure in a selfish way. Rather, I think there must be a sense in which I put my trust in Christ to radically forgive my sins, regardless of my ability to be “perfect,” and with the understanding that the legalistic conception of what exact behaviors are normative is almost always going to be an exercise in negotiating with the text, I feel a lot more theologically relaxed about my salvation. To this end, it helps that I have come around to a version of universalism as well.

Jesus told sinners “sin no more” and told us to “be perfect” and set incredibly high standards for moral perfection, whereby lusting even in our thoughts is immoral, not just acting on our desires. But I think the purpose of setting this incredibly high standard is to decisively show that it is only Jesus Christ, in His glorious divinity, that can live a perfect, sin free life. All other humans fall short. But it is precisely because Jesus Christ conquered death for us that we can have eternal life despite being completely incapable of living upon to Jesus’ impossible command to be even more perfect than the Pharisees. The point of Jesus saying “sin no more” is not to form a moral calculus by which we legalistically tally our individual and distinct sins, some of which we freely repent from, some we freely don’t repent from, and some we’re completely unaware we even ought to be repenting for.

I just don’t that repenting from our sins is arithmetic in this sense. The point is we all fall short and Christ is the Way for all of us and it is only by faith, not moral effort, that we are saved by Grace, triumphant in death only because it was Christ who conquered death once and for all, in Christ, through Christ, we also are saved. Does that make perfect logical sense? We tend to approach that question by thinking in metaphors, like the criminal justice system. But ultimately metaphors can only take us so far, and we have to confront that fact that ultimately God’s Ways are mysterious and incomprehensible to finite minds such as ours.

Conservatives will say I am changing my doctrines to enable a life of sin vs submitting to the authority of God. And that’s their prerogative to say that, but I feel peace with God, and know in my heart that I have full trust in Christ, who conquered death so that I may live. And that’s what matters. Amen.