A TikTok video reminded me recently that I used to wear a WWJD bracelet. Not just briefly, either. I wore the same one for years.
For those fortunate enough to have missed evangelical Christianity in the 1990s, WWJD stood for What Would Jesus Do? The bracelets were everywhere. The idea was simple enough: before doing something, look at your wrist, think about Jesus, and presumably make a better decision. As a teenager, I took this seriously. Then again, I took all of Christianity seriously.
I was raised in fundamentalist Christianity, but I don’t want to tell the easy version of that story where religion was something forced upon me while some tiny atheist inside quietly waited to escape. I believed. Enthusiastically. I led youth groups. I started Christian groups at school. I prayed with sports teams after games. I tried to “lead” my friends to Christ. I wasn’t standing outside Christianity questioning it. I was all the way in.
So when Mary Ann and I went off to a Christian college together, I fully expected that trajectory to continue. If anything, I assumed college would deepen my faith. Instead, during that first year, little cracks started appearing. Nothing dramatic. No lightning bolt of disbelief. No professor stood at the front of a classroom and destroyed Christianity with a particularly devastating PowerPoint. I just started noticing things. Questions appeared. Contradictions became harder to ignore. Of course, I was also a freshman in college, so my mind was occupied by plenty of things other than the metaphysical structure of the universe. Still, I stayed the course. I considered myself a Christian. I acted like a Christian. And around my wrist remained that same WWJD bracelet I’d been wearing since high school.
Then came the summer after freshman year. Mary Ann and I both stayed on campus, living in separate apartments until the next school year began. One evening, I was at her apartment watching a movie. At some point, I fell asleep on the couch. That’s it. That’s the scandal. I woke up the next morning and went home.
Later that day, I was contacted by the Dean and told he wanted to see me in his office. Dean Melton asked why I had spent the night at Mary Ann’s apartment. I told him. I’d been watching a movie. I fell asleep on the couch. I woke up in the morning and left. Then he looked at my wrist. He saw the bracelet. And with a smugness that has somehow survived perfectly intact in my memory for nearly three decades, he said something along the lines of: “I see that WWJD bracelet on your wrist. What do you think Jesus would do here?”
I was instantly furious. But here’s the funny thing. I actually answered the question. Jesus stayed in women’s homes with his disciples plenty of times, I told him. So I was curious: Would it have been okay for me to stay at Mary Ann’s apartment if twelve of my buddies had come over too?
Apparently, this was not the answer the bracelet was designed to produce.
The theological portion of our meeting ended rather quickly. I honestly don’t remember much of what happened after that. I think I was told not to let it happen again. I’m sure there was some additional administrative language about rules and appearances and appropriate Christian behavior. None of that stuck. What stuck happened a few seconds later. I walked out of Dean Melton’s office, looked at the bracelet on my wrist, took it off, and with his secretary sitting there watching me, dropped the WWJD bracelet I’d worn since high school directly into her trash can and walked away. I never put one on again.
Looking back, there’s something almost too perfect about the whole thing. Because Dean Melton wasn’t wrong. I should have asked what Jesus would do. The problem was that I did.
The question printed on that cheap little bracelet was supposedly meant to provide moral clarity. But somewhere along the way, “What Would Jesus Do?” had quietly become “What Would Our Particular Christian Institution Like You To Do?” Those aren’t necessarily the same question. In that office, Jesus wasn’t really being invoked as a person whose behavior I should examine. He was being invoked as an authority figure who conveniently agreed with the rules already written in the student handbook. Jesus had become middle management. And apparently middle-management Jesus was extremely concerned about where nineteen-year-old me fell asleep.
Once I actually considered the Jesus I had spent years reading about—the guy wandering around with a strange collection of followers, eating with the wrong people, staying in people’s homes, irritating religious authorities, and repeatedly making respectable people uncomfortable—the Dean’s question became considerably more interesting. And considerably less useful to the Dean.
I didn’t leave that office an atheist. I wish deconstruction worked that efficiently. There wasn’t a dramatic moment where I threw away the bracelet and suddenly saw through two thousand years of Christian theology. What happened was smaller. And probably more important. Something shifted.
I had been taught that questioning Christianity was dangerous because questions might lead you away from truth. But increasingly, I was discovering something much more dangerous: sometimes the questions worked exactly as advertised. Sometimes you followed them honestly and discovered that the institution supplying the answers wasn’t particularly interested in where the question actually led. That little bracelet had been intended as a mechanism for keeping me aligned with Christianity. Instead, for one wonderfully absurd afternoon, it became a mechanism of inquiry. I asked the question. I followed it. And the answer didn’t match the rule.
That wasn’t the end of my Christianity, but it was one of the moments when I began giving myself permission to trust the discrepancy. There would be many more questions after that. Questions about scripture, authority, morality, why an all-powerful God seemed so remarkably concerned with controlling the tiny details of human behavior, and why certainty was treated as virtue while curiosity was so often treated as rebellion. Eventually, Christianity stopped being able to contain the questions.
But before all of that came a couch, a Dean, a cheap bracelet, and twelve imaginary disciples standing awkwardly in Mary Ann’s apartment so that Jesus could apparently approve of the sleeping arrangements.
So, sincerely: thank you, Dean Melton. You meant to use that bracelet to remind me who I was supposed to be. Instead, you gave me permission to start asking who I actually was.