Ex Church - Tumblr Posts
It has consumed so much of our time and attention and energy. The processing is good and necessary, but the freedom, no longer directing our attention and energy to it…that is something really wonderful 🖤✨
I was going to use this blog to vent my exvangelical frustrations, but I find myself dwelling on it less and less.
I’ve been giving my brain the space to enjoy this life I now lead without the expectations, shame, and guilt that came with my religious past.
Oh I will still definitely have my moments because I’m still mad. It’s just not a daily feeling any more and I love that for me. 🥰
Welcome to my scrupulosity
Where god can do whatever he wants and to pray against any of it is to reject the will of god which is a sin and is selfish which is a sin and is fearful which is also a sin and is prideful to think I could ever have anything other than whatever god decides for me whatever that is and that’s also a sin and so much sin in infinite layers and unknown hidden corners of my heart and mind that even I don’t know and only the spirit of god knows so I must continually pray to expose every facet of my divide deceitful heart so that I can see my sin which god is waiting for me to be willing to see and I’m never willing enough which is also a sin
But oh my god aren’t I so spiritual, so holy, so earnest, always in prayer, gifted with discernment and words of wisdom and words of knowledge and prophecy and what’s that? I should be leading and teaching and speaking and shepherding others
Hey-o religious trauma is real and Christianity reinforces trauma and rewards your coping mechanisms which perpetuates the trauma.
Do you know how you cope with the cognitive dissonance of believing a good god can kill you at any time in any way because you deserve it and it’s his will and would be loving? You disappear. You “die to yourself”, aka dissociate. You cease to exist except in an animated body rehearsing the speech and behavior of theological dogma.
In actuality, your morals are the choices you make based on your values, derived from your ethics. If you lose your belief in god and decide human catastrophe and suffering is funny and something to be celebrated, that’s a you problem and even with a practicing belief in god, you will gravitate toward theology that still reflects those values, as the artist did.
We don’t have to think this way or see things that way. We don’t have to believe that humans are irreparably flawed For Some Reason. We can select different beliefs based on different criteria we choose to highlight and emphasize, and live accordingly.
ok i had to go read minna sundberg's christian coming-to-faith comic and this is literally a flaming trainwreck. like i don't think there's been a single scene so far where i wasn't like ''okay this is literally insane i think you need therapy"
The Christian conditioning to “pray and wait on God’s will” fucked up my life. Decades of choices, plans, skill building, wealth building, lost and unrecoverable, sacrificed to god and the church.
The years that the locusts ate were my good, young life poisoned by scrupulosity, the locusts were the high-control rules and conditions the church wielded to eat up my life.
There are three rules:
1. If you do not go after what you want, you will never have it.
2. If you do not ask, the answer will always be no.
3. If you do not step forward, you will remain in the same place.
Unrelated to world building but encapsulating all the above, the very concept of religion—what most people typically conceptualize when they think of this word (won’t say all bc I don’t exist in anyone’s head but my own, but this concept of “religion” is pervasive globally due in large part to Christian missionary activity)—
is a conservative, Victorian, white, academic framework, and when we use the term “religion” to discuss any spiritual practice or experience, we are casting that framework and colonizing unique cultural perspectives and experiences with white Victorian academic principles in order to discuss it. This was done specifically to be able to analyze different beliefs, practices, rituals, experiences, and meanings, on those terms and as such, is a domineering and oppressive way to discuss spirituality, belief, and frameworks of reality outside of white Victorian academic principles.
@learnedfoote on X generously shares and discusses his research on this.
the thing folks living in Christian dominant cultures gotta realize is that even if you’re not Christian, your basic understanding of religion and spirituality and morality is still being filtered through a Christian lens. your very concept of what religion is and does is filtered through that lens.
“Reality has a well-known liberal bias”
—Stephen Colbert, White House Correspondents Dinner, 2006
I’ve written a good bit about this on here and on Twitter X,
the way that authoritarian ideology, specifically salvific ideology (that is, ideology that purports humans must be saved by some external means due to some internal fault), teaches that you must separate True self (“capital T!”) from your humanity.
C. S. Lewis famously wrote, “you don’t have a soul. You are a soul, you have a body.” This emphasis on the soul and the diminishing of the physical has legitimate psychological consequences, especially when pushed through a values system that determines whether or not you are pure enough to receive not just god’s love, but his attention, his favor, his protection in your health and safety, and every possible aspect of your conscious life and your eternal retirement.
Gnosticism asserts that your body—any tangible human identity and experience—is corrupted, and only the soul can be purified. Evangelicalism insists that it is not gnostic, that Gnosticism is a heresy, but it continues to teach this existential division. One scripture speaks of the Holy Spirit acting as a sword that separates even the spirit from the soul, and this is taken up in further teachings about divisible consciousness: your flesh, your soul, and your spirit. How the hell does this work? They teach you are a spirit, who has a soul (a self, your feelings and personality) that lives in a body, and the spirit is what ascends and is perfected and made whole at the end of all things. Even factions that believe you get a physical eternity teach that your current body is either renewed, made new, or you get a new body entirely.
Your current self (the only one you have ever known and as far as you are capable, can ever know) is an offense to god, one he graciously tolerates until some time which only he has determined to make all things perfect. You are stuck.
How is any human being supposed to address this and live accordingly? Especially really serious believers who really care about getting it right to demonstrate how much they love and trust god?
The teachings get overly complex from there, trying to substantiate themselves with esoteric phrases and hidden wisdom, but the application is what remains consistent: your current conscious and physical self is corruptible, has already been corrupted, and who you are must be saved and sanctified, and even that is not enough because there is still yet another stage when “the kingdom comes in its fullness” and it’s finally complete with a Brand New Self that is not corrupted like you are now.
There are different interpretations of what that existence will be like. But for the earnest and intensely faithful of us, what else can we do now but “die to ourselves”? We become shells of people, an entity occupying a body, trying in every way to allow ourselves to be taken over by god himself, to be a conduit for his will to all humanity that we encounter. Our desires and preferences are selfish and sinful, or conversely they have been transposed with the will of god.
Often times we merry-go-round or see-saw between these extreme ends, in a desperate attempt to be So Pleasing To The Lord, and in the process we either reject any intrinsic sense of self, or we outsource it to the divine. It is so profoundly confusing to live this way, and the easiest way to make sense of it is to decide that you are nothing, and nothing you want matters.
For a time, I was asked to be a youth pastor at my small church. This was something I never wanted to do. I felt so uncomfortable, so unqualified, not at all gifted, and very unsupported materially and relationally. And because of that, I wondered and eventually “trusted” that this must the will of god because he wanted to purge me, he wanted to force me into submission and to force me to trust him because I couldn’t do it without him, and this was his good gift and perfect love. After all, the bible teaches that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope. If this is what god will do, through my suffering and struggle, why would I pray against that, ask god to change that? I stop existing, my fears, discomfort, and desires do not matter, and I only need to die to myself, give up every concern and hesitation because God’s love is poured into my heart.
The worst part of all this is that if you grew up in an abusive home, your survival mechanism of dissociation is not only reinforced in an authoritarian religious community, but it is rewarded—you’re so faithful! You have such a beautiful spirit! You’re such a servant! You are an example to the rest of the body of Christ!
The abuse-survival mechanism-reward dynamic can be extremely difficult to untangle. Who are you? If you grew up in this, there is likely never a time where you truly felt like you knew yourself, that you mattered, that your interests, preferences, and needs—all the things that make you human and shape your unique personality/self—were valid. How do you heal from this if you don’t know what you want or who you are because it was a deadly, existential threat to even think about?
It is possible, it is. Sending and extending courage to all those recovering from chronic, spiritualised dissociation.
Who wants to talk about borderline alterhuman identity acquired through cult socialization and separation of the self from human identity at an early age