Church Trauma/Deconstruction Thread • Page 3

i had a really nice fender bass and i left it at the church i was a part of. they didn’t let me have it back.

 

oh for sure. i think part of that controversy was also due to the use of "God" and "whore" in a so-called flippant way, which i think was going through my head when i noticed it at my local store. but obviously that behavior does feel characteristically Evangelical.

 

there was a point at the beginning of my deconstruction process that the one thing keeping me in my current context (particularly a campus ministry program at my first undergrad institution) was getting to play drums at our weekly worship service. the worship leader told us a couple weeks after i first thought that that everyone on the team should be involved for the right reasons - i.e. worship - and at that point i was pretty much checked out. didn't get a chance to play again until a couple years ago when my partner and i bought a fancy electric kit for our apartment.

 

Not a trauma dump but more so what finally turned me away from the church/religion.


I went on a summer mission trip to Browning Montana(town on a Native American reservation) We were there to help clean up the town and schools and I really had a great time meeting everyone and they were so kind and welcoming. One night the chief of the reservation invited us to his house as a thank you. Before dinner, he said a native american prayer which was really cool.

One of our leaders asked to do a prayer after him and proceeded to say he's not praying to the right god and that there is only one and we are here to help show the people of this community who that is.


I felt so disgusted that I wanted to go home that night.

 

big yikes

 

that's fucked up

 

My stories from youth group are more goofy:
- I was taught that condoms were designed to be just porous enough that sperm could swim through (because they're smaller than air), and that the people who make condoms intentionally sabotage them by poking them with needles.
- When boys go through puberty, their ding dong sheds skin "like a snake" as it grows.
- You can get pregnant through jeans, so no dry humping.

But yeah, looking back the youth group leader was insanely inappropriate towards the girls and left the state very quickly without much explanation.

 

The "born again virgin" stuff never made sense to me, even when I was in youth group.


Yeah, you might be "pure" now but that STD aint going anywhere.

 

I remember being told that if guys masturbated hair would grow on their palms lol

 

Gonna have one of my ribs removed so I can finally grow a beard

 

My aunt told me as a kid the reason people say god bless you after someone sneezes is because the devil can get up your nose.


To this day Im not sure if she was actually joking or not.

 

one of my old church buds built me a guitar years ago (not cheap). the pick guard was wood and it split. i asked him to fix it and gave him the guitar (was intending to pay, no movement for a very long time). it got stolen from him and bye bye guitar for me. i’m sure he got money from the insurance claim.

 

i dealt with a lot of very toxic worship band ish.

 

Fwiw I’ve attended a number of episcopal churches over the years and they’ve all been really good and on the right side of political history for things like this. Every church is different though. I also haven’t committed to a denomination and still feel comfortable going to the episcopal church now and then when visiting family or when they visit (most of my family is now Episcopalian)

 

i've been in that boat in the past, but i also get how others aren't fond of the tradition. after leaving the fold of Evangelicalism, i spent a few years attending Episcopal churches. i appreciated the liturgical change of pace and the seemingly more progressive values (although i'd hesitate to call the denomination "progressive"). i've known others who've grown up in it that don't find it as intriguing, but obviously everyone has a different history with religion.

 

Personally I’m so turned off by the Catholic Church that the episcopal church service itself is just unappealing in its similarity. That’s true for a number of denominations. The people and values of the Episcopalian churches I’ve been around have been good imo though, and they’ve been supportive communities.
I don’t want to get into details but I have some things from a Catholic orphanage I’m still unpacking to this day. What that organization has been allowed to get away with is infuriating. I’ve had a few other negative religion/church experiences from jehavoah’s witnesses/Kingdom Halls, mostly just watching it change and control some family members that I care about but I tried to attend a few times to try to understand. Just didn’t get it or the community.

 

I didn't know that Episcopal generally leans more liberal, it makes sense. My son is 4 and is currently in an Episcopalian preschool, I didn't think much of it, but we've toured a few private schools (he's 4, he'll enter kindergarten in the fall of '26, I'm slightly worried about the state of public schooling due to *waves hand wildly at the USA*) and recently toured a K-8 Episcopalian school and was really impressed with their commitment to diversity and other ideologies that are generally tied to the "liberal" side of the house while still maintaining Christian values.

 

Also I still attend a Church of Christ if anyone was curious. We're known as the hyper conservatives. Pretty traditional services, but no instruments, all acapella. It was preached as gospel to me as a kid, and that instruments in worship were wrong, but now I understand it's just tradition, preference.

That's one reason why I never played in a worship band, even though I'm musically inclined and have played guitar for 20 years. There's always been a huge separation in my brain of the songs we sing at church, and the music I listen to/play.

 

Wish my parents gave me a choice besides dragging my ass to mass for an hour of my life every Sunday as a kid. Had to go on retreats and all that bullshit too. I wnted to do ny own thing but they wouldnt let me. Church is a CHOICE, stop assuming your kids want to take part in that bull shiz.

 

A joke I always told people back when I still considered myself Episcopalian was “we’re just Christians that don’t watch Fox News”

 

I don't have my own church trauma, but my mom does which is I think why we didn't really grow up religious. My mom tried taking me to church for like a month when I was a kid but I think it was too much for her and brought back bad memories so we stopped going.

Also I was already a questioning skeptical little fuck at 10 years old so don't think it would ever take anyway. I remember after I watched Hercules for the first time asking a bunch of question about the difference between God and mythological figures,and why we recognize one as real and the others as made up stories, and why one is more valid than the other. None of the answers i was given made sense to me.

 

I’ve posted this in the Accountability thread and the Christian music thread, but it just occurred to me that this thread hasn’t been updated in a while and I feel like this is really important. Michael Tait of DC Talk and The Newsboys has been accused of grooming and sexual assault over a number of years by multiple men. Wouldn’t hesitate to guess that it probably goes back a lot further than even what is being presented here.

One moment, please...

I was raised on DC Talk (both Jesus Freak and Supernatural got a lot of spins out of me) and when I look back on the lyrics and the production of Jesus Freak especially, the indoctrination is so thorough and insidious. When you consider Billy Graham’s involvement with the band in using them to inflict religious trauma on an entire generation of kids and teens, that alone is enough to give me cause to reassess my relationship with this group.

But this… My heart breaks for the victims and also for the extended groups of people around them who are so enmeshed in the evangelical Christian rhetoric that they themselves have clearly struggled to call this what it is (fucking assault) and not just “forgive” him as Jesus “would have them.” Soon as I read those words it all felt so terribly familiar and unsurprising and that breaks my heart.

 

oh my god

 

Like many in this thread, I grew up in the church. I ended up meeting my best friend, the pastor's son, at this church. I always connected with pastor's kids because they were often messed up lol. The first seed of doubt was placed during my time in youth group, when some of the parents went to the leaders and told them they don't like my friends from high school that I am bringing. Smoking cigarettes and saying cuss words in the church parking lot? So not cool! But just generally being a huge fan of Underoath, Five Iron Frenzy, Relient K, The Chariot, Mewithoutyou, etc, and it's hard not to be influenced at that age. I attended all the cool events, camps, and whatever was going on in the 2000's.

But still, I ended up going to a Christian college and even majored in religion, because I found it interesting and was generally interested in spirituality. I never felt so out of place at than my time at that college. In conversation about Christ or scripture, people would condescendingly give me a little smile when I would question anything, or have a different take. It was as if I wasn't quite on their level, but maybe one day with faith I too could get there. The amount of gossip and bullshit that went on there was absurd. I met a few amazing people, but ultimately was incredibly frustrated at how judgemental and hypocritical the general student body was. This hypocrisy was also apparent with some of the teachers and staff. It was strange because while I did have a lot of fun at times, I also was going through major depressive episodes my sophmore year. I only stayed there two years when I simultaneously couldn't afford the outrageous cost, and was just fed up. I moved back home and was invited to go play on the worship team at my home church again. I went once, and haven't been back to church in 14 years.

Sometimes I think that growing up in the church really fucked with me. Being told you are sinful, going to hell, being persuaded to repress sexuality...and hearing it all at such a formative age is poison, and it is definitely be design. I really don't care what anyone does with their life or what they believe, but I cannot help judging people who are still in the church.