How I Became #Exvangelical OR A Few Drops of Poison
I follow a lot of #exvangelical people on twitter, which has been really helpful to me. But one thing that strikes me whenever I read their accounts is the lifelong immersion that most seem to have experienced. I wanted to talk about how I only was in the full-blown damaging evangelical realm for a short (if formative) time and how it still left deep wounds psychologically and theologically.
I grew up in an environment that was Open Evangelical (not sure if there is a US equivalent) and also Charismatic. My dad was the leader of the church, and has always made space for discussions, questions, viewpoints and perspectives. His theology has always been one I have found inclusive and founded on loving people when there’s any uncertainty about the text. You should check him out on @PaulDJSwann for his book, which I think would have a lot to offer #exvangelical types.
So I felt confident in faith, was LGBT-inclusive in that from an early age, well before I understood my own sexuality to be bisexual, and had a strong belief in the value of Christians of every sort working together. The latter point I mention because that’s part of how I got suckered. When I went to university, I got involved in the Christian Union there. I went to a collegiate university famous for its awful mental health and short terms, and at the college level, it was just as I imagined: Catholics, Baptists, high Anglicans, charismatics, evangelicals, all meeting and getting on together. But that isn’t the whole picture. The university-level Christian Union was altogether on the face of it more evangelical.
I say on the face of it because evangelical is a super-category here. What they were was conservative evangelical Calvinists with a line in recruiting Oxford people to influence society and with levels of sexism, homophobia and lovelessness hitting an extreme. I’ll tag them in purely so you know to beware them and warn others: @the_OICCU ( part of @uccf )
But I didn’t know the depths of those beliefs at first — and I was more willing to work with more conservative evangelical types from my positions away from them on the Holy Spirit and social progressivism, perhaps with the hope of making a case. Or I was just hopelessly naive. And perhaps also there’s a gaslighting element — when we spent a term looking at the Book of Joshua, with a purely pro-genocide if God tells you angle, I can’t have been the only one really really scared and disturbed, but there is a lot of self-convincing and desensitising. I’d become one of my college reps, as had two of my closest friends, and we were happy to forge our own path to a great extent. But I was still surrounded in any of the collective wider organisational stuff by vile, sickening theology. The @BrianZahnd talks of the contrast of Mars and Christ to talk about the love of human violence. I often think that the obsession with penal substitutionary atonement is a form of worshipping a Blood God — because it sure as anything ain’t Jesus they serve.
A quick summary for those unfamiliar — as when I share my spiritual scars with other people, theirs aren’t as often so particularly about certain theologies, but it matters because of the impact on my anxiety and why I still have a hypervigilance about a whiff of this stuff: Penal substitutionary atonement was described at one event that was aimed at outsiders (this really happened!) as like God burning Christ like a cruel child burns an ant with a magnifying glass, of God’s desire to punish every single human being pointed at his own Son/self. And that was supposed to be the sell! And in a way it is, I guess — because goodness knows fear is the basis of a lot of advertising. Without Christ to, as @BrianZahnd notes in Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, snatch us from the vengeful spider, we’re super-screwed. Because rarely, if ever, does penal substitution (as opposed to all the Biblical ideas of atonement — that Christ was a sacrifice made willingly, that Christ entered death and triumphed over it, that it’s a holy mystery, that Christ paid a price of liberation) not have Hell.
Hell in capitals. Eternal conscious torment is the buzzphrase — the most unimaginable agony for the most unimaginable time. And by the time you’ve imagined that version of a god, then all the grace, washing feet, dining with sinners, seek and save the lost stuff loses strength. Because you’re being pushed into Pascal’s Wager: Having doubt in your safety in the most ultimate ways at every moment, being uncertain of being loved by God, or loved in the fashion of an abusive relationship — only as a shorthand of being possessed at the risk of violence. And so I had firm faith in God — I always had and still do. But my sense of the nature of God was being warped. I feared that anything I’d heard about goodness and love was overriden by the constant message of wrath, and the Stepford-like at best, and sadistic at worse OKness that those who had bought in had. Unless it was like that Twilight Zone or whichever episode with the psychic kid who demanded all be happy.
Then add the final factor to that already hot mess of an evil and twisted theology: Calvinism. So if substitutionary atonement says that god needs to get his anger kick to forgive naturally flawed people, and eternal conscious torment says that if people don’t accept that, they get the ol’ forever torture, then Calvinism says that whether you accept that or not isn’t actually up to you, but god decided it before time and nothing can change that. God literally sat down and decided to both torture his son so that he could enable his own forgiveness AND sat down and decided to do the same thing to most of humanity anyway. That sort of god is where the ‘face god and walk backwards into hell’ thing really makes sense.
So I believed in God, and this stuff had infected and suffused me enough to not be sure of his goodness — but walking away wasn’t an option — I didn’t doubt his existence, which might have been easier! But I also couldn’t and wouldn’t love or support a god of evil.
I thought that I suffered from exam anxiety. I’d never suffered from it before, even at university in the first year, and since having had a fair bit of therapy, I recognise that anxiety is usually a lag for me on unprocessed anger. And the three triggers to my anger are exclusion, unfairness and hypocrisy. Being in that environment, hearing the messages that were in the name of my faith, and cast doubt on those who thought otherwise being part of the faith, really raised that anger that I had no way (for a lot of other reasons) to express. And my system has tended to convert that into anxiety. And that anxiety, although it was partly about failing university, which was not founded on any fact, was also that everyone I knew, including myself, was on the wrong side of the Calvinist Santa List.
Leave aside that many were Christians of various types, or whatever I might have believed about inclusivism, and the many deeply loving people of many faiths, earnest unstructured belief, or none of the above, I knew. It became like an intrusive thought, perhaps, or a recurrent trauma image — though not of a trauma lived but only imagined — of hellfire and being hated by a god that felt justified in his loathing. When I recently went through a serious bout of low mood and anxiety that took me out of work for a year, some of those fears came back. They’re still the pit — that when everything has hit rock bottom mentally, those will be some of the tormenting thoughts.
And I had started with a great grounding in a faith far truer to the love of Christ. Many of my university friends lived through that, and I know that some bear psychic and spirit scars. Many people I didn’t know were exposed to it, either from inside or outside the church. Worse is how many people I know or know of who still live in that corruption of faith — convinced of the goodness of a god who spits on the Christ many of us know, enthralled with human violence magnified into deity, who were indeed those who killed the prophets. God is love, their commands are love, and that is controversial most of all within some parts of the church that aims to follow God.
That was the trigger to my mental health going from vulnerability into actual anxiety. Since then, it’s rare that I was ever free of some measure of anxiety. Later, through other non-theological things, that anxiety has developed into chronic pain. Until having gone through therapy, taking medication, reflecting on and researching, hearing helpful liberatory sermons — @astr0wen on Joshua, @BrianZahnd on atonement, I had been anxious.
And is that any surprise, given the level of one’s foundations being ripped away, on being told that the truth of one’s faith is about serving a god who will callously harm most people anyway, on all of that happening in the crucible of the mood instability inspiring university?
Every church I go into, every sermon I hear, even from people I know, consciously trust, whose wisdom I treasure, there is still a part on alert that they will secretly be harbouring the poison, that despite the outer appearance, they will be trying to bring in through the back a sinister set of beliefs, founded on law, judgmentalism, a vengeful god, a love of blood (someone recently called them Vampire Christians, who only want Jesus for his blood), a love of conformity, a loathing of my sexuality, of inclusiveness, of hope, in essence, of Christ.
And that’s exhausting, at times, distracting from when there’s genuine good news to the good news, and here’s why I called this thread A Few Drops of Poison.
I was not in that environment for very long at all. I had good friends of many types of faith who were there for me. I had a lot of privileges! Cishet-seeming, only mildly developmentally disabled, middle class, educationally privileged! I had many shields. But even with all of that, the toxicity of a theology based on violence, subjugation, prejudice, judgmentalism, slavish obedience and wilful ignorance of the Bible they claim is 100% literal, and yet don’t do what it says or believe what it describes, that toxicity got to me. I’m thankful for the ways that I have escaped it, but the wounds or scar tissue are still very much present. That’s why I’ve had writing this on my mind for a little while, to try and at least air it, if not seek catharsis.
Part of that is my sense of over-responsibility, to shield others from things that I have suffered, prioritising their hypothetical protection over my self-care. Part of it is real warning. Part of it is a challenge to those who believe it, or otherwise let it flourish. The bystanders, who embrace parts of it — not the predestination, but the penal substitution. Not the child-abuse-atonement, but the flaming torture. Not any of that, but still no time for women, or for queer people.
And I haven’t yet found the answer, save to try to listen to my conscience, and to God, and to speak honestly my experience of Christ and a Christianity that can be. Sometimes that has been clumsy, and reactions have been a mix of pain with legitimate response to dangerous ideas coming from the pulpit. Sometimes that has been lashing against those who would never accept me or my ideas. One thing is helpful is #exvangelical voices, especially here on twitter — like @hannahpaasch and @emilyjoypoetry whose appearance on @exvangelicalpod partly prompted me to actually get this written. Especially @n_m_king who was in the same sorts of places at the same sorts of times, and had her own journey in that. Writers, of whom @BrianZahnd I especially value.
I am still wrestling with acting in accordance with my values and aiming to be Christlike in responding to the things that have traumatised me, harmed me, and the great sense of betrayal I feel. Sometimes I feel too passive, sometimes too aggressive, and sometimes too passive-aggressive. I want to understand turning the other cheek, being silent before the accusations, turning over the tables, saying “get behind me Satan,” cursing the fig tree, weeping for Jerusalem, speaking seven woes against the Pharisees and speaking beatitudes to people gathered on a mount. And I don’t know how, but I know I need to act upon this. This anger, I believe, comes from the legitimacy of the theological battle, and the human battle for people to not be abused by any institution.
That’s where my journey looks forward at the moment. Perhaps at some point I’ll combine it with a similar explanation of a similar journey in psychology.
If anything, at this point I am ever more convinced of the grace, love, peace and active inclusion of God. Jesus is the image of the invisible God, and he hangs out with sex workers and national traitors and terrorists. May I be led in that way.
