Wounding in the Name of...

So I haven't posted in a long while on this blog...life in 2025 has really taken a sledgehammer to my peace of mind for a variety of reasons, but today has really left me with the need to put some thoughts down to paper (or a laptop if you will). I watched Shiny Happy People Season 2 today about Teen Mania and the Acquire the Fire movement. And although I was never a part of that organization, some things really resonated as an evangelical kid who grew up in the 80's and 90's. I grew up in a small evangelical church community that some might say (myself mostly) was probably a cup of Kool-Aid shy of a cult. I watched that documentary and came away with a couple of thoughts. 1) I'm super thankful that we were poor and couldn't afford to do the programs Teen Mania offered because full yikes! 2) The culture of guilt and shame that was the evangelical church in the 80's and 90's and still today in some communities is hurtful and damaging to so many people.

I grew up as the daughter of the associate pastor in this very small church. Everything about our lives revolved around church--we had services 2-3 times a week, prayer night, youth group night, witnessing days, went to the church school, all the friends and people we interacted with were part of that community. We had family movie nights, sing-a-longs by the bonfire, camping trips and conference trips together as groups. We didn't listen to "secular" music unless it was oldies because I guess that wasn't enough of the devil that it was completely banned, had several shows we couldn't watch (THE SMURFS HAVE A CAULDREN!!), and all in all our lives were pretty sheltered. I will admit some of those Christian rock songs slapped. I was a pretty good kid. Still to this day, I am a stickler for rule following and staying out of trouble. But for some reason, every time I sat in that service, I would swear to you that I was going to go straight to hell because I was such an awful human being. I couldn't possibly count the number of times I was "saved" in my life because pretty much every service I went down to the altar to repent and recommit my life to Christ. Maybe I had talked back to my mom once that week, or gossiped with my friends, or thought about a boy. That was the culture. No person alive could ever have been as pure, virtuous, or righteous as we felt we had to be every day of our lives. Yes, we were taught about Christ's forgiveness but the overreaching message really was the fear of hell.

Add to that, at the time, we were just starting to come out of the cold war, and it was drilled into us how people in communist countries were not allowed to be Christians. I personally met people who went on bible smuggling missions into China and Russia. There were a lot of videos and movies and songs about what was going to be the inevitable persecution of Christians. I remember watching A Distant Thunder as a waaaaaaayyy too young child and thinking I was most certainly going to die because I couldn't face hell by taking the mark of the beast. Which by the way, the mark of the beast, at least in our community, changed pretty frequently. At one point, it was floated around that it was a social security number that could be it, and I thought, well I guess I'm in trouble because that already happened before we knew it was a problem!! Our church saw the events in Waco as proof that Christians were going to be persecuted by the government for their faith.

Now our church did diverge quite a bit from other mainstream dogma at the time. We didn't believe there would be a rapture. That would be too easy and the suffering was important. We would mock the people that would come out and prophecy about the rapture because clearly they weren't reading their bibles correctly and we were none of us going to escape the end times. We also didn't believe in celebrating most holidays as I mentioned in the previous post. But I think one thing that was probably the same for any church kid across the board at the time was that the most important thing was that you were on fire for God and that you were willing to do whatever you needed to do to share the gospel. Get up early on a Saturday to go knock on doors? Absolutely. Feed the hungry and make sure you shared Jesus when you did? Sure. My parents kind of took this the extra mile and would literally give the shirts off their back, the couch in their living room, the last remaining bit of finances in the bank account, or any available space we had in our house when someone needed a place to stay.

Here's where I think things that may seem slightly innocuous take a turn. I won't share my whole story right now here (maybe I never will), but the specifics are not really important. I will say that my story is sadly not unique, and there are a lot of other stories of us that grew up in that environment that are even worse than mine, but the theme remains the same. While we were growing up thinking that we had to be perfect, many times the leaders and people that were teaching us that were themselves perpetrating some of the worst kinds of pain on the kids they were supposed to be raising as good Christians. We were expected to live up to a standard that they themselves could not achieve, but no one knew the things that were happening behind closed doors. That kind of hurt is two-fold. 1) Terrible things should not be happening to children full stop. 2) It teaches you (or at least what I seemed to learn from it) that this is normal and part of God's will. I would always tell myself that maybe I wasn't praying enough or being good enough, and if I just tried harder that God would hear my prayer and make it stop. But when you are raised your whole life that absolute obedience and respect for authority are the right way, then clearly either I should just accept the bad, or I was bringing this on myself in some way because I wasn't righteous enough.

This kind of warping of religion and faith where children were being wounded in the name of Jesus is very hard to process even now as an adult, and I definitely couldn't process it as a child. And the sad fact of the matter is, I think some of the people who did hurtful things were themselves stuck in this cycle of guilt and shame, and maybe if they had been free to be open about their struggles and just to be human for Christ's sake, they would have been able to get the actual help they needed instead of things being swept under the rug and hidden at the expense of the most vulnerable. Was this happening in every evangelical church? No. Was it more prevalent than people might realize? I think definitely so. I've done a lot of work and spent a lot of time wrestling with the effects of this because it not only creeps in to how you view the world, but it also ties in to how you view your faith and God and everything you were raised to know. There is also the dichotomy of, mixed in with the bad, so much good and love and joyful times and the deepest friendships I've ever had. The principles and morals that shape who you are as a person. There were also so many truly good and kind people that didn't know about the bad things that were going on around them. I've forgiven those that hurt me. It wasn't easy, and it wasn't for them, it was so I could let go of the pain and the anger. I've been able to find healing and love and understanding in so many ways. I've spent the last 2 decades coming to terms with my own faith and relationship with God and what that means. I've learned to, as Stephen Colbert has said, love the thing I wished never happened. Because this life is a gift, and without where I came from, I couldn't be where I am.

I don't have all the answers. I do know that if I walk into any church and even get a whiff of it being like the one I was raised in, I'm out the door faster than you can say "antichrist." I sincerely hope this generation and the ones after that are raised in the church truly get to experience the love of God, not just the judgment and fear, and silence to their pain. And I hope we can all be a little more kind and gracious to ourselves and to each other. And just know that you are loved, kid.