CHAPTER 5: FINDINGS AND QUOTES
As millennials who were raised in the peak of the purity movement of the 1990s have grown into individuated adults, there have been some of those formerly devoted congregants who have left their faith. As these ex-Evangelicals have reflected on their experiences within the church, many have walked away with pain and possible trauma from the time spent in their former faith communities. This is especially the case for people who did not lose faith but lost trust in their religion and those who were excommunicated. The purpose of this research was to create a fuller understanding of how conservative Evangelical purity culture has impacted the congregants who have left their faith. In doing this, I have found that the primary themes that participants revealed that caused them dissonance and distress were (a) the rigid expectations of gender and gender hierarchy, (b) the way purity culture gatekeeps sexuality, and (c) the way it limits the possibilities and education of sexuality as part of the conservative Evangelical purity culture.
The Impact of Rigid Gender Roles and Hierarchy
The first theme that emerged was related to the subjugated role women are expected to accept from youth and throughout life. The Purity Movement’s emphasis on women being second to their husband did not bode well with many of the study participants. Studies show that gender-inequitable attitudes contribute to unequal outcomes for women (Seguino, 2010).
Esther (she/her) spoke candidly about the impact these teachings had on her self-esteem and concrete life goals. She remembered the Evangelical church’s teachings as contradictory of itself. On one hand, she was taught that
“we were all made in God’s image, but God has many qualities. And so, he gave men the qualities of strength and leadership and decisiveness and he gave women the qualities of nurturing and softness, caring, taking care of others, and being selfless.”
Josephine was taught similarly, that men and women are inherently worth the same in God’s eyes, but that their different roles relegated them to separate spaces and actions.
“I remember there was an often-used analogy during sermons explaining that much like a toaster and a coffee pot have different function, but cost the same, that we too should (women) are different than men and that we should submit to men. A toaster is more integral to breakfast, so it is the man. A coffee pot helps move things along, so that is the woman. The coffee pot is not less valuable, but it should submit to the toaster because of its’ different function.”
This type of teaching, that men and women are different but still inherently equal before the eyes of god, was followed up with more explicitly hierarchical teachings. While she was academically bright and a good athlete, her loving and supporting parents, following the Church doctrine, encouraged her to invest in getting married and be a good wife and mother and to give up her expectations of herself. In her words:
“The expectation is clearly stated that men are strong; men are leaders. Women are supposed to make themselves smaller so that they can be giving everything for other people. . . It was contradictory at times. I was an athlete, a good swimmer, and extremely smart. And my parents were always so encouraging. I was valedictorian in high school and they were so supportive. They told me I could be anything I wanted to be. But at the same time, it was clear that the best thing a woman can be is a good wife for her husband and a good mom for her children. I thought that maybe one day I could be a doctor, but I remember my mom pointing out that doctors have a demanding schedule and that I wouldn’t get to stay home with my kids. On one hand, they were so encouraging of me because I was a smart kid. But at the same time the underlying expectation is that I should have children and make that my priority. It was clear that the best decision I could make for my future was to get married, stay home and raise my children “right.”
Esther went on to note that this kind of messaging at home and at church led her to pursue a different career in order to be available to stay at home with her children because that was what “was expected” of her. She vividly remembered the way that her mother and other women in her family were held up as examples of the “more of you, less of me” attitude that felt pervasive in the pursuit of godly femininity:
“The question is always “What are you going to do for other people?” That’s up upheld as this highest goal. Wow! You are a selfless, you are so selfless, and that’s like the number one golden thing that you can achieve as like a womanly, a godly woman. The highest goal for a godly woman is for your wants and needs to disappear.“
Felicity (she/her), described her understanding of her place in the world as a woman in the church, “Women were sweet and submissive. They were the supporters. They were not leaders. They were emotional, you know? We were supposed to be a stereotype of a nurturing servant, deferring to our husbands.” On the flip side, she described how men were clearly revered and provided with a place of deference, “Men are spiritual leaders. They are supposed to be the ‘head of the relationship like Christ is the head of the Church.’”
Mary, she/her, also was cautioned to remain grounded beneath the stained-glass ceiling of “biblical womanhood.” Mary’s messaging flowed from her family of origin, who consumed Vision Forum catalogues as a guide on how to raise godly children. Her family impressed upon her the importance of her place as a woman even when she left the family home to pursue further education: “sure, I was allowed to go to college. And I could have a career for ‘a little while.’ But I was never supposed to usurp the power of the men in my life or act like I have any authority over men. I was never supposed to be something more in the world than any man could be” (Mary).
Research suggests that family and religious ideologies shape beliefs of how men and women should behave. Families governed by strong, patriarchal religious ideologies are correlated with some of the least equitable views of gender (Siordia, 2016). David is a participant who left the church but has remained a staunch believer in the teachings of Jesus. His wife, however, has remained faithful to many of the Evangelical church’s doctrines as she still has strong familial and communities ties to Evangelical fundamentalism. David (he/him) noted these challenges in his own marriage as he began to question purity culture:
“It shows up in patterns that follow the gender norms that she grew up with. Her family was much different than mine and were more strictly complementarian. Sometimes I feel like I’m being boxed into the roles she grew up in and patterns she keeps trying to repeat … That’s maybe the real thing about evangelical purity culture is that it does not allow people to be fully themselves in it. I think my wife struggles somewhat with identity sometimes. I know she’s chosen to stay home and be a stay at home Mom. And I have told her that she can work and do whatever she’d like. But did she really choose that? Or is she doing what her upbringing told her is right? I remember her mom would consistently say that she feels bad for women who have to work and that it must be because their husbands can’t support them. But in reality I want her to have every opportunity to do what she wants. And I think that’s the complicated thing. I don’t know if she ever gave herself the chance to figure that out.“
As David deconstructed his ideas of gender, complementarianism, and evangelicalism, he began to see the differences in how his wife was raised as a woman and how he was raised as a man. The more women are under the influence of the patriarchal umbrella of protection, the fewer opportunities are available for them in the wider society and even within Evangelical circles.
Esther’s career was shaped by the limitations placed on her by patriarchal attitudes. Mary felt her ambition was stifled by the umbrella of authority laid over her. Sadie, she/her, felt the restrictions of gendered expectations in other ways. She pursued leadership roles in campus ministries throughout college and continued to work with an Evangelical youth ministry into adulthood. As Sadie worked alongside Christian men within Evangelical hierarchies, the ways she was expected to behave and engage with her friends and coworkers around her highlighted other ways in which rigid gender roles made her feel lonely within Evangelical culture. Sadie described the impacts that these expectations had on her self-esteem and the ways she felt viewed as unworthy of affection by men seeking spouses within the church.
I didn’t feel “pickable” because I was more a bold personality. I was outspoken. It made me feel insecure because as someone who is a gifted leader, I was also not the meek and quiet “ideal Christian wife.” I think part of me not having been in a long-term romantic relationship throughout my adolescence and into adulthood is due to not feeling pickable within this whole Christian framework, because of my outspoken personality. And then also feeling like I have to be guarded because I know that I did not want to be in a relationship with someone who could not accept me for who I am.
An underlying theme throughout Sadie’s story, like that of many others, was that she was not allowed to reach out and express interest in men she was attracted to. Like all women raised under Evangelical purity culture, Sadie was instructed to sit and patiently wait while god’s chosen man came forward to whisk her off her feet. The tools of agency and ambition she would normally implement in her career or educational life were useless in the Evangelical romantic world. Being opinionated and showing leadership skills further limited her dating chances as she seemed a bad choice for good Christian marriage. For her it was a double whammy, she was indoctrinated not to seek out dating and she was labeled as a bad marriage potential.
Traits that would be prized in people who were born men were maligned in Sadie, who felt inherently isolated and “unpickable” from the Evangelical men around her. She still struggles with the deeply seeded belief, planted in the fields of Evangelical purity culture, that she is unworthy of being chosen for romantic love, a struggle she still works through even after having left Evangelical Christianity. Stripped of agency and ambition, women are inherently disempowered and relegated to being under the authority of men in all arenas.
The impacts of this culture on men are oppositional but harmful in different ways. August (they/them) observed,
“The misogyny in the church hurt the men, too. It meant they couldn’t be gentle. And they couldn’t be physical and have hugs from their friends for fear of being seen as gay or feminine. It looked so isolating.”
Samson (he/him) relayed that he felt “conditioned to be the privileged group here. For me, it was almost like a constant ego trip.” Samson describes his experience as a young white man in the Evangelical church as one of high power with little accountability; he was encouraged to confess his sins to his fellow brothers in Christ, but he saw a distinct “double standard” in how young boys and girls were treated in youth groups. Through that, Samson felt he was enabled to be “the worst version” of himself, a young boy who behaved selfishly and cavalierly within the rules of the Evangelical church. During his narration, Samson noted that his position as a tall, white man in the Evangelical made him the benchmark for what leadership would be simply by virtue of what he looked like and the gender he was born. Samson reflected on his time as a teen in the church,
It was easy for me to step into leadership roles or be told that “the sky is the limit” for me. I looked like a godly man. People around me told me, “You’re going to be the leader, the provider, the decider, and you’re going to know all of these important things that your future family will need. So starting now, at youth group, you can lead however you want.”
Because Samson was the epitome of what the Evangelical church prizes, a handsome, tall white male, he was placed on a pedestal and elevated. Mark (he/him) felt the weight of the expectations of men in the church differently. He reported,
“There was not a lot of space to be even slightly unconforming of who I needed to be as a man. The struggle was that I never felt like I fit in. Where I was supposed to be a good, Christian leader that makes overtures about being a strong, masculine man, I was sensitive and quiet.”
As a young, bisexual male, Mark felt as though he did not fit the mold of what an Evangelical “biblical man” should be. Mark was placed in a young men’s small group in which they were supposed to be a “band of brothers” type group, fighting the war on sin. Meanwhile, Mark found sanctuary in close platonic friendships with the young women of his youth group, who engaged in intimate late-night talks about feelings and insecurities. Mark reported growing up feeling like an outsider within a culture that should have placed him on a pedestal as a white male. However, his reticence to engage with the overt masculine stereotypes of his group alienated him.
Not conforming to rigid Evangelical gender roles, both male and female, had social consequences. Conforming to these roles yielded emotional consequences. Ultimately, rigid gender roles are problematic for many people. These roles placed under strict, patriarchal systems restrict everyone in different ways, keeping everyone under the stained-glass ceiling captive.
Gatekept Sexuality
This exertion of control begins at an early age through gatekeeping and sheltering young Evangelical Christians from age-appropriate information about sexual and reproductive health. Nine out of 10 of participants noted that they received no formal sex education in their youth, nor were they taught about reproductive health or the functions of these related organs in their own bodies. Mark (he/him), remembers being given a resource at age 16,
…called Passport to Purity. My Dad took me to a hotel for a getaway weekend to listen to tapes called Passport to Purity. I had to go through a workbook. I later found out that this is a resource given to 10 or 11 year olds. This is the only form of sex education I have ever had and the only conversation I’ve ever had with either of my parents about sex or relationships. It only vaguely referred to sex as being something where a man and a woman take off their clothes, get under the covers in bed, and then it stops. It was impressed upon me that what is very important it is that I don’t come anywhere close to doing this (sex) until I got married. There was an analogy about sex where it compared sexual intimacy to standing near a cliff. They said that it is like a very dangerous cliff that you could fall into and asked, “Do you want to argue about how close you can get to the cliff before you’ll fall in?” And the apparent answer was that “no, you stay the hell away from the cliff.” And so that was the attitude that I was taught. You are not supposed to even talk about kissing someone you’re not married to.
Similarly, Sadie walked through life with no formal knowledge of sex or sexuality until she sought out information in her adulthood after leaving the Evangelical church. She said,
The first time I like truly learned about sex, was when I moved to a new city and I was curious, and I watched a Youtube documentary. It was like a British Youtube documentary on like sex. And it hit me that I am like a college graduate who is like Wikipedia in sex. That’s how I was able to learn about sex and reproduction. But I truly was in the dark. It felt really gatekept. There was a consistent narrative that we should not ask questions. The repeated mantra was “Just don’t do it. Do not awaken love to it so desires.”
The latter portion of Sadie’s quoted statement, “Do not awaken love until it so desires,” comes from the often-quoted Song of Solomon in the Bible, a chapter in the Bible that Evangelical churches lean upon heavily in order to provide context for any type of heterosexual intimacy in the Bible. It is a verse that has become colloquial in purity culture circles to enforce the Evangelical edict that abstinence until marriage is the moral way, and therefore the only way, to safely engage with sex. Samson noticed this black and white thinking when he reflected on his experience of growing into a young man with sexual desires. Samson (he/him), acknowledged that he was taught “the most important thing is about your body is abstaining from sex, or any physically intimate relationships, until you are married. And then any action that compromises that is seen as really bad and potentially irredeemable.” He recognized a glaring gap in his understanding and education, as well:
I was never taught about the importance of consent and boundaries because sex was just considered bad so you shouldn’t do it anyway. In purity culture, you don’t need to know about consent, because you shouldn’t be having sex, making out, or being anywhere near physically intimate at all. As a result, I lived in this binary of good or bad, right or wrong. This resulted in irresponsible behavior. The thought was “Oh, we’re already like breaking the rules, so we might as well just like get naked.”
As Samson points out, there is an all or nothing mentality in this purity ethos. David, he/him, remembers this as feeling intense pressure from fellow kids in his small group at church to “be above reproach,” which functionally meant that he did not kiss a woman he dated until he was in his mid-twenties. Internally, David remembered strongly policing his thoughts, which meant “taking every thought captive” and devoting time and effort with his friends to confess the moments when he thought about a woman he found attractive, regardless of whether he acted on any feelings of attraction at all, in an effort to not allow himself to “stumble into sin.” Mark also was expected to attend to confessional appointments with his discipleship group, which was separated explicitly by gender. He described it as an all-male accountability group in which he and his peers would go around the circle, and you would tell everyone else in the group anything you’d been tempted by. So anytime you masturbate or see something in media that prompted sexual feelings or feelings of attraction, you’d confess it. It was expected that if there was a sex scene or kissing scene in a movie, you would have to tell your accountability group what it made you feel. “Did you see someone wearing a swimsuit? And how did that make you feel? Have you thought about anyone lustfully?”
Felicity (she/her) remembers the divide between gender roles extended well into adulthood and supported the harmful idea that men cannot control themselves sexually when engaging with someone of the opposite sex.
“I remember one of our neighbors needed to ride home from church. She was a lady, and my dad had an empty seat in the car, and he told her that ‘I would love to take you home, but I don’t ride in the car with a woman alone.’ I just remember having this like sense that you like you can’t be alone with someone of the opposite sex. You can’t really be friends with someone from the opposite sex, because, like what might happen?”
Mark reflected on his time growing up in Evangelical purity culture and reported that “human sexuality felt like something you should confess” because “there is a certain level of hostility toward your body like you’re supposed to have, especially if you’re not married. If you have sexual desires or thoughts, you should have disdain and shame for your body because it is causing you to sin.” This shame is enforced through policing behaviors and thoughts among young congregants. Young men are encouraged to ruthlessly squash any feelings of attraction for fear of committing a sin against God. Even in their shame and self-loathing, young men are given a privileged position in white evangelical sexuality. Samson remembers,
when guys did mess up in purity culture, it was a slap on the wrist type of situation. “Boys will be boys” was the attitude. We would confess and just try not to do it again. But for my partner, the girl, there was so much more shaming. I was considered cool if I made out with my girlfriend. Meanwhile, they would think she was a whore.
As noted by Samson, the people we interviewed who were assigned female at birth were taught different mechanisms to control and police their sexuality. The repetitiveness and frequency of these teachings ramps up the importance in the eyes of congregants as it is taught often and as an important tenet of holiness. Josephine describes the way that the Evangelical church teaches about sexuality as “obsessed with sex in a very ‘shiny, this is the best way to do things’ type of way.” Numerous participants described being taught several times from an early age through various types of illustrations that pointed to the same thing: if a woman has sex, then she is used up or less worthy. Felicity recounts one experience:
I specifically remember at one of these team meetings where we were talking about sex. Our youth pastor had us cut out construction paper hearts, a pink cart and a blue heart to symbolize girls and boys, and then we glued them together. Then they instructed us to try to pull them apart from one another. Because it’s construction paper and glue, part of the blue part is on the pink and part of the pink was on the blue. They told us that this is what happens when you have sex outside of marriage, and you leave parts of yourself with someone else, and you’re never the same, and you’re destroyed.
Esther echoes this experience by recounting a youth group meeting in which the youth pastor used a flower to describe sexual intimacy before marriage:
You’re a rose. And every time you kiss another man before you are married, you pluck a petal off because you are supposedly giving something of yourself away. And so if you pluck too many petals and show up to get married to your rightful husband, you are going to give him just an empty stem, which makes you worthless. Somehow love and intimacy are finite. . . The important thing was that you want to have the most of yourself to give your husband on your wedding day.
The implications of the lessons outlined above shame and gatekeep human sexuality. Taught in a gendered binary, men are taught to police themselves and hate their bodies for natural functions and desires. Women are taught that they are worthless if they allow men outside of marriage to touch them.
The expectations of how the binary genders that are acknowledged in Evangelical sexuality differ tremendously between men and women. Esther describes her experience with how she was allowed to engage in sexuality through conversations she had with family, who were incredibly influential in her life in the Evangelical church. Esther reported,
As a woman, you are supposed to run as far away from sex as possible. But, like you, run as far away from the line of sex as you can when you’re dating. I was talking to my aunt when I was in college and asked what was allowable for me to do in a dating relationship. It was all about rules, so I had to ask. Her response was “What would you feel comfortable doing if your dad was sitting on the couch across from you?” My whole purpose was to keep myself pure and be a good, godly wife and find a good, godly husband. If I wanted my life to be happy and holy, there was no deviation or exploration allowed.
Josephine echoes this sentiment of purpose being tied to female sexuality in the Evangelical church as she recounted several sermon series she was taught while in the Evangelical church: “Whatever man was preaching was giving like instruction to women in the room about how to be a godly woman. They made sure to impress upon us that our bodies belonged to our husbands and that I had an obligation to have sex with my husband. I was instructed not deprive him of sex, even if I did not feel like being intimate. My body belonged to my husband, not to me.”
Limiting Sexuality
The Evangelical church has been straightforward in proclaiming that homosexuality is a sin.[1] Adjacent to this staunchly held belief is that the Evangelical church places heterosexual relationships on a pedestal as ordained by their god. It is notable that the only sexuality overtly discussed in Evangelical circles as remotely acceptable is that which is confined in a heterosexual marriage. The Evangelical church is staunchly anti-LGBTQIA in their beliefs, going so far as to declare that “even a desire to engage in a homosexual relationship is always sinful, impure, degrading, shameful, unnatural, indecent, and perverted” (SBC, 1996).
In every recent convention, the Southern Baptist Church has affirmed the belief that to be queer or queer affirming is an abomination. Historically, the idea that homosexuality is inherently sinful or immoral is a controversial one, creating division within congregations as members reckon with their beliefs and how those beliefs impact their ability to love their neighbor (Van Geest, 2007). Homophobia, politicized and used to sow division and further create hierarchical divisions within the Evangelical church, is often fundamentally ignored in the teaching of Christian sexuality, as if not acknowledging the full range of human sexuality will cause homosexuality or other “unacceptable” expressions of sexuality to cease to exist.
Half of our participants spent time explicitly reevaluating their sexuality when they left Evangelicalism after spending their formative years without understanding how to explore their own sexual or relational identities. August (they/them) remembers their experience growing up in the Evangelical church as someone assigned female at birth:
I wasn’t interested in sex with boys, anyway. I remember them teaching us that sex is the greatest thing ever in the confines of a heterosexual marriage. There were only two options for how to live: either to be married and heterosexual or single and heterosexual. Growing up I do not remember them being explicitly against homosexuality. It was more like that they just never mentioned. It was never even on the table.
August married a man that they met at their Baptist college ministry in their early twenties. Their relationship was one of a close friendship as they shared an interest in games, music, and volunteering at church. As August grew older and began to think about their sexuality and who they are as a person outside of the Evangelical bubble, their perspective on what is possible for their life and relationships changed:
To this day I find it difficult to put a finger on the proper word for my sexuality. In theory, I could be attracted to any gender. Women are my favorite, but I’m like generally not like attracted really to anyone. I think I am on the asexual spectrum. I remember sitting through these True Love Waits lectures as the people around me talked about how hard it was not to want to have sex, or hold hands with your boyfriend. And I did not want any of that. I was not interested in touching boys. I knew that I liked it when my girlfriends sat in my lap. Now, in retrospect it is so obvious to me that I was attracted to more than just men. But because I did not know that being queer was an option, I just assumed that I was good at being pure. I assumed I was good at being pure and escaping sin, because I don’t even want to kiss boys much less have a boyfriend. That was the problem. I wanted to kiss my girlfriends, but I was not allowed to acknowledge that. There was affirmation in being good at avoiding my sexuality. It made me feel like I was good at purity culture, which I think made me take so much longer to figure out my sexuality, because I thought I was just good and holy and pure. I was just unaware and in the dark. Marriage and relationships were such a logical faith-based thing for me that I did not even think about attraction. Had I known there are other sexualities or other options, maybe I could have read and understood the difference earlier and avoided rushing into a marriage.”
Felicity also married a fellow Evangelical congregant in her early adulthood. After she and her husband deconstructed their Evangelical faith and parted ways on good terms, she began to explore her sexuality and date new people, including a woman. As Felicity talked about the dissolution of her first marriage and how she sought to individuate and determine who she is as an independent adult, she began to notice the ways she’d avoided her sexuality at all. It was during her first relationship with a woman that Felicity began to understand her own sexuality and her own preferences for what she likes in a partner. Felicity looks back on her reckoning with her own sexual identity as one of formative growth and exploration:
This is going to sound really weird, but I just never quite knew if I was straight or a lesbian or bisexual. I tried on different labels for awhile when I was with her. At the end of our relationship, right before we broke up, I traveled by myself to continue my exploration of who I was. It came full-circle and I gave myself permission to finally stop running. I gave myself permission to stop trying to be someone I wasn’t. I came home and I told her that I could not be in this relationship. In the unraveling of that relationship and in the months that followed, I did some soul searching and felt more firm and aware of my sexuality that I am straight. Exploring my sexuality was what I needed. I needed to understand and have those experiences for myself to understand my whole identity. I am straight and have been this whole time. But I didn’t know until I tried. Because I didn’t know myself at all outside of the kind of woman I was supposed to be according to the Church.
Similarly, Mark and Josephine experienced dissonance as they realized and explored their sexuality in post-Evangelical adulthood. Mark remembers coming to understand his sexuality in his adulthood after he left the Evangelical church, and with that understanding came self-awareness of the ways he did not feel as though he fit in: “I am a bisexual man and I feel like that explains a lot of why I did not fit into their mold of masculinity.” Naomi, she/her, began questioning her sexuality after a decade of marriage and came out to the interviewer with the quiet request to not discuss the topic further as it was still new to her and she is still in the midst of exploration. Josephine, meanwhile, discovered in talks with her therapist that she is demi-sexual, which is on the asexual spectrum: “I realized that it depends on the person and the connection, not the gender. This is why I need an emotional connection as a precursor for me before I can have sex. This is why, the demand of sex as a Christian woman, felt so icky. This is why the expectation feels so bad. Because I wasn’t connected. I was committed.”
As Josephine began to understand her beliefs and identity, she began to realize that the harms purity culture had done in her relationship were layered and complex. Much like August, Felicity, and Mark, she saw the limiting beliefs of compulsory heterosexuality and how not being equipped with any understanding of sexuality kept her from understanding her own wants and needs. Gatekeeping awareness and acknowledgement of sexualities outside of heterosexuality in the confines of marriage is harmful and delays human relational and sexual development, if it is even allowed at all.
Changes after Leaving
Participants’ reasons for disaffiliating from their religious communities varied across interviews, but there was one theme that all of the participants had in common as one of the primary reasons for leaving: dissonance between their values and the church’s values. Some participants, such as Naomi attributed her exit to the largescale societal changes that happened as a result of the pandemic as recently as 2020,
“I think the pandemic shook people up . . . I found myself wondering ‘am I still the same person that I was?’ I remember reading ‘Searching for Sunday’ as I questioned and realizing that ‘Wait. I don’t think I’m comfortable voting Republican, which was a given in the Evangelical circles I was involved in. I don’t think I’m comfortable with the war in Iraq. I don’t think I’m comfortable with how the church is treating LGBTQ people.”
Naomi is not alone in how her questioning led to her exodus from the system her entire social world revolved around. Other participants felt unmoored and adrift after realizing the ways that their own personal faith had diverged from their religious institutions’ values.
Josephine, who took time to individuate after seeing firsthand the ways that purity culture could impact her marriage,
“I feel really solid on what my core values are now, and I’ve solidified those after leaving the Evangelical Church. Now, after leaving, I would say that I even care very deeply about my spirituality in ways that are exciting to me. I believe that my own authentic faith can exist now that I’ve left such a very rigid, literal, black and white, you’re-either-in-or-out type of group.”
While the studies cited in this study’s literature review have shown that there are increased negative health outcomes for religious disaffiliates, the self-reported benefits that participants discuss are clear. They feel free. A majority of the participants in this study mentioned in their interviews that they have or are working with a therapist to help with the anxiety and depressive symptoms that they have experienced since leaving their faith community. Even in their grief and questioning, participants in this study expressed feeling freer to individuate and make their own choices.
Sadie, who did not feel desired or “pickable” within the church, reflected, “I feel like I have never been so sure and confident and comfortable in myself than when I finally left that community and that mindset. I have heard the pushback that ‘freedom is found in Christ’ and I think there is credence to that, and you can view that phrase in a variety of different ways . . . But when you’re in this environment in which there’s so many laws and so many rules that you must follow, it is hard to be yourself. I feel like for me l leaving that bubble and leaving those expectations was incredibly freeing.”
Esther described her post-Evangelical life in a reverent tone. She reported “it feels quiet in my head now. It feels holy and sacred.” As she has sought healing through therapy and connecting with others who have had similar experiences, she has found some peace and embodiment.
“I was taught that my body was not mine and I felt shame for doing things with boyfriends that I shouldn’t have done for years. My partner, Samson, and I actually had sex before our wedding night, and that shame boiled over into our marriage because we thought we had disobeyed god and deserved to feel ashamed. We blamed our sexual and relationship problems on the fact that we had sex before marriage. Now, years later, I am divesting myself of that shame. I’m scooping all of that out and questioning ‘who am I? What do I need to be happy?’”
Mark described his journey as one of learning nuance and stepping out of the black and white fundamentalist bubble,
“I’m more comfortable with ambiguity and more comfortable with just trying now rather than trying to be perfect. . . I am finally starting to believe that I deserve good things. In regard to my sexuality, it’s something that I have struggled with historically that I do not feel like I deserve to pursue opportunities or that I am a burden because I am still exploring well into my adulthood. But I’ve learned about how people can give consent and I can ask for consent. Because they can say no, and then that’s fine, or they can say yes. A lot of evangelical stuff left me with like this feeling that I don’t deserve good things. I don’t deserve pleasure. Learning to accept pleasure and that I deserve good things has been a huge part of my journey.”
Despite struggle and existential questioning, former Evangelicals are capable of finding peace within themselves and in the new lives they are able to build as they individuate and learn who they are outside of fundamentalist religion. The freedom they can feel is not without struggle or therapeutic work. But it is freedom, nevertheless.
[1] https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-heterosexual-gospel