Laurie Raymond
Nov 3 · 2 min read

Because I have a friend I’ve come to know closely in the last 10 years who has suffered these traumas after leaving the JWs, I’ve become very interested in these questions. As a kid growing up in an educated family of liberal northern Baptists, I recall my astonishment when the Catholic kids who attended our elementary school (there being no Catholic school in our neighborhood) would taunt us on the playground on the day after the days they were excused for catechism at the church. Suddenly they seemed to be exulting in their new knowledge that they were going to heaven and we were going to hell. Kids who had been our friends, classmates, Brownie troop members. Kids we knew as people, as individuals, as early as second grade (which is when my memory of the Catholic kids beginning catechism started.)

That is, we knew them as sometimes great, sometimes absurd, sometimes smart, sometimes dumb, sometimes brave, sometimes “chicken” — always, like ourselves, human. I thought, if you, my best friend, are ready to go to heaven and consign me to hell, what does that say about your god, your church, your family — and, ultimately, you? And that remains the most intransigent question that stands between me and real, compassionate understanding of people who succumb to these toxic religions. And I think most of the monotheistic ones, at least, have elements of this first command: cast out from the circle of those worthy of life whoever we tell you to — or else.

Does the shame of having been willing to throw others under the Eternal Bus in order to save ourselves a place in some kind of paradise — does this guilt have a way out? Of course, children raised in these religions have an excuse, up to a point. But past a certain point of maturity, which I’m sure varies from individual to individual — though it always does come — there is a choice. I understand that those who escape need healing. But don’t they also need forgiveness? From those they were ready to cast into outer darkness, even if those cast out were unaware?

How is it to be forgiven? I can forgive choices made out of fear and confusion. But the smugness, the exultation at believing oneself to be among the winners, the chosen — while others you know to be as good as you, are condemned? It seems to me that these religions inflict a moral injury similar to that which armies inflict on soldiers they send into war under orders to commit atrocities. The PTSD they live with forever seems to have no cure, without an awareness of the need for forgiveness, and the courage and humility to acknowledge it.

Or so it seems to me. Believe it or not, though I never believed in the heaven/hell of the little Catholic kids at my school, I knew they believed it, and were OK with my eternal exclusion. And it still hurts and it is still not comprehensible.

    Laurie Raymond

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