CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
“I can’t abandon the person I used to be so I carry her.”
Introduction and Reflexivity
Much of my life can be framed by my relationship to Evangelical Christianity. In my mind’s eye, I can see the pristine baptismal pool filled with glistening, holy salvation as I walk into the porcelain pool. I was nine and so certain of my faith and what this decision to be baptized meant. I could feel the energy in the air, in the chill of the water lapping at my ankles. Christ himself looked down on me with approval from the intricate stained glass above. My Mom, who was also baptized that day in order to join the Southern Baptist Church after a lifetime of being Methodist, beamed encouragingly as I waded into the water. The chlorine stung my nose as I was thrust below the water, descending into the grave, and I cleared my nose and mouth with a sputter as I was raised from death to life as the pastor jerks me from the water. I looked out into the smiling congregation, pews filled with people who were all related to me in some way or another. This was, and to some degree still is, my world. This is all I have ever known and all I should ever want.
My faith and relationship to the church evolved yet again as I made it my own. From summers at Fellowship of Christian Athletes summer camps in my teens to joining the leadership of an up-and-coming Southern Baptist church plant in my twenties, I was utterly devoted to my relationship with Christ and his Evangelical Church. Church planting is the deliberate process of a church sending members from a pre-existing congregation to a new place to duplicate that church’s doctrine and religious community in the new area. As a member of an Evangelical church plant, I was part of the process of building on a pastoral team’s work to start a new church community in a southeastern college town. As my sense of self changed and progressed I, of course, had questions and doubts. My friends and I were new adults exploring romantic relationships in a collegiate setting. A dear friend of mine came out to my small group that she had feelings for another woman and wanted to pursue that relationship. She said it felt as natural as breathing to love the woman she wanted.
Church leadership found out about the burgeoning love story that they believed was sinful. Swift disciplinary action followed, first directed at my friend. She was forced to meet with pastors on a regular basis to try to persuade her to step away her “sinful ways of being gay.” When the group questioned the idea of homosexuality being a sin, pastoral staff then began these regular disciplinary meetings with the small group. Throughout this process, I felt distinctly uncomfortable regarding my church’s rigid views or chilling silence on topics like homosexuality, racism, and sexism. I stood up for myself and for my friend as much as I could during the long, drawn out process of church discipline. But it was all I’d ever known and all I should ever want, so I stayed as long as I could. My small group was disbanded, and my friend left the state in pursuit of the relationship that made her feel brave enough to question her church leadership.
I did not leave Evangelical Christian with grace or ease. It was pried from my grasping fingers when beloved church family excommunicated me and several friends via church discipline because of our identities and beliefs about the LGBTQ identity (Leeman, 2023). After the church disciplinary actions taken against my small group, I could not seem to hold on to the hopeful, connected faith of my youth. I was wounded by the church discipline and felt alone as my small group was instructed to not see one another anymore for fear of tempting one another into sinful beliefs. My faith in the church was ground to dust over the course of several grueling years of rupture and repair; and like others leaving abusive, tumultuous relationships before me, I loved the church long after they no longer were allowed to love me. After leaving, I sought out other spiritual refugees via social media and podcasts. It was through conversations with my fellow ex-Evangelicals that this research was borne.
Bessel van der Kolk (2014) attributes attachment research to Beatrice Beebe with the oft repeated saying, “Most research is me-search” (p. 111). In order to lend balance to and combat my own subjectivity and background in this research topic, I leaned heavily on the ex-Evangelical community’s questions, hopes, and expertise. Social workers have been embedded in and a part of the communities we serve since my profession’s inception. So it was only natural that I, as a researcher and social worker, sought to ally with my own formerly fundamentalist community members to create something for and with them. Winberry and Gray (2022) recommend a couple of ways to cross-examine our own narratives as researchers who also hold the dual-role of being community members: community presence and social ideation. Being a part of the community not only in name, but also in practice has been important to understanding how my intersecting identities both mirror and differ from those around me in online ex-Evangelical spaces. Community presence helped me to better understand how the formerly Evangelical community has worked toward healing individually and the ways that we are still working together to reconstruct our faith in spirituality and ourselves.
Speaking with fellow ex-Evangelicals for support, wisdom, and shared experience gave me the opportunity to communally ideate the broader concepts of this research, which contributed to a much broader line of questioning and curiosity in my interviews. The ex-Evangelical community gave me the backbone of the topics that were most relevant to address in this research. Through the influence of the ex-Evangelical population I studied and those who surrounded them, I have been able to turn my “mesearch” into “wesearch,” a community-guided and empowered approach to gathering information on purity culture and religious deconstruction, as told from a perspective of those of us who have had to leave this version of ourselves and our faith behind (Winberry & Gray, 2022).
Rationale for the Study
While religion has been generally acknowledged as contributing to prosocial behaviors, it can also cause stress or harm (Belzen & Geels, 2008).
As people exit the pews, they leave the cocoon of insular religious culture and enter into a strange, often alien and confounding world. Leaving their religious communities can be disorienting in that for many ex-Evangelicals, it is the first time in their lives where they are truly allowed to focus on their happiness, wants, and needs first without the church or the Bible weighing in. My story of becoming a spiritual refugee did not happen in a vacuum; it is part of a greater movement of former fundamentalists reckoning with the way that their own values in politics, trauma, mental health, and sexuality conflict with their former religious community’s views.
With each new generation, since the 1970s, there has been a weaker attachment to organized religion than the previous generation (Hout & Fischer, 2014). This does not necessarily mean that former congregants’ faith in a god has waned. Moreover, it is more of a symptom of the way in which the Evangelical church’s cultural views lag behind social progress and cultural norms of the time. As each new generation begins to move more toward social progress and the Evangelical church becomes more closely associated with the religious right wing of conservative politics, it makes sense that congregants are willing to sacrifice the long-term relationship they have with the church because of the church’s affiliations with conservative politics in the United States (Djupe et al., 2018). Many Ex-Evangelicals would rather shed the restrictive views of conservative religion than lose their faith in a divine being they can believe in. As a result, the largest group behind Evangelical protestants are those who identify as religiously “None.”
Alongside shifting political views contributing to religious disaffiliation, peoples’ views on sex have evolved in a way that further promotes separation from fundamentalist, rigid principles. The same generational shifts that are correlated with political changes over time run parallel to the attitudes changing around sex and sexuality. Generations who grew into adolescence during and after the 1960s have continued to have more tolerant views of sex and sexuality. Coupled with this is an increase in distrust of authority that has been rising alongside more progressive views (Hout & Fischer, 2014). Therefore, as the religious and conservative political right continue to rely on fundamentalist views on sex and gender, new generations since the 1960s and 1970s have been further pushed to examine the dissonance between their religious beliefs and their social values (Hout & Fischer, 2014). This has resulted in fundamentalist religion being disavowed in favor of a less restrictive worldview. Religious fundamentalism impacts how people can engage with the world around them, going so far as to reshape some critical thinking processes (Zhong et al., 2017). Christian fundamentalism splits actions and beliefs into a binary type- thinking, casting everything into definitive shades of right and wrong, allowing for little flexibility and change. For example, fundamentalist evangelical teachings have been associated with conservative attitudes about gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy (Brinkerhoff & MacKie, 1984). Meanwhile, the world’s attitudes toward gender equality have become much more accommodating and open to different gender expressions. Most (71%) Americans surveyed in 2019 favored more gender equality (Pew, 2019). Among Evangelical Protestants, only 36% of those surveyed believed that homosexuality was acceptable (Pew, 2014). A vast majority, 71%, of Americans believe that same-sex marriage should be legal; this consensus has been true in the American public since the early 2010s (McCarthy, 2023).
It is common for Protestant Christian churches to theologically view the relationships between the binary genders of man and woman in two similarly binary ideologies (Bartlett, 2020). The first is complementarian, which basically asserts that men and women are distinct in function and character but equal in their standing before god. The second is egalitarian, which emphasizes that men and women are both inherently human and therefore can have similar personality traits and purposes in life (Roat, 2019). In the conservative Evangelical church, it is most common for teachings to be both implicitly and explicitly complementarian. Complementarian theology explicitly calls for male headship, placing men in authority over the women in their lives (Burk, 2022). This hierarchy, laid out in implicit and explicit ways messaging from authority figures, is a tremendous force in shaping the psyche of developing youth.
Rigidly held core beliefs about gender and sexuality can be harmful as people grow and change their understanding of themselves. A religion that heaps condemnation upon vulnerable populations cannot be fully accepting of people whose identities intersect with that which they abhor. Up to 60% of the American Christian churches identify themselves as Evangelical, which is marked by fundamentalist thinking and the inflexible belief that the Bible is completely factual and literal (Pew Research Center, 2019; Malley, 2004).
This dissonance between what ex-Evangelical Protestants once accepted as wholly true and what the rest of the world deem as socially acceptable can be unsettling for those who leave their fundamentalist religion. As this type of American believers begins to make cultural shifts that result in some congregants to empty the pews, it will be critical for social workers and clinicians to engage with this population. The dissolution of their previous spiritual bonds can shake ex-evangelicals on a multisystemic level from their internal processes to their family systems and work life. Ex-Evangelicals are experiencing disenfranchised grief and trauma as they mourn the loss of their previous belief in ways that are not widely acknowledged by the people around them (St. Clair, 2013).
Emotional distress and trauma can result from disavowing religious communities. Because religion is often a core identity to those raised in fundamentalist teachings, feeling the need to leave a faith community can feel like an attack on the person’s core sense of self (May, 2018). In Evangelicalism, there is an assertation that congregants should look for their identity not in self-individuation or in conjunction with connections to the outside world, but in conjunction with fundamentalist Christianity alone. [3] As a result, when stripped of what once stood in place of their core identity, religious disaffiliates often face worse health and wellbeing than those who remained in the religion in which they were raised. Rates of depression and anxiety, among other health concerns, are higher in those who have disavowed their religion of origin (Fenelson & Danielson, 2016). This serves as further evidence for the necessity of understanding how purity culture has impacted spiritual refugees. By understanding the struggle, we can inform more helpful treatment.
This is not an indictment of any specific faith practice or religious sect. I am not pointing out any beliefs that are secret or hidden from public view. Evangelical Christianity is open about its beliefs about minority populations’ place amongst the hierarchy in the Evangelical Church. The Southern Baptist Convention, one of the largest networks of conservative Evangelical churches, recently came under public scrutiny for their problematic beliefs regarding women in leadership, people of color, and queer people of faith. Congregants who remain within these systems continue because it benefits them in some way. Many people live long, full, lives as Evangelical Christians without long-term trauma. These people have fulfilling spiritual lives and do not see any contradiction between their faith and their way of life. However, there is a growing number of people leaving the Evangelical church as they reckon with the ways that their faith’s doctrine has impacted themselves and people they love (Smith, Pew Research 2021). With this increasing population of ex-Evangelicals, there will be more of those who have experienced “religious trauma syndrome” from leaving restrictive ideologies that no longer fit with the person they are becoming (Winell, 2007). It is vital for there to be space for clinicians to understand the potential traumatic situations and harmful teachings that have led them to experience religious trauma.
To approach this topic appropriately, one must take a trauma-informed, compassionate stance. I want us to endeavor to have compassion for not only the people who have left their religion and are struggling, but also the people who remain and still find value in the structure and community in the Evangelical church. I have been both in different seasons of my life and carry both versions with me as I journey into understanding this topic in more depth. It is my understanding that even when I was trapped in rigid thinking and mystical beliefs, I was doing the best I could to make sense of the world we live in with the information I allowed myself to accept as true. Trauma does not have to be incurred from a one-time impactful or horrific incident. It can happen over time through a loss of agency, manipulation, and ongoing emotional abuse or neglect. These traumas leave imprints on our brain, mind, and body and shape the ways we see ourselves and the world. In this dissertation, I have sought to understand the ways in which some of these religious traumas occur, as well as ways that clinicians and ex-religious people alike can respond to the impact of those wounds.
[1] https://bciowa.org/what-church-planters-want-you-to-know/
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2014/09/22/section-1-religion-in-public-life/
[3] https://www.cru.org/us/en/train-and-grow/spiritual-growth/core-christian-beliefs/identity-in-christ.html