Recovering from spiritual trauma

I am recovering.

As a child, I grew up in a world of religion and spirituality. Church was the center of our lives. It’s no exaggeration to say that church life kept our small-town Texas life moving, and so many of my memories are good. I am grateful for a natural and church family who loved God and me. Their tireless efforts laid the foundation of my faith in Jesus and the Bible, both of which I continue to cling to today. 

However, as much as I learned the stories of the Bible, taught to me by people who cherished them, I also learned a gripping fear.

Misfired Scriptures and prideful ideologies through the lens of Southern Baptist literature, interpretation, and weekly altar calls paralyzed me for fear that I was going the wrong way, had heard the wrong thing, did not know God, did know God but not enough, knew God today but might not tomorrow, was too quiet in matters of salvation, was too loud in matters of the Holy Spirit, and too much of a loose cannon for God (real words from a pastor in my adult years who loathed my spark of spontaneity).

I feared the world because it was “wayward;”
I feared the church because it was unforgiving
as it demanded my heart be smeared bare on the altar of repentance —  
always repentance —  
as if I could somehow repent enough from my humanity.

But wasn’t I wonderfully made? Yes, but also fearfully, don’t forget.

Ah, yes. I breathed deep in remembrance that fear might be enough to save my soul should liberation become too happy of a thing. Not even for a second does wonder come independently from fear in a religious world.

As a result, if God wasn’t safe, then nothing was, not even what used to be good. I grew to fear it all: sickness and health, Heaven and Hell, God’s blessing and punishment. And while I was taught to repent from fear, they made sure I kept just enough to serve God faithfully. Too much fear was a sin; too little might expunge me to Hell, but no one could tell me where the line was, or if someone could, someone else would move it.

If fear could keep me faithful, I owned enough to last a lifetime.

Learning to fear by the hands of religion as a child (and into adulthood) left me clinging to God as my anchor while simultaneously being afraid the anchor wouldn’t hold.

Eventually, I had a couple of nervous breakdowns that, tried as I might, I could not repent or pray hard enough to stop.

Of course, this was my experience, so I would not presume that every child who napped underneath the lullabies of a creaking pew internalized religion and church the way I did.

Neither would I assume that everyone who learned reading and writing by doodling in the margins of the church bulletin, while the hymn “Just As I Am” pled melodiously in the background to the backslidden and lost, would by necessity, one day, drown out the songs that saved her.

And it’s certainly possible that not all children who met God through the citation of John 3:16 would take so seriously the promise, and the threat, of everlasting and damnation as a terribly thin tightrope on which she could either balance or be hung.

It’s possible there are those unscathed. It’s possible, though I have not yet met one. Somewhere beneath the stories of nearly every Christian woman I work with, no matter how long or short of a time they have spent in the Church, lie the silent, pulsating refrains of an accusing faith and Savior that have become so consistent a voice they think it is their own.

We, the American Church, are today, and I suspect have always been, a hotbed of religious half-truths and negligent bearers of pain. So far, I have found that there are two types of active faith believers: those who know our condition and want to do something about it, and those who can’t, or won’t, yet face the reality that here we are.

Regardless of which camp you pitch your tent, perhaps the old adage: “If you don’t deal with it, it will deal with you” will ignite some sort of holy movement or grief inside of you, whichever is necessary for change. I just ask that you pick one; both if possible because spiritual trauma is here to be dealt with, and it's not asking if we are ready.

I am concerned for the children growing up in churches and Christian education systems, for the messages they are internalizing because we, as carriers of the Gospel, are not examining with precision and accuracy what we have been taught. Is it gullibility? Is it laziness, or worse, apathy? Is it a lack of understanding of God for ourselves? Is it an honest desire to follow our teachers and shepherds, to honor their leadership like we’ve been taught? Is it a horrible result of celebrity, punch-drunk culture, and those who are pastors by title but who have no consummate theology of the pastorate? I don’t know. I think it is probably all of the above and more.

What I do know are the imprints of spiritual trauma on a soul and within a body with as much certainty as I know the feeling of the warm summer sun on my face or which child is shouting “Mom!” from the top of the stairs without having to see his or her face. I know because I know. Because it is familiar. Because I have spent time with it, and it has spent time with me.

Religious trauma can hit with an impact so hard it takes your breath away at once. Or, it can be a slow drip of undetectable poison for years in the middle of much happiness that you hardly notice it’s there.

Thus far in my journey, I can only describe it like this:

Its blows are dealt when the severity of the law cannot bear witness to our humanity, to the experiences we live through and the pain that we suffer. It delivers deep, dark blows as God becomes someone to blame or fear much more than He comforts and heals. It is isolation when you don’t agree; entrapment, belittling, or the demand for performance delivered at the expense of many for the exaltation of one, and that one is not Jesus Christ. It is the twisting and brandishing of God’s Word to manipulate and control those who were saved under the promise of being set free. It silences and ignores, casts off and discards, places gender over gender and titles as gatekeepers, and misinterprets while claiming truth with no invitation to the table for discussion.

I don’t know what else to say. It is evil, catastrophic, unbalancing, and life-stealing to its core.

Like I said, I would not assume that every child learned God and fear this way. My interpretation was personal; its melodies carried cruelly through my own hymns I am still trying to un-sing.

“If I should die before I wake,”
And all the crazy things they’d say.
It scared me.

They led me down a Roman road,
It's a road I’ve never found you on.
It scared me.

They told me that I would never do,
All the things you said I’d do.
It scared me.

They told me you were pleased with me,
Then asked me if I was being pleasing to you.
It scared me.

They told me to go in faith
And then asked me if I was going the right way.
It scared me.

They told me I should give you my life,
But I’ve spent most of it asking you how.
It scares me.

Thank God, He has been so faithful to me through all my fears and questions. And while this is my story, I also know it is the story of so many. I talk with them. I hear it in their language. I read the devastation in their eyes line-by-line like a story I memorized a long time ago.

Today, I am writing a new story with God that is kinder and feels more like Jesus to me, and I believe that you can, too.

If you had written this article, maybe fear wouldn't be the legacy from which you are recovering. If not, what word would you use to fill in the blank: Recovering From Religion: The Legacy of __________ No One Talks About? Would it be abuse, perfectionism, shame, control, purity, or something else?

It may be time to fill in the blank and write your own story down. Stories need to be told, and first always to ourselves. Whatever you learned by “the hands of an angry God,” you can relearn in the hands of a kind one. I know because I did; because I am.