The fog that lifted…
In 2008, I left my Christian College and my life changed forever. As with most small campuses, there was a yearbook with a section for notes and messages to your friends for them to read years later…
15 years later and I still look back at one of those messages in particular with mixed feelings.
“The fog is clearing for you as it is for me.
Keep trusting God.
Promise me, never leave God.”
I wasn’t able to keep that promise. You see, when the proverbial fog cleared for me, I saw nothing divine. I saw the true hollowness of the community that my religious upbringing provided.
There was nothing to keep me there, other than the faith that I was groomed to profess.
I mean that quite literally: most children raised in religion have the illusion of choice, they have options, they get to say they aren’t sure. As the son of a religious leader in our very conservative sect of Christianity, there was no room for pretense. I was expected to take up the torch and devote myself wholly to leading and growing our community. This was a role deemed inappropriate for my sister to fill, only a man may lead the congregation...
I was preaching before I could read, and this “skill” was put down to the divine inspiration I received from God, and I was pushed to continue for years. At just 4 years old, I was crowned Multifaith Junior Preacher of the Year 1994.
Looking back, I can even remember the sermons I was asked to give. I had a picture book of Bible stories, and I was given the prompt to tell the people what “Jesus wanted them to know.” I would scream at people that “God is coming to judge them for their sins, like He judged Israel!” to rapturous applause.
What the audience didn’t know was that my father, who was reading his PhD in apocalyptic theology at the time, was dragging his 3- and 4-year-old children to his “the end is nigh, repent” seminar series for almost 2 years at that point. I was just parroting what I heard my father saying.
My mother had a similar influence. When I told the congregation “You’re all sinners, you need to pray to make God love you,” I was just repackaging the admonishments she would rant if I did anything she perceived to be wrong.
Dwelling on it now, I was looking for ANYTHING I could do to make my parents happy and busy, because when they weren’t, I lived in fear. And the only way to make them happy and busy was to make more people come to church.
My experience isn’t unique. Pastor’s Kids (PKs), as we are referred to in the general protestant world, suffer infamously unhappy childhoods. Some, like me, have severe trauma related to their experiences, while others make it through barely unscathed.
It took me a long time to truly come to terms with who I was and what I wanted from life. Every moment of my formative years was filled with phrases like “We are not of the world but in the world” and “God is watching you.” The value of a person correlated only to their compliance and reverence to God. I was taught to believe wholeheartedly that EVERY human on Earth outside my narrow, toxic brand of Christianity was going to Hell.
That, combined with the deliberate isolation that children of the clergy are subjected to, breeds a kind of numbness — an indifference to the world beyond your prison. I had very little contact with the outside world till I was disowned, disfellowshipped and left to fend for myself. The 3 secular school friends I did have are the sole reason that I am here today.
Sometime after gaining my freedom, I bumped into the friend who wrote that old yearbook message to me. I never told him that I became an atheist. I didn’t need to. The fact that I was “living in sin” as a proud gay man was reason enough for him to not speak to me for a decade. When we did finally cross paths, he took the opportunity to look at me sadly and tell me that he’d pray for me. Something my parents also do when forced to interact with me.
Experiences like that always left me with a deep sense of pain. How could he treat me like a stranger — worse, like a sinner — after I spent so many nights talking to him, helping him study for his theology degree? After I spent hours of my life rewriting his essays so he could have the future he dreamed of with the wife and kids he so desperately wanted? It never sat right with me.
The statistics of disfellowship, shunning and similar practices are horrific. Too horrific to share in detail. People, often young people, end up homeless, isolated, or caught up in problematic drug use. Many of them die. There is no Christian charity nor love afforded these individuals because they are no longer valuable to the Church organisation and they deserve death for it, like everyone else.
Obviously when you say it like that, people act scandalised, remember it’s never THEIR fault that the child ended up that way and had to be disciplined, sent away, ‘treated’ by religious ‘doctors’ and healers.
To this day, my joys, successes, and even continued existence cause my family nothing but shame. Their disappointment that I didn’t just crash and burn is etched into every interaction that we still (rarely) have. It’s more tragic because I believe that they genuinely do love me, the need for my repentance, changing every aspect of myself and unconditional compliance to their faith aside, of course. Knowing that changes you as a person. But I realised later on that it may also teach you something valuable. Realising that you’re now one of the billions of people doomed to hell, you learn empathy. They are after all, the same as you… the same as me, now.
I’m going to explore more of these thoughts and experiences this year and really take my time to appreciate just how different I am today from the scared, homeless, gay teen I was 15 years ago. I’d really like it if you came on the journey with me.
