Post-Certainty Reconstruction

By Ryan McMillian

There's a strange thing that happens when you grow up: the beliefs that once felt like bedrock begin to sound different when life finally speaks back. You start with convictions that feel inherited, almost predetermined. They come from your parents, your church, your community, the world that raised you before you had the language to question it. Those beliefs shape your worldview, your sense of right and wrong, your understanding of who you are and who you're supposed to become.

And then life happens.

Not the life your parents imagined for you, but the life you live, the one marked by grief, moral failure, loneliness, responsibility, and the slow, disorienting realization that the world is far more complicated than the frameworks you were handed. The younger version of me was certain. Certain about theology. Certain about morality. Certain about race. Certain about what was wrong with the world and what would fix it. Certainty was my armor. It made me feel intelligent, grounded, righteous. But certainty has a way of collapsing under the weight of lived experience. I grew up in a conservative-leaning Black household with married parents, church every Sunday, Pentecostal roots, and the unspoken rule that children don't get to choose their beliefs. If my parents said we believed in Jesus, then that was our faith. If they said we were going to church, then that was our destination. And woven into that upbringing was something quieter, something I didn't have the words for at the time: a subtle but persistent message that whiteness was the standard and Blackness was something to manage. "Don't act up in front of these white people." "Don't embarrass me in front of these white folks." "Don't have them thinking we're ignorant."

My parents meant well. Their warnings came from a place shaped by history, survival, and the trauma passed down through generations. But as a child, I didn't hear the context. I heard the message. And the message was:

"Who you are is not enough."

That was the beginning of the fracture, the quiet internal split between my identity and my worth. As I got older, I left the Pentecostal world and found myself drawn to Reformed theology. It felt clean, structured, and intellectually rigorous. Writers like Calvin, Spurgeon, and Augustine gave me a sense of order. They made the world feel explainable. But that tradition also came with a suspicion of race talk, a dismissal of cultural identity, and a theological culture that treated Blackness as either irrelevant or problematic. The only Black voice I found in that space was Voddie Baucham, and even he spoke about race in ways that reinforced the idea that the problem wasn't history or systems, it was "culture." I didn't realize it then, but I was absorbing a worldview that required me to shrink parts of myself to fit inside it. Then came adulthood.

Then came failure. Then came grief, the kind that rearranges your soul. Then came the loneliness of being the only Black man in my workplace. Then came the search for leaders who looked like me and the disappointment of not finding them. Then came the realization that even within my own community, Black men are often treated as disposable.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, my certainty began to crack.

Recently, I watched a video with the same conservative talking points I used to nod along with. "Black culture is the problem." "It's not systemic." "Other groups are thriving." "It's personal responsibility." But this time, something felt off. This time, I didn't hear tough love. I heard contempt. I heard a disdain for Black people disguised as analysis. I heard a worldview that pathologizes my people while pretending to be objective. I heard the echo of the same messages I internalized as a child, that Blackness is inherently deficient. And for the first time, I felt the cringe. Not because the arguments were new, but because I was new.

My worldview is shifting. My identity is resurfacing. My Blackness, the part of me I muted for so long, is demanding to be acknowledged. And I can't un-hear what I'm hearing now. I can't unfeel the tension between my faith and my lived experience. I can't pretend that the frameworks I inherited still fit the man I'm becoming.

This is what I call post-certainty reconstruction.

It's the stage where the old answers don't work anymore, but the new ones haven't fully formed. It's the uncomfortable middle, the place where you're rebuilding your worldview piece by piece, keeping what's true, discarding what was inherited but unexamined, and refusing to hold beliefs that require you to diminish yourself. I'm not abandoning my faith. I'm not abandoning responsibility. I'm not abandoning the parts of my tradition that shaped me. I'm abandoning the parts that taught me to distrust my own identity.

This reconstruction isn't finished. It may take years. It may change me in ways I can't predict. But I know this much: I'm done shrinking. I'm done suppressing. I'm done inheriting beliefs that cost me my own self.

Whatever comes next, whatever OATHBORN becomes, it will be built from a place of honesty, identity, not erasure. From lived experience, not borrowed certainty.

This is not the end of my story.

It's the beginning of the version of me that finally feels like mine.

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