CW /// Sexual Assault
There's something I want to clarify about this person, in regards to the abuse I went through. He was not a pastor. He was not a volunteer in the youth group. We were both 14 to 16 when he abused me.
#churchtoo #sbctoo #EmptyThePews
Abuse is encouraged in the #SBC, in many different ways. Here's a good thread from @ErikMKort about it. But the way I'm most familiar with is interpersonal male violence, which is both encouraged and indeed taught in the SBC.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews

The violence in my @livinghopebg youth group was emotional, physical, and sexual. We would be berated in front of the entire group if any of the leadership found out we had done something they considered sinful.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
I remember one of the leaders grabbing one boy in the middle of the youth space and screaming at the top of his lungs because the boy had been smoking on church grounds. I don't remember ever seeing him in church again.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
We were not allowed to be silent in small group. We were terrified into talking about our deepest thoughts, into talking about every embarrassing detail so that we'd feel the full weight of shame from everyone in the room.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
They taught us to use these same tactics when proselytizing and pursuing girls. Keep pushing. Don't give up. Trust that God is showing you the right way and don't take no for an answer.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
Boys would constantly punch or kick each other in the testicles. It was a game. I was both hit and I hit others, because I was egged on. Cause I thought this was what I had to do to fit into a place that had given me sanctuary from my crumbling life.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
"Mock" fights would happen, mostly at summer camp, involving choke holds and dog piles. They hurt. They were terrifying. But there was no blood, so leadership never did anything. This was male bonding.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
The boys (and we were boys, not men) did not allow each other to have physical boundaries. If we tried to cover ourselves in communal showers, towels would be stripped away. Boys would invade shower stalls while others were bathing.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
Leadership ignored this. I know. I tried to tell. Nothing happened. If they tried to talk to any of the boys about it then clearly it didn't help, because it never stopped.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
The most visceral part of the doc version of @JeffSharlet's "The Family" was the dramatized scene were they held Actor Jeff's face in mud and piled on top of him as he screamed. It was a familiar scene to me. I wept.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
Cause this is what they do. They teach men to commit violence against each other, tell them that this will make them part of something bigger than themselves, teach them how to induct other men through the same violence. To turn that violence outward.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
This violence bleeds into society outside of church, through Christian hegemony and the run of the mill expectations of men. There's over 67,000 people in Bowling Green, KY. I stopped counting churches after 50.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
If the children didn't go to church every Sunday, their parents certainly did, and they brought those lessons home with them. The boys I knew were casually violent, cruel, and misogynistic. This is inseparable from the Christian culture in this town.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
There was an actual fight club (inspired by the ironically anti-toxic masculinity movie) in my high school, where people would get together and watch two boys beat each other bloody. I know this because they videoed the fights and watched them at school.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
This is the culture I was raised in, that so many boys are raised in, even in environments considered good for them. I saw all of the things I listed above in the Boy Scouts, another bastion of Christianity and the abuse of boys.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
Having spent so long walking in lock-step with these ideals of manhood, I can tell you it's an utterly destructive, pointless way to live, full of pain and constantly shifting goal posts. You'll never be happy because that's not the point.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
You're supposed to hurt people, to cross that line and feel guilty so that you always have to go back to church and beg forgiveness, to beg at the altar to God instead of the people you hurt. To feel you need God to fit that impossible ideal of a Man.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
The ideal that just leads you to causing more pain, and destroying everything around you.

Christianity, in most, if not all of its forms, creates more abusers than it ever redeems.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
Even if you leave, you have to completely dismantle your identity to shed that indoctrination. Therapy only works when you go in fully aware of your toxic behavior, cause men don't want to believe they're bad, and will use therapy lingo to justify their behavior.
#churchtoo
And the majority of men don't go into therapy aware of those behaviors. They never learned how to identify them as toxic. They're taught to believe that they are right and good. They can't handle that their identities are based on lies and harm.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
There's no easy path to dismantling toxic masculinity. You'll lose a lot. And that's as it should be. Really, truly working to be better does not mean that you just get everything you want, that you can avoid consequence.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
But it's what we should do, what we should accept, cause it's not the cheap entitlement given to every straight white Christian man. It's just doing the hard, moral thing without expectation of Heaven or earthly reward.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
Because we owe it to each other to be better. If that means the #SBC and Christianity as we know it ceases to exist, then they should. Because the violence they breed needs to cease, and being better sometimes means losing something in the process.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews

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More from @Ford_Ebling

17 Mar
There’s a direct line between Christian #purityculture and the racist Atlanta shooter. Purity culture is not conducive to a healthy sexual ethic. Men raised in it are taught to view women with suspicion, as objects whose purpose is to draw them into sin.
#EmptyThePews #churchtoo
You’re also taught that your sexual urges are completely uncomfortable, that it’s only a matter of time until you hurt someone. In my Sunday school, they taught us that having sexual thoughts was akin to “raping a woman in your mind.”
#EmptyThePews #churchtoo
Combine all of that with an intense “warrior for God” philosophy, a desensitization to violence as well as emotion, and the racism baked into American Christianity, then physically violent action is sure to follow.
#EmptyThePews #churchtoo
Read 14 tweets
31 Jan
CW — sexual assault
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews

Last December was a year since I came forward about being sexually assaulted at @livinghopebg.
I didn’t mark it in any way.
One reason is because I don’t feel like anything has happened since.
But there was another reason:
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
Awhile back I decided to find out what it looked like to report SA to a larger #SBC org, to see what their process was, to see if they were really “Caring Well,” as @jdgreear and the rest of the #SBC resolved to do.
#churchtoo #EmptyThePews
So I contacted @IMB_SBC via their instant messaging service on their website (using a fake name), and asked where I could report sexual assault. They directed me to this woman, Somer Nowak.
Read 24 tweets
26 Feb 20
I say this fully knowing who I am and what background I come from, but if there’s anything that can be salvaged from Christianity, if it can be saved at all, it will not be done by white men.
And probably not by white people in general.
#EmptyThePews
For me, saying, “I used to be a Christian” is the same as me saying, “I used to be a skinhead.” Cause I came from a particularly nationalistic, military-worshipping, dominionist, White-centric brand of Christianity.
#EmptyThePews
And despite what every condescending “Not All Christians” bastard might say, there differences between a lot of the big denoms are not all that different. They have a lot of inconsequential theological differences, but the things they want are the same.
#EmptyThePews
Read 14 tweets

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