How Evangelical Christianity Fucked Me Up: A Post

2019-12-12T23:14:44Z

So, there’s this book called “The Martyr’s Mirror” which was first published in the 1600s, with stories and woodcuts about Christian, and especially Anabaptist, martyrs. It was supposed to be inspiring: all these people died for their faith, you should be like them! There was a traveling exhibit about it, complete with specific descriptions and actual 16th century torture devices, that came to my town when I was about 9 years old. Just old enough to understand something about what torture really meant, not old enough to know how to process it.

(side note: I wasn’t allowed to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because it was “too violent” but educational exhibits about torture were apparently fine. It just occurred to me that this is …not particularly consistent.)

So the story I remember from this book was about a guy called Dirk Willems. He was in jail, waiting to be burned at the stake for being the wrong kind of Christian, and somehow he escaped. He was running across a frozen pond, being chased by a guard, when the guard fell through the ice.

Dirk Willems stopped, went back, pulled the guard out of the water, the guard re-arrested him, and he was burned at the stake.

The moral of the story being, you should sacrifice your life to save others, even when those others are trying to kill you.

It didn’t occur to me that this was deeply fucked up until I was in my 30s.

I was telling my therapist the story at our last session, and she was like “Well, okay, if he believed that strongly, good for him. But me, I’d see that as a blessing and keep running.”

Today I was listening to an episode of “The Life After”, a podcast about getting out of fundamentalist evangelical Christianity.

For the sake of the lovely people who go to the church I grew up in, I should say that they weren’t that bad, mostly. We had a woman pastor for a while. I wasn’t told I couldn’t do whatever because I was a girl. I wasn’t told that my goal in life should be to get married.

But hoboy did I get a full dose of purity culture. And that’s what this episode was about. Purity culture, or as Jaimie Lee Finch called it on this podcast, “religious and cultural sexual suppression.”

And there was some stuff in there that was… enlightening.

Like, you can’t be a whole person if you’re taught that a part of you – your sexuality – is Bad. How people end up so disconnected from their bodies, because your body is dangerous.

That sex and sexuality are key parts of being human – fundamentally, after all, what we’re here for is to have sex and reproduce so the species continues.

So telling women they’re not supposed to feel sexual attraction, not supposed to recognize that part of themselves, is inhumane.

“You were not given this hunger in order to starve”

Some things I am still trying to teach myself:

I am a whole person. Sexuality isn’t just “not evil” it’s good. My body is mine, all of it.

I am not required to rescue people who are trying to kill me.

My life, my health, my needs, my desires matter. Just as much as anyone else’s.

I can find a story to tell about myself – who I am, where I came from, how I got here – that rings true.

I still don’t believe any of those, not really. But I don’t disbelieve them as much as I used to. I can write them down.

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How Evangelical Christianity Fucked Me Up: A Post