You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity

by Jamie Lee Finch

So often, for those raised within Evangelical environments, any single moment of perceived failure, any mistake, any step outside the previously established lines can paralyze with life-altering fear, anxiety, shame, and dread because the trauma of early teaching is essentially playing on a loop within us. Our brains developed in a state of restriction, hesitation, and lack rather than a state of permission, wholeness, and freedom. This is why any misstep threatens identity, threatens worthiness, and threatens belonging—because of being raised on such thin ice in relation to our human nature and the whims of an abusive deity that Jesus had to come and pacify to prevent from harming, torturing, and abusing us forever. When raised to believe that, left to our own devices, we deserve to be punished and tortured forever, worthiness, belonging, and safety are entirely conditional; our comfort with our own identity is conditional. Pleasure becomes dangerous, pain becomes discipline, and discipline masquerades as love.