I was fourteen, standing on a street in Spain, certain I knew something an entire population had missed.
We had flown in to tell strangers about God. What stays with me is the feeling underneath the message, the clean electric certainty that I was right and the rest of the world was simply wrong. It felt like power. If I’m honest, it felt like a small god complex. That feeling is the thing most religions are actually selling.
A way of seeing where every question already has its answer. It’s black-and-white thinking, installed early, that outlives whatever belief it first attached to.
The God Complex at Fourteen
At fourteen you don’t experience it as arrogance. It arrives as clarity, even as love.
I had been handed the entire map before I’d walked a foot of the territory, so I could look at a stranger’s whole life and file it instantly under lost. There was a relief in that I can still feel. The relief wasn’t really about being right. It was about never having to sit in the discomfort of not knowing, never having to wonder if the person in front of me knew something I didn’t.
So I knocked on lives with the answer pre-loaded. Being right about everything quiets a specific fear — the fear that the ground might not hold, or that the questions might not close. I didn’t have words for that yet. I just knew the certainty felt like safety, and I chased the feeling.
Doubt Was Letting the Enemy In
In the traditions I moved through, doubt was never an intellectual event. It was a breach. To question was to crack the door so the enemy could walk in and take the controls. Thinking for yourself got renamed until it sounded dangerous. It became the flesh, the secular, leaning on your own understanding. It was something to fight rather than trust.
The lesson underneath all the other lessons was simple, and it did the most damage: your own mind is the threat. Following your heart was not brave but reckless. Sitting with a real question was the first symptom of falling away.
So I learned to flinch at my own thinking and to treat the arrival of doubt as something to confess. You can spend years after that not knowing your hesitation is allowed, that an open question is a normal thing to hold, not a wound to close as fast as possible.
Black-and-White Thinking Was the Product
The specific beliefs were almost interchangeable. Which sins counted most, which end-times timeline was correct, which denomination’s fine print was binding (these shifted as I moved between traditions).
What never shifted was the structure: a world sorted cleanly into true and false, saved and lost, us and them, with no tolerable middle. Black-and-white thinking was the product, and the product never changed even when the packaging did.
The need for cognitive closure, or the craving for a firm answer over an open question is what this is called in Psychology. The research is unsettling for anyone raised the way I was: a high need for closure predicts rigid belief systems and a readiness to defer to authoritarian leadership, and external threat sharpens the craving.
Religion didn’t invent that hunger. It trained it, fed it daily, and (this is the part that makes it durable) it made the hunger feel holy. A craving you believe is a virtue is a craving you will never think to question.
I Carried the Hunger Out the Door
Leaving didn’t cure me. I walked straight out of the church and into yoga studios and Buddhist texts, and at first it felt like the opposite of everything before. It was earthy, real, raw, and finally mine.
But watch what I did with it. I clenched. I turned the teachings into new commandments and gripped the practice instead of letting it sit in me. I wanted the correct way to breathe, the right way to sit, the verified path to being enlightened.
It was new content in the same grasping hands.
If you’ve left something, you might know this move. The doctrine changes and the need for a doctrine doesn’t. You swap the content of your certainty and keep the certainty itself, because the certainty was the addiction. The thing being delivered was never the belief, it was the end of doubt. I had spent so long performing the trained self the church required that grasping was the only way I knew how to hold anything at all.
The Leader Who Never Wavers
That hunger doesn’t retire when you grow up. It goes looking for a host, and the most reliable host is a leader who never wavers.
Notice the appeal of the figure who is never uncertain, never qualifies, never says it’s complicated. “Make America Great Again” works as liturgy. It promises the restoration of an order that once felt certain. When the household was fine, when the categories held, when you knew exactly who you were and who to blame. The relief it offers is the same relief I felt at fourteen on that street: I am right, they are wrong, the answer is handled.
The disturbing part is that the relief holds even when the policies cut against the very households it comforts. Certainty was never about outcomes. It is the same black-and-white thinking I was raised on, grown up and handed a flag. It explains why evidence so rarely moves anyone…because the appeal was never to the evidence. It was to the unbearable openness of not knowing, and to anyone who promises to close it. This is how a religious childhood becomes a political vulnerability. The full version of that argument runs through the book I’m writing.
The cure isn’t a better certainty.
That’s the trap I keep watching people walk into. They leave one closed system and run for the next clean answer, a politics, an ideology, a guru, a rigid conviction that at least they are not like those people.
The real work is smaller and harder. Staying in the open question without flinching and letting a thing stay unresolved and not reaching for the nearest wall. I don’t always manage it. The fourteen-year-old on that Spanish street is still in me, still wanting the map before the territory. But I’ve stopped trusting the feeling of certainty as proof that I’m right.
Most days, that is the most honest thing I own.
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