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.