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

by Jamie Lee Finch

The truth is that religious trauma has consequences; a significant and long-lasting impact on the brain and the body,

Our brains developed in a state of restriction, hesitation, and lack rather than a state of permission, wholeness, and freedom.

God saves believers by way of redemptive violence because they cannot save themselves. And if the believers are emotionally affected by imagining what eternal damnation might actually entail, they are rebuked, or their fears dismissed. I not only experienced this as “My Story”, but also had parents, leaders, and teachers tell me that my emotional responses indicated that I was either disobedient or taking things too seriously.

Not only does psychological trauma, by way of a perceived threat, set the stage for the development of dissociation and PTSD, but it is clear from this story that there are potentially disastrous physiological consequences as well.

And perhaps because Christian viewpoints so permeate conversations in the US, most people do not think to question whether extremist Christian beliefs may be as damaging as any other extremist doctrine. Hence people do not recognize that the Evangelical power structure is churning out walking wounded at an alarming rate. The refugees of these doctrines often cannot seem to connect to themselves, their bodies, or to other people. Many of them experience anxiety, depression, and panic that they aren’t able to explain, and they don’t feel the inner permission to own their emotions, trust themselves, find peace, or experience pleasure. And many of these same refugees are living and moving in this world carrying unexplained sickness, disease, and imbalance for which few can offer explanation or diagnosis.

So true! I relate so deeply. Anyone else?

People raised under Evangelical doctrines are forced to wage war with their flesh, and their personalities, in order to be considered holy. It shouldn’t be a stretch to see that living under such chronic stress is likely to suppress immunological responses.

“Suppressing our inner cries for help does not stop our stress hormones from mobilizing the body”

when I left Evangelicalism, I didn’t even know my favorite color. That was how separated and disconnected from myself I had become over all of those years surviving in that belief system. It wasn’t until I had spent a few years outside that I was able to make that simple decision for myself and connect with the inner permission to make such a seemingly innocuous choice. While this might seem a benign point to anyone who hasn’t spent any time in a fundamentalist or authoritarian environment—or especially, experienced it throughout their formative and developmental years—in truth, it speaks volumes.

This can result in people not connecting with their bodies enough to realize that simply because their brains have dismissed teachings and ideas, doesn’t mean their bodies don’t still need to heal from the physiological trauma brought on by those ideas.

Religious and secular therapists alike may not understand the true severity of the belief experience, and could potentially do more harm than good by either dismissing their trauma or encouraging their client back to a place of belief.

Another essential part of the recovery process is anger—in fact, it almost always comes before and ushers in the grief so desperately needed to complete the cycle of trauma. Something cannot be mourned unless its existence has been acknowledged, and for many people, their anger signals that acknowledgement. Most people recovering from Evangelicalism wonder what to do with their anger when it starts to arise, and many are often too afraid to engage it and exhaust themselves trying to avoid or disconnect from it. This is because many of them have been previously taught that the acceptable response to upsetting circumstances is immediate forgiveness and forgetting and therefore can’t give themselves permission to validate their own feelings as indications of the wrong done to them.

Since anger often serves as the gateway to grief, and grief is the indicator that an event or experience has been relegated to the past, very often for people to begin to heal they need permission to connect fully with their own anger first. This is not an easy task for people who have spent most of their life being told that anger was disobedience and that disobedience was sin. It is vitally important for people recovering from religious trauma to find safe spaces—both therapeutic and communal—that allow for expressions of anger so that the survivor can discharge the energy that they couldn’t discharge during their prolonged threat experience.

Within fundamentalism, humans are trained towards passivity and codependence because of the emphasis put upon external guidance and divine control.

Experiencing depression or numbness is normal during this phase of recovery (Winell 23). I have had clients who have even gone so far as to describe it by saying, “I don’t feel alive.” Losing a former faith story means losing the meaning-making method by which a person made sense of their life and the world around them.

I always say that losing a sense of meaning - of purpose, of a point to existence itself - is the greatest thing I lost when I lost my faith. Rebuilding that from secular scratch has been my greatest challenge. It has also been my most solid reward.

The way I have described my own therapeutic experience was as if the train tracks of my brain rerouted, and I could literally feel that they would never go back.

Without a solid connection to their deepest and truest self, people run the risk of being pulled into another authoritarian influence or form of fundamentalism.

If it is true that emotional expression has healing properties for the human immune system, then we know that the suppression of emotions is damaging to immune system.

The narrative approach to healing states that in order to heal, an individual has to figure out where their imbalance or condition came from, what message it is trying to send them, and what it is trying to communicate to them about what they have too much of, or what they’re lacking. Until the pain or condition within a person’s body no longer conveys an unresolved issue, it will continue to be recycled into their being to protect the traumatized individual in situations of potential threat and arousal (Scaer 104).

Our ability to create fiction, retell the past, and speak of potential futures is what allowed us as homosapiens to develop into our species in the first place, and it is that very ability that is at the root of our propensity towards belief and religion (Harari 25).

If you're a deconstructing believer or former believer and you have not yet read "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari, I encourage you to do so!