When you give evangelicals a pass, you give oppression more power

Two weeks ago, the evangelical media outlet Christianity Today published an article in which they called for the impeachment of Donald Trump.

And then, people began praising them on the internet.

By people, I mean mostly those who have never been evangelical. The majority of ex-evangelicals I know saw the article and immediately knew the implications—good press for the movement that they would use to fuel an authoritarian agenda. We’re familiar with their goals because they used to be our goals, and we were trained by various evangelical authorities to achieve them. When it comes to gaining converts, siding with progressives over an issue-or-two isn’t anything new.

The logic: if evangelicalism can make itself look like it has a reasonable bone in its body, more liberal-minded people won’t be so put-off by it. Being publicized as “anti-Trump” ends up working to their advantage in those communities, because the media never asks them to explain themselves further—to answer for their myriad oppressive views and policies.

Instead, people are relieved. And they shouldn’t be, because the ultimate goal of evangelicalism—no matter what—is theocracy.

Not sure why anyone thinks Christianity Today deserves a pat on the back for this one.

Remember, evangelicalism - even when branded as "progressive" - still wants theocracy.

That's the natural conclusion of the baseline theology. 🤷‍♀️

— Gloria Beth Amodeo (@gloriousbeth) December 20, 2019

We said these things, but were met with criticism. We were told that we were negative, gatekeep-y, unforgiving. Those who didn’t understand the world that we came from wanted us to see a ray of hope in the article. If evangelicals aren’t on his side, Trump could lose the next election! This is huge! The end of the nightmare may be at hand!

Let me be clear: that article from Christianity Today did not reflect an overall shift in evangelical politics—as evidenced by the nearly 200 evangelical leaders who spoke out against it. It was not only written by an editor who was on his way out the door, but reflects—as one New Yorker article calls it—“a more urban, internationalist, and broad-minded elite class within the evangelical movement.”

In other words, if anything, it will only serve to draw progressive-minded city dwellers to evangelical churches on Sunday—churches that may be anti-Trump, but are also anti-LGBTQ+ marriage, and anti-abortion, and anti-female autonomy. Anti-any-belief-system-but-evangelical.

It’s not a good thing. It could never be a good thing. But people aren’t as afraid of evangelicalism as they should be.

*

The only way that evangelicals are going to be held accountable for what they really believe, for the harm that their beliefs inflict upon human beings all over the world, is if two major things happen:

#1 – The general public gets educated about what evangelicals actually believe

This, I think, is the main reason evangelicals get handed a cultural cookie whenever they say something moderately reasonable: people aren’t aware of how fucked up the belief system is underneath that seemingly good-natured statement. As an ex-evangelical who’s sat down for various interviews on the subject and had countless conversations with curious coworkers, friends, and acquaintances, I can tell you for sure that people have very little understanding of evangelical root beliefs—and as a result, underestimate its goals on a global level.

And #2 – The general public becomes aware of how much power evangelicals have

Now this is the scariest part, and I can see people (*cough cough* media) wanting to shy away from it. Evangelicals are not only fundamentalist authoritarians, but they are powerful in American government—both in public and behind-the-scenes. Yes, Mike Pence is the Vice President of our country. But there are also numerous evangelical Senators and Congressional Representatives, 16% of the US population that makes up an active as hell evangelical voting-block, and don’t even get me started on what Jeff Sharlet has to say in his book The Family. (Seriously, if you want to understand evangelical power in America and abroad, read it or watch the documentary on Netflix.)

If the general public can begin to understand evangelical belief, then they could see the vast implications those beliefs have on a political level. And then if they can see how much power evangelicals have gained in the American political system, then maybe the most important, system-changing questions will be asked: how do we keep them from gaining more power? More converts? How do we make the belief system as obscure as it should to be?

*

The key is listening to ex-evangelicals.

I hate to say it, but we are a resource on this shit show, because we lived it and breathed it and are walking encyclopedias of fundamentalism because of it. Yet, time and time again, evangelicals are given those cultural cookies and passes by people in media who don’t understand the many facets what they’re saying.

Talk to us. Listen to us. Ask us all the questions. Follow ex-evangelicals who are writing about their experiences, read our blogs and our books and our stories before you interview and/or listen to an interview from Tim Keller. Come to understand what happened to us so that you can see the implications like we can.

The nationalist, authoritarian problem in this country won’t begin to get better until you do.

Why it’s ok to ghost the evangelical church

Let me start out by simply saying this: however you want to/have handled your exit from evangelicalism is right and valid. This shit is highly personal and complicated and should be tailored to you and your very unique experience. We were all told by the church that we shouldn’t trust our feelings, and leaving the church is, for many of us, the first major exercise we’ve ever had in following our gut. It’s formative and important, and any way you decide to do it should be respected.

I merely want to talk about the benefits of a method that I’ve seen shat on as immoral, inauthentic, and just plain wrong in any situation—with all this judgment leading to people who’ve been abused feeling like they owe the worst people in their lives an explanation.

And so, without further ado, here’s an analysis of the survival skills that are inherent in ghosting the evangelical church.

*

Ghosting is, essentially, the antithesis of how the evangelical church teaches believers to handle conflict resolution. I remember it well—the good ol’ Matthew 18:15-17 method in which you have to handle quarrels via an arduous, step-by-step process. If you have an issue with someone, confront them one-on-one. If they don’t listen, take a mediator with you. If they still don’t listen, get the whole church involved, and depending on how that goes, you may have an opportunity to get that person out of your life.

This method is used time and time again in the evangelical church to enable abusers in a variety of ways, and is wildly easy for manipulative personalities to wield to their own advantage. It’s been used to shield and empower destructive behavior as well as remove people who are questioning evangelical theology from the fold. It’s meant to protect the organization, and not the people inside of it. It’s basically the most HR the Bible ever got.

In contrast, ghosting the church is like quitting a horrible job by not showing up to work. It’s packing your bags while your abusive lover is out and driving to a hotel at the other end of the state. It’s an immediate removal of the toxicity from your life and gives the church no chance to rebuttal—no argument to even rebuttal against.

It gives them absolutely zero leverage to manipulate the situation, and that’s the last thing the well-oiled machine of evangelicalism wants.

In some ways, the church’s teachings on conflict resolution are built to keep members from ever ghosting it. Confront the church if it’s abusing you, and it will either try to buy itself another chance or gaslight you into believing that you were never abused in the first place. It wants to be able to explain itself, because that way, it still has some skin in (what it views as) the game of your life—and skin in the game, for this belief system, ultimately equals a chance at maintaining power.

Ghosting the evangelical church gave me an opportunity to create some mental distance and consider who I wanted to be moving forward. It wasn’t the ultimate answer to my brainwashing problem, as I have spent many years wrenching what the church did out of my head, but it did give me a chance to remove their influence in an auditory sense. It stopped the pastors and people from actively buzzing in my ears.

It didn’t stop the text messages or phone calls or social media reach-outs—the “Praying for you” emails and the “God and I are here when you’re ready” guilt-trips. But there was something empowering in looking at myself in a mirror instead of at my Bible Study leader at a coffee shop. There was something that helped me in the silence of listening to my own feelings instead of theirs, in considering the person I wanted to become without giving them a chance to weigh in.

I began to recognize my voice in the mire of thoughts I was having, amidst all the doubts that the church had bred into me. And while I’m now agnostic/atheist, I consider that to be the holiest time in my life, because it was when I met myself again. It was when I finally began to untangle my identity from the fundamentalist entity that had been slowly killing who I was for seven years.

To do that, I needed the church to be quiet, and that never would have happened unless I ghosted them.

*

All that being said, I think it’s important for some people to have conversations with the church. I think some people need to confront the people who have hurt them and tell them to fuck off into the sun with their terrible, noxious theology. I also think it’s impossible for some people to fully ghost the church—be it because of family and/or financial ties. It’s not for everyone or every situation.

But I also think that it’s a necessity for some people, and it can be just as brave and galvanizing as having a transparent conversation. Silence can say as much as words. Making the decision to be silent, for me, ended up being the most powerful statement I ever made.

SO. In sum, being judgmental about ghosting is proliferating a bullshit narrative that the church bred into us about what the right way to handle conflict is, and when it comes to leaving behind a dangerous belief system (or, I would even argue, everything from a bad relationship to a shitty date), to each their fucking own. No one has a right to tell people that the way they choose to protect themselves is wrong.

It’s time to be extra critical about what’s actually immoral and what’s a story that the church built inside of our heads to control us.

How a lack of bivisibility led to my indoctrination

This was the only thing I knew: I wanted Cate to like me more than she liked anyone else. Even before she fully converted me to evangelicalism, before the night we sat in our dorm and she coached me through accepting Jesus via a track booklet, I found myself wanting to be like her so that I could always have a piece of her with me. I was jealous when she hung out with other women—what if she started to like them more? The idea was haunting, that I’d see her less and be demoted on her list of most preferred people.

I wanted her attention, and I wasn’t sure why. The idea crossed my mind. Did I have a crush on Cate?

No. No, I couldn’t. I wasn’t gay. I liked guys too much.

It had been going on like this in my mind for more than just that year, a source of confusion since my earliest memories. I was 5-years old when I developed my first two crushes—Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future and my babysitter, Rebecca. I was 5-years old when I began to get the message that liking other girls was unnatural, because girls were supposed to like boys. (See: any form of media entertainment in the 90s, suburban heteronormativity, etc, etc.)

The solution felt easy enough. My crushes on boys were just as intense, just as genuine, as my crushes on girls.

Pick one, society told me. For my own safety, I picked boys.

And so I was able to bury it for a long, long while—my attraction to women seemingly relegated to watching a sex scene in a movie, to the time a bunch of friends in high school turned HBO porn on at a sleep over. We laughed at the movies, at the porn. “Isn’t this hilarious?”

It wasn’t until I met Cate that my unprocessed bisexuality emerged, and it hurt me in all the ways I hadn’t admitted it to myself.

*

If I knew that I was bisexual, perhaps I would have understood that this was an attraction to a person, and not to Jesus. Perhaps I would have been able to process the complexity of that, instead of feeling like she somehow held my future in her hands.

But I did not understand that I was bisexual, so I hung on to her words and tried to decode them—like she had the secret to becoming the person I wanted to be, and I only had to be around her to discover it.

To Cate, the word “gay” was a slur. If someone said that they heard an actor was gay, it upset her. “How could you say that about someone?”

After I prayed the prayer of salvation with her and became wholly indoctrinated, she made it clear that anything other than complete straightness was wrong.

“Homosexuality is a sin because it falls outside of God’s order,” she said. While it didn’t make sense in my heart, I had been getting this message my entire life by the world around me—that heterosexuality was the only real sexuality. Whatever the hell I was, this strange amalgamation of gender attractions, wasn’t real.

And besides, the church was teaching me how to stop listening to my heart.

I was relieved that I was at least attracted to men. I was relieved that I had the ability to pick one, and, by proxy, hide the part of myself that I was most ashamed of. As an evangelical, doing so had never been more critical.

*

I felt forced to admit it two years later, when I was applying for a summer mission trip. There was a question on the application about my sexual history, and I had been warned against lying. God would know and withhold his blessings, all the Christians in my life said.

Please list your sexual history (including any homosexual thoughts.)

My strange sexuality had been emerging, despite all the ways I tried to stomp it out. I had been watching porn in the dorm bathroom, dreaming about having sex with both women and men. My sins were of the mind—what was happening inside my head was compromising my purity.

I went to Cate first and foremost, the person I trusted and admired more than anyone.

“I’ve had homosexual thoughts and feelings. I’m attracted to men, but I’m also attracted to women.”

After the initial shock of speaking those words wore off, Cate comforted me from across the room.

“I can see you helping so many other women with your experience,” she said. “I see you speaking at a conference and helping other women deal with this.”

Other women? There were other women like me?

“There are so many other women! And they need to know how you’re handing it.”

She wanted me to tell them how I had picked one, how I stayed strong in my pursuit of heterosexuality. She wanted me to use my vulnerability to incite the vulnerability of others, and then mold their thinking and processing into an evangelical context.

In saying all this, Cate was doing what she had been taught to do, and now she was teaching me. And how ripe I was for the teaching, not even knowing my own sexual identity—having no example of how to live with it out in the world. Through her vision for my life, Cate offered the only example I felt safe following.

It’s taken me a long time to see how much I needed bivisibility at that moment. My lack of exposure to others like me was being used to control me, and one day, Cate hoped, it would control others through me.

 *

Likewise, it took me longer than I wish it did to let go of my compulsive heterosexuality, and even longer to understand how my conversion to evangelicalism happened. The millions of little characteristics that made me ripe for fundamentalist picking were buoyed by those around me who said bisexuality didn’t exist—by the message that I should pick a side and keep the rest of it a secret.

Binary thinking harmed me, because it didn’t allow me to account for all of me. And the less we know ourselves, the less defenses we’ll have towards others who want to tell us who we are.

But what do you believe now?

No matter who I’m talking to, it’s a question that comes up when I tell people that I spent seven years as an evangelical.

“So, after all that, what do you believe?”

Am I atheist? Agnostic? Buddhist? Episcopalian?

My most frequent answer: agnostic, leaning towards atheist, and I usually leave it at that. Talking about spirituality on a deeper level is exhausting and, sometimes, re-traumatizing for me. I spent 7 years digging through the innards of my personal beliefs and having others warp them to fit a tyrannical agenda. It’s a sore spot, but also a tired subject.

Why should it matter? I think. I’ve stopped letting spiritual beliefs define me.

But last weekend, I was talking to a Wiccan friend after dinner, and I found myself weirdly wanting to go deeper. She asked me the question, and something inside of me opened up. Perhaps it’s because I spent some time in my teenaged years walking counter-clockwise around a pagan statue chanting “Earth, Air, Fire, Water”—an act that I was told to repent of multiple times as an evangelical.

I still find her belief system comforting in its mysticism, filled with possibilities. I wanted to share, despite my usual inclinations.

“I want to believe in something again,” I said, “but the last time I did that, I was taken advantage of.”

I didn’t just open up to her in that moment—I opened up to myself. I started explaining a fear of belief that I didn’t know I had. I told her that belief sits at the core of every person, informing our emotions and what we do physically. I told her that when someone gets access to your belief, they gain the ability—by proxy—to control how you feel, and what your body does with that.

Belief, I told her, is powerful. And I handed mine over to the wrong people. I did things that I regret, things that I can’t take back.

I never want someone to have that kind of power over me again.

My friend sat there and listened, understanding and compassionate. “I get that,” she said, and not a thing more. No rebuttals, no defenses. No “my kind of faith wouldn’t do that do you.”

It was so nice to be vulnerable and not capitalized upon.

*

When I left evangelicalism, I couldn’t embrace another form of Christianity. I couldn’t embrace anything at all on a spiritual level, really. I tried going to a few progressive Christian churches, beautiful places where LGBTQ+ people were pastors and in leadership positions, where women were interpreting and teaching scripture—no longer relegated to children’s church and baking for Sunday potlucks. I sat through gorgeous sermons that questioned the words of Jesus in all the ways that I was, that didn’t tie anything up in a bow. I heard them refer to people of other faiths as “brothers and sisters.”

No more exclusivity. No more dictatorship. Just genuine, curious, awe-inspiring faith in a higher power.

I loved it. I was so happy that I had witnessed it.

But I couldn’t be a part of it. I still can’t.

There’s something practical in my decision to stay away: I don’t have the time to be involved in a church anymore, and whatever time I used to have was stretched thin by evangelicalism. I spent 7 years giving hours and money and effort to that movement every Sunday. I opened up my living spaces for congregations throughout the week, did the selfless giving thing and made meals, ordered pizzas for Bible studies and post-church gatherings.

When I left, I started wanting to be selfish with my Sundays. I wanted to take that day, and every day, back for myself.

Taking those days back, while worthwhile, has been a lonely process. Leaving the church meant losing community, and I have never been able to replace the drop-of-a-hat support that was given to me by 200 people any time I needed it.

But the greatest loss, deeper than any interpersonal connection, has been the comfort of my faith—the relationship I had with the god I worshipped. The knowledge of his unconditional love, the purpose and reasoning I garnered from his omnipotence, his existence. The certainty that there was a heaven, and I was going to it, and all final decisions would be good and just.

I’m still sad that I can’t say for sure that this isn’t all more than just chaos.

There has been, and still is, so much grief in that loss. Praying is still a reflex, but I don’t trust what’s on the other end. I don’t know that opening myself towards spirituality won’t swallow me whole again, won’t take away everything that I’ve worked so hard to build for myself since leaving it. 

*

Here’s where I am now.

There was a still, small voice inside of me all those years in evangelicalism, and I was told that voice was the holy spirit. That voice brought me words of wisdom and peace, relief in moments when I should have been spinning.

I still hear and feel that voice, but I believe that voice is actually me. I had the capacity to give myself the love that I needed to receive, bestow upon my mind the insight that would help me grow.

And that, I believe, is one of the greatest threats to evangelicalism: the idea that we can be sources of love for ourselves. It’s why they teach us that we’re reprehensible, only desirable to god if we’re allowing Jesus to transform us. They break us down so that we can’t recognize where the goodness is coming from—and that we don’t need them to help us find it.

Realizing our ability to care for ourselves robs them of their power over us.

Woke up this morning thinking about how blasphemous I am now to believe that the God I experienced as an evangelical was actually MYSELF.

I comforted & loved & nurtured myself, offered myself prophetic words. What a propensity I had to give myself exactly what I needed!

— Gloria Beth Amodeo (@gloriousbeth) June 2, 2019

There was so much pressure in evangelicalism to know God, to dig into him and understand his heart. They wanted me to define my beliefs, say them out loud, make sure everyone around me knew that I belonged to Jesus.

Now, it’s not important to define my beliefs anymore. I am digging into myself, getting to know who I am better, finding all the safe chambers and sacred ways I can nourish my own spirit. If there is an all-powerful, omnipotent creator of the universe out there, I don’t believe it needs me to submit to it, because if it did, it wouldn’t be worth worshipping.

Whatever good the god of evangelicalism was for me, I now am for myself—and I’ve come to realize I was all along. It’s a challenging kind of faith, but I’m learning to trust myself enough to embrace it.

Being judged by the evangelical you used to be

Not being evangelical anymore is a surreal experience, because being evangelical used to define everything about who I was. I was taught in those vulnerable days of my life that my identity was in Christ above all else, that if I was ever doubting my purpose or worth as a human being, I had to remember that I was, first and foremost, a daughter of the King.

In a lot of ways, I wasn’t supposed to feel too bad about too much.

This teaching about identity was, as everything else in fundamentalist belief, meant to be all encompassing. My interests could never be more than interests, because my passion had to be Jesus. No book I was studying in school could be taken that seriously, as nothing other than the Bible was allowed to be considered transformative. It didn’t matter how much I loved singing or writing or acting, or how much I cared about another person, including my future spouse and children. I had to love God more. I had to be willing to sacrifice everything for him and his church.

I was told that by giving up my life, I would find it. But after seven years in the faith, that simply cost too much, and I did the most shameful thing a person can do in evangelicalism. I left it.

I would, of course, love to say that after leaving the church, I got my life paid back to me in full. I’d love to tell you that there’s some refund policy involved in all this. As many of you who also left know, there isn’t, and I’ve found that I’ve continued to pay in some ways for the loss of identity I experienced—for the amount of myself that I gave up to retain my place in that community.

 *

There are moments when the values I used to have flood back into my mind, and I feel like I’m watching myself from outside my own body. The person I used to be is suddenly there again, and she can’t believe I’m living the way I am now—that I’m doing the things I’m doing, that I “gave up” on God like that.

My chest leaps and my mind spins and I feel frozen, like I’ve been caught, like everything I’m doing is a secret that’s been exposed. It happens in intimate moments, from sex to merely cuddling with my partner. It happens when I’m brushing my teeth and I look at the apartment around me and remember that I share it with someone I’m not married to. It happens when I’m making my bed or sending an email or walking to work with a coffee in my hand.

Its presence is completely unpredictable, but what happens is always the same. Everything stops and the evangelical I used to be suddenly rears her head, and I can feel her horror and disappointment. I can feel how sad she is that I’ve turned out the way I have.

My reaction, at first, is always emotional paralyzation. I lose control and can’t move, like a deer in headlights, because something really fast is coming at me and I can’t think to do anything about it. Then I feel panicked, like I’m in a bad dream that I need to wake up from, like I’m doing something terribly wrong because I’m being mind-controlled by aliens and I need to run out their spaceship.

I’ll either start sobbing or get very still and quiet, distant in the eyes of people around me. Depending on the moment it’s happening in, I have varying degrees of being able to hide it.

And then I come back, the person I am now. I’m either fully back in a matter of seconds, or slowly over the course of a few minutes. I shake off the feeling, like a cat that’s been rained on, and I go on with my life after having, what feels like, a bizarre out-of-body panic attack.

When I told my therapist about these episodes, they used a term I had never heard before: emotional hijacking. They said that it happens as a result of trauma, when the stress and suffering of what you once went through re-emerges as a result of your brain processing it.

The term hijacking resonated with me most. I feel like my emotions and, in some ways, my body are being stolen from me in those moments. I feel violated in all the ways I didn’t allow myself to during my time in the church. I feel the anger and heartache that I swallowed coming up from the depths of my heart. I feel all the negatives that I don’t want to, that I never asked to feel.

I never asked for any of this. And yet, it hasn’t ended yet. I keep going through it, and I’m not sure it will ever really stop. I can only hope it will continue to get less frequent.

 *

There is no silver lining that I want put on this. The idea that any of this is a good thing, that it has some holy purpose, makes me mad—potentially because I automatically associate beliefs like that to making excuses for the totalitarian God I used to worship.

Rather, I think that understanding is what I desire. I want to understand how I was taken advantage of at the age of nineteen by a fundamentalist cult. I want to understand how it continues to affect me, all these years later, and why I’m still somewhat afraid of it—why I still feel like I need to hide from it.

Understanding, I think, can lead itself to justice. And since I can’t take what happened back, I’d rather spend my time trying to figure out all the ways it works so that we can, one day, see it destroyed.

Liking yourself after leaving evangelicalism

One of the most complicated facets of leaving evangelicalism, I think, is learning how to like yourself.

Some of it came instantly for me, and some of it is arriving much slower.

The instant stuff literally happened within days of leaving my faith behind. I remember biking through a nearby park and being struck by the fact that I no longer had to feel like shit because I thought that Jesus needed to save the souls of all the picnickers. I no longer had to see LGBTQ+ couples and remind myself that the love I witnessed, while obviously real, was actually a sin. I no longer had to walk through each moment and hate myself for my sexual desires—I could *gasp* go out on a date if I wanted to! I could kiss a person, sleep with them, re-consider my wants as needs.

It was a spiritual exhale—I could like myself now. I could join the forces of the world that I wanted to be a part of for so long, people who fought for real freedom and not some convoluted interpretation of it. I no longer had to convince myself that my beliefs were good, because I knew that they were. For the first time in 7 years, what I believed made sense to me, and I didn’t have to spend countless hours reading commentaries in the ESV Study Bible to convince myself that what I thought wasn’t, in fact, evil.

But liking yourself after leaving evangelicalism, after staring into the face of our nation’s most powerful cult, is like putting down a boulder and trying to stand upright again. The relief, at first, is great.

And then the pain from all that time carrying a boulder sets in.

I first realized this when I started having sex. I was neurotic about accidentally getting pregnant or contracting symptomless UTIs, overwhelmingly fearful that sex would somehow break my career or my kidneys. I’d be punished, I thought, for doing something so normal—for thinking that someone like me could deserve this kind of pleasure.

I saw the fear again when I sat down to write. I’d spend hours erasing sentences, obsessing over some strange syncopation, telling myself that I’d lost my skill, probably peaking sometime after grad school. I had won an award then, but I’d probably never do that again. I was a one-hit-wonder, probably not a good enough writer to gain and maintain the career that I had hoped for as a child.

It followed me, this fear, every time I had a feeling, lurking in the back of my thoughts when I made new friends, had good conversations, developed new life philosophies. How do you know you’re right? Do you really think you’re that smart? You couldn’t possibly have the brain capacity to go through life and rely on yourself.

It took me a long time to understand that I did have these capacities, that I had gained more than I lost, and that sex wouldn’t kill me. But to do that, I had to return to the root teaching that caused me to doubt my worth as a human being.

 *

Evangelicalism has a lot of poisonous teachings, but this may be the most insidious: you’re so polluted by sin that you can’t trust your own feelings. It’s the quintessential way that the church breaks people into pieces with the aim of re-fashioning them into automatons. It’s a mode of attacking personhood and making it sound mild, focusing on “flimsy feelings” and gaining access into the hardwiring of a someone’s judgement.

Feelings, for evangelicals, are a doorway to power, the first thing to seize on the road to controlling everything about a person.

By thinking that my feelings were polluted, I internalized the idea that I was emotionally stupid, that I couldn’t be trusted to steer the course of my own life and I needed someone else to do it. Who got the reigns? Jesus did. Who was Jesus? My pastors would tell you.

As an evangelical, I couldn’t say it, but I didn’t like many of my beliefs. At times, I felt like a terrible person for holding them. How could I have believed that everyone who didn’t hold my salvation doctrine was going to hell? How could I have believed that “the act of homosexuality” was a sin? What type of person was I for actually accepting these beliefs, for lending my strength towards a system that actively harmed people?

I didn’t like myself for beliefs I was told I had to hold—and if I didn’t, I’d lose all my friends. My spiritual family. The life I built in the church.

Liking myself after leaving evangelicalism is one of the hardest things I do every day, because evangelicalism was a constant assault on the deepest parts of my personhood. It was a reprogramming of my heart and mind, a conquering of my thoughts and actions, and I still can’t forgive myself in some ways for letting that happen to me.

Liking myself after this is, in many ways, being at peace with my own vulnerability, with understanding that this happened because I was taken advantage of.

And so liking myself is an admittance of my own humanity. It’s a daily excavation of the idea that being human is inherently wrong.

*

This is where the boulder analogy comes back. We carry the large rock of evangelicalism around, and are sore after putting it down.

But we all know that soreness builds strength, even around our injuries. There’s something to say, I think, for the fact that we could carry that shit in the first place, and even more for the fact that we were able to let it go.

I can say now, for sure, that I like all of us for that.

How “The Family” is really just every evangelical church in America

I’ve never been to Ivanwald, but I feel like I have, because all the evangelical churches I went to were modeled in the exact same way.

So, before you keep reading, I feel obligated to inform you that if you haven’t watched/finished “The Family” on Netflix, there are potentially SPOILERS ahead. But if you have no plans to do either and wouldn’t mind a succinct summary of various points that I found interesting and creepily nostalgic re: my own experience in evangelical churches, this could be the article for you.

A little background: “The Family” is a five part docuseries that profiles the experiences and subsequent journalism of Jeff Sharlett, a guy who was invited to live with a band of men outside of Washington D.C. and upkeep a house called Ivanwald, a meeting ground that a bunch of politicians frequented. Turns out that all these politicians were of the evangelical persuasion, and Jeff’s entire experience there included Bible studies, soul-breaking indoctrination, social gatherings with a neighboring house of females to encourage marriages, and general talk of how they, as the men, would inherit the world.

Do you think this sounds absolutely batshit? If you do, I hate to break it to you, but this is the ideology of evangelical Christianity in the United States—a movement that, according to General Society Survey data, boasts 22.5% of the American population. It’s everywhere, and it won’t stop gaining traction until we can consistently recognize it for what it is: a cult.

As a former evangelical, watching “The Family” was a pretty surreal experience, because I recognized the principles of my past at every turn and found myself, simultaneously, horrified and meh. I believed these things for 7 years, as did all my fellow evangelicals, and none of it felt dangerously radical or out of the normal. It was, to us, the truth. It was just the way we thought.

Here are three quotes that gave me this feeling of terror and unsurprised recognition the most.

“You’re encouraged to share really intimate thoughts and feelings, and then this intimacy binds you to The Family and their way of thinking.”

This is not just Ivanwald. This is how all evangelical churches operate in the United States to emotionally manipulate members into submitting to fundamentalist doctrine. This sharing of “really intimate thoughts and feelings” is most often encouraged in smaller groups—offshoots of regular church services on Sunday mornings. These groups are called “Small Groups,” or, “Life Groups,” or plain ol’ “Bible Studies,” and they are all designed to create a space where vulnerability can be coaxed out of church members, and where deeply personal information can be met with dogmatic analysis.

It’s a way that evangelical churches weaponize the social aspects of human nature. When we share personal information with those around us, we feel close to them. Our spiritual mouths are open in those moments, and evangelicals are trained to be at the ready with the food of fundamentalism.

It’s also, in my experience, a common evangelical missionary tactic. Build a relationship with a person, get them to be vulnerable with you, and you’ll have an avenue to “speak the truth of Jesus” into their heart. Unfortunately, this is exactly how I was converted in college—by getting close with an evangelical classmate, and having my vulnerability turned against me.

“What they offered their followers is a sense of belonging, a kind of unquestioning ‘We’re with you through thick and thin.’ And there’s something very alluring about that. I wouldn’t mind being accepted by a group, unquestioningly.”

Once again, this is a classic aspect of life in evangelical churches, and another way in which the social aspects of human nature are capitalized upon in these settings. When I entered the movement in college, I immediately made (what felt like) 100 best friends. After a childhood in which I felt like a lonely, social reject, I no longer had to try to fit anymore.

I just did. I was accepted—no holds barred. No questions asked.

And this sense of “We’re with you through thick and thin,” is also weaponized in different ways—the church makes itself feel unshakeable. Have you, according to them, sinned? Have you had an affair (like so many of the men in this docuseries), or are you anything but heterosexual, heteronormative? Are you a woman who wants to be *gasp* a pastor? Do you have some funny ideas about living your life outside “God’s order?”

Even if you leave, they will always keep the door open—in case you hit rock bottom, in hopes that they can lure you back in. They will always be there to accept you again, and bring you back into the fold of indoctrination. And they will never have your best interests in mind, because their interests are always their own: more bodies, more votes, for fundamentalist dominion. It doesn’t matter what “bad” you do in their eyes, because you can still play into their agenda just as you are.

And that, agenda or not, is alluring to human nature. The evangelical church wants you to know that you always have a home—no matter how toxic you may understand it to be.

“And they say it’s about faith, but there’s a shared understanding that what we’re really about here is power.”

I posted this one on twitter immediately upon hearing it because ^this right here^ is the definition of evangelicalism. The reason why the evangelical movement does everything it does, why its ministries exist, why it plants churches in cities and rural areas and impoverished communities, is to gain allegiances and support in a wider political landscape. Everything is political, even when they try to tell you it’s not. Everything is about numbers—how many members it has, how many people it shares its “gospel” with.

During a mission trip I attended with Campus Crusade for Christ, we tallied up the amount of people who converted on the beach and sent the numbers back to headquarters at the end of each week. We were doing so because they needed to quantify their influence, as all of evangelicalism does. It has larger political realms to answer to.

When a faith system is, at its heart, about dominion, when it states that no one can go to heaven without believing that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, it naturally falls into this line of thinking. For all its evils, this belief system is taking itself to its natural conclusion, and its influence upon politics starts in radicalized church communities that are going strong all around this country.

*

There are others that I won’t go into too much, because this is already quite long—but there is so much in this docuseries that is so incredibly compelling. (Clearly, I can’t stop using itals.) Below are a few other quotes that fucked. Me. Up.

“I think they use Jesus. I hate to say this, almost kind of a mascot.”

Ouch. And, also, truth. I’ve never thought of it this way, but the idea of Jesus that evangelicals have been parading around the world really is just a costumed housing portal for their theocratic political agenda.

“They say democracy in itself is a form of rebelliousness. It’s second to this bland, empty Christ.”

Ahhhhhhhhhhh. Again, I already knew that they think this and am completely not surprised, but ahhhhhhhhhhhh.

Alright. That’s all I have for now. I’m going to head back into the world outside of this blog and hope that everyone, however slowly, starts to recognize the dangers of evangelicalism and stops feeding into its convert pool. (And how that’s happening is a topic for a whole other blog post.) BYE.

You left evangelicalism because you understand it

One of the central beliefs of the evangelical church is that if you don’t bow down to the theology, it’s because you don’t get the theology. You don’t understand what it is to be in a real relationship with the almighty creator of the universe. You simply haven’t experienced the extravagant love of Jesus.

That’s why you walked away, they say. Because there was something too weak, perhaps even too selfish in you, and that thing kept you from grasping the most important concept in the world: that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life, and no one goes to heaven without believing in him first.

I was reminded of all this on Wednesday of last week, when my twitter mentions got bombarded by a group of people known as Trad (short for “Traditional”) Catholics. To be honest, I had NO IDEA who the hell these people were as they digitally hurled scripture and Latin at me, and I consulted some internet friends who are far more learned about this stuff to figure out what was going on.

Turns out there’s a fundamentalist wing of Catholicism (I am not surprised) and they are identical to evangelicals in their dangerous radicalism and gaslighting assholery (I am also not surprised.)

But the most identical facet of all was the way they attacked my intelligence, and the grounds they attacked it on.

OK so let’s back up a second. Here’s the tweet that got these people super butt hurt.

Just on a pure theological level, evangelicalism is bent on killing its believers.

"Die to yourself."

"Crucify the flesh."

"Lose your life for the sake of following Christ."#EvangelicalismKills

— Gloria Beth Amodeo (@gloriousbeth) August 12, 2019

I know, I know. It’s no wonder I made enemies by posting something like this. But really. I wanted to examine the way evangelical theology roots itself in death and then seeks to kill the autonomy of its believers until they’re robot troops for a Wizard of Oz spirit dictator (who is just a bunch of cis-hetero white male patriarchs behind the curtain, but that’s a discussion for another post.)

ANYWAY. The Trad Catholics went apeshit on me, and they called me stupid in many different ways. NOTE: I’m screenshotting and covering up account names/handles in an attempt to avoid stirring this shit up again and having to block 200 angry zealots while I’m in back-to-back work meetings.

There were others, of course, in which the theological beliefs were explained to me in ways I had heard before ad nauseum—quoting scripture, telling me to read Thomas Aquinas, trying to take me down the same winding roads of doctrinal nonsense I swore off 5 years ago.

I was called stupid for exposing a belief I had been taught, a belief I experienced until I couldn’t see myself anymore.

I was called stupid in a way I used to be afraid of, but now, I know better than to believe it.

*

Fundamentalists get angry when you point out the belief behind their beliefs, the way they’re told not to look at things. They want to focus on the petals of their theological flower, the stem and the leaves and the cute little buds, but never the root—never the teachings it grows from. They live by scripted commentary and spins that pastors have been twirling out of their brains for centuries, but they never call a thing a thing. They’re trained to ignore the obvious.

So far, the most interesting and, frankly, predictable part of being vocal about my evangelical experiences is the reaction I receive when I expose these roots. When I say the things we weren’t supposed to say, when I examine the beliefs in the ways we were told not to, the attacks are always intellectual.

And then, somehow, like clockwork, they turn more personal.

In other words, I’m not a good enough person to understand. If I just understood on a relational level what it is to follow Jesus, to love the person of him, then I wouldn’t be saying this.

Teaching people that they should be willing to die for their belief system is a very convenient way for fundamentalist churches to maintain power, and the “you just don’t get it” argument is a defense of their own radicalization. It’s a way of weaponizing “I feel” statements. You don’t feel what I feel because you’re not spiritual enough to feel it. You haven’t experienced Jesus enough to understand what I do, that losing yourself to him is the best thing that can happen.

Perhaps another church taught you the wrong things. Perhaps some Bible study leader poisoned you with a skewed interpretation. They’ll come up with all types of arguments and excuses for why you leaving wasn’t about their true theology—how it’s not a mark on the Jesus they really believe in.

But it is, and you know it is. You know that you left the very beliefs they hold dear, and it’s not because you don’t get them. It’s because you saw through them.

I’m not going to pretend that this Trad Catholic Twitter attack wasn’t triggering as hell for me, because it was. I wanted to tear them apart every time they called me stupid and defend myself into the oblivion. I didn’t actually want to block any of these people, especially when they claimed that I was only doing so because they were confronting my “ridiculous narrative”. I wanted to take them all on, one by one, in the intellectual boxing ring of the internet. I wanted to rip their bullshit fundamentalist supremacy to shreds and then virtually kick them back into the cyber sewer hole from whence they emerged.

I wanted to do it for the person I used to be, the vulnerable college student who was trapped inside those beliefs. Maybe there’s a part of myself I’m still trying to set free.

Alas, though. I have bills to pay. I couldn’t spend the entire day avenging my trauma while my mentions went haywire.

You or I or anyone who has left fundamentalism isn’t obligated to engage those who attack us intellectually—especially when they’re coming from the world that we just left. Our decision isn’t something we have to defend, even if they call us selfish. No matter how deeply they try to make it about us, it will always be about them.

They will never own that, but neither will I. And I won’t stop talking about it.

Beware of evangelicals with progressive ideals. They still want theocracy.

At some point in the midst of my final faith crisis, I decided that I needed to spend more time around evangelical women.

I had gotten the idea in my mind because of the phrase “guard your heart”—a line taken from Proverbs 4:23. It was interpreted by purity culture to mean that having a crush was dangerous, and since I was only supposed to have crushes on men, that meant that men were dangerous. I thought that spending more time around evangelical women would render my heart safe, make some space in my mind for God and allow me to work through my doubts.

I started going to a church in Brooklyn, one that was around the corner from my apartment, and I found myself a strictly women’s “Life Group” (aka, a Bible study where people “do life together.”) I went to the first meeting and was encouraged by the honest conversations everyone was having about their doubts, some similar to mine, about theological discrepancies and how we could trust that the Bible was infallible.

They also had similar anxieties to me. All the women, like me, were single. All the women, like me, were waiting for some reasonably attractive dude to come along and do the thing our churches taught us was his birthright—ask us out, pursue us. All the women, like me, were pissed off that we had to stand in this metaphorical gym class line and wait to be picked for these teams of two if we ever wanted to just have sex.

I liked this Bible Study because, like me, everyone was depressed, and no one was afraid to talk about why.

These women were, in many ways, beasts of the highest quality—self-proclaimed “feminists” in an evangelical world that looked down on any use of that word. They had voted for Obama, were pro-immigration, wanted gun control now despite what their evangelical relatives thought. They questioned the idea that women weren’t allowed to be pastors and wondered out loud about the roles that our gender, apparently, dictated for us.

One time, after church, we went to brunch with a bunch of people. The topic of dating came up, and a man voiced his opinion.

“If a woman asked me out, it would rob me of my manhood.”

My Life Group women went wild. They questioned this man like he was testifying before fucking Congress. They put him on trial over mimosas and eggs and told him that his views were sexist. Why shouldn’t a woman ask him out? Was his manhood that fragile? Could a simple question really tear it apart, a mere expression of emotional autonomy from a person of the opposite sex?

In a time when my faith was falling apart, they helped me feel like there was a place for my doubts. There was a place for my questions, for this anger growing inside of me, for the part of my chest that was beginning to puff whenever the pastor at our church took the pulpit.

And then, one of our members told us that she was having sex.

Her name was Jenna, and she met the man she was sleeping with at the gym. She started the conversation by saying that she was questioning whether or not she wanted to keep seeing him. She was shy about it, admitting the sex, but also bringing up the fact that he did drugs recreationally. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that, and was overall very confused.

No, the Life Group resolved. Hands down, no. She should not be having sex with a non-believer. She should not be having sex with anyone she wasn’t married to. She needed to end this because of the sex. It would be hard, but we needed to pray for her.

Jenna started crying and we went to her side of the room. We put our hands on her and I felt the sweat on her back, the shake of each sob. And in that moment, I stopped feeling safe to question my faith with those women.

*

There is a root belief of evangelicalism, and it dictates theocracy. Jesus Christ died on a cross to atone for humanity’s sins, and no one goes to heaven without believing that indisputably happened. There are other takes in the faith system—many that evangelical leaders debate as “secondary”—but this central belief colors every one of those.

We hold the truth about creation and the universe. Every other faith system is incorrect, and all will be condemned to hell after death if they do not grasp and spiritually buy into this version of events.

While it’s unpopular amongst the white male powers-that-be in the movement, evangelicals can identify as feminist. They can decide to be LGBTQ+ affirming. They can be anti-Trump and pro-immigration and advocates for gun control. But this root belief of spiritual exclusivity, of everyone who doesn’t believe what I do is going to hell, remains. And it’s deeply problematic.

When we take it to its logical conclusion, it means that the world can be run by women and LGBTQ+ people, but they have to be evangelical Christian. We can vote Trump out of office and free the people that are sitting in concentration camps at the border, but we have to ultimately convert them to evangelical ideology. We can have a completely progressive-looking world, but no one can be Muslim or atheist or Buddhist or anything other than Jesus-praising, Jesus believing.

It’s not inclusive. It can’t be. Evangelicalism, is fundamentally, exclusive—no matter how progressive it may try to make itself look. It can embrace progressive ideals, but that progressivism will always have a limit, be it beliefs about sex or purity or the very nature of what makes someone’s spiritual experience true.

It is still fundamentalist. It is still chains. It can wear a pink pussy hat and protest with everyone else at women’s marches, but it still wants spiritual dominion—it still wants to convert everyone there. It still has an agenda.

At its core, it is built to continuously strive towards theocracy.

I say this all because I want everyone to understand how nuanced evangelicalism is. I want to break down the stereotype of the soapbox preacher and the Westboro Baptist picketing bigots. Evangelicals do not always look like bigots. Most of the time, they blend in, because they know that their fundamentalism is a turn-off.

Get to know the people around you. Ask questions. And remember the root of it all.

Make sure you know what people really believe about what it means to be free. If it involves atheists going to hell, then it’s not freedom.

“I don’t agree with your lifestyle”: how evangelicals minimize dehumanization

Deep down, even when I was in the throes of my evangelical faith, I had a hard time emotionally understanding the way people in my churches used the word “agree.”

One time, an evangelical roommate told me that her brother was gay.

“I made it clear that I don’t agree with it,” she said.

This felt harsh, like a verbal slap in the face—like the tables had been, somehow, unfairly turned against him. “How did he feel about that?” I asked.

“Well, he couldn’t argue with it. I was telling him my opinion.”

Her opinion, I thought. She was, essentially, telling him she thought his sexuality was a slight against the creator of the universe, but was calling it her opinion.

Another time, a year after leaving the faith system myself, I sat across from an evangelical friend over dinner. I had just been broken up with by my first secular boyfriend, and I was crying about it.

She listened as I went down the laundry list of depressing circumstances that had led to the end of this relationship, and then she folded her hands on the table in front of us.

“You know I didn’t agree with this relationship,” she said. “Or the fact that you had sex with him.”

Agree. What was there to agree with? It was my relationship, I thought, my life. The synapses went haywire in my brain as they tried to categorize where her agreeing fell into the equation.

To be fair, I was deeply familiar with this concept in both circumstances, and had been coached by evangelical mentors to recite the same thing to other people. If someone told me they were gay, I was supposed to say that I didn’t “agree” with their lifestyle. If someone moved in with their partner pre-marriage, I was supposed to say I didn’t “agree” with their choice. If someone was living their life in any way different than the church told us to, using the word “agree” to express displeasure over their actions was the natural response.

It was a soft way of telling someone they were living in sin, to get the fact that we didn’t “condone” certain behaviors off our chests. It was a way to minimize the gravity of what we were actually saying: I think that God hates what you’re doing, and I don’t think you should be allowed to do it.

As an evangelical, I dreaded the idea of another believer telling me that they didn’t “agree” with something I was doing. It was a humiliating thought—that a person who knew Jesus could be in disagreement with me! I would have to evaluate the decision in question, find Biblical support for it, go to the pastors for analyzation and come out with an answer. If that answer was sin, then I had to repent. Stop what I was doing immediately, change my mindset, refocus.

I did everything by the book that had been drilled into my head, followed by the rules that the pastors preached perfectly, because I was so afraid that someone would come along and not agree with me—and where would I be then? There was, in my mind, no greater shame.

But in that moment, sitting over dinner, when my friend extended her hands and beckoned me to hold them, I felt something different. I felt invisible, like she couldn’t see me, like I had ceased to be a person to her, and perhaps never was.

*

When an evangelical says they don’t agree with something, it’s an attempt to maintain their presence in the conversation. It’s a way of saying I’m bigoted without getting kicked out of the room, a way of exposing their problematic views and keeping a seat at the table.

My evangelical friends used it to justify their access to my life, even when they had lost complete respect for the way I was living it.

I don’t agree with you, no big deal. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. We don’t agree, that’s all. Let’s just agree to disagree.

By presenting it as mere matter of disagreement, it minimizes the offense of their viewpoint. It makes people feel like they have to put up with it—even if the viewpoint is, ultimately, dehumanizing.

I don’t know who used the tactic first—evangelicals or Republicans—but this minimization of dehumanization on the basis of opinion is currently running rampant as our government falls further into the hands of fundamentalists. It’s used by the Republican party every time Donald Trump tweets, every time another mass shooting (or two) is announced on news outlets.

It’s not racism. It’s just politics. Why can’t we all just agree to disagree?

Thoughts and prayers to the victims of this senseless, unexplainable act that’s root cause is highly debatable.

Fundamentalism thrives through confusion and minimization. It wants us to believe that the most obvious infractions are all a dubious matter of opinion, because then it can take our rights way without us even knowing it.

Trust me, I know. The evangelical movement told me that my rights belonged to Jesus, and now I know that their opinion is bent on stripping this country of autonomy.

 *

I left my evangelical friends behind because of the way they talked about “agreeing” with my life. I stopped wanting to make room for people who saw me as less than and tried to equate their debasing views with a difference in ice cream preference.

I didn’t want to fight to have my life be seen as legitimate by the people I was spending it with.

And in the future, if I hear another evangelical tell me that they don’t agree with my lifestyle, I’d like to tell them to save their disagreements for preferences in cookie flavors and condiments. I’d like to tell them to cut the shit and say what they really mean, because the words coming out of their mouths are not as innocuous as an opinion. They’re the building blocks of a theocratic dictatorship.

There is nothing to agree about when it comes to someone’s identity. Never was, never will be. Contrary to evangelical beliefs, it’s not for them to decide.

For fuck's sake, let's not platform Joshua Harris over this

I’d like to talk about something that’s genuinely concerning me.

I’ve been seeing some generous takes on this here internet about how happy people are for Joshua Harris, the once evangelical poster child of purity culture/fundamentalist relationships, for getting free of evangelicalism and having the courage to publicly announce his apostasy.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I love seeing the world of evangelicalism lose a member of its theocratic, totalitarian regime just as much as the next person. And I respect the fact that some of you have chosen to offer this person well-wishes after he wrote a book and promoted a culture that caused you immense harm.

This post is not a skewering of your decision to find some semblance of forgiveness.

It’s a skewering of someone who I think is rebranding and will continue to try and control a conversation that he has no business controlling.

(P.S. For those of you who are lucky enough to have no idea who Joshua Harris is, this Wikipedia article on I Kissed Dating Goodbye gives somewhat of an overview.)

*

In 1997, with the publication of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Joshua Harris was handed one of the most powerful platforms any man in western evangelicalism can be given, complete with metaphorical crown and cape. In that moment, he was not only riding off privilege that the evangelical church automatically bestows upon men, the privilege that says only men can be pastors and, in marriage, pronounces every man “the spiritual head of his wife.” He had, somehow, managed to gain all that and even more—a place amongst the elite of the elite, his voice ordained one of unfettered, theological reason.

For the next 22 years, the ears of evangelical Christianity belonged to him and a select few men of his ilk, and those ears were numerous and powerful in their numbers.

This guy has been a highly influential ministry celebrity. And like all of those guys, he has been poisonous as fuck.

Fast forward 22 years, to the past couple of weeks—when Harris began hinting at his deconstruction. In a recent interview with Sojourners, he pontificates:

“I think that one of the mistakes of people like me who have come out [of] a very conservative, legalistic environment is [they can] just adopt a new legalism in a completely different way, and be very dismissive and critical of people who are still in that way of thinking.”

 He also speaks about starting a podcast:

“And I just I really have this desire to honor different stories. …There are going to be people that want to continue to embrace different aspects of purity culture, and they should have the freedom to have that option.”

What strikes me about all of this is that Harris is still telling people what the right way to do things is—still pastoring, in a sense, albeit towards an entirely different target audience. He’s telling us what our “mistakes” are in deconstruction, how those of us who adopt a zero-tolerance policy towards the teachings of purity culture are merely adopting “a new legalism.”

There is still a governance in his perspective, still an assertion that his experience is the most valid. If he’s going to leave evangelicalism, he is going to be the best at it. He’s going to do it in the most pure, correct way. He will write the book on it, and we will all buy that book. We will bring it into our homes and teach our children how to live their non-fundamentalist lives from it.

That’s what Joshua Harris is used to. He’s used to being an authority. He’s gotten a lot of criticism, but surely not enough to realize that he is not the most vital voice in the room—that his perspective is not the most important, nor the most interesting.

See this thread from Elizabeth Esther for a firsthand account of Harris’ compulsive self-centerization.

I say all this knowing that we are talking about a person who was taken advantage of by the evangelical church at a very young age. The zeal that was bred into him was used for its explicit purposes, and in many ways, Harris was a victim and a perpetrator. He was both at the same time.

That doesn’t mean that he gets to brand himself as the new face of deconstruction. That doesn’t mean that he gets to have a guiding voice in this conversation. That doesn’t mean that he gets to tell people how to deconstruct, continuing to position himself as a thought leader in the most personal aspects of how people live their lives.

I’m tepidly glad that he’s begun to say “I’m sorry”, and that he’s offered an Instagram apology for his non-affirming practices/statements towards the LGBTQ+ community. But let’s be honest—he hasn’t said nearly enough—least of all, about his role in the Sovereign Grace Ministries child sex abuse scandal.

As many have said before me, he’s done the literal bare minimum. And us accepting the bare minimum from him/carrying him on our shoulders is feeding into the privilege that the church, and the world, has always given him.

It’s ok to be happy that he’s begun to acknowledge and apologize for the harm he’s caused.

But it’s not ok to keep giving him a microphone. In my opinion, he shouldn’t get one ever again—no matter how many myriad horrors he apologizes for.

It’s time to start hearing from people who are not him. And please, for the love of Barbara, let those voices be truly intersectional.

*

Here’s my ultimate point. I don’t care that Joshua Harris isn’t a Christian anymore for two major reasons:

(1)  There is a WHOLE WORLD of toxic thinking that this guy has to deconstruct—the least of it being that his ideas aren’t the most brilliant and he should probably lay off the book writing/public speaking forever.

(2) I am WAY MORE INTERESTED in reading stories about why LGBTQ+ people and/or people of color and/or women left the church. I want to hear about what sparked those deconstructions, learn the roads they went down, get a glimpse into the lives they were able to build for themselves.

And I want to hear those stories on their own forums. I don’t want to be accessing them through the lens of a Joshua Harris podcast. I want to see the media put Joshua Harris down and pick those people up.

I’m just not interested in why a man who clearly can’t stop relishing in privilege left evangelicalism, all while holding on to the most dangerous thing the movement gave him: his own dominance.

I spent 7 years in the evangelical church revolving my life and needs and perspective around the whims of men like Joshua Harris.

I’m ready to start focusing on how the rest of us survived.

Washing Away the Brainwashing

Somewhere within my first year after leaving evangelicalism, I purchased my first psychic reading.

It happened in the great state of Minnesota, where I was visiting a friend for the weekend. We went to a store she had been telling me about for years—a place where potions and teas and authentic-looking cauldrons were sold. A witch store.

Of course, as an evangelical, I wouldn’t have stepped foot in one of these places, lest my soul be attacked by Satan himself and I fall victim to demon curses in the spiritual realm.

But I didn’t believe that bullshit anymore. Oh, how good it felt to be free from worrying about the spiritual realm! I perused the witch store and considered buying an assortment of tiny bowls, and then I saw a sign.

Readings. $20.

What did I have to lose?

I found a sales associate who wore a shirt with a giant, smoky moon on the front, the profile of a wolf howling up through the moon’s center. He had bushy brown hair and I immediately nicknamed him “Howling Wolf Shirt Man” in my mind before asking him where I could get myself a supernatural reading.

“Right here!” he said, and I realized that he was the reader in this establishment—the one I would be entrusting my first contact with the beyond to.

I paid the $20 up front and sat down, feeling naughty as hell. Look at me, dabbling in Ouija-board-like land! If only my pastors could see me now. They would be, to my satisfaction, horrified and disappointed.

Howling Wolf Shirt Man pulled out a deck of cards and shuffled them, asking me to cut before revealing anything to “introduce yourself to them.” I did so, and he put the deck back together, putting cards face up between us as he stroked the stubble on his chin. He muttered things about my life’s purpose.

Then, he pulled out a card with something that looked like a shelter on the front.

“This is interesting,” he said. “Your name is Beth, right?”

“Yes,” I said, preparing for the most interesting thing I had ever heard.

“This is the house card, and Beth means house in Latin, and getting this card means that none of your dreams in life will come true!”

My face must have dropped, because he suddenly offered a caveat.

“But you’ll be okay with that. You’ll be at peace with things not working out.”

I walked out of the store and had a quiet meltdown, my first since leaving the god of evangelicalism, since choosing not to believe anymore. I had dreams, big dreams—to write a book one day and publish it. To find a partner, have a child. To discover what happiness looked like for me, and then live in it.

Was this god telling me that he would never allow that to happen? Was this him following me, stalking me, making sure that I’d never find meaning? Was this him, that jealous asshole, trying to say Come back. You’re no good to the world without me. You have no real talent, no chance of success, unless you believe in me—unless you live your life the way I tell you to.

I realized that I wasn’t as done worrying about the spiritual realm as I thought.

 *

My evangelical friends said a lot of things to me when I left the movement, and I hated every second of those conversations—the manipulative jargon they were regurgitating from the sermons we once listened to together.

But the worst thing anyone said to me, beyond the “I’m worried about you!” concern trope, was when a friend sat calmly at a bar over drinks and relayed the words, “I know you’re okay. I know that God won’t let you go. I know that he still has you in his salvation.”

I know that God won’t let you go. I felt trapped. I could run, but I couldn’t hide. This god was never going to go away.

Since then, I have lived 99.9% of my life sure that I made the right decision by leaving, that this god isn’t real and if he is well he can fuck right off. I have no interest in living my existence underneath the thumb of a cosmic dictator. Hell is so preferable it’s hilarious. The sheer ridiculousness of this god character is enough to believe he isn’t real.

But there are other times, a 0.1% margin, where I’m frightened. Is he real? Am I trapped? Was Howling Wolf Shirt Man right and god will turn all my dreams into dust?

It’s a monkey on my back, this fear that perhaps I’m still being followed. It’s an after effect of brainwashing, and I’m still trying to wash what happened away.

There are moments of strange hope when I see the evangelical illusion crumbling in front of me—when an evangelical pastor who’s preached the worst things falls from grace (re: Mark Driscoll, Bill Hybels.) There are ironies that speak to the falsehoods of damaging things I was taught, like Joshua Harris—a prominent, powerful voice who wreaked havoc with his purity culture teachings—announcing a separation from his wife this week, divorce being something he demonized in the movement.

I think that many ex-evangelicals latched on to the Joshua Harris news because it felt like a complicated form of vindication, like a reprieve from that brainwashing fear monkey on all of our backs. He was wrong about relationships. He was wrong about life.

It’s not real, it’s not real. This is more proof that it’s not real.

To live with an ex-evangelical mind is to encounter flashbacks of feelings, to continuously confront a person you used to be. It’s examining that person from all angles so you can begin to understand yourself, who you’d be without all that brainwashing—who you can be now that you’re free.

I’m beginning to understand that part of being free is dealing with the ways I still feel trapped. I still remember part of the last thing Howling Wolf Shirt Man said to me, after my face dropped and he had to somehow save my enthusiasm for his reading.

“You’ll be at peace.”

I’m picking and choosing what I want to believe from now on.

When I was called a prophet

As a child, I was sure that I had some degree of magical powers. There was no way that if I didn’t try extra hard, I wouldn’t be able to fly off the couch. I stood on the cushions over and over, flapped my arms over and over, landed on the ground and got back up and tried to launch myself into the air again.

Hm. Didn’t work. Perhaps I was a Care Bear. I ran around the kitchen and attempted to burst rainbows out of my stomach. When that didn’t happen, when not even clouds came forth from my tired little abs, I thought I’M ON THE WRONG PATH. I’M PROBABLY RELATED TO SOMEONE SPECIAL.

Ah yes, I forgot! I was the great granddaughter of Dracula. I asked my mother to buy me a black dress with an over-sized collar for Halloween. I got the black dress, no collar—"I don’t even know how to find that,” she said—and I put it on and sat in front of the television and tried to channel my young inner vampire.

No matter what I did, I couldn’t make myself want to actually drink human blood.

Alas, I was at a loss leading into my teenaged years. I dug far into my own mind and tried to figure out what was special about me. I could sing! I liked to sing. I got cast in all the school plays. I liked to write, even penned a 200-page novel about a kangaroo who could shoot lasers out of his paws. I went to college and wondered Will anyone see that I’m special? Will anyone be able to tell me who I am, why I’m here, what I’m supposed to do on this planet?

And then, I found evangelical Christianity, and it was as if all the answers I sought had been with them all along.

First of all, I was BORN SPECIAL, they said. I was a daughter of the almighty, omnipotent King of Heaven and earth. My lineage was royal, the blood of my spirit sacred, and God had a purpose for my life that was far better than what I could want for myself. The future wasn’t bleak, like I existentially feared it was! It was bursting with hope and wonder and a richness of life I couldn’t predict, much less imagine.

But on top of it all, I had an amazing gift—one that revealed itself in the Bible’s greatest stories. It involved a supernatural communion with God, the closest thing to magic the evangelical movement would admit to.

It was first identified by my friend, Leslie. I stood behind her at church one day and had an overwhelming feeling of love towards her during the sermon. I focused on her left shoulder—was there something sitting there? She breathed and I saw it lift, a weight in my imagination that went floating into the air.

I told her after the service about this weird thing I saw in my head. She said that she had been experiencing pain in that shoulder, and it was alleviated during the sermon. Whoah, that’s strange I thought, and she said “I think you have a prophetic gift.” The child I had been swelled within me. HOLY SHIT I WAS MAGICAL AFTER ALL.

We marched over to our pastor. CAN WE PLEASE GET THIS VALIDATED? He told us that we needed to start out by praying, which we did. He then asked me if I ever had other experiences like this. “A comforting voice writes through my hand in my journals sometimes,” I said. “I’ve always wondered if that’s God.”

He asked me if it ever wrote things that could be “refuted by the Bible.” I didn’t think so, I told him. It was usually stuff about how I was loved, and would get through whatever sadness I was feeling at the time.

“You do have a prophetic gift,” he said. “It just needs to be nurtured.”

I cannot even begin to tell you how goddamn validating this felt. I felt special, powerful, created for meaning beyond the reach of Dracula’s daughter. After searching all my life for purpose, I thought I had found it in this movement, with this God who loved me and created me to do his will on earth.

But for whatever agency I was given, whatever power that was real or imaginary, far more was taken—and over time, I realized that. I traded my ability to lead for this purpose, being told that, as a woman, I could never be a pastor. I traded self-expression for this purpose, not being able to write a story or paint a picture unless it was centered on God, unless it had the ultimate goal of leading people to him. I traded the ability to make decisions for myself, to try out for a play or continue my education or move back in with my parents if I wanted.

It wasn’t my choice, it was God’s. Everything had to be vetted through the Bible, and the ultimate authority on the Bible was the churches I went to, the entire evangelical movement.  

I had no power, not really. I was just told I was to keep me busy.

As I went to graduate school and evangelized to my friends, I began to see that there was purpose and power in being normal—that the most formidable thing you could be, in some ways, was just like everyone else. Being special was depressing me, depleting me of human experience. I had been missing out on so many normal things, like decisions and dates and sex, drunken nights and mistakes and the ability to learn.

I wanted to stop predicting and start living, stop journaling the comforts of God and admit that I could comfort myself.

I wanted to be messy. I wanted to see what it was like to fall. I dipped my toes in the water, and the feeling was clear. I could wade in as far as I wanted.

If you’re reading this, I hope today that you can celebrate the beauty of being normal, of being a schlub like the rest of us—indistinguishable from the crowd. I hope you can find peace in walking down the narrow streets of a city, completely obscured by buildings, no pressure to be seen for the purpose of saving others. I hope you can feel the joy of being in the nosebleed seats of life, of coming and going as you please—as you please, the key words.

I hope that your life is on your terms.

I'm God's Ex-Girlfriend

It’s really hard explaining what it’s like to leave evangelical Christianity to people who have never experienced it.

The best analogy I have: it’s like a break up.

I say this because of the way faith was framed in the movement. I was told that I wasn’t promoting a religion—I was in a relationship with Jesus Christ. I was pushed to cultivate that relationship, to feed it every morning with devotional time, to silently pray through each moment of my day until I fell asleep at night. This relationship, I was told, would make me rich inside. It would make me happier than any secular person. If I gave myself fully to Jesus, if I loved him so much that I practically turned into him, I would fulfill God’s destiny for my life.

If I handed my autonomy over to this version of God, I would self-actualize.

It’s such smart framing for a cult that wants to keep its members complacently spinning in circles. The more personal you make things, the more difficult it will be for people to detach themselves. Tell them they’re married to Jesus! Tell them they can only hear his real voice through the Bible! Then decree yourself the ultimate authority on what the Bible is actually saying.

I fell in love with this version of God, but I realize now that what I really fell for were the people who created him. The evangelical church’s interpretations, dominated by white male pastors, created the outline for this God, and they were the only ones allowed to color him in. It was a loving God, they said, who was just and kind and merciful. He was also jealous and self-righteous—slow to anger, but nevertheless, capable of it.

And with that, they laid the groundwork for an abusive relationship.

The whole experience was just as cyclical as the classic model. God entered, told me he loved me, we had a great time in moments of prayer, then BOOM, I get the desire to be a pastor. Nope, sorry, you can’t be one God says, you’re a woman, I say no. Slapped back down, shamed for my gender, God says he loves me again and we’re back to square one. We’re happy, happy, strolling along, eating scriptural ice cream, then I get a crush on a guy and want to ask him out. NO WAY, God says, you can’t do that. The role of pursuit belongs to men, you’re paralyzed because you’re a woman, sorry. Just focus on how much you love me.

I have crush on a non-believer. I kiss a non-believer.

GOD IS JEALOUS JEALOUS JEALOUS. ANGER. FIRE. SADNESS. WEEPING. WRATH.

But he loves me. He loves me. I can’t make my own choices because he loves me.

Let me be clear: God was controlling as fuck, and when I dumped that asshole, he did not leave easily. The evangelical church was right there with the interpretations, my brothers and sisters in Christ presenting me with lines they had been given by our pastors. You’re talking a lot about doctrine, but what about Jesus? Have you been worshipping the real, living him? I just want to be sure God’s in the driver’s seat of your life.

NO MOTHERFUCKERS. I’m taking back control of the wheel! This God had left me in such a cloudy haze of depression and he wasn’t even turning the goddamn defroster on. I needed to do the responsible thing and drive my own car, right out of his shitty cloud castle and, for the first time in a long time, into a land of my own making.

Being an ex of the evangelical god is, in a lot of ways, one of the most complicated things a person can be. It involves ending a relationship with a literal puppet spirit who is actually a conglomeration of a bunch of sexist cis white men who want to ideologically control you and, ultimately, the world. It’s being the ex of a line of thinking, one that is bent on robbing you of your identity. It’s losing your identity, and then having to find it again, right back at square one.

It’s brave. Breaking up with this God is so very brave.

I have come to see myself on the other end of this as a survivor of a spiritually abusive relationship. I’ll probably deal with the trauma and pain of what happened my whole life, but being able to talk about it the way I did at the very beginning—as a relationship—has been strangely validating.

Maybe it’s because the word relationship is the only word that can get across the impact it had on me, the time it took away. I have spent so much time feeling like I lost a part of my life to this God.

I still feel that way. I’d like those years back, but I’m figuring out what it means now to live without them.