The (Mostly) Happy Beginning
I was never a hand-raiser. Although we lived in a small city, my parents took it upon themselves to drive us 45 minutes away from home, deeper and deeper into nowhere until we were on unpaved roads and arrived at an almost-secret church in a village in the mountains. There, we sat in hard wooden pews until the time came to sing, at which point we stood and used our hands to clutch our original blue Trinity Hymnals. I can still conjugate verbs in King-James-style English almost effortlessly, and a pet peeve of mine is when ignorant people just add -eth to the end of random words and think they sound like we did. That church is still there if you really really look on Google, although apparently they’ve never taken it upon themselves to put up any sort of website. I find it a bit selfish that those to whom God has apparently revealed himself the most fully don’t feel the need to make their unique wisdom accessible, but it made little difference in the 90’s. Honestly, my memories of that place are almost exclusively positive. We got there early on Sunday mornings for Sunday School, followed by morning service. There was some complicated ritual and a service that was at least an hour long. Unfortunately for me, the sermon was far too complicated for a child to follow and I wasn’t allowed to sleep, so I tried terribly hard to pay attention and listen but always ended up being involuntarily dissociated for almost the entire hour. My parents made sure I felt really bad about myself afterwards if I couldn’t tell them in detail what Pastor had preached about. But in good news, once the pastor got to his most passionate part, he would rage like a maniac and turn beet red while pounding his fist on the pulpit. This was way more entertaining than the rest of the sermon, and shook me out of my dissociation and made me feel like the information being presented was really important. After service, the pastor walked down the aisle out of the sanctuary, followed by the congregants. Everybody got to shake Pastor’s hand on their way downstairs for fellowship. Except me. If he wasn’t too sweaty from preaching, he always squatted down and got really exited to see me and gave me a hug. I was special.
We lived in a snowy area and it was even snowier in the mountains, and of course one service was not enough but it would be a huge pain for everybody to drive home and come back again (which would have totaled three hours of driving time for my family and a similar amount of time for others), so we had a potluck every single Sunday in the winter. I remember this being a place where I was almost universally adored by adults and there were kids to play with. Afternoon service was less structured and more interactive than morning service. Once the winter was over, we usually went back to having a structured morning service and evening service and went home in between.
It wasn’t all roses, though, apparently. I remember being taught that I was evil but being embraced with love by the congregants. My parents remember being taught that they weren’t good enough parents and that they needed to “spank” more. They say that the pastor who hugged me started spanking his son before they even left the hospital where the son had just been born. My parents insist that spanking was an is a totally legitimate parenting strategy and whether or not that’s true (which I suspect it isn’t), the spanking that my parents performed was hard-core abusive. No more details are needed on that, except to say that even using the word “spanking” was definitely a euphemism for something that no parent without severe and untreated mental illness would ever do to their kid. I still have no idea if this was actually what the kind pastor meant, but apparently his own kid ended up “mentally ill” and this was seen as a huge misfortune and happened in spite of Pastor’s excellent disciplinary techniques. To Pastor’s credit, it seems like he interspersed his discipline with a genuine love for kids, which my parents never did; the only time they expressed any kind of passion toward me was always a negative experience. It was also seen as a huge misfortune that there were a lot of scandals in the church. This isn’t really a negative memory emotionally because whenever there was a “members-only meeting” after church, we kids went downstairs and played Candy Land and other fun games to keep us occupied and easy for one or two adult volunteers to manage while the rest of the adults gathered in the sanctuary and learned the latest somber news on what man had been caught in “sexual immorality” this time and what woman they were going to blame it on.
The 90’s were mostly a happy time all-around and aside from my parents’ issues, I was largely shielded from most of the issues with the church. I was the world’s most intense Lisa Frank fan and although I couldn’t afford much of her merchandise, I saved my allowance until I could get a subscription to her magazine. I liked detectives and origami and pigs. My sister and I played with dolls and couldn’t wait to grow up and have kids. Best of all, we lived in townhouses and all the parents in the complex were apparently in agreement that kids should run around and play unsupervised as they had in decades past. There were a lot of serious Muslims in the neighborhood and I got along even better with them than with any of the other kids because we were a lot more culturally similar. Although they had been born somewhere in the Middle East and were still learning English, we shared moral values and there was even a lot of overlap in our holy books. They even didn’t eat certain types of meat and this was great for me because I also wouldn’t eat my favorite animal: the pig. From the perspective of a little kid, their moms dressed a bit differently from mine but we were basically the same. We had not one but two playgrounds in our large complex and ran and played and had a great time. We found a stream that we weren’t allowed to play in but did anyway. We ran as fast as we could and waved money in the air to get the daily ice cream truck to stop for us. I had a favorite tree and when there were no other kids around, I sat under it and played Raffi’s “Down By the Bay” over my mind. I think I was on my way to figuring out that there were issues with my mother. Either way, despite my being homeschooled, I had social outlets and I don’t remember any hint of mental illness. It feels like a different lifetime.
Mid-Childhood Crisis
Around the turn of the century when I was nine years old, we moved to another state. Our new neighborhood had no children roaming around to play with. We found another church that also followed the 1689 but the pastor never burst into a rage from the pulpit. There was also zero affection toward me. At age eleven I asked to be baptized and was rejected after an extremely long hazing process. When I was about 15 or 16 there were a lot of major changes and the pastor got ex-communicated for being an alcoholic (that’ll cure him!) and we got a new pastor. The new pastor was much more enthusiastic but very brainwashed and misguided. I started having extreme depression and anxiety very soon after we moved, and my mother had made sure that that was a large part of my identity by my teens. The new pastor actually cared, but he only believed in “biblical counseling,” which literally held as its primary principle that any and all research-based psychology was of the world and evil. Instead, only the bible was to be used as a guide. Unfortunately, the bible provides very little insight into counseling, so the inventors of biblical counseling found some verses on reproof and mostly used those to inform their practices. When the pastor came to my house for my “shepherding visit,” I told him that I felt like the church didn’t care about me very much. He reproved me and said, “I know my brothers and sisters in Christ” and insisted that they would never be cold toward me.
The absolute worst part of the second half of my childhood was the extreme isolation. While my siblings were outside playing kickball with our mom, I was the oldest so I had to sit on my bed and read textbooks for homeschool. An extroverted soul, I was shamed by my parents for needing socialization. My dad found a book called An Introvert in an Extrovert’s World or something to that effect, and I have no idea what the book actually said by my dad managed to take away the idea that introverts were better than extroverts. I had a whole network of imaginary friends to take the edge off the pain. I became suicidal but never acted on it because I didn’t want to deal with my mom’s reaction, even from beyond the grave. Meanwhile, my social skills stopped developing at age nine and the only other girl my age at my church went to Christian school, so she didn’t want to hang out with me and I didn’t understand why. I was completely and totally alone.
Off To (Evangelical) College
My only real consolation was that I was allowed to go to college. It had to be a Christian college, of course, because my mother felt that a girl could never go to a worldly college or she would be pursued by wanton men. Fortunately the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) provided plenty of options and I moved out of the house at age 17 to go live in the dorms at an incredibly conservative university 1,000 miles from my parents. It was a Southern Baptist school located in the Deep South. It was great, actually. Much as I wish I could have gone to a state school and hacked it, there’s no way that I would have survived. Here, the rules were familiar and although I was on a tiny campus with no car in a small town with no public transportation, I felt like I had been liberated. My social skills were literally still on par with an average nine-year-old’s, but I got lots of practice in and improved greatly by the time I graduated. College was the happiest time of my life except for my early years in the townhouse complex. What the times had in common was that I felt free, competent, and socially connected. By the time I hit college, I had a much more sophisticated understanding of theology and was madly in love with Jesus. Mostly. I had some “doubts.” I spent my first three semesters going to a Southern Baptist church that held Sunday School in a mobile home with a corrugated metal roof and seating made out of bench seats that someone had donated from an old vehicle. This church sang extremely traditional hymns, but from a different tradition and hymnal than I had grown up with. It seemed novel and exciting.
A Semester in Central America
My fourth semester of college, I spent abroad in Central America, where I had gone to learn Spanish. I went with a Christian study-abroad program so my host family was Christian, but they were Catholic. All I knew about Catholicism was that my mom absolutely despised it, which made it seem more enticing. Off I went with my Catholic host family on my first Sunday of study abroad, and the first thing I noticed was that, as Catholicism was the country’s official religion and the church had no parking lot, all the congregants simply parked in the road. They parallel parked on both sides, then filled up the road itself with parked cars. This apparently happened at every local Catholic church and caused serious traffic problems on Sunday mornings but in a very urban area in a huge city, it eliminated the need for a parking lot which would have been unused the rest of the week. I liked being allowed to wear jeans (which was also allowed in the Southern Baptist church but certainly not in the churches I grew up in except maybe for our weekly Wednesday night prayer meetings) and the priest conducted a brief homily on basic family values. I was not allowed to participate in anything except practicing the subjunctive as I expressed my hope that peace be with the other congregants, and then we swiftly got out of the building and back into the car, and the road was back to normal in no time.
This went on for most of study abroad, but we made three minor trips within the semester. The first was to a smaller town outside the city and I stayed with an Evangelical family. I thought that this would be more familiar to me than the Catholic family, but they were extremely charismatic Pentecostals. The experience was wonderful as, being outside the city, they spoke more slowly and had a lot more time to dote on me. They loved having me as a guest and were incredibly good to me. As for the church, though, I was a bit out of my element. My host father was the pastor of their church, and they sang contemporary Christian music, much of which I recognized as the Spanish translation of the same songs we sang in chapel at Baptist college. However, they were a lot more “filled with the Spirit.” They started out with exuberant hand-waving, rapidly progressed to dancing in front of their chairs, and soon filled up the area in front of the pulpit in what I can only describe as a Christian mosh pit. Then the music gradually changed from exciting to somber and shaming. Instead of dancing, the people were prostrating themselves and weeping. I stayed standing in front of my chair with my arms at my sides and claimed the linguistic barrier was too much for me to understand what was going on.
The second side trip was to a subsistence farm in a neighboring country where the host family made less than two dollars per day. I count this was one of the most privileged experiences I’ve ever had in my life. We started out in the capitol city, then took a bus as far as we could into the middle of nowhere, then were picked up by a truck which went way down a gravel road, until one-by-one each of our host families greeted us on horseback. When my turn came, I eyed the horse, noting in my mind that I had no idea how to ride one. Fortunately my host had thought of this and had tied my horse to his horse by a rope, and all I had to do was hold on for dear life as we went up and down muddy slopes and across streams. When we got to the house, it was made of wooden boards nailed together and a mud floor with open windows and doors. There was little distinction between inside and outside. My host mom cooked over an open fire. They had almost nothing but gave me everything they could, including lots and lots of fruit. My host mom explained that I would bathe in the river, and my classmate later pointed out that I had to be careful to avoid poisonous snakes as there were obviously no hospitals in the area. It was definitely rustic and even though I was only there for five days, it was hard to be there. The problem was partly the intense poverty, but even worse was the religion. They had apparently had Christian missionaries from the United States come in at some point and teach them how important the bible was, since they somehow managed to scrape together enough money for a floor in their church. It was the most shaming church I’ve ever visited in my life. The sermon was on the Prodigal Son, but they cut off the passage right before the son was redeemed and spent most of the time preaching on the distinction between trespasses and actual sins, or something to that effect. The church members said to my host mom that they were happy to see her, and she tried really hard to appear happy to see them, although she obviously wasn’t. When we got back to the house, she explained that she and her boyfriend were going to go to hell because they were living “in fornication.” Still in my late teens at the time, I honestly had no idea what to say, but I knew I thought it was wrong for them to have to feel that way.
The last trip was to an Indigenous community on and island in another neighboring country. This was also an incredible experience and they helped us learn a few words in their language and my friends and I had a great time sleeping in hammocks and watching the people chase the chickens that were constantly escaping their enclosure. We went to their church, which had apparently also been the result of missionaries from the United States, and they sang old school traditional Baptist hymns that had been translated into their native language. Then, in a very strange twist, it turned out that our visit overlapped with a visit from missionaries from Mexico. These missionaries were charismatic Pentecostals who somehow got electricity for a sound system, probably by bringing in a generator, and tried to teach the indigenous to sing contemporary Christian music in Spanish with lots of dancing and hand-raising involved. My friends and I were outraged that they were actually missionaries to another church. So were the locals, but they were a lot nicer about it. They simply shrugged it off and went about their business.
One day, our Indigenous host families took us out into the rain forest where their ancestors’ graves were. In their culture, they spent hours every day cleaning up the graves, and had a rich and deep religion that went along with it. Somehow, they had integrated Baptist beliefs in with it, as many Indigenous people groups have done with conquesting religions. This was probably the first time I was really exposed to a completely different religion from mine in a positive way, and it was a good stepping stone because the fact that they were nominally Baptist made it seem safe and okay to me. I could feel my mind begin to open.
Coming “Home”
When I got back to my Baptist college in the USA, the president had changed, but not much else. Except me. I had been exposed to so many new ideas so quickly that I still wanted to live a tiny bit on the edge, but as close to the familiar as I possibly could without feeling bored. So I went to the local Evangelical Presbyterian (EPC) church, which was a very small and crazy tight-knit community. Honestly, it was way too extreme in both of those areas, particularly the latter, but it definitely felt familiar. They were under a presbytery, they baptized babies and they were slightly less sexist than what I grew up with, so I told myself that they were different. But they were definitely Calvinist and used a lot of specific vocabulary that they had made up just for themselves. I stayed there for the remaining three semesters of college after study abroad. Then, when I was trying to decide what to do after college, it seemed logical to me that I would move in with my widowed maternal grandmother. I needed a place to live and she needed someone to care for her. I felt a strange suffocation around my family, and when I had been back for school breaks, I started my Facebook posts with “Day X of my captivity…”. I did not know that this wasn’t how everyone felt on school breaks. But as the time came for me to graduate, with highest honors and a semester early, I was terrified. I cried. I believed that I would never be happy again. I was almost right. My maternal grandmother lived in a faraway time zone on a lake in a tiny, remote village that was hard to get to because it was between a huge lake and total wilderness. I asked my mom if I could change my mind and stay in my college town but she refused, throwing my aunt under the bus and saying that if I didn’t go, my aunt would be devastated that nobody was taking care of my grandmother. The pastor’s wife of my little Presbyterian church asked me why I had to be “the lamb on the slaughter.” I didn’t want to go, but it was too late. It was a done deal. I graduated, and off I went.
Moving In With Meemaw
My maternal grandmother, who I referred to in my mind as “Meemaw” after living in the south, lived in a part of the country that had once been dominated by Congregationalist churches. Then there was a huge merger and almost all the Congregationalist churches had come under the umbrella of the United Church of Christ (UCC). I saw this as a huge problem because UCC was extremely liberal and ordained gay ministers, which as the time horrified me. (Now, it horrifies me that it used to horrify me.) So I found a church that was under the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference (CCCC), which was a rebel group that refused to be part of the merger with the UCC. I also went to Catholic Church sometimes because Meemaw was Catholic and sometimes her ride cancelled. I tried to make friends at the church and start a ministry for Youth and Young Adults, which soon became just a youth group as there were no young adults, and then after several months somebody got around to telling me that somebody else had already tried to start a youth group in that church right before I arrived in the area, and it failed, basically because all the congregants hated each other.
I started graduate school, got a retail job to help me pay the bills, and experienced severe depression. I often contemplated whether to drown myself in the river. I tried to hide it from Meemaw and everybody else that I hated it there. In this attempt, I failed. My aunt diagnosed the problem as me not loving Grandma enough, and told the whole family how terrible I was being to her poor mother. The entire extended family turned against me at a time when they were all I had. I had started writing journal entries toward the end of college expressing serious doubt in Christianity, but there was no one to help me because in that denomination, a woman could never be alone in a room with a man (such as a pastor) unless the two were either married or relatives, out of concern that the woman would turn out to be a harlot and ruin the poor man’s life. I had remained convinced the whole time that there must be something “wrong” in my reasoning, because Christianity seemed to have holes that I couldn’t reconcile. I had been reading books on apologetics and Christian epistemology to keep my faith together. Now, all alone, I had no one to turn to but Jesus. I swept my doubts under the rug out of emotional necessity. I participated in an Evangelical group on the campus where I was in graduate school; even though it was 45 minutes away, it was at a totally different time from any of my classes, there was often weather that was dangerous for driving, and I felt awkward because most of the other students were undergraduates. It was worth all of this to have a place to go to that felt safe. I don’t even remember the leader’s name, but I remember his kindness. It had not even begun to occur to me at that point that I might ever actually abandon Christianity, so I saw no reason I couldn’t be a missionary to Latin America. I was interested in what we called “mercy missions,” which weren’t about trying to convert people in places that already had lots of Christians (especially Catholics), but rather about providing services that are often not available to people in deep poverty. My family, especially my mom and aunt, said that it was wrong for me to want me to be a missionary because I wasn’t “called.” They knew this because they said if I had been called, God would have told them. Conversely, the leader of my on-campus Christian group admired me and tried to hook me up with the Assemblies of God missionary department. I really wanted to go with the PCA’s Presbyterian group. In the end, after a year trying and failing to care for Meemaw, I gave up and moved home to the town in the Deep South where my undergraduate college had been.
Moving AGAIN
Safely back in my EPC church, I continued graduate school online through the same university near Meemaw’s house where I had begun grad school, got a full-time job, journaled profusely and emailed the pastor’s wife my writings so she could share them with her husband with no impropriety, and started self-mutilating. All at the same time. My first time in the psych hospital lasted ten days, and I got a Christian counselor who had just finished seminary and told me that I just had to force myself to think optimistically 100% of the time with no exceptions. This did nothing but produce shame when my life experience did not line up with what I was required to believe, and I was shamed for not believing it, and I was shamed for the depression and self-harm that were thought to result. I got a PCP who I liked a lot because she was from the Middle East and reminded me of my childhood friends. She was the one who sent me to the hospital. I felt like she believed me. But after the hospital I had to see a psychopharmacologist and not the trusted PCP. The psychopharmacologist was mostly a jerk and shamed me when I came in and desperately told him how suicidal I was.
I was distraught. This college town was supposed to be my only safe place. Now that I was there and miserable, I had no place to turn. That was the first time I ever got mental health “treatment.” But given the ineptitude of my providers, all I got out of it was a concept of myself as broken.
Moving Is Kind Of a Trend Here
I was back in the Deep South for about a year and a half. After that, I had to take one more online class in a fall semester, and then finish my practicum in a spring semester. The practicum had to be done in the same state as where my graduate school was, which was near Meemaw’s house. But apparently Meemaw had been put in the nursing home and nobody told me out of respect for their narrative that I hated her and wouldn’t care what happened to her. My mother came up with an idea where I would spend this fall semester at her and my dad’s house. Oddly, this worked out, but absolutely not in the way she thought. I moved back in with my parents, and there was someone in the church who had been a college student when I was in my teens. She was a psychology major and had to really push back against the elders’ concern because she was incorporating research-based practices instead of sticking to “biblical counseling.” She had since graduated and started working and happened to be in town and invited me to meet up. When we met, I confided in her regarding my struggles. She recommended a local Christian counselor. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I remember her using the phrase “from what I know of your family.” I was completely confused. I had questioned God but never, ever my family.
I started seeing the counselor and she questioned my family. She also knew our time was short. She spent a few sessions validating me, when I had never been validated in my life. Then she dedicated a session to a major intervention. “Your family’s crazy,” she said, with seriousness and urgency in her voice. I was aghast. I planned to never see her again. I went home, silently poured myself a bowl of soup, and was immediately criticized by my sister for adding too much salt. An “Oh 🤬” moment if there ever were one. That whole week, despite constantly trying to defend them in my mind, I was suddenly aware of my family’s dysfunction. The constant character assassinations. My mother’s emotional outbursts in which she would roar with rage and stamp her feet like in “When You’re Angry and You Know It.” Her denial immediately afterward that it had ever happened. Everything came unraveled. I showed up at Christian counseling the next week a changed woman.
We spent the next couple of months discussing the layers of dysfunction in my life. She challenged my faith in both my family and my religion. She told me that if I gave up Christianity, I wouldn’t go to hell because salvation was based on works and being a good person, which was the most outright heresy possible in any denomination in which I had ever been seriously affiliated. I worried that she was going to go to hell. Then my online class was over and I had move back to my graduate school’s campus’s state and do my final practicum.
The Final Move
I was devastated to be losing the one person who had ever helped me. I was traumatized by the state to which I was moving. But I did manage to make one critical adjustment: instead of moving to the wilderness, I moved to the largest city in the state, which was nowhere near the campus but technically within the state lines. My hero counselor had told me before I left to take folk dancing classes because I had never taken them before and it would be a good way to meet people. So the first thing I did when I got to my new city was sign up for the only folk dancing class available, which was at the local Greek Orthodox Church. I figured I’d might as well try out being Greek Orthodox while I was there since apparently I wasn’t going to be risking eternal damnation. I never got that into it, mostly because I didn’t speak Greek, but I made a good friend who I stayed in touch with for years after. The second thing I did after I arrived was adopt a turtle, who remains my best friend in the world. Lots of other things happened during my practicum, too. I tried to find a Christian counselor there, but they all sucked. I continued to self-mutilate recreationally and also attempted suicide for the first time, but somehow managed to make that not affect my academics and graduated on time, once again with highest honors. I was always an overachiever.
Finally, a desperate email back to my favorite therapist resulted in her recommending that I scrap Christian counseling and go with anyone “knowledgeable.” Thanks to President Obama I could stay on my parents’ insurance until I turned 26. I was 25 at the time. I got a therapist and a full-time job so I could keep her and pay my rent, but couldn’t keep my mental health from affecting me at work. I tried to compensate with extreme perfectionism, but this just resulted in me suddenly burning out, attempting suicide, getting hospitalized, not knowing how to explain that to my job, getting fired, and getting a new job, in an endless cycle. My therapist operated everywhere on the spectrum from spectacularly helpful to spectacularly harmful, but I always believed that everything she did was right. Finally, she fired me, and that resulted in over two years of near-constant hospitalizations until the present one.
To that therapist’s credit, she’s the one who got me to become an apostate. It wasn’t hard. She just referred to herself constantly as a “godless heathen.” I realized that if God was going to send her to hell, I didn’t want to spend eternity worshipping the god who sent her there. She also put me in contact with my paternal grandmother, who turned out to be the most positive influence I’ve ever had in my life, despite her declining physical health and my parents’ desperate manipulative attempts to keep me from connecting with her. It turns out that my Grandma had been extremely worried about me the whole time and the fact that I sought her out less than two years before she died was—dare I say it—a miracle. She emphatically told me she loved me every chance she could. The therapist was not the only “unbeliever” for whom I was willing to go to Hell as a protest. I was not okay with Grandma, the only person who had ever loved me with no strings attached, being damned.
Conclusion
So that’s how I became an apostate. I’ve known countless kind, I mean truly kind, people who were Christians. Most people I’ve met both in and out of church have probably been mostly kind. The book I’m reading by Jonathan Haidt which I mentioned in my first entry explains this as a function of how humans evolved to be supersocial. It’s ironic that I find that so significant now, since giving up Young-Earth Creationism was probably the last thing to go from my Christianity because I wanted so desperately to believe in a perfect world before The Fall.
I don’t know how many denominations I’ve mentioned here, but I wanted to make this post in part to explain that I’ve been around the Christian block. The reason it didn’t work for me wasn’t because I didn’t understand its tenets, and it wasn’t because I wasn’t committed. I believed that if different parts of my life were a pie chart (school, work, etc), that my faith was the plate underneath the entire pie. It was my life. A lot of Christians, including my family, believe that if someone falls away, then they were never “truly saved.” My point here is that I know where my heart was at the time, and if the Bible were true and salvation were real, I absolutely would have been “saved.” Anyone who says differently just wants to believe that falling away could never happen to them.
I want to reiterate that the reason Christianity didn’t work for me wasn’t because I didn’t try to make it work. There are many who consider this to be the great tragedy of my life: that I fell away from The Faith despite valiant efforts to remain a Christian. I staunchly disagree. I consider it to be the great tragedy of my life that I spent almost the first three decades of my life in a group that considered falling away to be a tragedy. I think it’s a tragedy that I even tried to stay a Christian. My parents were so afraid of me falling away that they trapped me in a house and wouldn’t let me talk to anyone. But, as I keep saying, I am my paternal grandmother’s granddaughter. Not only was there nothing, ever, that could have kept me from falling away, but falling away is the best thing that ever happened to me.
