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charlottemadison42 · 5 years ago

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On Good Omens and Faith

Here follow personal thoughts on what Good Omens has meant to me as an Exvangelical. There’s a lot of healing & hope here, but it gets a bit dark first, as worthy stories do.

CW: I wasn’t badly spiritually abused in church, but I’ll be discussing things that are spiritually abusive: purity culture, sexphobia, queerphobia, abortion, mild self-harm, failure to treat mental health appropriately, ableism -- plus the special ways church authority makes all of these especially hard.

I’m personally an atheist but this message is not an argument against faith itself, rather against the specific subculture I grew up in. If you are a person of faith you’re welcome here.

I grew up in the American Evangelical subculture of the 80′s and 90′s, in the Keith Green/DC Talk/Left Behind/Veggie Tales era. I got saved at a Carman concert in sixth grade, and re-pledged my faith just to be extra sure every year at summer camp and youth group retreats.

This upbringing is not unusual. Doesn’t make me special. But its effects were real.

I’m finally engaged in a reckoning with it, in the “I should maybe talk this over with a support group or therapist” sense. I was a worship leader and youth leader at a Vineyard church when I left my faith abruptly in 2007*. It took me ten years to tell my family and friends that I was an atheist. For that decade I didn’t think about it -- but when I confessed to my loved ones two years ago, the processing began in earnest.

If you came up Evangelical, you already know how literal our belief in angels and demons can be in certain strains of the church. Until I was 26, I believed they were real entities genuinely and invisibly at war all around me. The End Times were real and we were in them. The Antichrist was whatever high profile democrat could be weaponized at the moment, the Rapture was nigh, and Armageddon was imminent (which explained why tension kept building in the Middle East).

My church community regularly discussed friends and neighbors’ problems in the language of demon possession or harrassment: depression was a demon, addiction was a demon, promiscuity was a demon. I was part of casual and formal exorcisms and the occasional healing. No holy water, but there were hours of fervent prayers and tears, speaking in tongues and anointing with oil. It’s like a fever dream looking back at it now.**

Shout out to my other teens and tweens of the Frank Peretti era, forbidden from reading books of fantasy any later than Lewis or Tolkein -- Xanth was forbidden, Hogwarts was demonic. We were given instead (retrospectively) horrifying books about spiritual warfare, Christian takes on historical fiction, and end times fantasies. But they weren’t sold as fantasy to us, it was all real. Adults in positions of power confirmed it over and over. Narnia might be allegory but This Present Darkness supposedly illustrated spiritual truths.

I remember telling a trusted church teacher at age 10 or 11 that sometimes I would get scared at night, in the dark, and feel a palpable terror that kept me awake. They told me with no hint of comfort, “That means a demon is visiting you and sitting on your chest, trying to oppress you with fear so you will sin. Don’t wake your parents or read a book, instead you should pray or read only the Bible until the demon is compelled to leave, either by an angel or the presence of God.” This adult was affirmed by amens and mm-hmms.

I took this teaching to heart. I also understood, by implication, that if the bad feeling stayed with me then I was praying wrong -- that no angel would rescue me that night. I knew that my fear as it compounded in the dark was itself a sin that made God harder for me to reach.

These are not things that should be told to children.

Then there were the prophecies. (read more if this resonates with you, if not I’ll clip it here so I don’t take up your whole screen)

Anyone could prophesy in most churches I attended. Dreams were prophecies, visions were prophecies, vague feelings were prophecies. (That gave nightmares / being hormonal / being really hungry an awful lot of sway at Bible study.)

I had a woman prophesy over me weeping, with her hands buried in my hair, that she felt overwhelming grief for my future child. I was 23.

I have no child, and I harbored the secret at the time was that I didn’t want one -- a rebellion for me as a married woman. I feared she was prophesying an abortion in my future, and I was inconsolable for months at the damning choice that would visit me someday. (As of this writing at age 38 I’ve never been pregnant, for which I give all thanks to modern birth control.) I still wonder what happened to that woman’s child, or pregnancy, or perhaps her desire for a child, that this was her prophecy for me.

I heard much darker things prophesied over other people. I remember career changes (ill-advised) and marriages staying together (they shouldn’t have) and mission trips undertaken (that assuredly should not have been) because of prophesies.

Last, of course, I didn’t know it yet but I had many queer friends at the time. Some of them didn’t know it. We had no context in our small town -- and no corners of the internet to hide in and learn context, because the internet didn’t do much more than access our local library catalog at the time. I was told that demons sat on my chest to oppress me as a child, but I was shielded from understanding what a lesbian actually was until I was sixteen.

I remember feeling vaguely guilty when we prayed over this or that person in youth group, entreating God that they could resist their base urges. We prayed that they could choose a life of abstinence if they had to, rather than enter sexual sin and be cast out. I felt guilty but I still joined the circle to pray.

I’m sorry. I was wrong. Part of me knew it at the time. I wish I had listened to that part of me because that it was correct. There are fragments of my former faith I still treasure, but those prayers were rotten to the core.

Sidebar: Luckily that feeling of guilt bloomed quickly into rejecting queerphobic doctrine. By age 20 I decided I could only attend churches that did not preach homophobic takes on scripture from the pulpit, and that did not advocate/imply advocacy for any particular political party. The reason I mention this: if YOU are currently a person of faith in this position, uncomfortable with what you hear from your leadership, go find a church that’s queer-affirming, gives to the poor, and advocates for immigrants. Live in a conservative area? Create or join a home church. That’s what the early church looked like anyway. Don’t shrug off this responsibility. Shine a light.

Anyway. Several years later, I fell.

I had to step down from multiple church leadership positions in one day. My entire life changed in two months; marriage, job, home, friends, everything uprooted when I could no longer pretend to believe. I didn’t tell my family why everything fell apart, even as they let me crash their couches.

I had wanted to be a good believer. I read apologetics, the mystics, eschatology, theophostics. I taught and attended study groups, I took troubled teens out to coffee, I served the homeless, I waited til marriage. I was in church as many as thirty hours weekly. When I first felt my faith slipping I said “not yet,” and I read the entire Bible straight through twice, in different translations, while journaling through “My Utmost for His Highest.” Then, unsatisfied, I read and annotated the New Testament in interlinear Greek. I gave it my everything.

What could replace all that?

Time, it turns out. And freedom.

Freedom to not think about it was perhaps the kindest freedom. The constant labor of self-evaluation and thought policing that goes into Evangelical Christianity is exhausting. Letting it go of it felt like getting my mind back. Or owning it for the first time, since I never knew this freedom before. I had even been seeking counseling because I was hearing multiple voices in my head at once, all mine, often arguing. That problem vanished the hour I deconverted. I heard only one voice anymore, and it was my own.

For ten years I was free to just not think about it.

When I decided to remarry I realized that I didn’t want to explain to anyone why my ceremony would not include prayers or communion. So I told my loved ones at last that I was an atheist, a decade late. They received it graciously, and I’m sure they had known-but-not-acknowledged it for a long time. I hope they don’t worry about me or pray behind my back for my salvation. But if they do I can’t accept responsibility for it anymore.

Since that confession I’ve finally felt compelled to back at what all actually happened in church. It seemed so normal to me at the time. But wait, it wasn’t:

I exorcised people. I laid on hands for healings. I encouraged episodes of religious rapture, falling out, and speaking in tongues, and as a worship leader I knew the music cues to bring them about (yes, there are certain chord and tempo changes for that). I was present for prophecies that changed people’s lives and might have issued some myself, I don’t remember. I alienated people who didn’t fit in, whether because they were queer or just because they didn’t conform to church culture. I witnessed abuse and had no language to report it or even comprehend it. I hurt people. I was hurt.

I was told there were real demons in my room and I had to pray them away all by myself.

The work of undoing this mindf*ck (sorry friends of faith, that’s how it felt) suddenly turned urgent after being ignored for a decade. I can’t afford therapy, but thankfully Twitter chats and message boards and podcasts exist (thank you, @goodchristianfun and @exvangelical).

And then -- out of the blue -- along came my own personal angel and demon, along with Frances McDormand herself. I watched it on a whim. (Actually no, David Tennant’s hair made me.)

Apparently Good Omens had a few things to say directly to my mindf*cked subconscious:

1) Are you scared of demons in a pathological childhood trauma way? Here, have a helping of this amalgam of your favorite Doctor and scariest ever Marvel villain tearing it up as the demon Crowley.

2) Does your mild bookish personality and respect for the culture you grew up in keep you reflexively deferential to authority, even as it gaslights you and hurts others? Enjoy some Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale.

3) Are you stuck still mentally assigning a male gender to the god you always claimed was beyond gender? Boom, meet Her in all Her ineffable wisdom.

4) Are you terrified of the End Times, both as a Biblical horror of childhood and as an adult who reads the f*cking news? Let’s fantasize awhile about a solvable apocalypse (because what would that even look like, yo).

5) Do you keep reflexively binarizing good and evil? Still giving in to the temptation to characterize humans as righteous or fallen, especially celebrities and political prospects? Spend some time on Our Side with Adam, the utterly human Antichrist, as he makes choices that matter -- some goodish, some baddish, all with mixed consequences, because that’s what humans do.

6) Do you need more queer love stories in your life? Yes you do. Yes. YES. Here it is. The good stuff. Whether it’s gay, trans, genderfluid, asexual, agender, metaphysical, whatever (I’m enjoying reading all these takes and more on AO3) it’s a hell of a love story.

Good Omens was a f*cking revelation.

I’m not sure why the show hit me as hard as it did in the Exvangelical feels. It’s not that it’s a perfect show, but it was the right thing at the right time for me, and it brought a truck full of dynamite to the excavation I was just beginning with a trowel and a makeup brush. I finished watching ep 6 and thought “why do I feel like I’ll be thinking about this every single day for years?”

And then I looked down, and lo and behold I had an open chest wound -- inside of which I found the banished memory of a child trembling and praying in terror in a dark room.

There was a lot that I forgot about in the ten years it took me to hike away from Evangelical life. It all came rushing back.

I had forgotten the sweat and cries during exorcisms and the heat of laying on of hands. I had forgotten fits of ecstatic tears of self-hatred and self-denial so strong they were almost blissful, as I sang and chanted mantras like “I am nothing, You are everything.” I had forgotten giving away ten percent of my income until I was 26. I had forgotten the constant mental effort of Being A Proverbs 31 Woman, about submission and complementarianism and feeling responsible to guard the virtue of men by never tempting them. I had forgotten the pressure to not even masturbate before marriage and to become a sexual athlete the night after.

I had forgotten the hours and hours of daily prayers. Every phrase was carefully carved in language my superego ran by my doctrine, to make sure no hint of rebellion ever bled through. I washed words of need and doubt and frustration from my mind so they could never slip between me and my Heavenly Father. I didn’t just want to hide thoughts God wouldn’t like, I would have cut them out with violence if I knew how. As a result I picked and ticced and cut and exhibited symptoms of OCD.

It hurt to remember all of this at once during a BBC Amazon Prime miniseries. It confused me. It confused my spouse. I looked at all these feelings, exposed and piled in a massive dirty heap -- and I spotted the straps I used to haul it around with me for decades. Who knew I could carry all that? The weight of faith?

But I don’t have to pick it up again. I had a new story to help me frame my story. I felt equipped with a flaming sword to face my past and a new syntax to describe the old ideas I'm ready to let go of.

I got to recast Heaven and Hell. I was invited to ask myself whether a cozy cluttered bookshop doesn’t beat them both hands down.

I got to reimagine angels and demons, good and bad, intentions and consequences. I was invited to live in the reality that we’re all of us humans in between, and that I’m probably still overinvested in the value of Good and Bad as yardsticks.

I got to reimagine western history. The show’s perspective of history is very limited and Eurocentric, but it’s also the version of history I was taught at an early age, which made the story a useful lens to deconstruct what I learned before I knew much about critical thinking.

The opening of Episode 3 in particular f*cked me up. First Aziraphale lies to God and She vanishes, then Crowley starts poking holes in the story of the Flood, then at the Crucifixion -- I started breathing hard on my first viewing, experiencing a real physiological threat response. I was loving it, of course, but distressed panicky love.

The second time I watched it I realized what was happening: I was going back to Sunday School to revisit ideas I absorbed before I was fully sentient, and examining them in the light of fully formed adult secular morality. They look different from here.

When God withdraws Her presence from Aziraphale in the first few moments of Ep 3 as he prevaricates (well, lies) I remembered the one great fear of my faithful life: that I could sin a particular sin and as punishment I would be cut off from God’s presence. As a believer in the End Times, that meant the Rapture could occur at any moment and I might be rejected, be left behind to experience the Tribulation.

Now, from some remove, I realize that I always had one fear larger. It’s a thought I never allowed myself to entertain consciously. Good Omens unearthed it like a vein of flowing lava:

If the Apocalypse as my church describes it is real, how could God want it to happen? And if God does, is this a God I want to worship? If I don’t, but I’ll be damned for that, is my faith freely chosen?

Whose side could I really be on, in the End Times, if not Heaven’s or Hell’s?

These are not small questions.

I’m relieved that I answered them a long time ago for myself.

But even after the answering, there’s fallout; a million little knots to untie and ideas to unlearn. We all get to spend our lives doing this sort of archaeological dig through our childhood baggage, I suppose. My Stuff is certainly not unique. It’s just a lot. Same as everyone’s.

But once in awhile a story comes along and helps us with the process. A sharper spade, a better tool for the work. In my case, through Good Omens I received demolition-grade explosives. It gave me a framework, characters, and a personal shorthand to speed my own digging and contextualize what I find.

If your history is kinda like mine -- whether you’re still in the faith or not -- be sure to talk to someone about church stuff from your past. The weird stuff, the dark stuff, the things you did/people did to you that now seem “off.” Even if you’ve grown past the point of “mental illness requires an exorcism” there are still dangerous ideas buried like land mines in our moral matrices. Self-hatred, intolerance, fear of abandonment, fear that failure is damnation, presumption that “we’re” on the “right side” of everything and “they’re” not, fear that we the apocalypse Is Written by powers above and so we can’t change it.

I’m so happy I know a story with an Our Side now.

I’m so happy I know a story in which the true test of devotion to God’s Ineffable Plan is turning away from the dictates of Heaven and turning toward the World.

I’m so glad I met Aziraphale -- so like me, still seeking Heaven’s approval far too late in the game. I’m so grateful he found the courage to walk away, and I’m so glad I did too. I love that I know Crowley now, self-pwning lovelorn disaster demon of minor inconveniences and imagination and free will. I’m so happy Crowley was there to tempt his friend with questions from the start, and to receive him when he was finally ready to break away.

I’m so proud to know Adam and the Them and Anathema and Newt, inept humans trying their hardest against unstoppable cosmic forces, getting it right not just despite their flaws but through and because of them.

I’m so grateful I’ve finally managed to completely swap to female pronouns for God (thanks, Frances). I still love stories about Her, I still enjoy talking theology and religion. And after 20+ years of insisting God is above gender but masculinizing him, it’s about time I switch to thinking of God as Her for a spell to even things out.***

I’m so thankful for the nicest fandom I’ve known in ages and all the glorious queer beautiful amazing body-positive art and writing growing in this fabulous garden.

Confession accomplished.

P.S. I might not have the time/resources you need to chat with you if you’ve had similar experiences or want to discuss. If you need help be sure to reach somewhere healthy to get it. If you witness abuse, online or in church or otherwise -- report it, block it, mute it, shut it down, whatever is in your power.

P.P.S. If you have words of rebuke for me from a churchy place, and/or critiques about gender or politics, sorry, don’t give a f*ck. This is my story to tell and I am secure in my spiritual status. I am free indeed.

++++++++++++++

*Re. Deconversion: Or rather, I had my faith zapped out of me in what turned out to be the truest rapturous religious experience of my life. It happened in a church service; I almost fell out and spoke in tongues with the tingling power of understanding that I was truly and finally faithless. It’s an interesting deconversion story if you're familiar with charismatic church stuff, ask me sometime over tea. It felt like this.

**Re. Exorcisms: Most disturbing was the regular practice of exorcising people who clearly needed professional help for their mental health. I was present when prayers against demons happened over cases of depression, manic depression, epilepsy and other seizures, addiction, schizophrenia, and psychotic episodes. My particular church did acknowledge the role of modern medicine, but felt that the true core of these issues was spiritual and that medication ultimately could not solve a problem of demonic infestation. Looking back now I shudder and weep to think that this happened, that I was part of it once, and that it still happens daily at churches everywhere. It can be unspeakably damaging to the people being prayed over. If this practice happens in your church, leave. If it happens at a church where you’re in leadership, end it.

***Re. God as She/Her: I encourage you to find your own appropriate pronouns for God, whether you believe in Them or not. For me personally, still reeling from the Proverbs 31 upbringing, She/Her is very healing for now. But gender is a construct etc. etc.

#good omens #good omens analysis #aziraphale #crowley #exvangelical #ex-christian #neil gaiman

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confrontingbabble-on · 7 years ago

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““I am 30 years old and I am struggling to find sanity. Between the Christian schools, homeschooling, the Christian group home (indoctrinating work camp) and different churches in different cities, I am a psychological, emotional and spiritual mess.” --A former Evangelical

If a former believer says that Christianity made her depressed, obsessive, or post-traumatic, she is likely to be dismissed as an exaggerator. She might describe panic attacks about the rapture; moods that swung from ecstasy about God’s overwhelming love to suicidal self-loathing about repeated sins; or an obsession with sexual purity.

A symptom like one of these clearly has a religious component, yet many people instinctively blame the victim. They will say that the wounded former believer was prone to anxiety or depression or obsession in the first place—that his Christianity somehow got corrupted by his predisposition to psychological problems. Or they will say that he wasn’t a real Christian. If only he had prayed in faith believing or loved God with all his heart, soul and mind, if only he had really been saved—then he would have experienced the peace that passes all understanding.

But the reality is far more complex. It is true that symptoms like depression or panic attacks most often strike those of us who are vulnerable, perhaps because of genetics or perhaps because situational stressors have worn us down. But certain aspects of Christian beliefs and Christian living also can create those stressors, even setting up multigenerational patterns of abuse, trauma, and self-abuse. Also, over time some religious beliefs can create habitual thought patterns that actually alter brain function, making it difficult for people to heal or grow.

The purveyors of religion insist that their product is so powerful it can transform a life, but somehow, magically, it has no risks. In reality, when a medicine is powerful, it usually has the potential to be toxic, especially in the wrong combination or at the wrong dose. And religion is powerful medicine!

In this discussion, we focus on the variants of Christianity that are based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. These include Evangelical and fundamentalist churches, the Church of Latter Day Saints, and other conservative sects. These groups share the characteristics of requiring conformity for membership, a view that humans need salvation, and a focus on the spiritual world as superior to the natural world. These views are in contrast to liberal, progressive Christian churches with a humanistic viewpoint, a focus on the present, and social justice.

Religion Exploits Normal Human Mental Processes...

To understand the power of religion, it is helpful to understand a bit about the structure of the human mind. Much of our mental activity has little to do with rationality and is utterly inaccessible to the conscious mind. The preferences, intentions and decisions that shape our lives are in turn shaped by memories and associations that can get laid down before we even develop the capacity for rational analysis.

Aspects of cognition like these determine how we go through life, what causes us distress, which goals we pursue and which we abandon, how we respond to failure, how we respond when other people hurt us—and how we respond when we hurt them. Religion derives its power in large part because it shapes these unconscious processes: the frames, metaphors, intuitions and emotions that operate before we even have a chance at conscious thought.

Some Religious Beliefs and Practices are More Harmful Than Others...

When it comes to psychological damage, certain religious beliefs and practices are reliably more toxic than others.

Janet Heimlich is an investigative journalist who has explored religious child maltreatment, which describes abuse and neglect in the service of religious belief. In her book, Breaking their Will,Heimlich identifies three characteristics of religious groups that are particularly prone to harming children. Clinical work with reclaimers, that is, people who are reclaiming their lives and in recovery from toxic religion, suggests that these same qualities put adults at risk, along with a particular set of manipulations found in fundamentalist Christian churches and biblical literalism.

1) Authoritarianism, creates a rigid power hierarchy and demands unquestioning obedience. In major theistic religions, this hierarchy has a god or gods at the top, represented by powerful church leaders who have power over male believers, who in turn have power over females and children. Authoritarian Christian sects often teach that “male headship” is God’s will. Parents may go so far as beating or starving their children on the authority of godly leaders. A book titled, To Train Up a Child,by minister Michael Pearl and his wife Debi, has been found in the homes of three Christian adoptive families who have punished their children to death.

2) Isolation or separatism, is promoted as a means of maintaining spiritual purity. Evangelical Christians warn against being “unequally yoked” with nonbelievers in marriages and even friendships. New converts often are encouraged to pull away from extended family members and old friends, except when there may be opportunities to convert them. Some churches encourage older members to take in young single adults and house them within a godly context until they find spiritually compatible partners, a process known by cult analysts as “shepherding.” Home schoolers and the Christian equivalent of madrassas cut off children from outside sources of information, often teaching rote learning and unquestioning obedience rather than broad curiosity.

3) Fear of sin, hell, a looming “end-times” apocalypse, or amoral heathens binds people to the group, which then provides the only safe escape from the horrifying dangers on the outside. In Evangelical Hell Houses, Halloween is used as an occasion to terrify children and teens about the tortures that await the damned. In the Left Behind book series and movie, the world degenerates into a bloodbath without the stabilizing presence of believers. Since the religious group is the only alternative to these horrors, anything that threatens the group itself—like criticism, taxation, scientific findings, or civil rights regulations—also becomes a target of fear.

Bible Belief Creates an Authoritarian, Isolative, Threat-based Model of Reality...

In Bible-believing Christianity, psychological mind-control mechanisms are coupled with beliefs from the Iron Age, including the belief that women and children are possessions of men, that children who are not hit become spoiled, that each of us is born “utterly depraved”, and that a supernatural being demands unquestioning obedience. In this view, the salvation and righteousness of believers is constantly under threat from outsiders and dark spiritual forces. Consequently, Christians need to separate themselves emotionally, spiritually, and socially from the world.These beliefs are fundamental to their overarching mental framework or “deep frame” as linguist George Lakoff would call it. Small wonder then, that many Christians emerge wounded.

It is important to remember that this mindset permeates to a deep subconscious level. This is a realm of imagery, symbols, metaphor, emotion, instinct, and primary needs. Nature and nurture merge into a template for viewing the world which then filters every experience. The template selectively allows only the information that confirms their model of reality, creating a subjective sense of its veracity.

On the societal scale, humanity has been going through a massive shift for centuries, transitioning from a supernatural view of a world dominated by forces of good and evil to a natural understanding of the universe. The Bible-based Christian population however, might be considered a subset of the general population that is still within the old framework, that is, supernaturalism.

Children are Targeted for Indoctrination Because the Child Mind is Uniquely Vulnerable...

“Here I am, a fifty-one year old college professor, still smarting from the wounds inflicted by the righteous when I was a child. It is a slow, festering wound, one that smarts every day—in some way or another…. I thought I would leave all of that “God loves… God hates…” stuff behind, but not so. Such deep and confusing fear is not easily forgotten. It pops up in my perfectionism, my melancholy mood, the years of being obsessed with finding the assurance of personal salvation.”

Nowhere is the contrast of viewpoints more stark than in the secular and religious understandings of childhood. In the biblical view, a child is not a being that is born with amazing capabilities that will emerge with the right conditions like a beautiful flower in a well-attended garden. Rather, a child is born in sin, weak, ignorant, and rebellious, needing discipline to learn obedience. Independent thinking is dangerous pride.

Because the child’s mind is uniquely susceptible to religious ideas, religious indoctrination particularly targets vulnerable young children. Cognitive development before age seven lacks abstract reasoning. Thinking is magical and primitive, black and white. Also, young humans are wired to obey authority because they are dependent on their caregivers just for survival. Much of their brain growth and development has to happen after birth, which means that children are extremely vulnerable to environmental influences in the first few years when neuronal pathways are formed.

By age five a child’s brain can understand primitive cause-and-effect logic and picture situations that are not present. Children at this have a tenuous grip on reality. They often have imaginary friends; dreams are quite real; and fantasy blurs with the mundane. To a child this age, it is eminently possible that Santa Claus lives at the North Pole and delivers presents if you are good and that 2000 years ago a man died a horrible death because you are naughty. Adam and Eve, Noah’s ark, the Rapture, and hell, all can be quite real. The problem is that many of these teachings are terrifying.

For many years, one conversion technique targeting children and adolescents has been the use of movies about the “End Times.” This means a “Rapture” event, when real Christians are taken up to heaven leaving the earth to “Tribulation,” a terrifying time when an evil Antichrist will reign and the world will descend into anarchy.

When assaulted with such images and ideas at a young age, a child has no chance of emotional self-defense. Christian teachings that sound true when they are embedded in the child’s mind at this tender age can feel true for a lifetime. Even decades later former believers who intellectually reject these ideas can feel intense fear or shame when their unconscious mind is triggered.

Harms Range From Mild to Catastrophic...

One requirement for success as a sincere Christian is to find a way to believe that which would be unbelievable under normal rules of evidence and inquiry. Christianity contains concepts that help to safeguard belief, such as limiting outside information, practicing thought control, and self-denigration; but for some people the emotional numbing and intellectual suicide just isn’t enough. In other words, for a significant number of children in Christian families, the religion just doesn’t “take.” This can trigger guilt, conflict, and ultimately rejection or abandonment.

Others experience the threats and fear too keenly. For them, childhood can be torturous, and they may carry injuries into adulthood.

Still others are able to sincerely devote themselves to the faith as children but confront problems when they mature. They wrestle with factual and moral contradictions in the Bible and the church, or discover surprising alternatives. This can feel confusing and terrifying - like the whole world is falling apart.

Delayed Development and Life Skills...

Many Christian parents seek to insulate their children from “worldly” influences. In the extreme, this can mean not only home schooling, but cutting off media, not allowing non-Christian friends, avoiding secular activities like plays or clubs, and spending time at church instead. Children miss out on crucial information– science, culture, history, reproductive health and more. When they grow older and leave such a sheltered environment, adjusting to the secular world can be like immigrating to a new culture. One of the biggest areas of challenge is delayed social development.

Religious Trauma Syndrome...

Today, in the field of mental health, the only religious diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is “Religious or Spiritual Problem.” This is merely a supplemental code (V Code) to assist in describing an underlying pathology. Unofficially, “scrupulosity,” is the term for obsessive-compulsive symptoms centered around religious themes such as blasphemy, unforgivable sin, and damnation. While each of these diagnoses has a place, neither covers the wide range of harms induced by religion.

Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS) is a new term, coined by Marlene Winell to name a recognizable set of symptoms experienced as a result of prolonged exposure to a toxic religious environment and/or the trauma of leaving the religion. It is akin to Complex PTSD, which is defined as ‘a psychological injury that results from protracted exposure to prolonged social and/or interpersonal trauma with lack or loss of control, disempowerment, and in the context of either captivity or entrapment, i.e. the lack of a viable escape route for the victim’.

Though related to other kinds of chronic trauma, religious trauma is uniquely mind-twisting. The logic of the religion is circular and blames the victim for problems; the system demands deference to spiritual authorities no matter what they do; and the larger society may not identify a problem or intervene as in cases of physical or sexual abuse, even though the same symptoms of depression and anxiety and panic attacks can occur.

RTS, as a diagnosis, is in early stages of investigation, but appears to be a useful descriptor beyond the labels used for various symptoms – depression, anxiety, grief, anger, relationship issues, and others. It is our hope that it will lead to more knowledge, training, and treatment. Like the naming of other disorders such as anorexia or Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), the RTS label can help sufferers feel less alone, confused, and self-blaming.

Leaving the Fold...

Breaking out of a restrictive, mind-controlling religion can be liberating: Certain problems end(!), such as trying to twist one’s thinking to believe irrational doctrines, and conforming to repressive codes of behavior. However, for many reclaimers making the break is the most disruptive, difficult upheaval they have ever experienced. Individuals who were most sincere, devout, and dedicated often are the ones most traumatized when their religious world crumbles.

Rejecting a religious model of reality that has been passed on through generations is a major cognitive and emotional disruption. For many reclaimers, it is like a death or divorce. Their ‘relationship’ with God was a central assumption of their lives, and giving it up feels like an enormous loss to be grieved. It can be like losing a lover, a parent, or best friend.

On top of shattered assumptions comes the loss of family and friends. Churches vary with official doctrine about rejection. The Mormon Church, for all the intense focus on “family forever,” is devastating to leave, and the Jehovah Witnesses require families to shun members who are “disfellowshiped.”

The rupture can destroy homes, splitting spouses and alienating parents from children.

For Women, Psychological Costs of Belief Include Subjugation and Self-loathing...

Christianity poses a special set of psychological risks for people who, according to the Iron Age hierarchy found in the Bible are unclean or property, including women. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the combination of denigration and subservience takes a psychological toll on women in Christianity as it does in Islam. Not only do women submit to marital abuse and undesired sexual contact, some tolerate the same toward their children, and men of God sometimes exploit this vulnerability, as in the case of Catholic and Protestant child sexual abuse. But most of the damage is far more subtle: lower self-esteem, less independence and confidence; abandoned dreams and goals

Why Harm Goes Unrecognized...

What is the sum cost of having millions of people holding to a misogynist, authoritarian, fear-based supernatural view of the universe? The consequences far-reaching, even global, but many are hidden, for two reasons.

One is the nature of the trauma itself. Unlike other harm, such as physical beating or sexual abuse, the injury is far from obvious to the victim, who has been taught to self-blame. It’s as if a person black and blue from a caning were to think it was self-inflicted.

The second reason that religious harm goes unrecognized is that Christianity is still the cultural backdrop for the indoctrination. While the larger society may not be fundamentalist, references to God and faith abound. The Bible gets used to swear in witnesses and even the U.S. president. Common phrases are “God willing,” “God bless,” “God helps those that help themselves,” “In God we trust,” and so forth. These lend credence to theistic authority.

Religious trauma is difficult to see because it is camouflaged by the respectability of religion in culture. To date, parents are afforded the right to teach their own children whatever doctrines they like, no matter how heinous, degrading, or mentally unhealthy. Even helping professionals largely perceive Christianity as benign. This will need to change for treatment methods to be developed and people to get help that allows them to truly reclaim their lives.”

https://www.salon.com/2014/11/01/the_sad_twisted_truth_about_conservative_christianitys_effect_on_the_mind_partner/

#atheist #agnostic #secular humanist #skeptic #Religion #Christianity #religious insanity

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laurensaysthings · 4 years ago

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The Church

I can only speak for myself and the specific sect of Christianity I survived, and I believe wholeheartedly that every human being has the right to decide their own beliefs about existence. But I also believe that there are many others like me who have been traumatized by the weaponization of the unique brand of conservatism that occurs within certain Christian communities.

Here is my truth.

I grew up attending an Evangelical Free Church in a small, predominantly white farming town. I was a depressed, anxious kid. As a licensed mental health professional, I would probably schedule a kid like me for twice-a-week sessions. But back then, I was praised as an overachiever. Middle school was my time to shine. I was 0.01 points away from being 8th grade valedictorian. I was involved in sports, yearbook, student council, youth group, guitar, piano and voice lessons. But buried under all of that was a mile-thick layer of insecurity and crippling fear of losing a Kim Il-Sung level of control over my existence.

Though I was surrounded by adults who purported to care about my “spiritual well-being,” not once did anyone acknowledge or seemingly even notice my many depressive episodes or extreme anxiety, let alone suggest I receive treatment. Instead, I was pushed to do more within the church. I led worship for the youth group and small-group Bible studies for other teen girls. All the while, I was broken, often suicidal, seeking out external affirmation as a way to subvert my lack of self-knowledge and self-worth.

Women weren’t allowed to hold higher leadership positions in my church, so the highest achievement I could hope for beyond what I’d already attained was to land a husband. A man’s commitment to a me as a woman was the highest form of validation.

And in the pursuit of being “chosen” as a wife, the greatest honor, I had to prove myself to be worthy in a very specific way. It was drilled into my head that the highest form of integrity a woman can have is sexual purity. This meant not having sex before marriage but also, not leading men astray in my daily life. Mostly this meant I had to dress conservatively, because I was taught that men having sexual thoughts about me was my own fault only. I was Eve and every man on earth was Adam. He only ate the apple because she suggested it.

In retrospect, this ideology is obviously why it took me 4 years to share the fact that I’d been raped with my Christian relatives. In fact, I still struggle with the vestiges of this ideology in my romantic relationships. How do you build an equal partnership when you are responsible for your partner’s actions and even their private thoughts in addition to your own? What an impossibly heavy burden to carry.

Meanwhile, I was never taught about consent and bodily autonomy. The focus was only on sexual purity, not on what it means to have agency over your body and your sexuality. “True love waits” was the mantra indoctrinated into us as teens. Just don’t have sex, then get married, then have sex. That was the limit of the education about sexuality. Men have the right to your body because men, after all, are the head of the church and the household. The pain of this still lingers in my bones. I am still grieving over what I’ve let men get away with and what I’ve blamed myself for, even recently.

The first example I can recall happened when I was 16. I had dropped out of high school after freshmen year because my depression had become untenable. The excuse I used was that I was spiritually vulnerable to being led astray by my classmates’ drug use and sexual escapades. But ultimately it was as simple as this: I was mentally ill and not receiving treatment.

I was in so much pain, and I couldn’t share this struggle with my fellow Christians, my community and support system, because even at age 14, I “understood” that being in emotional pain was merely a result of personal moral failings. I just had to be a better Christian, pray harder, be more involved in church activities. Then I would feel better.

I was homeschooled my sophomore year, and then I enrolled in courses at a local community college for my junior year. I tried to hide my age from my classmates (which in retrospect was incredibly silly, considering I looked like a child). There was a man (age 19 or 20) with whom I had a few classes in common that first year, and he took an interest in me. You will recall that my entire education about relationships up until that point was limited to the church’s overtures about the importance of my purity and my responsibility for men’s purity, so I was deeply confused by this man’s behavior toward me.

He sexually harassed me for months. It was so bad that at one point, a professor noticed and called me in to his office to ask me if I wanted to report the man to the school’s administration. But of course I didn’t because it was my fault. If I could just be more conservative, it would stop. I started dressing in baggier clothing, trying to talk to this man about Jesus so he too could be saved. I spent MORE, not less, time with him in this pursuit. He offered me a ride home one night, and I would have accepted had it not been for the intervention of my parents and a good friend I had at the college. Who knows what would have happened had I gotten into his car that night.

A few days after I refused the ride home, he changed completely. He started mocking me, telling me how worthless, ugly, disgusting I was. I will never forget one night at the end of class as we were leaving, he turned around and, in front of all of our classmates, said to me, “No one will ever touch you.”

Thinking back, I am so deeply sad for how much I internalized that sentiment. Being desired by a man, no matter how awful his behavior, was the ultimate compliment. And even though the church sought to curb sexuality as a means of control over women, it ironically had the opposite effect. Suddenly, as a result of this man’s harassment, I understood that the easiest way to get attention from men was through my sexuality.

The church taught me that it is irrelevant for a woman to be intelligent and compassionate and successful, because what matters most is marriage and children. Sure, you can have a career, as long as you have a family first. College was a means to an end: attend a good Christian school to find a good Christian husband.

Here is the impossible paradox inherent in the church’s lessons: attracting attention from men means you are impure and unworthy of committed love BUT your worth is determined by a man paying you attention and choosing to commit to you. And so we have the classic conundrum of the “innocent slut.” Of course I know this impossible standard exists outside of the church, but the church certainly does a good job of reinforcing the mixed messages women receive all day every day in a constant barrage of advertising.

Imagine if we let women's integrity be defined in the complex, holistic ways we calculate men’s integrity. Of course that would require women to have power and bodily autonomy. It would require women’s worth to be defined outside of the context of men’s approval. In fact it would have nothing to do with men at all. But in the church, I learned that men are the center of everything. I can support them and play a role in their agendas, but they hold the power.

Fortunately here is where my own beliefs started to diverge from those I was steeped in. When I left home at 18, I moved to a new city and surrounded myself with incredibly strong women. They were funny, creative, brilliant. Some of them were even Christian, which actually helped during this transition period. Quite frankly, these women saved me.

Through their relentless friendship, I learned that even though I was broken, I was still worthy of unconditional love exactly as I was. I didn’t need to change or hide my truth. On endless road trips across the country and all-nighters studying and just sharing the mundane parts of life with people who loved me so thoroughly, I started to heal.

With these women in my life as my safe harbor, I could be weird and take risks and explore my talents and interests unhindered. It was a revelation. I started to understand the power of women and not fear it. I started to understand my own power, and it had nothing to do with men.

Of course, it’s a journey. During this same time, I let men take all kinds of liberties with my time and my body. To this day, I’m still recovering from the harm the church has done in my life, but my recovery started there with those brilliant women.

In the decade and change since that time, I have gotten treatment for my mental illness. I still have depressive episodes every now and then, and on a scale of 1-10, my daily anxiety level is an 8. But part of who I am is that I run a little neurotic. I still want to have a Kim Il-Sung level control over my life, but I can cope when I don’t, which is most of the time. And I still seek out brilliant women as my daily support system.

I hold a leadership position at work now. I have a team that relies on my integrity, which I define by my compassion, strength, commitment to social justice and unconditional support of my team members.

I survived that Evangelical Free Church in a small, predominantly white farming town. I don’t look back with hatred or bitterness but rather with grief. I am grieving what I missed out on during those years and also the harm I may have done to others as part of that structure.

To my family members who continue to try to reel me back into the church, this essay is for you.

This is so you can better understand why I left and why I won’t return. I don’t begrudge you your beliefs at all but I do take issue with the institution.

I believe that we all have to continue to examine the systems within which we operate. What I've learned in the years since leaving the church is that we often miss the forest for the trees. You can be so steeped in something that you miss the harm it’s doing.

Another way to claim our power is to keep learning. Surround yourself with people who are different from you, listen to their experiences, believe them. Support others in claiming power that was stolen from them.

As with those women who helped me heal, I want to be a safe harbor for others to heal. The work begins within ourselves and the institutions we uphold. We are responsible.

Love, Lauren

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polyadvice · 7 years ago

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Hi Zinnia! If you are comfortable with it, would you mind talking a little bit about your faith and its relation to polyamory? I was raised Catholic in a rather strict community and had to unlearn a lot of toxic teachings to become comfortable with polyamory. I'm curious about your experience and keeping with the faith.

This answer ran really long, so I’l put it under a cut and break it up into sections.

My identity

I believe that I have always been polyamorous; I can look back at some thoughts, feelings, and questions I had even as a young kid and recognize that traditional monogamy just would never have been healthy for me. This “born this way” narrative helps strengthen my conviction that polyamory is an okay way to be; it’s not just urges that I need to resist to be a good person.

My personal faith journey is a bit unconventional in the sense that I was not raised Christian but converted as a teen. So I was lucky in that I didn’t grow up with a lot of toxic teachings about bodies, sexuality, relationships, purity, etc. I converted in the context of the Evangelical church, passionate and individual-focused, but I never held to much of their theology around social issues.

When I discovered polyamory as a term and concept and started practicing, I was 19 and had been Christian for about three years. I wasn’t too concerned with how it intersected with my faith; I was still learning who I was and what I believed, and I was the only Christian in my social group, so there wasn’t much pressure around that. My parents are okay with my polyamory and NOT okay with my conversion to Christianity. Go figure.

By the time I was 21, my identity and theology as a Christian, and my identity and philosophy as a polyamorous person, had both crystallized. They grew in form together, informed by my studies into queer, liberation and feminist theology. My polyamory is part of my faith; my faith is part of my polyamory. I see traditional attitudes about relationships, gender roles, and property rights as violent and outdated, and standing in opposition to the Gospel message, and healthy, intentional polyamory is one way, for me, of re-claiming the dynamic vision of wholeness that I believe the Kingdom reflects.

Romans 13:10 tells us: “Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” I believe sin is anything that separates us from God, each other, or ourselves; anything that denies someone agency and wholeness; anything that causes trauma to our bodies, earth, relationships, or minds. I can see no evidence that healthy, intentional polyamory does harm. It liberates us from rigid relationship roles that are tied up in oppressive ideas about gender, bodies, and economics. I don’t think it’s “wrong” or “sinful” to be polyamorous.

I am fully aware that parts of the Bible clearly prescribe monogamy - but I believe those sections must be understood in the context of the time. It is clearly sinful to cheat on someone, to use your body or your language in ways that hurt someone or leave someone vulnerable. Without a cultural concept of healthy polyamory, unhealthy non-monogamy of course looks sinful.

But the Bible also condones slavery, plural marriage, and violence against children, so, again, it’s important to understand context and culture. My old priest used to say “Jesus talked a lot more about economics than sex,” and she’s right. If you look at the core message of Jesus - liberation, wholeness, reconciliation, redemption, love - it is a lot more compatible with polyamory than a lot of the stuff we see in the Old Testament, stories being related to us not as an example to follow but a historical record of a specific people’s relationship to the Divine.

I get really insulted when people (that means you, everyone who messages me on OKCupid) imply that my polyamory and Christianity exist “in spite of” each other; or that I must “compartmentalize” in order to be both, or that I have to do some “reconciling” to avoid “cognitive dissonance.” To me, they are intertwined; they inform each other; they are rooted in the same thoughts, beliefs, values, feelings, desires, and needs.

My Christianity influences my polyamory - Gospel ideas about growth, healing, inclusion, and love. My polyamory influences my Christianity - practices centered around intentionality, identifying and communicating needs, honoring a person and their relationships without having to fit it into a pre-existing box. I am both a Christian Anarchist and a Relationship Anarchist, and that’s not exactly a coincidence.

Being polyamorous in a Christian community

I immediately started running into opposition, however. My spiritual leader on campus, the InterVarsity coordinator, disapproved of my polyamory and cited Scripture about it. It hurt my heart to have such an important part of my life and relationships rejected by someone who I needed to be a safe person, so I sort of just dropped that as a conversational topic, and she did the same, though I know she continued to “pray for me” over what she saw as a dangerous and harmful choice I was making.

Later, I took a volunteer gig as a youth ministry helper in a church. But since I was living with my boyfriend and unmarried, I was unable to sign the covenant the church required of actual volunteer-staff, which was why I remained a “helper” instead of a “leader.” In practice, had all the same roles and responsibilities as a leader, but on paper I held a lower position. The youth pastor and his wife were supportive and welcoming, treating the whole situation like a bureaucratic annoyance. But it was a clear signal that my understanding of sexual morality was different than this church’s party line, and so I kept my polyamory to myself.

I was accidentally outed during a conversation with the youth minister’s wife - I mentioned a college boyfriend, but she remembered that I had been with my current partner since high school. I said yes, we opened our relationship to get through the distance of college. She said “but now that you live together, that stopped, right?” I could have lied to her, but I really don’t like doing that - staying closeted through omission of details is one thing, but answering a direct question with a lie feels gross. I told her the truth.

She was clear with me that she doesn’t believe that is a wise or healthy or Godly choice. I was clear with her that I respected her position but wasn’t interested in being evangelized out of my relationship and identity. She told me she would pray for me and encouraged me to spend some time with the Holy Spirit seeking discernment about this. I told her that I would (knowing that the Holy Spirit and I frequently come to conclusions together that she wouldn’t agree with). She also made it clear that I was to keep this private at church, especially since I worked with the kids. I promised her that I would. She continues to be a good friend of mine, a loving and supportive sister in Christ.

When I moved to where I live now, I sought out a more open church. I found my way to the Episcopal church. They are known for being incredibly progressive in issues of sexuality, gender identity, etc. They have openly gay and leaders in the church, perform same-sex weddings, teach comprehensive sex-ed rather than purity-culture nonsense in their youth programs. I joined an Episcopal church in the area and soon was interviewing to be their youth minister. As part of the interview process, I told my priest, who would also be my boss, about my polyamorous identity.

He was less aggressively this-is-wrong than the other church leadership I’d spoken to, but was also not immediately welcoming. He told me that he didn’t see it as a problem and was still happy to hire me to minister to the youth of the parish. However, as a condition of my employment, he did want me to stay closeted at church. Essentially, his position was, he didn’t have an issue with it, but he also wasn’t “for it” enough to take a stand for me if the parents of the parish were put off or uncomfortable. He didn’t want me to put him in the position of defending something he wasn’t sure he was able or willing to defend. He also didn’t want concerns to be raised that I was teaching the kids something inappropriate or out of line with the church’s beliefs.

So I agreed. It was worth it - I love the kids and wouldn’t trade my place in the community for anything - but it is painful and isolating. I do live in fear of being “caught.” I have two long-term partners right now, one of whom is seen by the church as my boyfriend; and another who is my “friend.” I am very lucky that this person doesn’t pressure me to let him be his true self, hold my hand or kiss me when he visits me at church to hear me preach - it is a big thing I am asking of him, too, to be closeted as well, to be kept a secret. I have a lot of church people on my Facebook, so I cannot wish him a public happy anniversary, refer to him as my boyfriend, post any photos of us kissing, etc.

But I also live in most areas of my life as an out poly person. I run this blog (actually, the login page for my gmail which clearly says “polyamoryadvice” was accidentally projected to the entire parish when I plugged my computer in once, which gave me a gnarly panic attack but thankfully had no consequences) and have an OKCupid account (where local people have found me!). I worry about being doxxed or being seen out and about with one of my other partners. So It’s a fine line to walk and I do carry a lot of stress and sadness about it.

I have been open with my priest about my future desires to go into the Episcopalian priesthood, and he is very unsure of whether he could support me if I continue to be a practicing polyamorous person. If I started in the seminary, I would want to be out and proud, but that is not a bridge I need to cross just yet, because I am making different plans for the next few years of my life.

Why I don’t fight for inclusion right now

I would love to be able to write this blog under my real name. I would love to be able to publish articles about polyamory elsewhere, under my real name. I would love to be able to include all my partners in all areas of my life. I am often asked why I don’t push my priest, and my church community, to be more inclusive and accepting.

The answer is two-fold: one, I simply don’t have the energy right now. I am the only person of faith in my polyamorous network right now, and the only person my age in my church community. I just don’t have the peer support or community foundation to start such a fight right now. This sometimes makes me feel ashamed - I look at the pioneers who fought for women’s ordination or LGBTQ rights in the church, and I know their journey was lonely, and difficult, but ultimately worth fighting. I am just not ready to make those sacrifices just yet, to step into that loneliness and pain and struggle.

The second answer is that I want to be sensitive about what I am asking for. Church community and church beliefs are messy, complicated, and, for many people, sacred.

I wouldn’t appreciate it if I was running a community with a set of stated values and someone just showed up and insisted we change to accommodate them. Even if I agree that inclusion is a good thing! Even if the change they’re asking for would ultimately be for the better! This is the kind of thing where, sometimes, you stay in your seat and be a passenger for a while before you try and take the wheel to change course. I respected the right of my former church to set their morals and covenants, even if they didn’t suit me entirely.

I do not get to show up to an established community with established values and an established identity and start making a big mess of things. I don’t get to demand that they change the way they do everything to include or accept me. I wish I could. I wish there was space for me, all of me, in the church right now. But there isn’t. This makes me feel sad and lonely. And I intend to continue fighting for myself and others like me, looking ahead to a future where I don’t have to be so closeted or compartmentalized - but, for now, the healthiest thing for me to do right now is keep my head down on this issue, because I need a secure place in a church community to build a foundation on before I feel safe striking out on my own like that.

In conclusion

So there you have it! I hope this answers your questions.

This is a really sensitive topic for me - I often feel rejected and alienated from polyamorous communities because of hostility against Christianity, so please don’t send me hate mail about that. I honor and recognize that a lot of people, especially people in the queer community, have a lot of pain and trauma history around childhoods in the church, and you have every right to your anger. But please try not to direct it at me. I get enough snide comments and casual alienation in my daily life, where 99.9% of my peer group is atheist, and it’s pretty lonesome being a polyamorous Christian in an incredibly secular area, attending a church where my demographic is under-represented along every axis. And if you are a Christian who wants to send me hate mail about how my Biblical interpretations are wrong and I am a hedonistic sinner, also, please just don’t. It really hurts my feelings. I don’t exactly fit in anywhere. I literally cried when I saw an etsy listing for a polyamorous-and-Christian pendant. So trust me, whatever you have to say, I’ve already heard it, and it made me feel bad, but I’m still polyamorous and Christian, so, save your energy and do something slightly more Christlike with your time. <3

#polyamory #faith #polyamory and faith #poly identity #polyamory and christianity

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aliceviceroy · 6 years ago

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“I am 30 years old and I am struggling to find sanity. Between the Christian schools, homeschooling, the Christian group home (indoctrinating work camp) and different churches in different cities, I am a psychological, emotional and spiritual mess.” –A former Evangelical

Religion Exploits Normal Human Mental Processes.

Some Religious Beliefs and Practices are More Harmful Than Others.

When it comes to psychological damage, certain religious beliefs and practices are reliably more toxic than others.

Janet Heimlich is an investigative journalist who has explored religious child maltreatment, which describes abuse and neglect in the service of religious belief. In her book, Breaking their Will, Heimlich identifies three characteristics of religious groups that are particularly prone to harming children. Clinical work with reclaimers, that is, people who are reclaiming their lives and in recovery from toxic religion, suggests that these same qualities put adults at risk, along with a particular set of manipulations found in fundamentalist Christian churches and biblical literalism.

1) Authoritarianism, creates a rigid power hierarchy and demands unquestioning obedience. In major theistic religions, this hierarchy has a god or gods at the top, represented by powerful church leaders who have power over male believers, who in turn have power over females and children. Authoritarian Christian sects often teach that “male headship” is God’s will. Parents may go so far as beating or starving their children on the authority of godly leaders. A book titled, To Train Up a Child, by minister Michael Pearl and his wife Debi, has been found in the homes of three Christian adoptive families who have punished their children to death.

Bible Belief Creates an Authoritarian, Isolative, Threat-based Model of Reality

Children are Targeted for Indoctrination Because the Child Mind is Uniquely Vulnerable.

Harms Range From Mild to Catastrophic.

Others experience the threats and fear too keenly. For them, childhood can be torturous, and they may carry injuries into adulthood.

Delayed Development and Life Skills. Many Christian parents seek to insulate their children from “worldly” influences. In the extreme, this can mean not only home schooling, but cutting off media, not allowing non-Christian friends, avoiding secular activities like plays or clubs, and spending time at church instead. Children miss out on crucial information– science, culture, history, reproductive health and more. When they grow older and leave such a sheltered environment, adjusting to the secular world can be like immigrating to a new culture. One of the biggest areas of challenge is delayed social development.

Religious Trauma Syndrome. Today, in the field of mental health, the only religious diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is “Religious or Spiritual Problem.” This is merely a supplemental code (V Code) to assist in describing an underlying pathology. Unofficially, “scrupulosity,” is the term for obsessive-compulsive symptoms centered around religious themes such as blasphemy, unforgivable sin, and damnation. While each of these diagnoses has a place, neither covers the wide range of harms induced by religion.

Leaving the Fold. Breaking out of a restrictive, mind-controlling religion can be liberating: Certain problems end(!), such as trying to twist one’s thinking to believe irrational doctrines, and conforming to repressive codes of behavior. However, for many reclaimers making the break is the most disruptive, difficult upheaval they have ever experienced. Individuals who were most sincere, devout, and dedicated often are the ones most traumatized when their religious world crumbles.

The rupture can destroy homes, splitting spouses and alienating parents from children.

For Women, Psychological Costs of Belief Include Subjugation and Self-loathing.

Why Harm Goes Unrecognized. What is the sum cost of having millions of people holding to a misogynist, authoritarian, fear-based supernatural view of the universe? The consequences far-reaching, even global, but many are hidden, for two reasons.

This article was adapted from “The Crazy Making in Christianity” Chapter 19 in Christianity is Not Great: How Faith Fails, edited by John Loftus, Prometheus Books, October 2014.

______________________________________________________________________

Dr. Marlene Winell is a human development consultant in the San Francisco Area. Winell is the author of Leaving the Fold – A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving their Religion.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org. Subscribe at ValerieTarico.com.

#discovery list #cults #ex-christian #spiritual abuse

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levaire · 7 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://levaire.com/questioning-doctrine-hell-fairness-god-part-1/

Questioning the Doctrine of Hell and the Fairness of God | Part 1

In his November 2016 video, “Is HELL REAL or an Invention of the Church?” former Christian pastor and missionary, Joshua Tongol, sounds off on his problems with the doctrine of hell and eternal damnation. He opens with the example of a loved one who doesn’t believe Christianity but still has a loving heart. They die suddenly. “Where are they now?” he asks. Fundamentalists would say, “Hell. Forever. Eternal conscious torment.”

Of course, most Christians trying to be soft in their response would say, “Well, that’s for God to judge.” Theologically speaking, however, most Christian fundamentalists still silently feel—without the salvation prayer (an invention within the past 100 years)—the unregenerate “unsaved” will be going to hell. Even if one says the prayer, without true repentance and a heart-felt desire to pursue Christ, can’t they still be counted as “still-born”?

Tongol poses some tough questions. I was completely unequipped to answer the same questions in my late teens when a Jehovah’s Witness friend fired them at me. My inability to answer these questions in the face of my staunch Catholic upbringing marks my own launch into personal apostasy. That fall would last over two decades before I returned to the faith. The questions:

What kind of loving parent would send their children to eternal damnation? For not believing? For having little context for believing?

How to reconcile God’s unconditional love and everlasting mercy with eternal damnation? Preachers push this concept often when they posit “God loves you so much, but if you don’t love Him back, you’re going to burn.”

If God is omnipresent, how can the common explanation that hell is “existence without God’s presence” hold any water?

My Children Are Destroyed By Lack of Knowledge

When you can’t reckon the gap with logic, folks rebut with, “What does the Bible say?” Well, which Bible? Certain bibles don’t mention the word “hell” at all. Furthermore, the images of hell don’t seem to coincide. Are we talking about the verses that support an eternal hell, the verses that support the destruction of sinners, or the verses that support a temporary hell? So, which is it?

If God is all-knowing, as the Bible affirms, why create people who are simply destined for eternal hell? As a parent, say you’re able to clearly see the future for your children. You see that your next child will have less than 100 years to live on the planet, and then will burn in eternal conscious torment afterwards. Would you still bring them into existence? Our lowly, natural minds would say certainly not. If we can agree that God is way more just, way more loving and way more merciful than we are, it’s safe to assume we don’t have the whole picture.

Does it seem fair to be eternally punished for believing the wrong thing about God? Maybe you’re born in the wrong place, at the wrong time or into the wrong religion. A common response to the remote aborigine who never hears the Gospel is, “Well, God will take that into account then.” Essentially, they’ll be graded on a curve because of their ignorance. So then are missionaries doing a disservice to proclaim the Gospel to indigenous people, placing them in the path of eternal damnation by risking their rejection of Jesus? Why make them responsible and put them at risk? Wouldn’t ignorance over a span of less than 100 years and a higher likelihood of union with the Father be better than risking them making a bad decision and landing in eternal torment? This same argument has been applied to abortion providers, as if abortion simply jettisons the unborn into the lap of God.

Will we really be infinitely punished for finite sin and understanding? This possibility is hard for our fallen minds to swallow. Yet, if we believe the Bible, we can expect God is fair. Not only is He friend and father, but also judge.

And so, the questions continue to brew.

What’s the Big Idea?

Tongol asks, “Does God’s loving pursuit of humanity end at death?” If love is patient, does one’s physical death mark the end of that patience? What of the many who live short lives?

The common retort is, “God gave us all free will. God doesn’t send His people there; we send ourselves.” And if that is true, and it was our free will that landed us in hell, can we not use our free will to get back out of hell? Does our free will stop at physical death? Isn’t the concept of hell dangerously abstract to those with no experience of it?

If the residents of hell (angelic and human) have–through their own free will–resisted the love of God, can God’s love be resisted forever? Wouldn’t even a loving earthly parent try to snatch their child out of eternal torment? If God is love (as Christians claim) why would God do anything less for His children?

The scenario can be irreverently described like this:

Humanity starts with two people who trip over themselves in the garden of Eden and commit all subsequent generations (billions and billions of people) to sin-driven lives, losing most of the Father’s creation to hell. God, being smart and loving, has a plan. He sends His Son to die on the cross to take our sin from us and model the Way, the Truth and the Life, BUT still only a few people will find salvation. “Narrow is the path, but wide is the road to destruction.” (Matthew 7:13)

So, what would be the point to losing most of your creation to the devil; to free will; to sin?

If eternal hell does exist, shouldn’t Christians be more passionate about witnessing to the world? How can we even sleep with millions of people dying everyday with little or no knowledge of the Gospel? Do we not care? Do we not believe in hell? Are we just lazy?

In the Nazi holocaust of World War II, millions of people were tortured and killed. Fair to say most of those were not evangelical Christians. The unsavory question: Should we believe that most of those people are in hell along with their persecutors because they didn’t believe and convert during their time on earth?

Many fundamentalist Protestants may even say Mother Theresa herself has been swept into to hell. As a Catholic, the Protestants may argue she would have been works-based and not operating under grace. But if we believe our eternal salvation hinges upon accepting Christ or saying a salvation prayer before our physical death, isn’t that works? Both contingencies are actually marketed by churches as steps we have to take in order to become “saved.” Does your chance to accept Christ as Lord and Savior end upon physical death?

Retribution, Restoration or Both?

Tongol goes on to ask, “Is true justice retributive or restorative? Is it all about getting what you deserve or is it about restoring a person?” If unending punishment is the solution, then evil is not overcome by love, not overcome by good. In fact, it would appear evil would have won. An eternal hell keeps the cycle of evil and penance going forever. It keeps the cycle of evil demons doing evil things to evil people going forever. If that is the case, there is nothing redemptive in that. Was Jesus’ example to us an example of retributive or restorative love? (Hint: John 3:17 NKJV, “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.”)

When our Lord stood down the crowd wanting to stone the woman for fornication, most of us agree He disqualified them from casting the first stone. Maybe fewer of us notice that—in doing so—He qualified Himself at the same time. He did not cast stones but simply told her to go and sin no more. (John 8:11)

Do we not know the will of the Father through the life of the Son?

Here is where the opposing comments arise:

“It doesn’t matter how you feel on this topic.”

“It doesn’t have to make sense.”

“While you may not be willing to send people to hell forever, you’re not God.”

“So even people you love may be burning in hell forever,” Tongol says.

Love heals. Love restores. We know the will of the Father through the restorative life of the Son. Did Jesus not teach we are to forgive our neighbor not seven times but seventy-times-seven? Will not a loving, infinite God do even more for us?

Is It Wrong to Even Ask the Question?

Rejecting the notion he is a Christian Universalist (who says everyone is going to heaven,) Tongol makes the point: Once he lands in the afterlife, he “would rather be guilty of overestimating the love of the Universe rather than underestimating it.”

The “Universe”? An apparent nod to pantheism and the notion that the Creator and the creation are all one. While Tongol’s questions are well-constructed, he—like the rest of us—has room to grow in the understanding of God’s character. The potter is not the clay.

I believe there was way more accomplished through Christ’s atonement than we can intellectually grasp. I believe Jesus taught on hell and that it certainly exists, but my jury is still out on how many will be lost to the grave and how many will be lost to eternal conscious torment or everlasting destruction.

Of course, maybe that’s the problem with the whole question. I’m placing questions about salvation into my own court instead of keeping them in God’s. We’re counseled by God’s response to Job and by verses like:

Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor? (Romans 9:21 NKJV,)

And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter; so he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make. Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter?” says the Lord. “Look, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel! (Jeremiah 18:4-6) and

Surely you have things turned around! Shall the potter be esteemed as the clay; For shall the thing made say of him who made it, “He did not make me”? Or shall the thing formed say of him who formed it, “He has no understanding”? (Isaiah 29:16.)

Is it darkened and audacious to even ask questions then? Yes, we are to seek His face and grow in our understanding of His character, but far be it from us to push an “ought” or “should” onto the Father. It is surely a darkened mind that seeks to pass judgment over the methods and intentions of our infinite Father.

Questions Bought by Eternal Conscious Torment

To summarize some of the questions provoked by the doctrine of eternal conscious torment:

Are your deceased loved ones exposed to eternal conscious torment for not saying a salvation prayer?

What kind of loving parent would send their children to eternal damnation? For not believing? For having little context for believing (e.g. born at the wrong time, in the wrong place or into the wrong religion?)

Will we really be infinitely punished for finite sin and understanding?

How can we reconcile God’s unconditional love and everlasting mercy with eternal conscious torment?

If God is omnipresent, how can the common explanation that hell is “existence without God’s presence” hold any water?

Will our loving God sustain spiritual torture for all eternity? The Bible says all are sustained through God. We cannot exist apart from him.

Are the punished granted eternal life as well as the redeemed? According to the doctrine of conscious eternal punishment, they are.

If God is all-knowing, why create people who are destined for eternal hell?

Does God stop pursuing us upon physical death? Does your chance to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior end upon physical death?

Does judgment and subsequent delivery to heaven or hell occur immediately upon physical death? If so, how do we rectify the resurrection and judgment during the Second Coming? (Matthew 25:31-46)

If eternal hell does exist, shouldn’t Christians be way more committed to saving the lost than they are?

The doctrine of eternal conscious torment—a stumbling block that brings emotional distance and confusion to believers and unbelievers alike—seems to be far out of character with the Father of unconditional love and unending mercy. Jesus even went to his death without chastising his accusers. “You will be with Me in Paradise,” He told the believing thief.

In our confusion over this issue, are we as wrongly accusing God as the Jews did Jesus?

If I’ve established anything on the doctrine of hell, it is to continue to seek understanding and intimacy, but to do so with a heart hungry for communion—not with a heart rife with intellectual judgment or emotional confusion surrounding my prospects for the afterlife.

References

Amirault, Gary. Tentmaker. Bible Translations That Do Not Teach Eternal Torment. Retrieved from http://www.tentmaker.org/books/GatesOfHell.html.

Jones, Erik. Life Hope & Truth. What Is Hell? Retrieved from https://lifehopeandtruth.com/life/life-after-death/what-is-hell/.

Tongol, Joshua. YouTube. Is HELL REAL or an Invention of the Church? – Joshua Tongol (Former Pastor/Missionary). Retrieved from https://youtu.be/54KoNT-19Bk.

#apologetics #hell

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