Leaving the Foyer of the Church

When I left my faith, and the church, it was like…it was like there was still a part of me, maybe a small part, still standing in the foyer outside of the sanctuary. I heard the worship music. Through the shut doors, I could still feel those echoes of sermons.

I wanted to bridge the gap between us. Nothing had happened the way that I was told it was supposed to. I didn’t lose my faith for the reasons we said people did, and none of the supposed “sins” I was doing were like how we said they were like.

I started blogging when I was still a Christian. It was 2009 or 2010, I can’t remember anymore. I wrote with my fellow Christians in mind. When I started losing my faith, I still did—I wanted to say here I am, remember me? Can you hear me at all?

Losing your faith is a slow trickle. I stopped believing in God before I stopped believing in hell and I still believed in hell when I stopped fearing demons. I don’t know when I stopped believing that I had a “call” on my life. My writing always felt like that, like I had the skill, the clarity, the sincerity to ask my former Christians to see the world from my side. Understanding that I could never do that, that nothing I said or did, could ever make my former faith see me, listen, understand, and believe in my own sincerity, and the work and reasoning that went into the decisions I made, well, that might have been the last thing to go.

A part of me was standing in the foyer. Still carrying all the pieces of my faith, this world that had been mine for most of my life. I was the infant in the nursery, the child in Sunday School. A sheep in a church production of We Like Sheep, a member of the choir singing O Come All Ye Faithful in front of our congregation. Summer camps earnestly praying to the Lord. Home groups, as we called them (some churches call them life groups) at various church members houses, running in the backyard playing with other kids, or sitting at my mother’s feet, my Bible open, following along.

A part of me was standing in the foyer. When I’m home alone, the first thing out of my mouth is often singing The Steadfast Love of the Lord. Then it blends into Create in Me a Clean Heart, or As the Deer Panteth, these songs automatic, cut deep into my brain so solidly, they might, in my old age, be the last things I’ll ever remember.

I was the teenager with a thousand questions. We were told: it was the world who made decisions by feelings. The world who thought that thinking too hard, or too freely, was dangerous. Nothing, absolutely nothing we threw at God could deny him. Ask anything, explore anything, because, like the sun, or the ground beneath our feet, no question, no doubt, can risk denying him.

And I did. I asked everything. I was spiritually voracious. Curious, imaginative, praying. I loved the Lord, with a fierce and real love, with an excitement to whatever purpose and plan God had for me.

When I was a teenager, and young adult, my friendships were built on the foundation of Christ. The parks we hung out in, the sleepovers we had, drenched in God-talk. Oh, we were on fire. We were passionate. We wanted truth. We wanted to fill our minds and hearts with whatever was good. Whatever was righteous. I remember them. I remember how sincere we were. I remember the love we said we had. I remember. I remember.

Standing in the foyer. And the worship music, its refrain muffled, but ever present, in the background, the hushed voice of the pastor saying the final prayer nothing but a murmur. My Bible now lives on the top shelf of my bookcase. I have never gotten rid of it. It sits, the leather rotting in disuse, the pages still an archive of my highlights, my struggles, the scriptures that I lived by. Sometimes it comes down off the shelf when my girlfriend and I get the hankering again for a religious discussion, reliving what we once loved; checking scripture against our memories, and asking questions.

But the foyer I’m standing in is the one frozen in my memories. The last year I attended church was 2009. When the doors open, and the people coming pouring out, their children dashing ahead to run on the echoing tile, the laughter and hugs as old friends and new mingle, it’s the late ‘00s.

There are a great many people who would tell me that there is a clear and direct line between those Christians then and now. I understand. I’ve spent the past 10 years critical, angry, rejecting that faith. But I cannot help but feel as though, when the doors to the sanctuary opened, if I had a projector at the ready, playing out this future for them, those 2009 Christians would say what are you talking about that will never be us.

In 2016, I was furious and confused. My girlfriend was heartbroken. Maybe we were too sincere ourselves. Maybe we had been the foolish true believers, not knowing that for those around us, it was a farce. This was the very faith that had formed the foundation of our morality. When we left, we still kept the pieces of it, the ideals of life, and justice, and truth, and hope. Even when we stopped believing in that God, even when we saw our former faith as living contrary to what they said they believed, we still believed. Our eyes still shone with a love of righteousness, justice, truth. And then, it was though someone tapped on the sanctuary walls and they fell, easily, cleanly, like cardboard, revealing the cruelty underneath.

There were heartbroken Christians, too. I remember how many asked: is the Evangelical name salvageable after this? Can we say we stand for anything, argue on a foundation of morality, and be listened to and believed? If they’re still asking those questions, I would like to offer the answer now: no.

That part of me stood in the foyer for so long. Because part of me always had a healthy respect for the sacred, even if I no longer believed in it. And I’ve always held onto the idea of the spiritual human: important, and significant, a single life so special, precious, and rare. That beautiful and almost-contradiction of how numerous we all are, how short our lives, and yet, and yet, the uniqueness of everyone so stunning and worth preserving.

I can’t stand in the foyer anymore. Whatever I held onto, whatever scraps I’ve over the years that left me lingering, holding in suspension the tatter remnants of something of my childhood faith is gone. The sense that there are still good people. The sense that something is salvageable. The sense that I could ever hope to say, look at the damage Evangelicalism caused. Do you care enough, do you love enough, do you want truth and justice enough, to make this better? is all gone.

The doors that open today are not the doors that opened then. The pastors are death preaching to death. The sanctuary walls are rotting, mold and decay blooming and spreading, stained glass shattered on the floor. Their children’s feet are scratched and punctured, their hands grasp and crush the glass through bleeding palms. The worship songs are too loud to hear them crying. The laughter that rolls through the church reeks of death.

And when the doors open, they are skeletons. Their bones crumble against the tile with every step. They grin. They hate. They call their hatred their God. When I left, there were so many Christians who told me that I was rejecting a God fabricated out of the “bad” Christians, the not-really-Christians. That underneath the cruelty, there was a different God. No. This is the God I rejected. And this is the God that they run to.

That’s what’s left of that faith.

And I can’t stand in the foyer anymore.

The Optical Illusion of Gaslighting

From my zine, All the Things Abuse Steals, Issue 2

I have long wished to make the distinction between gaslighting and being gaslit. Gaslighting is what someone does, it’s identifiably abusive. But being gaslit is when it works. And when it works, when you believe it, your sense of self and the world begins to erode.

In my last abuse zine, I wrote about the ways my mother gaslit me, how she taught me to see myself always on the cusp of a break with reality. I had to reassure her that my worldview matched hers entirely, but not only that: she put the entire world’s eyes on me. If I had a doctor’s appointment, she would edit my language choices or else they might think I had (gasp) mental health problems. My internal world was shaped and formed with a thousand voices in my head, a choir directed by my mother, shadowing over me.

That, alone, I might have been able to handle. I might have been able to silence them, to reach the point where the sounds faded, where I could slough their control, recognize them as the fictional beings they were, crafted by my mother.

But what was worse is that my mother defined for me how to see the world. She spun me stories of who people are and in those stories she and my brothers were the sympathetic characters. She taught me that I could not understand either the depths of their pain, or the limitations of their choices. She snatched the word traumatized out of my mouth before I ever would have had a chance to use it. She had trauma. My brothers had trauma. I was so untouched by trauma, I could not even begin to grasp the sheer privilege I had in anything I did, in any accomplishments of mine…in any calls to be treated better.

It’s taken me this long to realize that, for someone who spends an awful lot of time worried about the depths of my own evil, it was because I was not cruel like my brothers, I was not abusive like my parents, I was something different than them, that helped spur this narrative, was part of the reason my mother tried to convince me that my supposedly trauma-free self could just not ever hope to understand why the rest of them couldn’t help being the way that they were.

The world forever remains situated around her, because I know what it looks like through that lens. There’s an optical illusion now everywhere I look, the trees or the face in the trees, the young woman or the old woman, the two sets of the same information, rapidly switching: what I know of myself versus how she taught me to see myself. What I know of the world versus what she told me that world was.

In the mockery of Evangelicalism, the way that those outside of it are enticed to gawk, to find it silly, and bafflingly humorous, we miss how it appeals to a tightly bound logic, a story of the world that holds up when measured against itself. The narrative is compelling and satisfying, and when you agree to it, its explanatory power—we are all sinful, we are fallen—answers all the questions of why humans are the way they are. Evangelicals aren’t anymore illogical than anyone who believes in the biology of gender roles, or espouses evo-psych beliefs about relationships and queerness. We tell these stories because we want the irrefutable, because the stories themselves lend to a determinism that shaves off the edges of our fear, loneliness, and responsibility.

What I mean is: my mother told me that men couldn’t help being like her husband was, like her sons were, because then she didn’t have to do anything, didn’t have to account for feelings like disappointment and disgust, or hold them accountable. When she told me that I couldn’t possibly grasp her trauma, or her son’s trauma, that was her way of making their actions sympathetic: it’s not that we both had choices, but rather that they were so hurt, they could only be that way. That I chose better wasn’t a choice, but that I was “granted” this option, by my lack of trauma.

Sometimes people will ask survivors to be kind and empathetic, to see the world through our abusers eyes, and I never know how to explain that I see that world every day. That I was born to see that world, that my job, my role as victim, was to stand in their shoes, account for their every hurt, their every experience, their every limitation and framework and experience, in order to understand exactly every single moment that brought them to the one where they hurt me.

The world in which abusers are sympathetic, in which men can’t help themselves but are simply acting out their own pain of either circumstance or testosterone, the world in which my mother was traumatized herself and only knew how to treat me abusively, that was my world.

And it stays with me. I hear it, ringing in my ears everyday. I know the logic of it. I know the stories, I know that there is a parallel path running next to me, and in it is a place where I would be swallowed alive, where my understanding of the world could be ripped out from under my feet, where my mother smiles confidently and full of comfort that she was right all along.

I always appreciated that Lundy Bancroft added a section in Why Does He Do That? about abusers and their allies, the collection of opinions that bolster both the abuser within their own community and within society at large.

But the appreciation is also filled with pain, because as I said: I was trained to see the world through my mother’s eyes. Which means: I know my father’s allies. I know how much it hurt my mother to be told that she should’ve accepted his abuse, to have been told that he was hurt, and sick himself, and she was cruel and wrong for kicking him out. I know how much it hurt her because she told me.

Can you understand how crazy-making it is? To have been hurt by the very weapons your abuser knows hurt? To see them acknowledge their own rights as a person, to take their own justice and freedom, and then use the very words, the very logic they know would destroy them, and fling it at someone else? It’s more than hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is usually two like-minded things that allow someone to justify why it’s different. Instead, it’s that at every point my mother knew how horrible, how cruel, how unfair it was that people offered my father excuses. But only for her. It was only cruel for her.

I know the things that my mother was abusive. I know that she gaslight me. I know that her excuses, and justifications were wrong, I know that my family had choices, and I know that they chose cruelty and violence. I know this.

But I know this like one knows they can walk on a perfectly transparent glass walkway thousands of stories high. I know how sturdy the structure I stand on is, I know how safe it is to transverse forward. But still: I put my foot down, and expect the plunge downward.

Precision of Christian Language

Within the Christian faith I grew up in, everything was predicated upon how you talked about your faith. There was an emphasis on precision of language because the strength of your faith was determined by the language you used. My mother judged the strength of a woman’s faith on the fact that she described herself as Christian rather than a Christian. A missing article was enough to call into question how much of a true believer she was.

The joyful Christian is a better Christian the despairing one. The Christian who knows exactly who God is, exactly what terms to use about Him, the world, themselves, and everything, is much better than the Christian with sloppy language.

There was no such thing as blowing off steam. Or saying something you didn’t quite mean, with the understanding that no one was expecting to take you literally anyway. And it also meant there was no such thing as putting things in your own words. You couldn’t say something in a different way, with different language choices or a different perspective. After all, who counts as more of a Christian, the one who says, “life sucks,” or the one who says, “God is seeing me through a season of trial”? The Christian who says “life sucks,” will be held to their flippant language, seen as someone literally saying that all of life is bad, awful, and worthless, and will be responded to as though they have blasphemed against God’s creation by declaring it bad.

But all of this means that you can’t let yourself think, because thinking requires imprecise thoughts. It requires supposing, wondering, imagining; it requires you to think errors, so that you can solve them. It requires saying something vague, and following it up with, “you know what I mean?” while you struggle to find the words. It requires exploring your own mental landscape, thinking morally “sinful” thoughts, just so you can figure out why exactly they are sinful.

But because language mattered more, because we cared more about making sure every Christian had right doctrine, then understanding ranked fairly low, and regurgitation of thought ranked higher. Better to repeat the words you knew would make other Christians look at you and think, there’s a true believer then to risk the possibility of new perspective and thought and be labeled anything from weak in the faith to false convert.

The “Probably” in the Absolute (Part 2)

I wanted to write a follow up on my previous post, because I feel like there is more I could say about it.

In that post, the reason I brought up the contradictions in the gospel accounts of the New Testament was because that was the first question that I ever had. All my life, every question, every doubt, every seeming inconsistency had already been answered for me. Before I could even comprehend asking “Why does God allowing suffering?” I already knew the answer. When you grow up within Evangelical Christianity, you can already answer every question that has ever been tossed your way.

But the only answer I had ever heard to “Why do the gospel’s differ?” was, “They don’t.” It had been a misnomer, a “gotcha” question non-believers threw at us because they didn’t know anything about our Bible.

And I believed it, because our faith didn’t require us to read large swaths of the Bible all together. You didn’t read all the gospels on the same day, and very rarely did you even read more than a few verses at a time. So the first time I ever saw someone point out that there are subtle differences between gospel accounts, I didn’t know what to do. They weren’t supposed to be there.

So I asked my mother. And her answer to me was the first time I ever had an answer that didn’t suffice. “Well, the accounts are different because different people wrote them. And you know how different people have different perspectives.”

But I had been trained, first and foremost, to disregard the idea that perspective could be truth. That two people could see things two different ways and both be right was the argument of the liberal, evil, truth-denying postmodernism plaguing our God-hating society.

And now I was being told to accept that as a satisfactory answer.

This is a fairly common response, by the way. If I google “inconsistencies in the gospels,” that’s the argument I see. Some are a little more willing to stick to their Evangelical roots and claim that it was simply that all of it is all completely true, and it’s just that different people emphasized different things that all totally happened.

But I bring all of this up to ask this question: How do they know?

How do they know that the reason for these totally not inconsistencies is because different people have different perspectives that they put in scripture? Well, they don’t. They have no scriptural backup for that belief, no real proof that theirs is divinely given knowledge.

So how do they know? Because that’s what makes their beliefs make the most sense. If the Bible is 100% inspired and infallible, and if there are scriptures that on the surface look like they contradict themselves then they just…don’t. Then the first answer I ever got was the right one. “They don’t.” Because they can’t. Because the first axiom must be true, so everything else must follow. You can’t throw out the first axiom, you can never decide that there is overwhelming evidence that contradicts it. It’s truth, so everything else in the world must be made sense of in light of that truth.

How do they know that the problem of evil is easily answered with, “God allows evil because he doesn’t want to restrict our free will”? How do they know that God’s hands are tied in this one regard, that to intervene in every moment we might wish to do harm would turn us into mindless, God-serving puppets? Well, because it’s plainly obvious that God does not stop people from committing atrocities. And, because they believe that God is a loving God, then that must be the answer. Once again, the axiom’s are unquestionable, unchangeable, so whatever answer one gives must always lead to that conclusion.

But if you think about it, of course, they don’t know that. They don’t possess these answers as any kind of real knowledge. These are the guesses. These are the “maybes” and the “probablys” that get treated as though they are as binding as “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” and yet all they are are assumptions to make all their preconceived beliefs make sense when combined.

But I could do just the same thing as well. Maybe there are inconsistencies in the gospels to test your faith, to see if you’re trust God enough to still believe in the face of them. Maybe there are inconsistencies so that you won’t rely on your own interpretation of the Bible, but rely on God himself. Maybe God stays hidden because “blessed is he who has not seen yet still believed.” Maybe God allows evil to exist so that eventually they’ll be horrified by their sins and turn to him. Maybe he allows evil to exist because he gave Satan dominion over the earth as consequences for our sin. These are all different interpretations that I carefully chose because they do not contradict the notions of God and Christianity that I was raised in, and they are just as likely as any other belief I was taught was the truth.

(Also, to drive this point home, I would like to point out that I googled “God gave Satan dominion over this earth” because that is a phrase so drilled into my head I have always assumed it was a specifically quoted scripture. It isn’t. There are a lot of scriptures that are used to explain how this belief is evident, but “God gave Satan dominion” isn’t there.)

Because on the whole, much of Evangelical Christian beliefs have little, if anything, to do with “absolute truth” or plain scripture readings. It is a religion that has been built upon many beliefs of who God is and how the world works — beliefs that, because they can never be questioned, can only be justified no matter what evidence might contradict it. The clear, unchanging, unconfusing word of scripture is easily muddied, broken apart, quote-mined, and analyzed down to the semantics of a single word to justify a great number of beliefs that aren’t overtly stated.

I don’t particularly have a stake in what another person believes. But I do think, if you are a Christian, (or if you’re in the process of questioning your Christian beliefs), it’s always a good idea to approach everything you hear with the question, “How do you know?” What are they using to justify this belief? Is it is a scripture, or is it a “Well, maybe…”? Does the scripture they use actually mean that? Ask yourself why you believe what you believe. Ask yourself if the beliefs you hold are because you have genuinely sought and found meaningful answers, or if you have found justifications that help it all hold together.

Always question. Always wonder. If truth is valuable, then you should seek to find it, no matter whether that contradicts what your family believes, what your pastor believes, what Evangelical Christianity holds as infallible truths, what you have always assumed is the reality of the world because it’s been what you’ve always believed.

And I know it’s terrifying. Because in my experience, if you ask, “How do they know?” you might begin to realize how often the answer is, “they don’t.”