Revising chapter 3 of my book on Religious Trauma today:
🧵Kristie Dotson describes a specific kind of willful ignorance especially relevant to our current moment with respect to religious trauma. This is contributory injustice (2012). Contributory injustice occurs when a... marginalized community has developed the conceptual resources to make their experiences intelligible to themselves and to others, but the more privileged members of society refuse to engage with or give sufficient up-take to those resources. As online survivor communities...

🧵Funny how “not causing a brother to stumble” only ever gets applied to how women dress and maybe occasionally the permissibility of drinking alcohol. I’ve never seen anyone suggest that a Christian should sell their nice house and live more modestly so that they don’t tempt… fellow Christians to covet wealth. No Christian has ever offered not to eat meat around me, as a Christian vegetarian (even though the passage specifically references meat and neither clothing or lust). No one ever seems to consider that policing women’s clothing and…

If you are out here saying the problem is women’s failure to communicate expectations, think about the last time you had to tell your wife or gf that you also wanted to eat a meal that she prepared, that you would like her to throw your laundry in the load with hers, that you… would like a Christmas /birthday present, that you would like your name on the Christmas card to your parents, etc. If the answer is that you don’t have to tell your wife stuff like this, then the reason you didn’t know your wife wanted a stocking (or gift or card) is because…

Follow up🧵: When I tweeted about whether people who support spanking toddlers on the grounds that one cannot reason with them would be okay with being beaten themselves if they lost their capacity for high-level reasoning, quite a few folks objected that there is an important... distinction between those who lack sophisticated reasoning skills but are in the process of developing them and those who are losing them or cannot develop them further. This is a real difference. But, I don’t think it is relevant here. If the real reason that people say...

🧵Everyone who cares about Humanities education should read this. Here Alla Gutnikova makes it an integral part of standing against oppression and tyranny as she is convicted for the equivalent of “corrupting the youth." "I am not going to speak about the case, the search, the interrogations, the volumes, the trials. That is boring and pointless. Recently I’ve been attending the school of fatigue and vexation.

It’s deeply concerning to me that an organization that claims not only to do research on, but to care about survivors of, religious trauma would invite a man who supported a credibly accused abuser. This is not the way. Here activist Ryan Stollar discusses the statement. Although he doesn’t provide a rigorous analysis, had does cover the accusations against Jones in a detailed post (linked below)

rlstollar.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/a-r…

I’m not sure who is involved with GCRR’s recent work on Religious Trauma, but I know that a lot of people whose work I respect were invited, as I was, last spring to be involved in writing a textbook with them. At the time, I saw a number of red flags. The concerns were serious enough that I declined the invitation, but not straightforward evidence of anything amiss. However, given the revelations about Paul Maxwell and the trend of people co-opting important justice work to create names for themselves, I’m going to share.

Content Note: Discussion of trauma, PTSD, and trigger warnings.

A few more issues about the trigger warning article I criticized earlier.

Neither the author nor those she cites seem well-informed on the latest trauma research. For example, the article says
"“Cognitive avoidance is really counterproductive,” psychologist Darby Saxbe told Katy Waldman for a 2016 Slate story on the then-current science of trigger warnings, a point Jones also made to me. I know this extremely well from my days...

People often say that #Exvangelicals left our former faith (for agnosticism, atheism, or other kind of Christianity) so that we could "be popular" or "fit in." It's true that for many of us, exposure to different people and sources of information did play a role in our shift. It's also true that many of us have gone on to form friendships, build community, and even gain some sort of platform on the basis of our newly formed beliefs, our shared journeys, or our more "progressive" views. So when we respond to those accusation by saying...