And On The 7th Day, God Spake “Thou Art Canceled”

How Evangelicals mastered exclusion via shame years before Cancel Culture was a thing.

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Happily Faithless

13 min readApr 26, 2022

Image Credits: Pixabay.com/user:Ohmydearlife

I’ve noticed in recent years that a lot of churches in my area have been re-branding themselves; I suspect as a means to appeal to a younger demographic, the people of which studies have shown are abandoning organized religion just as rats abandon a sinking ship.(1) There are around twenty five or so churches within a mile and a half of my house, though it only seems to be Evangelical congregations doing this. They are using more savvy marketing strategies, such as putting a ‘kinder, gentler’ name on the sign out front, so that people won’t know initially that they are still the same ‘hell fire and brimstone’ Dominionists which prop up the political Right in this country.

If you don’t know what Dominionism is, I highly recommend looking it up, because it explains a lot going on in the country today.(2) As with these rebranding efforts, a denial of history is important to Evangelicals, because history illustrates that their words aren’t worth the breath taken to expel them when spoken.

Actions matter, and if you’ve been paying attention for the last forty years or so, you’ll know that one of the most consistent actions taken by Evangelicals is exclusion, an intense and vociferous ‘othering’ by way of accumulated social or political power. Nevermind fringe wackos like that sign-carrying Dead Fred asshole from Kansas, I’m talking about the pricks who have religious shows on Sunday morning, reaching out with their lies to a mass audience. The most famous of these hateful bigots is, of course, Pat Robertson.(3) Not only has he vociferously maligned the LGBTQ community in his decades-long hate-gasm, he’s had the audacity to call it an expression of love. Aside from that, he’s gone to great lengths to mischaracterize the truth of history to suit his own propaganda regime.(4)

Some years back, I saw a video involving Robertson speaking on a recent ecological disaster in the region(5), wherein he went on about Haiti and how they had made a pact with the devil years ago to throw off the French and become a free nation. He had the further gall to contrast Haiti with the Dominican Republic by claiming that the latter was prosperous because it had beautiful resorts and a better tourist industry. Of course, he didn’t really have a clue there, because anyone who does an ounce of due diligence with facts will know that both nations have severe issues with poverty.

Many baseball players have come to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic seeking a better life for themselves and their families precisely because living conditions were so bad. I cite as an example stories told in the Tenth Inning sequel to the Ken Burns docuseries Baseball.(6) Clearly, the DR is doing better than Haiti in some respects, but that has more to do with the opportunists who have built lavish estates for rich exploitationists so that they can get away from the unwashed masses. Investment in Haitian infrastructure hasn’t been as good, for a multitude of reasons.

The matter of Haiti having made a pact with the devil to throw off the yoke of their French enslavers is just a blatant falsification on Robertson’s part.(7) One of the few freedoms the slaves in Haiti were allowed was the right of religious worship. They used the cover of Voodoo ceremonies in order to be able to organize an armed rebellion against the French. The leader of the revolution drank pig’s blood in order to symbolize the solidarity of his conviction but this wasn’t some pact with the devil of christian mythology. It was an expression of religious devotion toward a righteous cause on the part of a people enslaved and forcibly removed to an unfamiliar land. The revolution was a success, of course, but that is where the victories begin and end, because once Haiti had thrown off the French, they were basically ignored economically by all of the great ‘White’ empires of the early 19th century and left to rot like the ruins of the sugar plantations which still dot the Caribbean landscape.(8)

I’m not really here to talk about societal level political infestations though. I’m more interested in relating my personal experiences with the Evangelical world as a means to illustrate the exclusionary power of their patriarchal religious sensibilities. A few years back, in the midst of my most active era in the local Atheist community, I was acquainted with a couple who broke away years ago from an Evangelical congregation in their community which was only two steps removed from the one in which I was raised.

My earliest memories of this congregation are that the worship services were held in an abandoned hotel on the North side of my hometown. After a time, we removed to an old school house in a small town about halfway between home and the college town north of us, where from came a large portion of the congregation, as I was led to understand years later. As I came to know eventually, that early congregation was only one step removed from the one of which the couple I had befriended broke. It wasn’t until I was a bit older, when we moved to the old school house fifteen miles away that the congregation split again.

Anyway, the lady of the couple I knew had actually grown up in the same congregation as some of the elders who were a part of my upbringing, theirs an Assembly of God congregation if I recall. Names I remembered were familiar to them. And it was such an odd experience when she finally realized who I was. She knew who my grandparents were and the look of realization on her face was so profound. It was as if she instantly knew, based on her prior knowledge of my ‘weird’ grandparents, why I was sitting across from her at an Atheist meeting. It was by far the most profound time in my life where I actually felt understood. So yeah, I may have been a bit of a misfit growing up, but it was nice in that moment to know it probably had more to do with a toxic upbringing rather than faulty wiring.

And what faulty wiring there was… For one thing, my elders didn’t like dissent. I was basically forced to study the bible as a kid; not a joyride by any means considering it was the 80s and fun colorful stuff was EVERYWHERE. One of the things I noticed during these ‘devotional’ sessions was that there was an incongruity between the two versions of the Noah story, something to do with one passage saying it rained for a certain time and another saying it rained for a different length of time.

Naturally, I was taught that the bible was the perfect word of god, so I was understandably confused. When I asked for clarification on the matter, wishing to know which version of the story was the correct version, I was told in no uncertain terms that both versions were correct, and it was said so in very annoyed, self-righteous manner, as if to suggest that I shouldn’t bring it up again if I knew what was good for me. So yeah, no dissent through questioning the perfect(ly) confusing word of god; and the othering threat of corporal punishment if I tried twice.

And punishment there was. I wont say I was a perfect angel as a child, far from it. I stole shit all the time, not because I wanted to be bad, but because I wanted what other kids had and wasn’t properly inculcated to understand that stealing is wrong. Blame bad parenting. Well-rounded kids aren’t born well-rounded, they’re molded. Sufficed to say, I got the belt a lot when I was a kid, and again, it was called love. Nevermind that the proper way to ingrain virtue in a child is careful and patient tuition with reasonable consequences for bad behavior, like a grounding period. Their solution was a leather belt and a few useless prayers to their imagined god. I still hate the bastards to this day for it. Based on what I’ve learned about the proper emotional development of children, and the effects of trauma where it concerns mental illness, it’s all but certain they bear responsibility for the shit I’m going through today.

Apart from that, I recall just how divorced from reality was the thinking of my elders when it came to their god and a consistent narrative. On one occasion, I was related a story about how a man had accidentally ingested glass fragments, from tainted milk if I recall, and how god was able to pick all of the glass fragments from out of his stomach to save his live. In the same sitting it was related how a janitor, I believe, accidentally ingested cleaning fluid and died because god couldn’t save his life.

Clearly, this was not a good way to illustrate the virtues of having faith in an all-powerful deity. If a being as high and as mighty as the christian god is purported to be, has the power to extract glass shards from the stomach, surely he would be able to cause a vomit reaction in someone who had accidentally ingested poison. It definitely left an impression on me because I was taught, on the one hand, that ‘our’ god could do anything. I was also taught that ‘our’ god was all knowing and all seeing, so it begs the question why he didn’t just prevent these people from ingesting harmful substances in the first place. Best answer they could muster — his ways are mysterious. Translation, “we don’t have a clue so any bullshit will suffice to impose our god on you, young child.”

And that brings me to my Sunday School teacher, the pastors wife. She was a nepotist through and through. When it came to the yearly holiday presentations we kids would put on to entertain the adults, her kids were ALWAYS given the choice parts. And of course, my inquiring mind had to ‘push boundaries’ because I recall once saying in class that maybe god could gain the power to defeat the devil if he got enough followers on his side. Her response, of course, was that god did have the power, he just didn’t have the authority.

What really got me about her, though, was an exercise she put on for some of us kids one time. It involved a bottle maze set out on the floor of the cafeteria area. We were split into twos, one blindfolded and the other intended to guide the first through to the maze without knocking over bottles. Easy enough, I thought. Use short shuffling steps and you minimize the chances of knocking over a bottle. The other team’s blindfolded kid, on the other hand, made it through successfully using normal strides.

Of course, the big reveal on the part of the teacher was that it had nothing to do with making it through the maze successfully, but that it was an exercise in illustrating our depth of faith. My short shuffling steps, she claimed, demonstrated that my faith wasn’t as strong as the other kids’ faith. So yeah, othering by way of deliberate misrepresentation of a task and then an inculcation of shame where it concerned the differing styles used to successfully complete said task. The timeline of events isn’t so clear in my head but I’m pretty sure that things started going downhill for me at this point where my relationship with that congregation was concerned. The kids made fun of me constantly, for whatever reason. It got so bad once that I had to hide from people in the bathroom until the older kids were forced to apologize to me.

On another occasion, there was an event at the pastors house, wherein the teacher brought out a tape from an old holiday performance. It couldn’t have been more than six or seven years in the past at that point, but I had no clear memory of the event in question. So it was a very strange experience to see myself on screen, singing in a children’s choir, bobbing my head up and down, as some kids do to keep time with the music. The other kids thought this was funny and laughed at me for it. The teacher, to her ‘credit’ chastised them lightly in my defense for their laughter.

My memory isn’t so clear but it’s possible that my egg-donor chastised me on the car ride up to the event in question about my body odor. I suppose I was getting to the age where hormones were starting to take over, but I didn’t know much about deodorant at that point apparently. If my elders were going to shame me for smelling bad, they probably could have saved a lot of trouble by teaching me about antiperspirants.

Of course, this was the same woman who tried to ground us from television permanently on several occasions, and who also resorted to throwing my Star Wars toys in the trash because she couldn’t handle that I was having nightmares. The logical solution would have been to teach me not to be so fearful, but this is the same woman who claimed that I was seeing demons on the walls at night when what I was really seeing were the after-effects of flash-burns on my eyeballs. Maybe I looked at the sun once too often…IDK…

Anyway, going back to the kids at church. I was desperate to belong when I was a kid, but I was also becoming disillusioned with my abusive home life and was starting to resist being a part of it. Once there was a tape of a christian comedian going around, and I wouldn’t watch it at home. But apparently I was ok laughing at it when I was in the company of the kids at church. Let’s face it, kids with emotional deficits and a crisis of identity lying under the surface will mask a lot if it ups the chances of being accepted in a peer group. Naturally, the egg-donor shamed me for this incongruity.

It was a constant thing for her, to use shame on me. It’s for this reason that I can look back and see just how narcissistic she was, and how unfit she was to be a parent. To drive the point home further, she divorced my biological father when I was five, and I rarely got to see him over the course of the next decade. At one point Disney re-released Fantasia into theaters and my father had called once to see about taking me and my sister to see it. I wasn’t that keen, really, because I was getting older and, for some reason, was trying to put ‘kids stuff’ behind me. I reluctantly agreed though, merely because he was my father and I was missing something in that regard. Where the bitch and her shame machine comes into it is that my uncle on her side, who had lived with us for a few years before he was forced to move out, called up once and offered to take me to the same movie, but I declined, expressing that I felt I was too old for a kid’s film like that. Shame, shame, shame…shame, shame, shame…shame your children.

Clearly, othering through shame was a big factor in my Evangelical upbringing. What’s worse is that the gossip factor is dialed up to eleven in Evangelical circles, so if you screw up, pretty much everybody knows about it. Or if you just stick out too far, everyone stares in disapproval. I can recall on more than one occasion having to wear my little league uniform to morning service because I had a game right after. All eyes were on the mismatched attire, or at least it felt that way. And naturally, if I were punished, my siblings would stare at me at the dinner table as if I were some freakish scientific specimen. It would have been one thing if I had taken my licks and that were the end of it, but Evangelicals have a way of tightening the screws to make inside-outsiders feel that much more unwelcome. Eventually, I started rebelling, to the point that I wouldn’t do my Sunday school assignments, among other things, getting stood in the corner as a result.

Once I broke away from that church and that family environment, my life started to improve somewhat, but it was no bed of roses. I was still suffering a deficit of identity and was still in the habit of seeking affection and approval from anyone I could find. After too many years of being taken advantage of in this regard, I basically said ‘fuck it’ and decided close bonds, whether familial or social, just weren’t worth the trouble, especially if the othering shoe was always sitting just around the corner, waiting for that elusive moment of hopefulness to drop and ruin the affair. Even in the last several years, as I was active in my local Atheist community, I came to realize that othering through shame was still a thing people could use to exclude, even if they weren’t religiously affiliated.

Having said all of that, the emergence of cancel culture in recent years, the collective act of marginalizing undesirables through virtue signaling and mob-mentality condemnation, has been very unsurprising to me, to say the least. I was canceled by my own family and religious community decades before we even had a way of saying ‘Canceled’. Of course, this was years before we had the ‘benefit’ of the internet, allowing shame-mongers the freedom to basically ruin a reputation for life. Some people deserve to be shamed for life, but the reality is that most who suffer the indignity of the shame machine which modern cancel-cultists perpetuate don’t actually deserve it, just as I didn’t deserve to be excluded as a child merely for reacting to the world around me from a place of naive innocence. Regardless, the power to exclude is pervasive and few groups of people have done it ‘better’ over the years than Evangelicals, people who mask their bigotry and ill intentions behind a mask of love, all for the purpose of maintaining cultural hegemony over the masses they’ve othered.