Thread by @Delafina777

So I started reading @C_Stroop's Empty the Pews and it is not at all what I expected (in a good way!), especially after reading a lot of stuff about religious abuse.

amazon.com/Empty-Pews-Sto…

@C_Stroop Like, I guess I was more... braced for a parade of misery, and for the same basic outline to be repeated over and over again.

@C_Stroop That said a lot of it was weirdly familiar. I didn't grow up evangelical, but I had a fundamentalist Christian aunt that my parents used to send me to stay with in the summer so they could have a kid-free week.

So I've personally seen some of this shit.

@C_Stroop The main difference was that I experienced it from someone who wasn't a parent, who didn't have absolute power over me, and I knew that it was temporary, that at the end of the week, my life would go back to normal.

@C_Stroop So on one hand I've experienced it, but on the other, it was only a glimpse. I don't know (thankfully!) what it's like to have that be the entirety of your world, to have no escape from it, to not have your parents coming to rescue you from it, and to not have any checks on it.

@C_Stroop My fundamentalist Christian aunt is my dad's sister. My dad's a mainline Methodist, a member of a mild-mannered church that is largely like, "we don't know, maybe everyone goes to heaven!" and I 100% approve of their theological vagueness.

@C_Stroop But that fundamentalist tendency is definitely *there* in his family. He's got another sibling who isn't that bad but leans that way, and so my mom (who has little use for organized religion of any sort) has made it her life's mission to ensure he doesn't slide too far that way.

@C_Stroop So a lot of my childhood was my dad's sister pushing him to go to less mainline churches, my mom checking out the church, deciding it was too evangelical, and herding him back to somewhere more mainline.

@C_Stroop So every summer, I'd be packed off to stay with my fundamentalist aunt, who would have one week to try to save me.

There were a lot of attempts.

@C_Stroop (And sorry, @C_Stroop--Twitter seems to have removed my ability to untag you, so I apologize for you being tagged into all these tweets.)

@C_Stroop So anyway, my aunt would always arrange things so the week I stayed with her was the week her church did Vacation Bible School.

I was, on one hand, very good at Vacation Bible School because I knew Genesis and Exodus very well and liked being an A student.

@C_Stroop My dad and I used to also play word games while we ate breakfast every morning, where he would use some sort of obscure word list from the daily paper and quiz me about whether the roots of each were Latin, Greek, or German and make me use them in sentences.

So I knew some Greek

@C_Stroop All of this made me very good at some aspects of Vacation Bible School.

I'd also been raised to ask questions and debate.

That made me... not very good at other aspects of Vacation Bible School.

@C_Stroop But I was largely polite enough--and aware enough of when to drop things--to get away with it.

So one year, when I was 6ish, I finished up my classes and went to my aunt's classroom (she taught a different age group) while she cleaned up to wait to go back to her house.

@C_Stroop And while I was waiting with her, a bunch of the other teachers came in. In my memory it's like 10 adults, but that may be exaggerated because it was scary.

And they started telling me how my mom was going to hell, but I didn't have to go with her, because I could accept Jesus.

@C_Stroop And it was very much what, as an adult, I would call a hard sell.

It was URGENT and we had to pray about it RIGHT NOW and my SOUL WAS IN DANGER.

I was initially baffled, because my mom had taught me that my relationship with whatever I believed in was, y'know, very private.

@C_Stroop I attempted to explain that to them, because initially I was just sort of astonished at the invasiveness and *rudeness* of the whole thing.

But they started going into more detail about how my mom was going to suffer forever in hell, and it started to scare me.

@C_Stroop What scared me wasn't hell--I'd been assured by my great-aunt and grandma and mother that it was nothing I needed to worry about.

It was a bunch of looming, threatening adults.

Saying horrible things about my mom. And my grandma. And my great-aunt.

@C_Stroop But I'd been raised to be polite to adults, so I tried to be polite and get them to calm down.

It didn't work. The more I tried to reason with them, the more intense they got.

I started crying, and that just made them get louder.

@C_Stroop Finally I told them I would rather be in hell with my mother and great-aunt and grandma than in heaven with them, managed to duck around them (I don't know if they'd actually surrounded me or I just remember it that way because I was pretty small and it was scary), and ran out.

@C_Stroop I shut myself in the bathroom until my aunt came along to tell me, resentfully, that most of them had left and I needed to come out so we could go home.

I returned to the room just in time to hear her talking to the one remaining teacher about "bad blood" on my mom's side.

@C_Stroop I remember standing there with a weird combination of confusion, shame, and pride.

I loved and was in awe of my fiery mom, adored my gentle grandma, and worshiped my whip-smart, sharp-tongued great aunt.

@C_Stroop A few years later, my sister was old enough to start coming with me. She was a lot less docile than I was--the sort of kid who got labeled A Difficult Child.

When she was 4 she mouthed off to my aunt, who locked her in a room w a Bible and some verses she was supposed to read.

@C_Stroop I was TERRIFIED. You didn't lock my sister in a room. She'd break things, get hurt, be furious for DAYS.

Plus, I'd taught her to read when she was about 2 1/2 but the Bible was still a little advanced for a 4-year-old, so how was this supposed to work?

@C_Stroop And worse, it was COMPLETELY SILENT.

That was scarier than an audible tantrum.

I spent several hours sobbing and begging my aunt to let her out, but she insisted that she had to learn her lesson and think about what she did.

@C_Stroop After several hours had passed, my aunt decided that my sister had probably learned her lesson and could be let out of the room.

I followed her to the door, she opened it.

@C_Stroop My sister had been busily tearing pages out of the Bible, crumpling up some of them, folding others--the place looked like a tornado had gone through a library.

I began giggling in relief. This was the best possible outcome. No permanent destruction, no injuries.

@C_Stroop I think it actually broke my aunt, though.

There was my tiny, red-headed, defiant sister grinning at her atop a mountain of crumpled pages, just daring her to try to punish her more, just all BRING IT

This was not an outcome I think my aunt had prepared for.

@C_Stroop She eased off on coercive attempts to convert us after that (thanks, sis!) and focused more on trying to convince us or just verbally scare us about hell.

She started sucking up to me when I was in high school and didn't go stay with her anymore.

@C_Stroop She still passive-aggressively emails me on my birthday every year.

Here's the thing: my sister and I never discussed it, but neither of us ever told my mother about any of it until we were adults.

Neither of us wanted to hurt her feelings that way.

@C_Stroop But when we did finally tell her (I think I'd graduated from college at that point), she cut off all contact with my aunt, banned her from our property, and told my dad he could stay in touch with her but none of us would be attending family events if she was there.

@C_Stroop The last time I saw her was shortly before this at a family event where she was trying to explain some theological tenet to my dad.

She kept using isolated Hebrew divine names, bizarrely, pretentiously.

I corrected her pronunciation under my breath.

@C_Stroop Anyway, that's my experience of evangelicalism--knowing that my mom and my aunt were in a weird chess game for my dad's soul, and keeping my aunt's behavior toward me a secret to protect my mom's feelings.

(I had evangelical friends, but of course that was more removed.)

@C_Stroop But it's weird how much--even with that limited experience--parts of the stories in Empty The Pews feel familiar. Enough that I wonder how I would have reacted if this had been my parents, and not one aunt.

@C_Stroop Maud Newton has a by-turns funny, sad, and horrifying essay about the kid that supposedly died and met Jesus, and it got made into a movie and everything, in which she talks about pretty much that same experience, but with parents.

@C_Stroop Like, what does it do to you when it's adults you TRUST saying this stuff to you?

And what I found most poignant about that essay was this--a desire to experience the numinous, and only knowing this one, fear-soaked option for it.

@C_Stroop I think it's a very normal human thing to *want* to experience awe and wonder and--call it what you want, whether that's the sacred or magic or mystery.

@C_Stroop And what I got most from some of these essays was *claustrophobia.* Because the options for feeling that, for a lot of the authors, were crushed into this one, flattened, coercive, restrictive path--and it was that, or nothing.

@C_Stroop Like I said, I expected this book to be a harder read than it has been so far--I've known a lot of people who grew up in authoritarian Christian environments and I was braced for more descriptions of sexual or hardcore physical abuse, or even more extreme physical abuse.

@C_Stroop And so far it's been relatively mild--what's going on here is a lot more subtle. And surprisingly, not unrelentingly negative.

@C_Stroop Lyz Lenz has an essay about a childhood that sounds like it was sometimes beautiful, even idyllic at moments, that prompted her to try to recreate that beauty by starting her own church as an adult.

@C_Stroop It actually illuminated a lot for me about what I don't get about Christianity, I think because it was written in a way that wasn't solely critical. I find the Christian determination to personally experience paradise admirable in a way--I just can't really understand it.

@C_Stroop As a (Reconstructionist) Jew, what I have is hope in a better world for the living, not perfect, not paradise, but just and abundant. That is generational work, planting seeds for people I will never know to harvest. (Or, as Laurie Zoloth puts it:)

@C_Stroop But as someone who doesn't believe in an afterlife, at least not one where we remain ourselves, where life of a sort goes on just on some other plane, that determination to experience paradise *permanently*, to make it exist in more than fleeting moments of happiness, is alluring

@C_Stroop It's just not something I see as possible. I read this and try to imagine "pure faith and community" and that's where the Christian utopian urge loses me; I mean, rules are what lets you *have* a community. We make agreements to live together, to be face to face with others.

@C_Stroop But at the same time, there's something here that's the opposite of that claustrophobia I was talking about earlier--she got the ability to imagine what her ideal community would look like, so it's not all dire.

@C_Stroop Anyway, I'm rambling now, but my point is: I expected that an anthology called "Empty the Pews" would be like a lot of books I've read on religious abuse--a parade of harrowing escape stories.

This is something more nuanced, complex, and thoughtful.