Church Trauma/Deconstruction Thread

Funny enough, idea started in the Anberlin thread to have one dedicated to church trauma stuff. We are all boys/girls/people with big stuff related to the church. I know I got some. Let’s hear some stories so we can be less alone.

Fuck For Today is all I gotta say up front but the “America, YOU WILL BE JUDGED” breakdown goes hard low key

 

need to hear this story at some point as a former (albeit minor) For Today fan

 

one day i’ll trauma dump in here

 

not gonna detail a ton, but i was lucky that nothing blatantly terrible really happened to me as an Evangelical youth, although leaving the fold in 2015 led me to unpack some subtle, unresolved spiritual trauma/abuse. just Google "James River Church controversy" and you'll find all kinda of shit.

i try not to worry about putting a label on what i do and don't believe anymore, but i'd probably call it Christian in a very loose sense.

 

Oh man, what a thread. I can definitely share the wild things I can remember from our twice a year retreat that in retrospect was just trauma bonding to convert

 

fuck, church camps and retreats made for some of the most insane, traumatic moments

 

I’ve definitely said a lot in other threads over the years, but …yeah. I’ll contribute.

 

RE: Acquire the Fire

tbh though Nevertheless performed and they were pretty solid

 

tv smashing sounds pretty fun ngl

 

My youth group would have nights of destruction where students could beat up various things with a bat. They never tied it into the message that night, it was just something fun.

 

tangent, but i’ve wanted to go to one of those rooms where they set up a bunch of stuff to smash and you just go hog wild. would definitely be taking out some of my evangelical disillusionment on that room.

 

I would love to do a rage room. Closest I’ve gotten is playing drums haha

 

ah man a drum kit would be sick. i drool at the thought of one of those high end electronic drum sets (because 10 month olds)

 

This kind of shit is deeply triggering for me.

I went to a Christian summer camp where they emotionally manipulated us into committing to a Christian college and I fell for it. Made the decision devoid of any parental figure in sight to offer me any guidance. When I came home, I told my mom about my decision and she was so disappointed because she knew I had no passion or real vested interest in becoming a pastor or youth pastor or whatever I had put into my head. I applied to a Christian school and got accepted months later... right around the time I came to my senses and realized I'd made a mistake. But it was also too late by then to apply elsewhere so at the end of my senior year I sat and listened to my friends talk excitedly about where they were going in the fall and which states they were moving to. I knew l'd be staying home going to a community college and that summer I watched all of my friends leave me behind one by one until I was alone and more lost and angry than ever.

It completely altered the direction my life took and I spiraled into a very dark depression during that period of time that genuinely haunts me. I am married now and have two wonderful children, and I have been in therapy for several years. I've learned techniques that have been very helpful for me and every day is a new challenge that I am learning to be at home with, but even after all these years that one choice is so very painful to me because of the path it led to. I've told my wife that if someone were to come to me and say "I can erase those first two to three years of your college years, BUT there is a catch -" I would immediately cut them off and say "okay."

I remember so vividly hearing the stories my old friends would tell about college - or the way they'd excitedly talk about it - and then quietly sinking further into that old familiar feeling of despair as I’d wonder "why not me?" I've always wondered how many other kids in that room who made the same commitment as me may have ended up in the same boat. Selfishly I always hoped I wasn't alone and the problem wasn't just me, which I now understand is more of the Christian indoctrination couched in shaming tactics.

These poor kids have no idea what they're doing or what is being done TO them. It's a monumental, life changing choice and god damn any church leader or camp director who gets in the way by pushing their agenda on some unsuspecting, emotionally vulnerable teens.

I went to a lot of camps and they were all varying degrees of bad, but this particular one that led to my manipulated decision was LIFT summer camp at Cedarville University in Ohio. The camp director, Dan Brown, is a smug, self righteous piece of shit at the center of it and to him "salvation night" was a game. I remember specifically that he'd hold up these little notecards, both during and after the service, that the kids who'd gone up the aisles to the stage had filled out if they were praying the sinner's prayer. He'd count them off and announce how many were being "saved" as he received them onstage.

To Dan Brown, we were numbers. That was what he cared about most and it's so transparent in retrospect. He'd chastise us if we got out of line and one year he told us all that we were collectively the worst camp group he'd ever hosted. There was one year my little sister had brought a friend with her who went forward and prayed the prayer and did the thing. So l approached the speaker to thank him for his help in "speaking to her heart" and he looked me dead in the eyes and asked if I was familiar with Romans 8. I told him yes and he asked “are you sure?" Then he said I needed to go back and reread it for myself and *then* we could talk. He walked away from me and I stood there flummoxed because I knew Romans 8 was about salvation and the assurance of faith. I went back and did as he said and felt...so angry because I suddenly understood that to him I was nothing but a number as well. He didn't care to hear what I had to say. To him I was another opportunity for him to stroke his own ego and "save me" even though l'd done the whole thing years ago as a child, grew up in the church, was even on the youth group leadership team, etc. The guy knew nothing about me or my life and just could not care less. I was so turned off after that.

The summer after my senior year I went to my very last summer camp and, seeing as I was already in the throes of my college mistake, I was completely tuned out of the entire week. I still recall very sharply sitting in the auditorium when they pulled the same exact college pledge on those unwitting teens who once again flooded the aisles and feeling nothing but unbridled rage, like I was really seeing it for what it was for the very first time. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Tug at the thread and all that. Sometimes I think that was the real start of my experiences with dissociation.

 

Some random things that happened at my churches over the years.

This was about a year after I started going to this church and it was summer. Our children’s ministry director was leaving for another job or whatever they told us and she’d leave at the end of summer once our kids camp was over.

In August, our senior pastor went on vacation and drove his motorcycle all over the country. Shortly after his return, he announced a Wednesday service for him to talk about the experience. My group of friends and I knew something was going on as our youth pastor had texted us to make sure we were going. We always did anyway, so it was odd. That night at the service, he talked about how he felt god had led him to realizing it was his time to move on, but all was well.

Me being 18 and deeply naive took him at his word. Didn’t give it a second thought. Cut to a couple weeks later or so and I’m out for dinner with a youth volunteer leader and another student. She asked me if I had heard what people were saying about that pastor. I hadn’t. She told me that some people were saying that he had an affair and that’s why he left. She asked what I thought and I just said I didn’t see a reason to not believe him. Oh, young Greg, you fool.

Time moves on, but within a year or so, I heard it again and from a credible source. Not only had he had an affair, it had been with the children’s ministry director that had left right before he left. Someone had found out and the board of elders forced them out and let him lie to us about why he was leaving. A few years later, I learned that the way it was handled almost split our church. This was a mega church, so if half the people left, it would be a huge loss. Didn’t end up happening, but I stuck around there enough to learn some real inside info.

okay I thought that would be shorter than that. Oops. I’ve got one more for now.

Each summer we had a big camp for kids that would do 3 full weeks. It had grown to the point that they would hire a director of the camp each summer vs adding it in to a current staff member.

One summer, the director they brought on was a young woman. Mid 20’s and pretty attractive. Single. That summer nothing out of the ordinary happened. She stayed on to volunteer with youth ministry over the school year. There was a high school senior guy who was flirty with her, but due to her having been his boss the prior summer and her being older than him, everyone just thought he was just being a high school boy.

The guy turned 18 at some point during that school year. We all worked that camp again that summer. I’m found out in the fall that they had ended up having sex, her taking his virginity. At the time it came to light, she wasn’t on staff in any capacity, so there were no consequences. She moved on to whatever church she chose and that was that.

 

to save space, i won't quote the whole post, but i'm so sorry you had to go through that. i've had friends who have gone through the same thing and have lived with a lot of regret because of it. it's incredibly manipulative to force a child or teenager into doing something that doesn't align with their passions because their passions are not "God's will", and i'm glad you've made it to a really good place in your life on the other side of it.

 

I was raised Episcopalian and went to church weekly. I was part of this Sunday school group with the rest of the kids while normal service was happening

One day, there was really no game plan as to what we were gonna do for Sunday school, so they showed us Transformers (2007). Afterwards, I told my mom about it and she was really confused and disappointed so I never ended up going back.

In a weird way, Shia Lebouf and Optimus Prime may be directly responsible for me becoming agnostic

 

Subbed for later use

 

And what is it that the devil wants more than anything, kids?

“The cuuuuuuube”

 

I'm still a member of the denomination that I grew up in but definitely look back at what was happening in the church I was growing up in and see some stuff that was pretty "yikes".

These days what's mostly in my brain is trying to be a stealth agent for change, mostly due to our current political regime in the US. The church I grew up in posted a photo where they had a prayer day, and each table in the fellowship hall had a theme of what you were supposed to pray for. The government/country leaders table had a framed photo of Trump on it, and I can almost guarantee someone just grabbed it off their mantle before coming.

Thankfully where we are now is pretty diverse, and while I'm sure there are Trump supporters in the congregation (I live in Alabama) it's not blatant. Leadership there is also diverse, and I never get the sense of pushing political ideology on anyone, just Biblical principles, some of which leans more liberal than most in the audience realize.

I've probably mentioned it before, but me and my wife are white, but we have an adopted son who is biracial, so the nationalism that has been laying dormant in the church for a long time that got brought out in the open during Trump's first term really had me at odds with the church we attended at the time, that basically preached that voting for anything other than the Republican party was a sin.

Even in the class I've been attending, we've been looking at things the church has historically done a bad job of handling (same sex marriage, abortion, supporting single mothers, how we talk about people who are getting government assistance, etc, all the stuff the church rightfully gets a bad rap for) and talking about how it SHOULD be handled, and it gives me hope.

Anyway. Even though I still regularly attending and believe, I do share a lot of the same sentiments as people who have gone through a full deconstruction, especially if it's rooted in how evangelical Christianity operates on a large scale in the US, or bad experiences they had in the church, especially as kids.

 

Oh and if you somehow missed the Valleyheart album Everyone I've Ever Loved, you should really check it out. It's one of the more tastefully executed examples of an album examining a youth group kid's deconstruction as they grow up. I love it so much.

 

Christian bands I still fuck with:
- Relient K
- House of Heroes
- Anberlin


That’s about it haha

 

With Stephen gone, I don’t think Anberlin as it exists today can be considered a Christian band.

 

How dare you insult Rev. Marty that way

 

August Burns Red if they are still on that spectrum. I still enjoy Norma Jean but I think Corey is kind of stupid.