“They took my identity away. So I was a shell of a person for years,” Passons went on. “Literally…now’s the time I actually need therapy. Now’s when therapy might work, just a different kind, just to know how to get up off the floor.”
What’s more, he said, “I was damaged goods in this town because there’s no way that I could just quit a group at the top of their game and everybody in town not have questions about it. And so I had no traction in Nashville after that.”
“Why would the group fall apart if they chose you over this other person?” Custer asked.
“Because I was the one that didn’t fit into the conservative narrative,” Passons answered. “And that was their audience.” At the time, he still believed the way he was living was wrong, so he accepted what happened more readily than he would have otherwise, in part because it seemed “inevitable.”
Michael Passons Began ‘Rebuilding’
Michael Passons went on to recount how he “disappeared” and began the slow process of “rebuilding myself” and working through what he actually believes. Now, he is still a “person of faith” but describes himself as “spiritual” but not “religious.” He believes the way people interpret the Bible is “ever evolving and changing.”
“Look at all the things that conservative Christians have let go of because now the status quo didn’t have a problem with it,” he said, giving as examples slavery, opposition to civil rights, being against interracial marriage, and “keeping women on the sideline.”
“One thing that has cemented me being good with where I am is that I look at certain people in the political arena right now and how they’ve been embraced by people of faith,” said Passons.
“I see billboards in East Tennessee with their pictures painted next to Jesus. But you threw me off the bus,” he said. “I gave my whole life—diapers to diploma—and even after I gave my career, everything to the cause of the faith of the Christian church…they threw me out at the first hint that I violated a Scripture in Deuteronomy.”
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“And so that’s what cemented in my mind that I made the right decision to depart from the way that I was brought up,” Passons said.
“My faith right now is based on the fact that I am not going to be so presumptuous as to think I know who God is or the Creator,” said Passons. “I’m just going to live every day knowing that I have no idea who this Creator is innately, but I’m asking for it to be revealed to me in even the smallest increment.”
ChurchLeaders has reached out to Avalon for comment and will update this article in the event of a reply.
