Thread by @mcjulie

True. It was the theology and worldview that hurt me, I was never "hurt by the church" in any other way.

https://twitter.com/StephenPihlaja/status/1429362941808283649

And Mark Driscoll is a very revealing piece of that: would you trust any theology that didn't instantly reveal Mark Driscoll to be a misogynistic piece of shit?

Or Paul (1 Corinthians Paul) for that matter.

Which reminds me, I was talking about the incident described here with a friend who's training as a therapist:
gothhouse.org/blog/territori…

Talking about it made me realize that, in spite of the trauma I experienced as a child that was all centered around fears of hell, that the hell-related trauma was mostly of the past. It was more like remembering OTHER irrational childhood fears --

You know, like closet monsters and that one house in the neighborhood that's clearly haunted and "but what if that monster in the story was real though?" kind of stuff.

The thing that gave me a full-on panic attack as a grown-ass adult was a li'l dose of patriarchy doctrine. A choir director going out of his way to emphasize how special and important he thinks it is that God created men and women *differently*

My therapist friend talked about trauma connected to feelings of safety/lack of safety. We talked about it storing feelings like, "this person (like a parent) who should have protected me, didn't."

And I thought, "why would patriarchy doctrine do that to me? My parents weren't big into that kind of thing, in fact, they were feminists... "

"Wait. I HAVE read this story. It's the Stepford Wives."

Imagine teenage me, then, being hit hard with patriarchy doctrine for basically the first time, at a church *my parents made me go to*

I didn't consciously have this kind of thought at the time, but I think somewhere in the depths of my brain a little alarm buzzer was going off: your parents WERE feminists, what if they've changed their minds about that?

What if they're not going to send you to college after all? Or what if they're going to make you go to a Bible college?

Because one thing that didn't occur to me at all was that my parents didn't have the faintest CLUE what I was being taught in Sunday School. I mean -- they MADE me go, right? Why would you INSIST your kid go to something where you don't even know what goes on there?

Evangelical parents had, maybe still have, a completely unreasonable trust in the church. That if your kid is in Sunday School or Church Camp or whatever, that they're getting more or less the same version of Christianity that YOU, the parent would teach them.

And that's on TOP of their unreasonable trust that youth leaders aren't abusers.

This is why I say Christianity should be for adults only.

Just imagine it. No hand-wringing over adult children "leaving the faith" because nobody would be so absurd as to think children were ever in the faith in the first place.

No more Christian schools, day cares, vacation Bible schools, conversion therapy, abusive "tough love" camps for wayward teenagers, after school clubs run by Project Blitz with the express purpose of indoctrinating children...

No more Sunday school, no more youth group, no more Bible Bowl, no more "teen dances" with a sneakily Christian rock band and an unexpected altar call

No more dangerous unvetted "Christian child-rearing" books. No more "purity" indoctrination for high schoolers even at supposedly secular high schools. No more ignorant 21-year-olds writing books like they're some expert on dating & scarring multiple generations to come.

Are you an evangelical parent who wants to share your faith with your kids? Fine! TAKE them to church WITH you, don't SEND them to church-related activities without you.

If they're too young to sit in church without squirming, they're too young to understand your faith anyway, get a babysitter or just read the Bible in your own house or something.

Obviously, this change wouldn't save kids from abusive Christian parents. But I think it might save kids with NON abusive parents who don't realize how abusive the Church itself is.

My daydream -- and it is a daydream because I don't realistically see it happening anytime soon -- is that as a society we change the WAY we think about the Christian faith, and view child indoctrination the way we now view child labor.

Below, images of children being exploited

And I just thought of something, the next time I run into some fetus cultists, my counter-protest is going to focus around the fact that the church abuses and exploits children.

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1429150715075710977?s=20

As you can see from the heart rate screencap, this stuff makes me pretty HULK SMASH angry, I've had a rage hangover for about a day.

Does anybody else get rage hangovers? If something makes you mad it's like it takes over your whole body, absolutely floods you with adrenaline, and then you're an absolute wreck for a while afterward?

I guess that's the end of the thought chain, have a good Sunday everybody.