Tradition Didn’t Kill My Faith. Amnesia Almost Did.

For most of my Christian life, tradition was treated as a liability. Not openly despised—just quietly sidelined. Creeds were “helpful, but optional.” Doctrine was “important, but secondary.”

What mattered most was sincerity, immediacy, and whether faith felt alive right now. The assumption was simple: if belief ever felt unstable, the solution was subtraction. Remove what felt inherited. Remove what felt fixed. Remove anything that sounded like it came from someone else’s century.

At the time, this didn’t feel like rebellion. It felt responsible. Honest. Humble, even.

What I didn’t realize was that in shedding memory, I wasn’t uncovering a purer faith. I was hollowing it out.

The problem was never that Christianity remembered too much. The problem was that we stopped remembering together.

American evangelicalism is very good at producing faith that feels personal. It is far less good at producing faith that lasts.

Many people who walk away from Christianity are described as victims of doctrine—crushed by rigidity, suffocated by authority. Sometimes that’s true. But just as often, the opposite is the case. They were never meaningfully formed by doctrine at all. They weren’t worn down by creeds; they were sustained by vibes.

Faith was something they felt, not something they received. Something they curated, not something they inherited.

That kind of faith can be exhilarating. It can also evaporate quickly. When belief isn’t anchored in shared memory, it becomes weightless. It floats—until it drifts into whatever current happens to be strongest at the moment.

In churches with thin memory, Christianity quietly reorganizes itself around personalities. Scripture is quoted but rarely received. Authority is denied in principle and exercised constantly in practice. Someone still decides what matters, what counts as faithful, what gets emphasized—but those decisions are no longer accountable to anything older than the present moment.

When tradition is pushed aside, it doesn’t leave neutrality behind. It leaves a vacuum.

And into that vacuum rush charisma, moral urgency, cultural pressure, and the unspoken anxieties of the age. Christianity doesn’t disappear; it just becomes more reactive. More brittle. More dependent on the stability of leaders and the agreement of crowds.

Ironically, this is how faith becomes most fragile. When nothing is fixed, everything is negotiable. When belief has no memory, it has no resistance to reinvention. The faith bends—not because it is generous, but because it has no spine.

I didn’t understand this until I watched how often faith collapsed not under persecution or intellectual challenge, but under exhaustion. People didn’t leave because Christianity demanded too much. They left because it demanded that they carry the whole thing themselves.

I didn’t return to the creeds because I wanted certainty. I returned to them because I realized I couldn’t keep pretending faith was a solo project.

Evangelicalism treats belief like a private achievement—something I generate through insight, sincerity, or moral resolve. If faith weakens, the assumption is that I need better arguments or stronger feelings. The burden always falls back on the individual.

Historically, the Church understood belief differently. Faith was never meant to be sustained alone. The creeds weren’t written to stifle thought or end conversation. They were written to ensure that what Christians confessed together remained recognizable across time and place.

When we say “I believe” together, we are admitting something deeply unfashionable: belief is not something we invent from scratch. It is something we receive. Something we are carried by when our own confidence runs out.

The Church remembers on our behalf. It holds words steady when our language falters. It confesses truths that do not depend on our clarity, enthusiasm, or emotional health.

Much of contemporary Christian conversation revolves around deconstruction. Sometimes it is careful. Sometimes it is careless. What it rarely is, is complete.

Deconstruction without memory does not produce freedom—it produces fatigue. When every belief must be justified from first principles, faith becomes unsustainable.

Tradition does not eliminate authority. It restrains it. It binds teachers and leaders to something older than themselves.

Tradition does not promise certainty. It promises continuity.

Christianity is not a self-improvement project or an experiment in relevance. It is a faith that remembers for us when we can no longer remember ourselves. Tradition didn’t kill my faith. For a long time, forgetting who we were almost did.