Into the Woods, Part I: Fundamentalism and Cracking

I haven't been able to write for a long time. I've tried. No words would come. Or maybe pieces of words and sentences, but nothing that made any sense.

Maybe I didn't have anything substantive to say. Maybe I didn't want to break anyone's trust. Or maybe my life just stalled out.

The last post I published was in April. It was an acknowledgement of the shame I've lived with for 25 years. Perhaps the reason I haven't been able to write is because I am still frozen there.

Growing up, I often heard the term "right-wing fundamentalist." I have only just begun to realize that was me. I genuinely thought that all people who were "really Christians" believed the way I did.

• The earth is only 6,000 years old?
Okay. The rocks and fossils must be lying!

• The Bible is not only God-breathed but also requires almost no interpretation?
Okay. I just won't think about it too hard.

• Gay love is sinful by nature?
Got it. It's gross! Will "love the sinner, hate the sin."

• Sex before marriage splits your soul into a horcrux and renders you unfit for a husband?
Understood! Sex, dating, kissing, anything that acknowledges I have a body of any kind is bad.

• An old man says to try on bathing suits for him, and that he's your brother in Christ, and that it's sinful to be disrespect him?
Got it. Might cause me to throw up later, but the Bible says to respect your elders!

• The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked and therefore experiences and feelings and memories are not to be trusted?
Got it. Will repress rage at injustice and betrayal.

• It's possible to be struck dead instantly if you take Communion with unconfessed sin in your life?
I will just never take Communion again. Or I'll take it -- because the Bible commands it! -- but I'll be terrified every time.

• It's wrong to play basketball with the boy next door because it might cause the neighbors to think it's a prelude to sex?
No more basketball. All interaction with the opposite sex is bad! Unless they're your elders. Then I don't have a say, I have to obey.

• Sunbathing in the backyard may cause a neighbor to "stumble" into sin?
Okay, I'm getting the hang of this: all skin/bodies = bad. God + parents + religious leaders = good.

I need to tread the next part very carefully... I wrote it, slept on it, revised it, and ultimately deleted it -- I'm not sure why. I suspect it's because once it's out there, I can't take it back. I want to be truthful but not grotesque and that's hard when the pain is this deep. So I will write this instead...

You may wonder why I didn't rebel. Maybe if this were regular fundamentalism, I could have. But I was also raised by a parent with a personality disorder -- so in the middle of all the mandatory Bible reading, devotionals, prayer times, and sermons on how much God loved me but also might kill me, I experienced a great deal of violence and rage. There were multiple rods broken on my body, and violations too numerous to count.

There are some wounds you just can't undo. They go too deep. My parents taught a Parenting Teens class at the megachurch we attended. Mixed up in the pain and in the horror and in the unwilling blackouts after trauma, there was religious fundamentalism and the belief that I was inherently evil and bad. If they taught other parents how to do things, they must be right, and I must be sick in the head and sick in the body. My understanding of Christianity became interwoven with violence and fear about how evil I was.

All of this was the lead-up...

The foundations cracked for me in phases. The first phase happened at 17. My parents sent me to a religious training camp in the mountains of Colorado. (Side note: I still get sick whenever I am in Colorado.)

The camp promo is deceptively simple:
Summit Summer is a 12-day conference where students experience spiritual growth as they explore relevant cultural topics to help them think deeper about their personal faith and convictions. Students engage with like-minded peers, ages 16-25, and learn to think well about their faith, purpose, and identity with world-class faculty.

Let me translate it for you: 

Students at a malleable age will explore relevant cultural topics from an extremely narrow-minded and bigoted worldview that will destroy their personal faith and conviction in Christianity! Engaging only with people who look and think exactly as they do, students will be indoctrinated by leaders of the Religious Right as they learn just why Our Way is correct and everyone else is going to hell!

That was the first crack for me. Everyone else the drank the Kool-Aid. My bunkmates thought I had seriously lost my shit because I laid in bed crying and screaming about how this couldn't possibly be right, that anything this dogmatic had to have an equal in the counterculture that was convinced it was just as right. Probably Buddhist students were in bunkbeds on the opposite side of the world learning why their religion was the only true way and how to belittle anyone who thought otherwise.

It was seriously messed up. I didn't know if I could be a Christian anymore.

The panic attacks started after that. See, I'd never been taught how to think, only WHAT to think. I went off to college and just regurgitated everything any authority figure had ever told me.  But I panicked when doubt crept in. That was the second chink, and I was barely holding myself together as the rules of black-and-white thinking continued to pile on...

• Wearing spaghetti-strap tank tops is bad because it exposes too much of my body, and female bodies lead to sin? Okay. I feel gross, but that sounds familiar, so I'll go with it.

• A woman's place is as the submissive spouse of a Christian man, and her role is to bear him children?

Oh shit. I don't know how to date because I wasn't allowed to! Plus, I thought all dating and bodies were sinful!? How am I supposed to get married and be a submissive wife who bears children if I never interact with boys??!

It was an impossible system to live up to, and after awhile, and I sank further and further into despair. It was into this void that new friends stepped...