Thank you for reading Tim Gilmore’s deadpaper. Perhaps you know my writing from my 22 books, perhaps from my 751 nonfiction stories at JaxPsychoGeo.com, or perhaps you’ve no idea why you’re here and reading this very sentence. I’m still aiming for 10 percent of this newsletter’s readers to be paid subscribers, so please at least think about becoming one if you’re not. Either way, I’m grateful for you.
Sometimes ideas that seem most obvious are the slowest ones to develop and accrue. No one had our particular concepts of “nature” or “the environment,” for example, before people lived apart from nature, before the environment became something to stand apart from and consider. So perhaps growing up in religious trauma means that’s your environment and you can’t see it for what it is.
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So what is it? In academic psychology, until recently, there were “relatively few references to religion’s negative impact and virtually no references to religious trauma,” writes Alyson M. Stone in “Thou Shalt Not: Treating Religious Trauma and Spiritual Harm with Combined Therapy” in the Winter 2013 issue of Group, a peer-reviewed journal of the Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society. “Popular literature, conversely, contains many books on spiritual and religious abuse and manipulation, religious addiction and toxic faith. This disparity suggests the professional literature does not yet accurately reflect the potentially harmful impact of religion and spirituality.”
I’ve written extensively about the related idea of spiritual abuse, the use of a person’s spirituality or religion to manipulate them. I wrote about it in my 2016 book, Devil in the Baptist Church: Bob Gray’s Unholy Trinity, which I’m currently revising, and in such JaxPsychoGeo stories as “Trinity Christian Academy” and “The ‘Perfect Pedophile Paradise’ at Trinity Baptist Church.” To think of religious trauma as something distinguished from spiritual abuse, however, has taken me a little time. Throughout my childhood, in all my foundational experience, spirituality and religion were inseparable from, inextricable from, control waged through fear and shame.
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Nearly anyone who grew up in fundamentalist Christianity knows what it was like, as a child, to lie in bed at night terrified, in tears at the thought that your faith might not be strong enough, might not keep you from burning alive eternally, separated from your parents and everyone you love, in hellfire. The very fact of the fear proved the weakness of your faith and redoubled the fear. It’s a conversation that’s often accidentally popped up with artists and friends I didn’t even know shared this fundamentalist or evangelical background. Likewise, I remember being a child and first noticing a woman’s legs and the all-encompassing 24-hour shame and self-disgust that accompanied it. The flesh was “of the Devil,” but adolescent hormones seemed indomitable.
Millions of American children are brought up this way, so whenever I’ve encountered other adults who seemed newly aware of or surprised or shocked at the influence of fundamentalism and evangelicalism on America’s strange politics, I’ve often felt annoyed at their ignorance. For a sizeable portion of the U.S., fundamentalist reality is as much the norm as nature is nature; it’s God’s truth, as evident as the air.
“Religious trauma,” according to a post at therapist.com, “is a systemic experience between a person and their religion as a whole. Often the trauma is not linked to one specific person, but to a series of people over a period of time who enforce a traumatizing message or fail to help when a traumatizing situation takes place.”
I don’t want to be melodramatic about this realization. Many people have asked me, since my writing Devil in the Baptist Church, if I was ever sexually abused in the church. I was not. Nor have I any desire, and certainly no right, to co-opt other people’s suffering as my own. It’s why I’ve never liked Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy,” in which she refers to her father’s effect on her as “An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew. / A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. / I began to talk like a Jew. / I think I may well be a Jew.” Not only was Plath not “a Jew,” but the suffering of the Holocaust was never hers to try on for metaphor.
While I don’t want to wax melodramatic, however, I also don’t want to ignore what feels like a realization I’ve had for decades without realizing. (Are there concentric circles of realization?) I did grow up believing in Original Sin (what’s the point of the Crucifixion and therefore Christianity without it?) – that all “our righteousness,” as the Book of Isaiah says, “is as filthy rags” – that we are born deserving death and eternal hell from which only faith and predestination can save us, that “the world,” meaning the world outside the church, is “of the Devil” (except football, for some reason), that all things pertaining to the flesh are inherently sinful and evil, that demonic possession is a real and present danger, and that God watches everything we do, down to every single thought. This ontology was constantly reinforced through attending church multiple times a week and attending fundamentalist church schools every weekday.
Into this worldview, then, came my mother’s two year struggle with ALS, resulting in her nearly complete paralysis and death when I was 12. After she died, I never once felt that she was out there, anywhere, and throughout my adolescence occurred the slow process of losing my religion. I began to rebel against the strictures at Trinity Christian Academy, but tried hard to hold onto the actual faith. Eventually I failed at the latter.
When I found out later that Trinity Baptist Church and its Kindergarten-through-12th grade school had covered up and therefore allowed its pastor, Bob Gray, to sexually abuse children for half a century (and that he was just one in a web of such abusers protected by similar institutions), that fact made perfect sense.
I’m leaving out countless details in trying (probably failing) to streamline the point. I’m still working this out. Marlene Winell, who coined the term “religious trauma syndrome” also wrote the book Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists. I can’t look at how, as a child, I experienced my mother’s illness and death and extricate that from the existence in which I grew up, a reality in which listening to rock music could literally cause demonic possession. Nor can I face the anger and absurd abandonment issues that continue to pop up in me at surprising times and separate them from the facts:
a) that I grew up with sexuality equated to evil, with the idea that women wearing anything “immodest” was sinful and a betrayal to family,
b) that despite the previous point, Tom Messer, Trinity’s current pastor, told me in 2016 that he “doesn’t give a rip” about people whose faith was impaired by the fact of Bob Gray’s raping children, or,
c) that in 2023, Jacksonville nearly elected a mayor, Daniel Davis, from Trinity’s leadership. Daniel was quarterback for Trinity’s football team when I was in high school. It was Dennis Cassell, Trinity’s first football coach, who referred to the church and school as a “perfect pedophile paradise.”
All these things lead me to wonder how there could not be substance to the idea of “religious trauma syndrome,” how my own history of such symptoms as depression, anxiety, shame, self-hatred and substance abuse could be unrelated, and why it’s taken me so long to come to this concept.
Having lived in a Christian children's home for 3 years, I can attest that religious trauma syndrome explains perfectly how I feel about organized religion and probably always will.
As a possible answer to the question you posed in the last paragraph about why it took you so long to connect your upbringing to symptoms of shame, depression, substance abuse, etc, it could be that you were told (like me) those symptoms were caused by barriers that you yourself placed between you and Christ and were a result of your sin. Of course, the people who told you that also told you (repeatedly) "For ALL have sinned and come short of the glory of God", however, it was somehow implied that they either had no sin or that yours was much, much worse.
Thanks so much for this, Tim. It helps to know there are other fellow sinners out there 🙂