Why I Left: Finding the Way Out of Religious Abuse

In January 2018, I stopped attending church. There were many reasons for this, but mainly I did this to create space in my life for a deeper kind of love. I left Evangelicalism so that I could heal and create boundaries with the abusive systems I witnessed and experienced as a child and young adult.

Let me be clear about this from the beginning—there are plenty of churches and religious communities full of good people who provide supportive, loving environments. There are plenty that are not full of those things. This story is not about convincing anyone to leave or join specific communities, but is about particularly harmful power dynamics that led me to leave my evangelical community. I left when I could no longer make excuses for the on-going harm that was often upheld, covered up, or enacted by church leaders.

I’m going to back up a little, and ask you to think about what the word trauma means to you. This is a term we use and hear others use quite often, and I think it’s worth paying attention to what it has come to mean. We can think about trauma as any event that overwhelms the central nervous system and puts the body in a state of fight or flight. Even though trauma has become more widely recognized as a common experience, most people use this term to reference acute trauma—the kind of trauma we all encounter at some point—such as, the death of a loved one, surviving a car accident, sustaining a severe injury, etc. Complex trauma refers to repeated, violent events or abusive systems that keep a person in a survival state for sustained time.

In Trauma and Recovery Judith Herman explains that victims who experience repeated trauma lose the sense of self in all capacities. The repetition of the trauma works overtime to corrode the belief that there is anything different. This affects the person’s core beliefs about themselves and about the world. There is a lack of baseline understanding of what is “normal” and safe. This is also why it becomes incredibly difficult for victims to seek help—they come to believe over time that what is happening to them is, in some sense, what they deserve.

When I first read about complex trauma, I felt intense relief. It was the first time I had ever encountered a name and explanation for my childhood experiences—especially those connected to my religious communities. I could no longer deny that what I experienced was abuse. I couldn’t explain it away or say it wasn’t that bad. I was looking it right in the face. And naming what my body already knew to be true set me free in a way that nothing else could.

So, back to the religious component. When someone experiences complex trauma inside the context of a closed religious group, the consequences can be unique and even more painful. If one chooses to leave the religious community in an attempt to heal from harm and/or abuse experienced within it, they often end up losing extremely important relationships, communities, rituals, and structures. Marlene Winell explains why this is the case in Leaving the Fold, where she writes: “Life transitions in general are challenging because of the loss of the familiar that occurs when you let go of accustomed places, roles, and relationships. Changing your religious point of view is equally as significant, if not more so, because your entire life can be affected.”

Leaving is one of the most difficult things to do, but staying often comes with a much higher cost. When there is no opportunity for understanding and healing within the structure, what other options are available for victims? And more often than not, religious systems protect perpetrators instead of victims. Herman explains that this happens because it is psychologically easier to side with perpetrators—all they require is your silence. They require nothing from the bystander. To support victims requires us to feel pain and suffering, to bear witness, to mourn, and to demand change.

Here’s an important example of how this works

In 2019, The Houston Chronicle published a series called “Abuse of Faith” that reported crimes of sexual abuse that had been on-going in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) for decades. The series also includes a database of over 263 SBC leaders who had been convicted for sexual abuse crimes in over 30 states.

The SBC is the largest religious organization in the United States, with close to 47,000 churches across the nation. What is most upsetting about the sexual abuse cases in the SBC is the way that leaders intentionally ignored or silenced victims within their churches and how the executive committee handled these cases, which often included advising pastors to quietly force victims from the congregation. While I could talk about the SBC for a very long time, the point here is that this is just one example to show how large systems (like this one) can create conditions of power in which abuse goes unchecked and compounds over time.1

How do we make sense of harm like this as individuals and communities—how do we heal? These aren’t questions with easy answers, but they are questions that help move us toward each other and toward the future we want to live in.

To open this path a little more, I’ll share some of my story about healing from the effects of abuse and sexual violence experienced in religious contexts. I won’t share specific details about the abuse, because (as I explain later) telling and retelling the details isn’t always what brings us healing. My story is just one of many, and it is a story that continues to shape how I engage with the work of writing about and healing trauma.

I had gone to therapy off and on in my early twenties, but I struggled to find the motivation to stay for more than a single session. I usually felt compelled to go in the wake of a low moment—a breakup, loss of a friendship, and so on. I didn’t feel like I was moving toward healing, though. I would go to an opening session, divulge all the details about my past, and wait for the therapist to give me homework. What do I do with this? I was always told to keep coming back, but I didn’t know how to keep talking about the past without integrating it into my present.

Eventually, through a strange series of events, I found my way into working with a trauma specialist. I had been wrestling with anxiety and insomnia for several months in the early days of my doctoral program. So, I took an internet test (the worst choice) and was slightly concerned that I might be experiencing bipolar symptoms (especially since there was a family history of it). When I went into the counseling center, I completed the intake form and was almost immediately pulled into a side room. The person reading my form told me that I had disclosed several incidents that would qualify as complex trauma and asked if I would like to see a trauma specialist. I said yes without hesitation and entered into the most intense work I had done in life so far.

I spent week after week excavating my past. We worked with one or two core memories for months at a time and moved slowly across the complexities of repeated abuse. Many of these memories are rooted in the doctrine of the religious cult I grew up in—Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles. I’ll have more to say about the IBLP in later posts, but you can also watch the Amazon show Shiny, Happy People if you want to learn more about it. Prior to the work I did with my trauma, I would dissociate frequently, losing sense of time and space. I had never been able to imagine a world where I was in my body and fully present to my life. To get back into my body fully, I had to let myself work through the pain from my past. I had to allow myself to face the terror embedded in my memories and acknowledge that I had made it safely home to myself.

Here’s the most important takeaway I had from this work: healing is hard. It is possible. It requires significant effort, though, and it might be the hardest work you’ll ever do. Constantly retelling the details of trauma does very little in the process of healing. The details of the past matter less than the conditions of the present. If you can establish safety for your body (typically through setting boundaries and getting out of harmful relationships), healing is possible. My body is the most important source I will have in understanding the past and present. But healing is a lifelong commitment, one that can only happen in the context of relationships and our lived experiences. We need each other. No one can do this work alone.

It has been almost a decade since I started naming, processing, and healing my past. I cannot imagine returning to the person I was before I began. Of course, there is still more. There is always a horizon full of joy, freedom, and beauty that we get to continue to discover and feel. Being alive in my life—in a life that I built and crammed full of love—is the most precious gift I gave myself.

There may be a time and space where I do find joy and meaning inside a church community again. No feeling is final. And if you are reading this and have similar experiences, know that the future is possible. The future is always there waiting for you. You get to build a life that you want to live.

If you want to learn more about the SBC, I recommend looking up the report and reading the emails from the initial investigation. The primary research on this topic is perhaps the most important entry point to understanding what happened and how it was covered up for so long.