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.

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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.