Ex Evangelical - Tumblr Posts
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GET KOSA TRENDING.
STOP SCROLLING NOW!
AS OF FEBRUARY 21ST, 2024, WE GOT FIVE DAYS UNTIL THE DAY OF DECISION OF THE KOSA BILL, WHICH WILL CAUSE MASS CENSORSHIP ROUND THE INTERNET IF PASSED. OR DOOMSDAY. WE NEED EVERYONE TO KNOW ABOUT THIS AND CONTRIBUTE. I'M NOT GIVING UP ON YOU ALL.
WE'RE DOWN TO THE WIRE BUT WE CAN'T GIVE UP YET. IF WE GIVE UP, EVERYTHING IS OVER. IF WE DON'T, AT LEAST WE HAVE A CHANCE.
I'M THE ONE WHO SOUNDED THE ALARM, AND I'M NOT GOING TO CURL UP AND DIE YET.
Reblog this post in every LEGAL way you can under the Tumblr guidelines with the appropriate tags. TELL AND TAG EVERYONE YOU KNOW, then add the tags to see below... and more if you can think of any complying.
Visit badinternetbills.com if you want to find a way to defeat KOSA. It WILL NOT take much of your time. Reblog with any other information or sources, too-- but make sure to reblog if you can.
Reblog if you support lgbtq+ content.
Reblog if you support questioning queer youth and/or abused youth getting the information they need.
Reblog if you support Ao3 and/or other sites that wholeheartedly preserve talentedly made media.
Reblog if you're going to repost this on other sites than Tumblr and spread the word across Twitter, Tik Tok, Pinterest, or elsewhere, alongside the link to badinternetbills.com.
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Hey, everyone. So yeah, this is happening. We're still fighting this battle. And we can't give up now. We can't. We can't stand idly by while one of the most important resources that helped us all wake up, or at least start to question things, is being threatened by the government.
We can't stand idly by when kids, teens, and adults just like us still trapped inside might lose access to the resource that could help them wake up. We can't stand idly by when they might lose access to their non JW friends and family. We CAN'T stand idly by when we can do something to stop this bill from passing.
I am sick and tired of this same old song, where conservative fuckers higher up think they can oppress everyone. I am FUCKING SICK of it.
Please, reblog both this post and the original post linked above what I've written, and do what you can to stop KOSA, please. We are running out of time.
I suggest that if it is within your power to do so, that you do more than simply reblog and assume someone else will do something. DON'T assume that. Please do more than just reblogging if you are able to, because that's not really enough at this point.
Call/email representatives in the House and tell them to oppose KOSA (you may want to list different reasons depending on who you're calling, some House representatives are anti-LGBTQ+, so it may be best to tell them to oppose because it violates people's privacy, safety, and anonymity online). Print posters and put them up where legal if you can.
Sharing all this information to other social media sites (Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, the bird app) to reach more people can really help too. The wider the reach, the better.
Thank you. Now let's fucking rip that bill apart like we rip apart Watchtower magazines and eat it for fucking breakfast. (In a "we're eating it and the politicians who are sponsoring it are looking on in horror" kind of way)
Scrupulosity nearly killed me—the belief that my inner world was being constantly surveilled by god, and that every emotion and thought was a potential sin if there was even a hint of it not being worship, not being complete dissociative submission, the thought or feeling wasn’t pure,
Christianity not only exacerbated childhood trauma but then rewarded my reaction to it: die to self, be a nothing who only exists to be a conduit for god, which requires constant inner prayer, endlessly asking god to search my heart and reveal any sin, to forgive me for things I didn’t yet know but he surely did, to forgive me for needing to be patient with me.
And wow did that kind of inward examination and devotion to prayer skyrocket me into leadership—“you’re so faithful, you are so in tune with god, you are such an example.”
I nearly literally died because I refused to take care of myself, in fear that going to a therapist or a doctor was not trusting that god was capable, or that God’s will was to not heal me and I was going against that—
the cycle of not trusting feelings and thoughts, or my own body, never knowing if this was god testing me to build character, to build perseverance, to develop hope…isn’t that godly? Isn’t that holy? Isn’t that sanctification? Why would I ever pray against god doing that in me by asking for healing? Why would I ever reject his will for me to experience those things by going to a doctor?
“Wow, you have such tremendous faith!”
I truly think the bible has many harmful/unhealthy teachings. People will try to deflect and say only when it’s twisted by abusive people or taught “wrong.” But no, I think it has harmful teachings at its very core. As an example:
When certain emotions are labeled as bad/evil/a flaw or something you just “shouldn’t do” it prevents many people from being able to process emotions healthily. See Ecc 7:9, Ecc 11:10, Col 3:8, Phil 4:6, James 3:16 as a few examples. I went through my life as a christian never really fully processing anything, and I was so emotionally unhealthy. Instead of viewing emotions as neutral signals from my body and sitting with them and letting them move through my body, I would read the thought terminating cliches of “don’t be anxious give it to god” or pray about it and continue to be disconnected from my body. I would feel shame when experiencing normal feelings of jealousy, anger, anxiety and feel like I was spiritually failing. That shame would cause me to continue to suppress those feelings instead of hearing and processing them, and it could cause it to come out in dysfunctional ways. And I see this in hundreds of people who are Christians in my life.
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
Project “31 interviews in 40 days” complete! Thank you to everyone who has contributed to my master’s thesis project on identity development of ex-Christians; the interviewing process has been so life-affirming and hearing the stories of people in the ex-Christian community has reminded me over and over again why research in this area is so important.
I’ve reached recruitment capacity for this project, but I will undoubtedly be doing additional work on the topic of religious exit in the future. If you’d like me to reach out for a future project or if you’d like a copy of my master’s thesis when it is complete, please feel free to send me a message!
AAAAAAAAHHHH
YA BOY IS A PUBLISHED ACADEMIC IN SOCIOLOGY!!!!
Back in January 2021, I started writing a literature review for a class assignment that grew into something much bigger. My professor, Dr. Don Ebel, noticed my passion for the mental health of ex-Christians and encouraged me to seek publication for my literature review. Back then, I never would have thought publication in any reputable journal was possible, especially for a review article, but two conference presentations and many, many revisions later, it’s officially published as of today in Sociology Compass.
If you’re a student and/or have an institutional library access, the link below will take you right to it. If you’d like to read it but don’t have access to an academic library, please message me and I’ll happily provide a pdf copy. 🙂
(And feel free to share the link or pdf with others who might be interested!)
(P.S., for those who interviewed with me this summer, this is a completely separate project from that one, i.e., my thesis, which is still in the analysis stage.)
https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/soc4.13030
Quote from Susan Cottrell on the difference between what we believe and Jesus' call to love.
Quote from Albert Einstein.
After growing up evangelical, forgiving and loving Eve feels the same to me as healing my inner child. Because I’ve been called a sinner all my life. I’ve been manipulated and tricked. Eve is me, I’m just like her, we are the same. How was she supposed to understand God’s instruction if she had no knowledge of evil and no concept of death? Why is someone as inexperienced as her judged so harshly? Why not put responsibility on the omniscient god who made her imperfect, made the poison look exactly like the good fruit she eats every day, told her something she couldn’t understand, and then put the poison right in front of her unattended? When I accept that Eve is a victim, I accept that I have been too. We aren’t bad. Adults who should have protected us didn’t. She was just a girl, like me.
Why yes I do think I’m better than god. Because I’m able to process my emotions and forgive people and be empathetic towards them. God can only forgive if he tortures and murders his own son and if everyone begs for forgiveness their entire life and serves him. We are not the same.