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.
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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.
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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.