I feel compelled to make clear that what follows is a personal story about Religious Trauma Syndrome in action. It crescendos with a 15-year old me in a fetal position, rocking back and forth under a tree as I sob for God's mercy. It is an epic night for a anxiety attack: The winds howl …
As someone working through my own religious trauma, I have come to both comprehend and try to own the fact that both our bodies and our souls carry our history, often in ways we do not expect. Working through my trauma is therefore a lifelong process in which I am learning how to pay attention …
Continue reading Exvangelical Meditation: How Our Bodies Carry Our History
It has never been easy for me to define family. I find this to be a common struggle among exvangelicals, not least of all because those in the evangelical community with whom we share DNA often simply cannot understand the reasons that we have decided to walk away from this path. For so many in …
Continue reading My Story: “Keep My Sister Safe” – A Tale of an Exvangelical’s Prayer
You may be surprised to learn that many of my greatest exvangelical heroes are Christians. In fact, it was an evangelical whose writings walked me through the process by which the Moral Majority came into power – how Nixon dabbled in creating a voting base out of the religious right, and how Reagan ran with …
Growing up in the Southern Baptist Church was basically life in a bubble in which we pretended the world we created for ourselves was the only one truly worth living in for everyone. Sometimes, people would just leave and we'd hear they were “backsliding,” but it's okay – we were prepped in Sunday school and …
Continue reading Exvangelical Musings: How to Talk to an Evangelical When You are Deconstructing
After walking away from a childhood faith that taught me that it holds the absolute Truth (about God, life, the universe, your eternal soul, and everything else), transitioning out took more than simply walking away from it all. It required a complete deconstruction of the way that I was taught to think – all things …
In 2018 -- 12 years after walking away from the church -- I finally went to therapy and confronted what I came to understand was trauma I still carried from my religious upbringing. The more I realized that I still carried so much trauma within myself, the more I knew that I needed to confront …
Continue reading My Story: A Dream of a Million Feathers – A Tale of A Repentant Abuser
Marlene Winell's book LEAVING THE FOLD, in which she coined the phrase "religious trauma syndrome," was immensely helpful in my own healing -- particularly in recognizing the ways I still carried abuse and trauma from my experience in church. (I left the church in 2006, but did not read the book until 2018.) For example, …
Continue reading Exvangelical Meditation: The Sin of Pride and Religious Trauma
One of the most common phrases that the evangelical church likes to toss around is, “The greatest trick the Devil pulled is convincing everyone that he doesn't exist.” I'd actually like to beg to differ. I think one of the most horrible tricks the Church ever pulled was convincing everyone within their walls that he …
It may surprise you to learn that the concept of Biblical Inerrancy is a relatively new movement in the Christian church. In fact, it isn't even as old as America – when Thomas Jefferson distributed copies of the Gospels to the other founding fathers, he left out all the miracles. He is on the record …
Continue reading Exvangelical Musings: When Scientists are Satanists – Biblical Literalism in Action
Surviving the Spirit 