Untitled

A place for me to reblog things to help process my religious trauma.

[weltenwellen]

Buttercream Joy Sullivan

[saintgoodlove]

sometimes it’s unbelievable to me how little the average person knows about evangelical pop-culture. like there’s so many levels to this whole big world and no one would know what im talking about. even some evangelicals. like how do i begin to explain that the Jonas brothers did a curriculum that taught that the earth was 6000 years old but also had really fun comics in it and had founders that defended Jim Crow? how do i explain the 2010s christian techno-pop dj remix fever? what about the Christian cover-song fever of the late 2000s? no one knows about the TBN evangelical version of Disney Channel’s Shake It Up (and the boyband Mission 6 that came out of it). Mr. Whitaker from The Odyssey series? y’all had Dan & Phil and whatever Vine influencers went on to have YouTube careers, while I had BlimeyCow and Goodnight Kevin. normal people had MCR and I had ReliantK. you had LMFAO and I had Group1Crew. Family Force 5, even. you were not there when Christian Kendrick Lamar came out as gay and you only just learned who Cain Culto is. you weren’t there when he had long hair and was fighting Christians in his comments over his music video choices with his band Ecclesia. you weren’t there when he also came out as gay. you don’t know the depths of the Left Behind series and Joel C Rosenberg (and its contribution to antisemitism and Islamophobia in post 9/11 politics). you don’t know the chokehold Frank E. Perretti had on Christian readers when it came to his thrillers. or how Francine Rivers was the most “raunchy” of the respectable Christian romance writers (she wrote hella steamy Bible fanfic like omg and they were bestsellers). you weren’t there during the whole Christian teen suicide pact culture that formed after the Columbine shooting (like people were taking pledges to not deny Christ should “their time come”). and the role Tobymac and his band DC Talk played in making it a fad (Christian goth culture fr). you have not followed and deconstructed two-decades worth of David A.R. White movies (he’s doing Christian action movies now). or the time Lecrae was in a Lionsgate comedy movie that pissed half of the evangelicals in America off. or when Kirk Franklin called out the racists at the Dove Awards and caused a whole controversy. what about how Adam from Capital Kings went on to make one of the biggest dance club hits “The Mac” after he split the duo???? you don’t know about the magnificence of Hillsong Australia’s Brooke Fraser and her song “Psychosocial” that also lost her Christian listeners. or her song about Narnia and CS Lewis. don’t even get me started on the apologetics YouTube space or the discography of For King & Country and their terrible human trafficking movie. none of you know what in the goddamn hell I’m talking about 😭😭

[howlonghaveyoubeenseventeen]

being on the other side of christianity I’m just like. why would you take something as beautiful as human life and ruin it by creating a higher power who hates your natural state of being and demands perfection with a set of standards that don’t mean anything. when you could just like. be kind and respectful to others. and enjoy being in your body. we never needed guilt and fearmongering.

[caughdeighy]

Sometimes I feel like being an exvangelical queer gives me something of a leg up when it comes to self soothing in the face of doom.

Gee whiz, the world is ending? [takes a deep drag off my cigarette] never heard that one before. How about you sit down and have a whiskey? You seem stressed

[christmasturtles]

[deservedgrace]

You are not responsible for his death. You didn't contribute to his torture. Your sin didn't drive the nails in his hands.

You are not sinful simply for existing.

[botmilf]

Girlies who grew up in religious environments, did y’all ever dress/present decidedly more masculine as a teenager and into adulthood because your—I guess ‘femininity’?—didn’t feel safe in that environment? Like it just felt safer to behave and present in a way that felt more masculine? Idk if I’m using the right terms here.

[azspot]

“For Tertullian and the early church fathers, Jesus is the full expression of God, and he has revealed God to be completely and utterly non-violent; choosing to go to the cross rather than to wield the sword.”

— Tommy Preson Phillips

[winged-thinged]

found my own words in the wild on r/exchristian (via BigClitMcphee) 🥹 I am giving you all a hug rn, if you want one

[voluptatiscausa]

Been thinking a lot about how the central myth of my life since I was an infant was the idea that I was born fundamentally broken, dirty, and undeserving of love but an omnipotent entity in the sky was so benevolent and condescending that it loved me anyway (even though I did not deserve it) HOWEVER the only way I could be made unbroken and clean enough to someday approach this entity was by the torture and death of that entity’s inherently pure offspring

Anyway now I struggle to accept that I’m loved because I fear I am fundamentally broken and dirty inside. Probably not related tho

[deservedgrace]

I so often forget how focused on war and combat my experience with Christianity was, how much mental space it took up. We are members of the Lord's army. Put on the full armor of God. Spiritual warfare. We're constantly under attack from Satan. Satan influences the world. We can be killed at any moment for being Christian. Mental illnesses are demonic attacks. They wanted our mental energy to be spent constantly feeling attacked and making everything outside the church seem unsafe, making the church our only safe space.

[angeerie]

It was so silent, too, you never really thought about it until you were out of it. Of course it was normal, I mean, how could you know something was off when it was all you knew? To be at war with the world, to be at war with yourself, to be at war with the Devil. And with the Lord, also, sometimes, also silently, but just as destructive...

[pastelalleycat]

I was raised in a kind of Christianity that painted Judaism as Christian Lite. We both had the same God, but because Jews don't believe in Jesus as a deity, somehow their faith was "incomplete". I thought I had all the answers to Judaism (aka: just convert) and didn't need to look deeper into it. In actuality, bigotry and ignorance are often intertwined. By dismissing Jews' unique religious practices and traditions as pointless, since the Law was supposedly already fulfilled, I was inadvertently perpetuating intolerance of Jews. Also, not all Jews are religious- at its core, Jews are an ethnic group; they can very much be atheist and/or agnostic and still be Jewish.

It's not a salvation problem, it's not a good works problem, it's not a worshipping-the-wrong-way problem, it's antisemitism.

[blood-is-the-life]

Tumblr user, look at me. Your problems with organized religion are not solved by harassing random religious people on the internet.

[simulationswarm]

basically i'm a late in life life-enjoyer so if it seems like i approach all the recent situations i get into like i'm new on earth that's why

[tinstol-archive]

When someone is abused by religion and thus turns away from religion, the tragedy is that they were abused, not that they are no longer religious, not that they don’t see your religion in the “correct” way.

[byjove]

sects of Christianity that retract from the all-loving God thing are so stupid “God hates you, repent.” why the fuck would I negotiate with a terrorist?

[theshoesofatiredman]

Something that's genuinely so eerie is that after spending enough time outside of Christianity, the responses that Christians give to questions or the things they say in conversation start to sound so canned it stops sounding like you're even talking with a person. It's like one moment I'm talking to my mother and the next she's telling me that God's ways are higher than our ways and in her feeble human mind she cannot begin to imagine what it's like to be God and somehow that means she doesn't have to view the amount of suffering in the world as a contradiction. And the shift is so jarring that it feels like I activated a sleeper agent, like I'm not talking to my mom anymore but the person she was programmed to be by her religion. And she sincerely believes what she's saying too. She may sound like she's parroting the party line but it's a lone she's bought into fully. And it's even crazier because I know I used to sound exactly the same. I know I used to code switch hard into the same sayings and had no awareness of how it sounded. They sound like they're in a cult