I finally got around to reading ‘Original Sins’ by Matt Rowland Hill—a book I deliberately avoided when it first came out in 2022. At the time, I was grappling with my own burnout, trying to untangle the complicated web of how I’d ended up there. And though Matt’s life has taken a very different shape from mine, I knew there were threads that would overlap, intersections I wasn’t quite ready to face. So I waited.

Now that I’ve read it, I’m profoundly glad I did. This is one of the most powerful, unflinching, and strangely beautiful memoirs I’ve ever encountered. It’s culturally significant—perhaps even theologically so. As I turned its pages, I found myself drawn back into my long-held love for the Manic Street Preachers, only now realising that this is no coincidence. Hill and the Manics are, in their own ways, singing from the same scarred hymn sheet—wrestling with the unresolved hangover of a very Welsh twentieth century, its disillusionment, its yearning, its ghosts. 

At its core, Original Sins is a story of longing—for love, for relief, safety and a home. Being a Welshman by birth, but now lived most of his life in England, I don’t think ‘hiraeth’ has ever left Matt. His loss of faith and the Welsh language appear intertwined, and fittingly so.

Beneath the personal narrative lies a more uncomfortable question, one that Christianity, at least in some of its forms, must reckon with: How did it create a culture that leaves some people feeling so profoundly unworthy that they spiral into despair, self-hatred, and, in cases like Matt’s, addiction? 

Hill’s story is not unique. Again and again, we hear of those who have grown up in the church only to find that their deepest struggles—whether with sexuality, mental health, or simply the inability to squeeze their souls into rigid doctrinal frameworks—lead them to crisis. And too often, that crisis is met with silence, condemnation, or, at best, the hollow promise of change if only they would pray harder, believe more, repent fully. 

What does it do to a young person’s psyche to be told, in the subtlest and not-so-subtle ways, that their desires are disordered, their hearts untrustworthy, their very being somehow wrong? Not only am I still a Christian, but I’m also a Pastor—and I’ve even had to see a counselor to unpack the emotional baggage I’ve carried from some of my more negative experiences within the church.  

The consequences are not theoretical. For example, there is research suggesting that those who leave some churches often experience emotional and psychological challenges similar to those who leave cults. Studies on religious trauma, such as those by Dr. Marlene Winell (who coined the term “Religious Trauma Syndrome”), highlights symptoms like anxiety, depression, and identity confusion in former evangelicals—paralleling the struggles of ex-cult members. The connection is not hard to trace. When faith becomes a cage rather than a refuge, when its only offer to struggling people is to suppress, deny, or eradicate fundamental parts of themselves, the fallout is inevitable.

My point is that Matt Hill isn’t an anomaly, despite what many churches might suggest. He’s part of a broader pattern—a generation of people, mine included, who were raised in evangelical culture and are now reckoning with some aspects of its impact even if we still hold to the central truth of its Gospel.

Some Christian culture recoils at stories like Hill’s, dismissing them as bad apples or attributing struggles with addiction and self-destruction to personal weakness rather than systemic failure. But if the fruit of a theological system is widespread pain and alienation, should we not question the tree from which it grows? If the Gospel is meant to be good news, why does it so often leave some of its most earnest believers crushed beneath the weight of their own supposed unworthiness?

In ‘Original Sins’, we witness the wreckage that one specific experience of Christianity, a fundamentalist one, can leave behind. But we also glimpse something else—a lingering, inextinguishable longing for God, even in the depths of addiction and despair. The Christianity of Hill’s childhood didn’t bring him joy, but he doesn’t seem entirely at home in his atheism either. It’s as if he’s been conditioned to reject the possibility of looking again at the Jesus of Christianity—not out of apathy, but because he was taught there was only one correct way to believe. If he couldn’t accept that singular doctrinal framework, he had to walk away entirely.

That should give us pause. It should force the Church to ask itself: Do we make space for the full, messy complexity of human lives, or do we demand a sanitised version of faith that leaves no room for struggle, no grace for those who do not fit the mold? If our faith is to mean anything, it must be big enough to hold doubt. It must be strong enough to withstand questions. And it must be compassionate enough to love people as they are, not just as we wish them to be. Otherwise, what gospel are we really preaching?

I grew up in a safe and happy family—nothing like the turbulence Matt experienced. My experience of evangelical Christianity has been largely positive and quite different from the specific brand of fundamentalist evangelicalism Matt describes. But some quirks of the evangelical subculture he describes I do recognise. Perhaps its most enduring mark was its fixation on correct belief, a rigid doctrinal certainty that often seemed to leave little room for actual spirituality. It’s a tension Matt and his mother reflect on in the book’s final pages.

I’ve actually been thinking a lot about the way aspects of religion embody all kinds of universal wisdom, if you see what I mean. You know, since the meditation retreat. I actually had this really strange experience there I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. Kind of like an epiphany or something, I guess?

My mother listened patiently as I tried to explain my vision and the meaning I saw in it.

‘The way we were all just sitting there, together. Without words,’ I said, surprised to hear a little catch in my throat.

It was just so peaceful. Like the sort of peace – I don’t know exactly what I’m trying to say, but—

‘A peace that passeth understanding’, she said, visibly softening.

‘That’s right! That’s exactly it! All this trying to understand, to fit things into words, concepts, doctrines. And this need to be right all the time – it’s just a total waste of our lives. Who cares if we call it God or a higher power?

Well, his mother did care about the distinction between God and a more abstract higher power—and so that brief moment of reflection quickly spirals into yet another heated Hill family argument. Personally I hold to a generous historical orthodoxy, but perhaps what Matt’s book reminds us of is that how we hold our beliefs matters just as much as what we believe. Thank you Matt for sharing your story, because it could well have been mine. 

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