(Part Two) 👇🏻

*not my photo*

Okay, let’s get right into it-

1. Any time something bad happens and you get through it, any time you work hard for something you want or need, Christians will insist that you only did it by god’s grace, that you only got that far by his blessing. This is so incredibly dismissive. I once heard a woman’s testimony of how she got herself out of an abus!ve relationship after years of praying for god to save her, and so many people tried to tell her that all the work she did was actually god, that he did answer her prayer. They completely dismissed her pain, saying that it was some kind of test of faith. My accomplishments are my own, I don’t owe them to a deity who has never shown he cares about me (or any deity, for that matter).

2. Circular reasoning abounds in the church. There are a million examples I could use, but the simplest would be the way I was taught about the Bible. The argument basically goes like this: Everything god says is true, so his word (the Bible) must be true and therefore must be obeyed. How do we know god is all-knowing and truthful? Well, the Bible says so. Friends, that is a logical fallacy and proves absolutely nothing. This cedes well into my next point - “historical proof” for the Bible’s accuracy.

3. The Bible *does* contradict itself in many places, no matter how you try to excuse it. Which makes sense, because it was written by many different authors at different time in history. Of course they don’t all believe the exact same things or represent information the same way. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that none of that is true. The Bible doesn’t contradict itself at all, and everything it says makes perfect sense. In this case, the argument I was taught is that the Bible isn’t just religious text, it’s a history book. And because the history is accurate, that’s how we know the religion part is true. This doesn’t actually prove anything, and I’ll give you a great example: Say we have a history book full of stories about famous women. There are sections on Anne Frank, Amelia Earhart, Hellen Keller, Marie Antoinette, Harriet Tubman, Marilyn Monroe, etc. But throughout the book, we also find the stories of Goldilocks, Snow White, and Red Riding Hood. Could I then make the argument that, because Amelia Earhart flew a plane, Goldilocks definitely talked to bears? Because we know Marie Antoinette was beheaded, we can know that Red Riding Hood actually survived being eaten alive by a wolf? That since Hellen Keller learned to read and write despite being deaf and blind, Snow White really did get cursed with magic? Of course not, that’s completely illogical. Just because parts of a text may be accurate or true, that doesn’t mean the entire whole is infallible and cannot be disputed.

4. I was always told to “give my burdens to god”, but no one actually explained what that meant or how it worked. I tried, but it was like someone held a sieve above my head and told me to pour the heavy bucket of water I held into it. That didn’t relieve me at all, it just poured the water back down on me. I never felt any relief from handing my worries to god. I do, however, feel immense relief in letting go of my religious guilt and shame over things that no one should have to feel ashamed about. I feel lighter and freer now than I ever did when I was “leaning on the lord”.

5. Every time I talk about my experience with Christianity, I get slews of comments like “I’m sorry this was your experience but not all churches/christians are like this”. I am so f*cking sick of that response. I wasn’t hurt by *my* church, I was hurt by *the* church, as a whole. It wasn’t just my pastor and congregation that had issues, it was every church and pastor I ever came in contact with. It is the entirety of Christianity as a whole that perpetuates the same issues. And I’m not the only one. I’m not some kind of outlier. The phrase “no hate like Christian love” exists for a reason. Millions of people have been hurt exactly the same way, all over the world. It is a systemic problem, one that cannot be solved by “othering” the Christians that do harm and uplifting yourself as “the good ones”. It wasn’t “one bad experience” it was a whole life of repression and lies and misinformation and shame and fear.

6. Piggybacking off that last sentence, Christianity as a faith operates on shame and fear. We fear the consequences, we’re ashamed of ourselves. In turn we become bitter and angry and lash out at the people who don’t limit themselves like we do, those who get to live life to the fullest without looking over their shoulder for a god that’s going to damn you to hell for m@sturbating or being child free or wearing a crop top. And you can say that’s not the truth, but as someone who lived it, it absolutely is the truth. I hated myself for my sexuality, for my desires (and I mean for normal things, not just even sexual desires), for the questions I had about the way I was told to view the world. Every tiny mistake, every minuscule indiscretion, sent me spiraling into guilt. I spent so. many. nights crying as I prayed and prayed and prayed for forgiveness. I was told that asking for redemption would assuage my guilt, but it never did. I didn’t feel any better afterward. I was just tired.

7. Women also have so little autonomy within Christianity. And we can talk about the nuances of what it means to “submit” to your husband all you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that the only approved path for Christian women is almost always to be a virgin, not date, get married young, pop out lots of kids, be a stay at home mom, homeschool your kids, be a homemaker, and never ever complain or ask for help. You’re not supposed to be a leader, you’re not supposed to have ambitions, you’re not supposed to have a job. You’re meant to be a pretty silent domestic slave.

I was going to talk about the mess that is purity culture, but then I realized there’s simply too much to say and that deserves its own post, so I’ll leave it here for now.

#religioustrauma #religiousdeconstruction #whyimnotreligious #christianity #exchristian #exvangelical