Christian but not feeling anything at times.

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i've written and rewritten this post a million times just to word it right. i'm wondering if you guys can relate to appreciating spirituality (i'm Christian) but feeling left out when you don't feel emotional like everyone else. i'm pentecostal and though i've had wonderful experiences...for the most part i'm just participating manually. i'm sincere, but i can tell when almost everyone in the church is crying (usually over a modern worship song that i cannot stand) and i'm absolutely unmoved. i don't feel like withdrawing, i'm happy to be there, i'm just like out of the emotional loop. i have enough of a relationship with God to just love Him inspite of how i feel, but it would be good to know if others can relate. infact, i cry more over well written and orchestrated songs. does neurodiversity come into play, you think? i think it does because its not a bad feeling. and i'm trying to over analyze everything to be autism/adhd but this has been a huge part of my life. and i'm pretty much embracing it. just thought i'd ask

I'm a Lutheran, and my faith isn't dependent on feeling any sort of ecstatic experience. Rather, I put my trust in what Christ has done, not on my emotional response. If I display a response to God's free gift of salvation, it's by reciprocating his love by loving my neighbor.

^
Good point!

Maybe the OP should consider exploring other denominations to find a better fit.

If I were a Christian, I don’t think I would enjoy being a Pentecostal. It would just be too much. I know a bit about them because my uncle is one or was one before he went to prison. I’m not sure if he still identifies or not.

He won’t have an opportunity to go back to his old church for a LONG time.

ANYWAY, sometimes people think those feelings are proof that a group has God’s Spirit, but the truth of the matter is that other religious groups have similar experiences - both within Christianity and outside of it.

You don’t have to be emotive in your worship for God (if He exists) to note your worship of Him.

He is “all knowing,” after all.

yeah ive been to loads of churches and i would agree with the above.
I have listened to and sung christian songs like the ones from hillsong in my spare time and cried with the 'God's spirit' feeling.
I think it only happened once in the pentecostal church, but that was a special occasion over which i had no control. That was one time in about a year and a half.

I guess you're just not the emotionally-infectable type. Pentecostal services depend on quite a lot of emotional contagion, so you're probably just not a suitable target for what they try to do to people. I'm not very emotionally-infectable either, but being secular I don't expect to get anything from going to church anyway. I notice how different I am if I go to a concert by a famous, revered performer. It seems everybody else is picking up on this vibe that the act is transmitting, and getting taken through an emotional peak, while I'm just sitting there responding to each song according to my own internal compass, so I'm on a different plane. There's a bit of infectability in my mix, but nothing like as much as I see being expressed by a typical audience.

Anyway I wouldn't worry about it. Emotionally-infectable people can be dangerously open to being manipulated, and I think it's unusual that an infector is genuinely doing it for the good of the receivers. I think that more often than not they're just after something for themselves, e.g. sales people who use that kind of thing to artificially inflate demand for whatever they're selling, so that folks end up buying what they don't really want.

thank you all for your input. my church is pentecostal but besides the emotional aspect, it's very grounded in Biblical teaching. I'm happy to attend there, but i'm learning much of what you're saying. i suppose i just wonder if it's my lack of depth and i'm seeing it could be a neurodiverse element of my life. i used to feel left out, but after learning about myself, i don't. in fact, i'm seeing so many things about my life i used to think were problematic but just turned out to be the way i process things.

I really don’t think that you are the problem here. Perhaps you don’t get emotional because you are more of a thinking person than a feelings person. There’s nothing wrong with that!

Other Christian denominations use the Bible just as much as Pentecostals do. I would consider shopping around.

^

I think that people sometimes take that bizarre behavior and apparent strong emotion as proof that their faith is true because they think: why else would people behave this way?

The reality is that people behave strangely and feel strongly in many different religious communities - both inside and outside of Christianity.

The human species is in a weird position of being one of the few animals smart enough to know we are going to die.

To keep us from losing our minds, we've evolved a "circuit breaker" around death. We perceive death as something that happens to other people. We've also invented religion to tell us that it won't actually happen to us, even when it actually does.

If it gives you comfort, go for it. But most religious people are doing it out of social or family pressure. Remember that no major religion got to its "major religion" status without killing a lot of people. Christianity and Islam both had periods where they forced people to convert. They knew by doing this, it would eventually become custom and the bulk of people would go along rather than risk social ostracism.

Anyone that thinks they know what happens after you die is a narcissist trying to get power over you. We fear nothingness, and our only data point for after death is what before life was like - and thats nothing. It scares us.

Again, it is entirely possible that when we die there's some sort of reckoning. I hope its true - I'd gladly submit myself to eternal judgement if that means Adolf Hitler gets it too. But I'd say the data we do has shows that for most of this universe's existence, you will be non existing.

Cherish life, and make the best of it. It's all we know for sure we have.

I grew up Catholic, and spent a significant amount of time in Bible study as a protestant as well when I wanted to marry a Baptist. Numbers 31 is an awful, awful story that opened me eyes. How could that be God? Seems to me like the Hebrew God was just an excuse for Jewish nationalism.