My story of growing up in a religious family

For over 20 years of my life, I lived in an extremely religious environment. I grew up in a family that considered religion to be the ultimate answer to all questions you can have in life, that it should govern every part of it. It had an extremely destructive influence on my emotional development.

My parents were protestants, belonging to a tiny religious minority in Poland, which is, by large, dominated by Catholicism in its very conservative, intolerant form. As such, finding ourselves in a besieged fortress mentality — it was an even more important element of the identity for me and my family.

Every week I would spend at least three hours at the church, with home Bible readings a couple of times a week. Almost all of the friends of my family belonged to the church. Most of the books on the shelves were religious ones. For my 16th birthday I got a Bible from my parents — one that, just recently, I abandoned during a move-out. I believed it all, I believed that the Bible has the whole and only truth, that it’s the literal word of God with all its implications. This ideology was everywhere and — at some point — completely transparent, shaping my view of the world and myself.

The problem of the body

Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.
— 1 Corinthians 6:19–20

The progressive message of the religion says: take care of your body, cherish it, for it’s sacred, it’s a gift from the God almighty. But also it brings a much darker underlying message: you are never in charge of your body. It’s just lent to you, and as with all God’s gifts, you are responsible for them. Make sure to make good decisions, or God will say about you: “And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Mt 25:30) — so don’t get too comfortable in the skin that God kindly gave you. It’s a fight for purity, perfection and holiness in their most physical aspects.

Sexuality, of course, is the area in which this fight is the most heated; even if it wasn’t always like that. The Old Testament, as a book written in the early Iron Age, doesn’t concern itself with any sanctity of sex, as it operates on completely different set of moral rules — ones where incest is a side note, non-penetrative sex doesn’t exist and everything else can boil down to power relations, including God-sanctioned paedophilia: “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.” (Num 31:17–18).

Meanwhile, the New Testament, written in a big part by mysogyn Paul, treats the whole sexual sphere as something dirty and something that serves only to distance us from God. After all, as he wrote: “Now for the matters you wrote about: <It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.>” (1 Cor 7:1) and “Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.” (1 Cor 7:8–10). If you want to serve God properly you need to distance yourself from the needs of the flesh. How convenient it is! Teaching people that their basic needs are sinful is teaching them that they can’t trust themselves at all. Lay the trust in the hands of God’s servants who know better, who are closer to God than you are. Let them leverage your insecurities, let them be the dispensers of absolution over your very nature.

Of course, the religious views of impurity of sex bleed into the image of the whole body. The body gets stripped off of every other quality and reduced to a sexual, and thus, impure object that we need to approach with utter distrust. It stops being a work of art in a way that was cherished throughout the ages — and, instead, is a trap that we need to hide, to be ashamed of. It stops being your mean of expression, an irreducible and essential part of you — it becomes an area reserved for God, for his worship in the defiance of sexuality — and for that special someone to whom you shall uncover yourself to become one in body in total submission of sexuality: “ The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.” (1 Cor 7:3–4)

This also means that the body and the mind are separated; there is no unity, there is no holistic “me”, there is an eternal struggle between the soul and the body. Do not identify yourself with your body, don’t listen to it. Its desires, as Paul wrote in Romas 6:12, are evil, and it shall be transformed by the righteousness of God. Does it need to be pointed out how disastrous it is? When you are taught that the thing that makes you — you — can not be trusted?

That’s why in the religious life you need self-control, that’s why you need to keep yourself in line, to only ever act on your super-ego, to punish yourself for every deviance from the perfection. “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age”. (Titus 2:11) Live your life in a state of fear, punish yourself for every transgression, be upright, live in constant stress, for you can’t be trusted.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
(Rom. 12:1)

It’s all a matter of servitude

So, if your body is not yours — what is? Nothing, for all we do should be done in servitude to the God (1 Cor 10:31) — or the others. After all, religious freedom is the freedom to do the right thing: “ You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.” (Gal 5:13)

In a life of faith, you should remove yourself from the picture completely; disappear, in favour of an ego-less servant of God, whose whole life is dictated by the needs of the church and the others. You need to make yourself subservient to others, to their needs, to their most important need — the need for salvation.

In this subservience you need to also forgo any kind of reward, even an emotional one of feeling good with yourself — for everything you do, you do in the name of God. It’s not yours that you did good, it’s only because you were enabled by God. You are irrelevant in it: “(…)What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, <If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.>” (James 4:14–15)

And it comes in all flavours — from the sexual service of marriage, through a humble service to your brothers in faith, and to those who do not believe yet (after all, you are the salt of the earth and the light for them) — but also to the social structure and class divisions, slavery being no exception to it. “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. (…) Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not people” (Eph 6:5,7); “Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust” (1 Peter 2:18). Do not fight the power structure here in the Earth, do what you are told to do, know your place, don’t speak against the injustice — for the masters are ordained by God and rule by his will, sometimes for their righteousness, sometimes, like kings of Babylon did, as tools of punishment; but all power structures are given by God and shall exist as long as God wills them.

This extends to the power structure of families. After all: “(…) I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.” (1 Cor 11:3) and so, “wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.” (Col 3:18). It’s only natural and ordained by God himself that a woman should remain subservient to her husband. Of course, reading through Christian material it gets packaged in a lot of honey — that it’s just a call for cooperation (under the guidance of the man, of course), that the man is also given the responsibility of being like Christ in the relationship. That servants might be greater than their masters. But it’s just a sweet talk necessitated by the reality of the XXI century when the feminist movement made sure that Christianity’s real message can not be tolerated in the public discourse any more. The true message of the inferiority of a woman: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” (1 Tim 2:12); “And so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled” (Titus 2:4–5); “ Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.” (Col 3:18); “For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.” (1 Cor 11:8–9).

Keeping the family power structure is important — as it’s important to discipline the children. They need to know their place through physical pain. Modern science might claim that spanking children lowers their IQ and causes multiple emotional problems in adult life like depression, unhappiness, anxiety, feelings of hopelessness, use of drugs and alcohol, and general psychological maladjustment; but the literal word of God says instead: “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die. If you strike him with the rod, you will save his soul from Sheol.” (Prov 23:13–14) Are you willing to risk sending your child’s soul to hell by not beating him? Are you going to disregard the word of God for things conceived by fallible humans? After all, “(…)the wisdom of this world is nonsense in God’s sight” (1 Cor 3:19).

Who do you believe?

When you live in a truly religious community, one where Bible is revered as a whole, you need to answer yourself (and all the others) — who do you really believe, humans and their science or God and his words?

I was a member of an extremely conservative and anti-scientific church — but in one thing they were certainly right. The Bible makes absolutely no sense once you submit to the modern scientific regime. So you either turn a blind eye on gaping, massive inconsistencies of your religious worldview — or you just assume that the modern world is fundamentally wrong (for which you might find a lot of support in, well, the Bible). One of such issues is evolution — if to disregard the story from the Genesis as a literal transcription, we are left with blanks in the questions of the source of evil, nature of sin or the plan of salvation. Catholic church (and — to my knowledge — also most protestant congregations) cunningly sidesteps the issue by not acknowledging it at all. It gives no actual answers and as so it can switch its interpretations at will.

When was that the first hominid that sinned by killing his brother — instead of just acting because of natural (and, apparently, God-ordained) selection? How comes evolution could exist when Bible unequivocally connects death to sin? What is the source of sin and death? Was it all a part of God’s plan? If so, then why do we need salvation, what is the meaning of Jesus’ death? Isn’t it, what Paul wrote, that: “ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor. 15:56–57) I tried to find the answers. I prayed and searched through both conservative, creationist sources — and those progressive ones, to no avail.

Of course, we could assume that the Bible should be treated as nothing more than a collection of stories — but the Bible has self-affirmation clauses. In 2 Timothy 3:16, we read: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”. Peter, Paul — and Jesus quoted stories from Old testament such as deluge as literal ones. You either treat it seriously or not. And if you do — you need to somehow deal with the inevitable cognitive dissonance that it causes, where the Bible doesn’t line up with the reality. And the easiest answer is — damned be the reality.

That’s why religion uses well-tested semantic structures of conspiracy theories.

If all the people tell you that you are wrong it simply means that the whole world is out there to get you — you, the one who knows the truth. There are so many videos on youtube (translated with yellow subtitles) where you might reaffirm your knowledge. And, as with the World Government making Antarctica off-limits for Flat Earth Society, the kabbalah of palaeontologists hides the evidence of human-dinosaur cohabitation. The Turkish government prevents expeditions to Mount Ararat so we will never see the proof of Noah’s Ark existing. There are wheels of chariots that were crushed by the waters of the Red Sea as it closed after Moses, but Saudi Arabia prevents excavations there. And if you start to scratch the dirt it becomes obvious that the pyramids were nuclear reactors built by a pre-deluge civilization (or by their blueprints). I wish I were joking.

You get “authorities” writing in official church’s magazines such as Sang Lee, an “immunology expert” whose practice’s address is a shack in LA’s suburbs; John Sanford, a plant geneticist who disproved evolution on a basis that all mutations are harmful despite contrary physical evidence; a world-famous neurosurgeon and a former presidential race candidate, Ben Carlson, who said that Satan influenced Darwin to create the theory of evolution; or Carl Baugh, a high school graduate who, despite his education, is an “expert” in a field of palaeontology. It’s often von Däniken’s level of nutjobbery with the same reverence from their followers — all that matters is that they are on our side, that they know the truth which they share with us — the truth that they don’t want us to know. The truth that explains the world, life, our special place in the universe in an overarching, gnostic way. It packs the time into a human-digestible span filled with mythos, all relevant to our everyday experiences. It removes the great emptiness and coldness of the universe in favour of a cosmic battle between the forces of the good and evil where we are the centrepieces. It does away with all those pesky details that suggest that we are nothing more than accidents in an accidental universe and puts us back again in the middle of the universe. Whatta glorious feel.

Te experience of the living God

As centrepieces of the universal struggle, all who are faithful followers of God should experience his guidance in their lives. Sometimes it’s a BDSM kind of guidance, as it’s written: “As many as I love, I reprove and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.” (Rev 3:19) One way or another, if you don’t go through God’s trials and experiences — you are not close to God’s cause.

It can take extreme forms, as it is with pentecostalism, where speaking in tongues is the highest form of God’s blessing — and so, during church services people just randomly start blabbing, with all the visual flair added to it, that is certainly the Holy Spirit’s work and not a display of mental disturbance; but it can be just about telling stories of everyday acts of the God in the faithful’s lives.

In Catholicism, those stories are usually reserved for the saints and the chosen ones, but in Protestantism, everybody is chosen, everybody deserves God’s special attention. And so it goes, from the stories of rebuking one’s neighbours for working on the Holy Day — to actual miracles. Speaking to natives in their language while bringing them c̶o̶l̶o̶n̶i̶a̶l̶ ̶e̶x̶p̶l̶o̶i̶t̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ the True Faith (of course, it happens handily only off records in far-away lands). Miraculously driving to the church while the car is out of gasoline. Multiplying pasta during a church meeting (again, I wish I was joking). Getting cured of terminal cancer (it’s better if it happens while participating in our NEWSTART® programme).

The biggest issue is — we know we are the faithful. And we know that they are not. And yet they say the same stories, as the semiotics of every religion boil down to basically the same building blocks. For me it was one of the turning points; this semiotic incoherence of having to accept one story without any proof — and rejecting others for their “obvious falseness”. After all, we all know that saint Mary of Guadeloupe doesn’t exist, so how could she cure this man? But with the power of prayer to God (coupled with fasting and vegetable smoothies diet, available in a concise book or during a bargain treatment in one of our clinics) a man can be cured of all ills. I have heard the same story told as an example of God’s guidance for our church member — and ridiculed when it came from the Catholic church.

The power struggle

But the unfaithful who only claim to have experienced God’s guidance are not only present outside the church. They creep in the very heart of the community, spreading heresies that would undermine the truth (and sometimes the income of the church), as it’s written: “It is no great thing therefore if his [Satan’s] ministers also fashion themselves as ministers of righteousness, whose end shall be according to their work” (2 Cor 11:15). And so we all need to be wary for the corruption within and weight every teaching on the God’s scales.

There is a lot of dangerous heresies around. Did God kill people in the deluge — or was it Satan? Was the story about Elijah and a widow about being good neighbours? Should 10% of the income that you are ought to send to the church be calculated pre- or after-tax? What kind of music are you allowed to play in the church? Which Christian groups (if any) are you allowed to commune with? All those non-trivial matters need to be settled before God. And, of course, those who go against the word of God (and the word of the people who hold appropriate offices to judge what is the word of God) can not go unpunished — or be allowed to spread them further. With a simple mechanism of removing people from the church for such offences, the local community in my hometown shrank within 10 years from around 120 people regularly attending the service to 20.

It was a valuable lesson for me — a lesson in hypocrisy. People who had so much to say about God’s love, about God’s forgiveness, about being nothing more than His tools, about being guided by His words, stepped down to nothing when it came to always be on top. And in this very crafty political struggle declared values had no place in the praxis. You can be a domestic abuser, as long as you are on the right side — do the work for the glory of the Lord, for you are a valuable asset in the struggle.

Oh, the shame

In the egalitarian community of believers, joined in faith by Holy Spirit everybody needs to know their place. And the best way to make sure that they do is by keeping them down with shame.

Unsolicited “I will pray for you” is one of the most disgusting things anybody could say — and religious people love to do that. This very innocent message has dark underlining. It’s not saying “I care about you and I hope everything will turn out to be okay”. It’s saying “I know better than you. I, the priest of God, will perform a rite to keep God’s wrath away from your foolish decisions.” It’s removing agency from the prayee. It’s an intrusion into the most intimate space of symbolic integrity, it’s denying the right to rebel — for you are but a child, for whom an adult, who knows God’s will, needs to show the right way. You are not a partner for an ideological discussion. You should be ashamed of your lack of understanding.

Its apparent triviality is incredibly dangerous. After all, it’s such a small thing. Why should you fight back against something well-intentioned? But when it becomes the prevalent environment it’s so easy to internalize. Maybe, after all, there is something wrong with me? Maybe, after all, they know my place better than I do. It becomes nothing more than emotional abuse, no different from screaming or silent treatment.

Shame can be derived from so many places. What happens when you mix the gospel of love with the innate need of any organized religion for hierarchy?

My father was an ideological adherent to this mix, popularized by some “progressive” preachers in the church. I will never forget the example he would be talking about over and over again: “If your son won’t make his bed in the morning, be like Jesus — do it in his stead until he realizes your love.” In other words: Shame him. Show him how little he loves you through this very selfless act that he is too egoistic to reciprocate. Make sure to invalidate any, even the tiniest, act of rebellion through it. Irreversibly tie the concept of love with shame. Love equals shame. Shame equals love.

Of course, in a perfectly hypocritical way, he would never follow his words. After all, he never cared enough about me to even shame me correctly — but the words were enough for me. I always felt that there was something very wrong about it — but I could never name it. Yet it hurt me deep enough that I still remember hearing it for the first time after all the years.

The reaction in religion

Organized religion always goes hand in hand with social reaction. It’s a system designed to support the status quo. It’s a system intertwined with the ruling economic system, as the superstructure always necessarily needs to be. It’s a system that fights against any social progress, a system built to oust any deviation from the norm. It’s supposed to shame people who don’t fit in, it’s supposed to keep us down, it’s supposed to call a sin that what is different — just because it’s dangerous to the homeostasis of the system and its hierarchy. This is why every religion builds around itself a cocoon of traditions — a form of symbolic dominance keeping the past in the present.

Technically women in the Adventist church can become priests. How many female priests are there in Poland? Zero. It’s the year 2019, over 100 years since the suffrage movement secured the right of voting to all women in Poland — that’s how strong the reactionary forces are in the church. Some people speak about the issues of gender equality; but they do it with lowered voices, for they know the wrath of the system. In 2019 the official dogma speaks of people who are not heteronormative as sinful or, at the very best, lost and misguided. Every major victory of any progressive thought of the last century has been rejected by the church with the whole strength.

It’s a system that does everything to distance itself from the revolutionary roots of Christianity, those that called the believers to unconditionally love others, to forget about nations and gender divides, that called for life devoted to the good of communities, that called the believers to practice deep solidarity; those, finally, that called for economic equality, that reviled accumulation of capital and accumulation of power. A vision of a society of equals, loving and forgiving, was incredibly quickly turned to one that supports hierarchy and obedience. How many times have I heard sermons that would explain how the call of “give away everything you own” meant everything but that you should give away everything you own. Indeed, I have heard sermons of how God promises to bless those who are faithful with riches, as he blessed Job after the trial. If it is so, doesn’t it mean that the poor have not been faithful enough? That their plight is of their own doing and only through devotion to God can they be lifted from the ground? Isn’t it the most reactionary message — that enshrines inequalities of the capitalist system as virtues?

It was a long process for me to dismiss the reactionist brainwashing I received in the church. It took long, painful years for me to accept the need for equality and solidarity, for feminism and progress of human rights; to reject the patriarchal culture that stems from all Abrahamic religions.

Slavoj Žižek claims that we need to uphold Christian values in the society exactly because of the revolutionary element of Christianity — for it’s a religion in which god dies and leaves only the sanctified community of believers. From my experience, I can say that to achieve that end we need to destroy any kind of institutional Christianity. Those Christian values that Žižek seeks to enshrine are deeply against Christianity as we know. He claims that only Christianity leads to real atheism — but what if the opposite is true? I say that only a real atheist can be a Christian he would want to see.

God, who never existed

I got hurt deeply by religion. It caused me to lose faith in myself. It caused me to distance myself from myself. It made me despise myself for my bisexuality, it made me guilty for masturbating, it made me guilty for wanting sex. It made me seek approval for any kind of relationship from those above; I fantasised about being let by my parents to pursue sexual relations to lift the weight of the sin from the act. I internalised the guilt and externalised my needs. In the most classical Freudian way, I rejected the most basic needs of my id in the most harmful of ways. I lived in a shadow of the Big Other watching me constantly, overloading me with orders and adjurations — one that used “love” to keep me subservient and unable to rebel against the heavy burden of it all.

It ended with me developing a severe neurosis. It ended with me learning that I need to hide the truth about myself; that I can’t admit it even in front of myself, for God knows everything I do and only through rejection I can be pure. It taught me that love needs to be earned, that “unconditional love” is a tool of control. That love is abuse and abuse is love. That I can’t have my borders. I followed those teachings even after rejecting the religion — and I know that I still, to some extent, do.

Fortunately, the source of strength that religion has over people was its undoing for me. I was always drawn to the allure of science and I listened to people whom I considered to be scientific — and they showed me the trappings of the semiotic base of conspiracy theories upon which my faith was based. I felt offended when they would pout creationism together with flat earth and Perpetuum mobile theories. Sure, those other ones were bullshit, but what I believed in? I had arguments. I read books on it. But I wouldn’t get offended enough to quit, and so I started asking questions. I started exploring.

There were also other people I encountered on the internet, those from the other side of the nutjob divide. Holocaust deniers. Scientologists. 9/11 truthers. And they also had arguments. Arguments that could never stand the scrutiny of a reality check — but arguments nevertheless, arguments that were often internally sound and consistent. I started to see parallels between their beliefs — and mine. It all started to unravel.

I was brainwashed into a totalitarian system of belief, and that realisation hurt like hell. The slow erosion was incredibly painful, it was a process of losing parts of myself bit by bit. I struggled against it. I prayed for faith. I tried to ask religious authorities for answers which they could not give me. I was ashamed of losing faith. I was scared of the void that awaited. And, finally, I had to admit that those I believed in, whose words I trusted, have been outright lying to me. Not out of malice, of course. They didn’t even know that they were doing it, but it didn’t change the fact that, ultimately, they were lying all the time. I had to reconstruct my whole life from pieces.

It still doesn’t come easy for me to do that, but I must proclaim: There is no God. I would love it to be. I would love to know that there is some benevolent entity that cares for me and the whole world and has a plan and that death is not the end. I don’t like the thought of the ultimate pointlessness of our sisyphic plight. I don’t like the void of the uncaring universe; that we are just a pointless accident, here only for a moment to burn out and disappear forever. But I must face it. There is no use in denying the undeniable and running away from reality. And I must face the world of the incredible moral burden in which we are left alone to each other, to care for each other — not because of some divine command, not because of some Big Other, but because we are.