Spiritual Abuse, Skittles & Me
When God aligns himself with our oppressors
When I was 17 and a high school senior, our student-run store began selling Skittles. I’d never tasted Skittles. I liked the bright red packaging and the appearance of the colorful candies, but I couldn’t afford to try them. I didn’t have the money for a candy bar.
One day, during lunch, I went to the typing room, where I typically spent the hour alone, copying my favorite passages from Dickens. Lo and behold, there on the floor was a scattering of spilled Skittles, stamped with their little white S.
No one else was in the room. The floor looked fairly clean. So I tried my first Skittles.
Looking back, what’s strange about that story is that I was working at the time. I had a job at a fabric store — after school and on Saturdays, 20 hours a week. Not long after I’d landed it, though, my Christian mother had received a message from God. It seemed I wasn’t to spend my earnings. Instead, my well-off parents would continue my tiny allowance, and my paycheck would go in the bank.
So that’s how it was.
Of course, more was at stake than just candy bars. My allowance barely covered the gas it took to get to work and back. I had nothing at all left for extras, which meant that every time a need arose, I had to ask my parents for money — that, or beg to use my own funds. Clothing and school fees, meals out and menstrual supplies — it had to all come through them.
Mostly, I did without. Back then a half-pint of subsidized school milk cost six cents. Boys would throw pennies in the school’s courtyard, and if I could collect six, I could have milk at lunch. It was a fucking poor year.
God lends his weight to oppressors
We hear a lot about some forms of abuse — physical, sexual, verbal, emotional. It’s more rare, however, to hear about spiritual or religious abuse. The definition I most often find goes something like this:
“Spiritual abuse is any attempt to exert power and control over someone using religion, faith, or beliefs.”
That definition is broad, and in truth, spiritual abuse can take as many shapes as the human mind can construct. I’ve heard so many heartbreaking examples from former Christians: Bible-sanctioned beatings, parents attributing their children’s behavior to demon possession, philandering pastors shaming adolescents for their sexual thoughts, fathers devaluing their daughters “because of Eve,” husbands telling their wives that, in spite of their bruises and broken bones, Jesus insists that they stay.
It seems you can back up almost any atrocity with God’s word, but as varied as the individual acts are, the message is always the same:
God is on my side, not yours.
That’s how it was in my childhood home. The Christian God was inextricably linked to every part of our existence, an element of every act of abuse. God had, after all, given our parents authority over us. It was right there in the Ten Commandments:
“Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” Exodus 20:12
We all prayed to God, but my mother was the only one to whom he spoke directly. I seem to have been a frequent subject of their divine conversations, and the results weren’t always disastrous. Before my birthday one year, God told my mother I needed a kitten. That was a nice surprise, and I did enjoy having a pet of my own.
More often than not, though, God’s messages about me were negative. My Creator seemed to have a real problem with my personality. God thought I was arrogant — that my opinion of myself was too high, that my intelligence put me in danger of becoming prideful.
Together, Jesus and my mother conspired to humble me, and they managed it wonderfully well. By the time I started high school, their many lessons had changed me from a confident, curious child to a silent, anxious loner — so much so that when I was told at 17 that I couldn’t use the money I’d earned, I didn’t even raise an objection.
An efficient abuse delivery system
As determined as my mother was, her efforts to subjugate me might have failed if she’d not had God on her side. The change in me could not have been wrought without Christianity — without the religious beliefs that had been drilled into me at our several churches, in Sunday school, and through the Bible.
If my mother had said to me, “Daughter, I know you have a job now, but I have an all-consuming need to control you, and a deep fear that you’ll escape my influence. So I’m going to tell you what you can do with the money you earn . . .”
Well, I could’ve argued with that.
But by bringing God into it, my mother was able to immediately eliminate any objections I might have raised. It was God’s will — the Almighty’s doing, not hers. Who can win against an all-knowing, all-powerful deity?
Despots small and large have used this tactic since religion first made its appearance, and it seems to me that Christianity, with its perfectly unclear holy book and countless denominations and variations, is an ideal vehicle for abuse. What was done to me has been done, one way or another, to millions of souls over thousands of years.
Abuse, control, power — deference to the ones at the top. It’s how religion works.
So where does this leave victims? Where did it leave me?
Without a god, for certain. Without confidence, without trust, without faith, without a religion, and — because of that — without an extended family.
Yet difficult and devastating as those losses have been, they represent a best-case scenario for me, because the other path — remaining in the religion — would’ve led to even more abuse, more self-loathing, perhaps even a new generation of spiritual abuse victims.
My mother, before she used God against me, had been a victim herself.
Though I have managed to escape further abuse, I’ve never recaptured the self-assurance that once came so naturally to me. To this day, I have trouble spending money on myself. Sometimes when my financial self-abnegation is particularly glaring, particularly pointless, I’ll catch my husband shaking his head.
“They really did a number on you,” he’ll say — they being my mother and Jesus.
Then my husband will go to the store and buy me a package of Skittles.
Recovering from Religion offers support for those who are experiencing doubt, or have questions about changing or leaving their faith. I’m not associated with this group, but I do know that sometimes support can be vital.
