Reincarnating

How my rejection of fundamentalist religious thinking and learning to sit with new information about other spiritual beliefs changed my life

Feb 07, 2025

This article is part of an ongoing series of stories leading up to my experience with witches, reincarnation, past-lives, mediumship, psychics, and the paranormal. All of these have been beautiful, life-changing spiritual experiences that I’ve had after I left a lifetime of Evangelical Christianity, where any participation in these things was prohibited because they are considered “evil” and “demonic.” If you’re interested in following along, please consider subscribing.

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“Reincarnation is bogus.”

That’s what I believed most of my life.

It was more than bogus. I was indoctrinated to believe it was an evil idea. No room for mystery. Definitely no space for uncertainty. It’s not a part of Christian theology? Evil. Period.

“Be sober-minded, be alert. Your adversary the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for anyone he can devour.” 1 Peter 5:8 CSB

The adversary was always found in the beliefs and practices of other religions and forms of spirituality — like the belief in reincarnation. Or in astrology, tarot, psychics, mediumship, talking to trees1, or doing yoga…definitely doing yoga. And definitely if you wore yoga pants.2 I wish I were kidding.

Once I began deconstructing my Christian faith and opened myself to learning other perspectives on spirituality, I learned that the reason many things were considered demonic within evangelical Christianity was because of white supremacy and racism.

Beliefs in reincarnation can be found in the eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. Yoga is rooted in ancient eastern traditions. Astrology is a practice developed by non-white and non-Christian cultures over thousands of years through meticulous study of the planets and their correlation to earth and humans. If Christianity believes that God has given us dominion over the earth, there can be no reverence for nature since we are meant to abuse it for our profit. So we demonize indigenous culture and spirituality that practices a communal relationship with nature.

I wasn’t allowed to do yoga because it could “let in evil spirits.” Communing with nature was labeled as idolatrous worship. Reading astrology was satanic. Tarot was demonic divination. And communicating to dead loved ones through a medium? Well, you might as well send a direct invitation to Lucifer himself to possess your soul.

Since the only people who had access to the one true God were white evangelical Christians, any spiritual practice that didn’t arise out of a white, western, Christian narrative — or if it wasn’t considered valuable enough to be appropriated for profit — then it was labeled as evil. Full stop. No curiosity allowed. If you questioned this, you were susceptible to temptation, making you a “stumbling block” to your fellow Christians. Full, devoted, unquestioning obedience was required. This dictated what I could wear, how I moved my body, what music I listened to, what prayers I could pray, what books I could read and this authoritarianism is what pressured me to give up my dream of having creative career in the arts.

It was a cult.

When the documentary Surviving Death crossed my path in the middle of my faith deconstruction, I was insatiably curious. This series explores personal stories and research on near-death experiences, reincarnation, and paranormal phenomena.

The paranormal was something I had been taught to fear, but that fear no longer had control over my life.

The first few episodes about near-death experiences (NDE), mediumship, signs from the dead, and consciousness surviving the body’s demise — it all made sense to me. I even had my own paranormal experiences that I never put words to. Or at least I gaslit myself to believe these experiences weren’t real because they didn’t fit within my Christian fundamentalist framework. Watching this documentary made me feel validated. People shared their common stories with the paranormal. Scientists that study consciousness gave compelling arguments. I was able to give space to admit that these things exist and that they weren’t evil like I had been led to believe. Even though there’s no certain way to undeniably prove it all, it’s able to exist as faith, just like the Christian faith I had devoted my life to. I could embrace the mystery, especially after I read several books by professionals who study these topics.3

Then there was an episode on reincarnation and the idea of our souls living past lives.

Again, it was compelling. It all made sense. But even though I had released my claws from their death grip on my Christian faith, I was so indoctrinated to believe that something like reincarnation does not — could not — exist. I finished watching and had no idea what to do with the information I learned. I didn’t shut it down like I would have in my fundamentalist days. I knew now that to say reincarnation was a lie would be egotistical of me; It would be invalidating of the people who had a very real experience with the concept of reincarnation4 and it would be disrespectful to dismiss the spiritual beliefs about reincarnations held by people of other religions. I was working on embracing mystery and the new spiritual information I learned.

So I just held it…open.

I sat with that openness for a long time, leaving space for it in my daily thinking. It was uncomfortable for a time because I didn’t have an answer. But just because I didn’t understand it, didn’t mean it was wrong. Just because it didn’t fit within the only framework that I knew, didn’t meant that it was a lie.

Holding on to the discomfort I felt from my openness to accept something that challenged the framework I had built about existence and spirituality, was a beautiful, beneficial practice of leaning into uncertainty, engaging my empathy, being curious, and learning about things I never took the time to understand because of my own willful biases.

I chose to open myself up to a world that looked and believed different than I had been taught in order to help me understand, not just the spiritual practices of others, but to also see the humanity in others.

Before long, my openness to accept that the idea of reincarnation was a valid belief would rock my world by changing everything I thought I believed about my own reality.