I’ve talked about religion and my faith a couple of times on my blog, though it’s been a while. My last post on the subject was early 2018, and a lot has changed since then. The last ten years have been a whirlwind of struggle and doubt in the faith aspect of my life, and I’m sure there’ll be more to come.
Right now, I’m at an odd place in my spiritual growth. I’ve spent ten years questioning everything I was taught to believe, and I’ve barely started reconstructing what I’ve come to believe for myself. And since this is where I am, I thought I’d reflect on where I started, how I got here, and where I go next.
Living in Darkness
I was born and raised in a Christian family. Though my relatives mostly identify as politically moderate and we attended a non-denominational church, I attended privately owned Christian-Reformed schools, my church was evangelical by nature, and my parents raised me on Christian radio programs from Focus on the Family.
Middle school brought me to the lowest point of my personal life. My best friend moved away, I began having suicidal thoughts, and I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. My self-esteem plummeted more and more every day, and my self-loathing grew stronger and stronger. I reached a point where I believed that God hated me for bad things I did and the only way I could change this was by becoming the Perfect Christian. This meant pleasing people, embracing purity culture, not speaking for myself, and going to youth group in addition to Sunday church services.
Unfortunately, youth group only made my problems worse. I won’t go into the details here, but my small group was a high school clique at best and spiritually abusive at worst. Though I have no reason to believe that the youth pastor overseeing all the small groups was a bad person, I also have no reason to think he would’ve believed anything was wrong if anyone spoke up. On the whole, these four years of my life did not teach me how to love like Jesus loved.
Then I started college and was finally free from my old church. In this time, I considered agnosticism. I watched the behavior of other Christians harshly judging others for their sexuality, their life choices, even their lack of belief in God. This completely contradicted everything I thought Christians were supposed to be, and I thought, “if a Christian is supposed to think about others as lesser beings, then maybe I don’t want to be a Christian anymore.” Ultimately, I decided to remain a Christian after my trip to Mississippi, and began a journey of finding another community of followers.
The Post-Abuse Search
Since graduating high school ten years ago, there were only three churches I’ve attempted to attend regularly, and I ended my time at each of them for various reasons. There were others that I attended for special occasions (friends’ weddings and the dedications of my niece and nephew). Sometimes I didn’t go to church at all, I was either an exhausted college student or I just didn’t want to go. One thing I regret was that I didn’t try other denominations beyond evangelical or non-denominational. I figured the specific church was the problem, and it took ten years for me to realize that much of what’s wrong with American churches today are systemic issues rather than problems limited to one congregation.
The first was an evangelical/nondenominational church that my brother found in college. While nothing bad happened to me there, I always felt like it was more my brother’s church, and I needed to find a community I could call my own.
The second place was an evangelical church. I’d had friends who specifically attended these churches or were stung by them, so I wanted to know what the fuss was about. Eventually, I made friends and became reluctant to leave even when I struggled to make peace with being there. After several instances where I asked hard questions and didn’t receive satisfying answers, I finally reached a point where I could no longer continue going back there in good faith.
The third church I tried was non-denominational, and after my first two weeks there I was excited about going to church for the first time in my life. The sermons both challenged me and lifted me up. The congregation supported female leaders and advocated for the human rights of the marginalized. The pastor commented time and time again that Jesus was no friend to oppressors. And after an incident that ended with two men going out of their way to check on me after the fact, I learned that it’s okay to speak up if something doesn’t feel right.
But when the excitement faded, things started to get complicated. I found that I felt anxious when random congregants reached out to me to get me connected. Sometimes I found myself back in the mindset of having to earn God’s love. For periods of time, I’d feel so anxious about going that it was easier not to. And sometimes I felt pressure to be someone I didn’t want to be (i.e. a physically affectionate extrovert). At the end of the day, this particular church was a great place to visit but I don’t think it was one for me to live in.
Something else that came up during this time was that I found a therapy group for people who had been stung by church in some way. Among the many things I learned there, I found out that church is defined less as a physical building and more as an assembly of believers. And though finding an assembly of believers is a key part of exercising faith, no one is less of a person for not attending church regularly. God’s presence is everywhere, so why limit your time with him to one hour in a building every week?
Moving Forward
Writing this blog post made me reflect on my experience with spiritual abuse. And through these reflections, I realized how my experience informs my interactions with other Christians to this day. My complicated relationship with my youth group leaders made me distrustful of religious figures who decide to get involved with my spiritual life. I criticize fundamentalists for being so judgmental and hypocritical, and yet my gut instinct is to dehumanize them in the exact same way. I get excited about how to develop a spiritual life on my own, but the thought of joining a Christian community terrifies me.
Being in quarantine for two months has given me a lot of time to think about my faith and the future of my spiritual growth. How do I practice? Can I be part of a Christian community if the very idea gives me anxiety? Now that I know what happened to me was spiritual abuse, where do I go from here? Reconstructing my worldview is going to be a lifelong process, and chances are I still won’t have everything figured out by the time I die.
What I do know is that I want to keep learning and growing. I want to let go of my fears so that I can live more fully. I want to cast out the shame that I was convinced I was supposed to live with. I want to find the truth for myself and not be afraid of what I might find. And I want to cultivate a spirit of love and wisdom.