After publicly renouncing his Christian faith earlier this year, Hawk Nelson's Jon Steingard now says he finds it "hard" to say he doesn't believe in God because there's a "maybe" about the existence of God.
Steingard shocked the veteran Christian band's legions of fans when he wrote a confession on Instagram back in May declaring, "I no longer believe in God."
But Steingard, a pastor's kid, tells the Matthew West podcast that leaving the Christian faith hasn't been as smooth sailing as he thought it would be and that it's been followed up by a period of wrestling with his beliefs and trying to figure out what to fill the void with.
"It's been really cool because it's enabled me to connect with so many people, mostly through Instagram, that are in the same boat as me," Steingard said.
"The boat for me is that I really thought that I would post that and that I'd be like 'sweet, great, I'm done with God. And I can just live my life free of this stuff now.'
"But what I discovered was, as soon as I did that, I did have freedom, I felt like this whole new level of like 'I'm not constrained by Christianity. I'm not constrained by being a Christian musician. No one has any expectations like this on me anymore. So now I can believe whatever I want.'
"I felt so free, but then very quickly, I was like 'OK, so what do you believe?'"
He has a "hard time" saying that he "unequivocally" believes in the core Christian beliefs, but on the other hand, he said he finds naturalism and the atheist worldview "dissatisfying."
"I even have a hard time saying I don't believe in God because I'm sort of like 'oh, maybe'," he said.
"A lot of the things that you would need to believe in order to say that you're a Christian, I have a hard time believing. But then I also don't feel satisfied with just a completely atheistic perspective. I guess I'm a little difficult," he said.
"Agnostic is probably the closest term to where I'm at right now.
Surprisingly, Steingard said he has been reading his Bible more, and that he still prays.
"I've never had more conversations about God than I'm having right now. I've never read the Bible more than I am right now ... There's so much I didn't know," he said.
He added: "I still pray. When I pray now, it sounds something like 'God, I don't know if you're there. If you're not there, then what I'm doing right now isn't harming anything. But if you are there, then, if you can hear what I'm doing right now and talking to you, can you show up in my life?'"
