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Theology

Plymouth Brethren Dropouts

One of the friends I’ve made in the blogging world and on twitter is Dani Kelley. She’s an amazing woman, and just getting to know her online has been a joy and a comfort– and watching her journey this year has been incredible. She is strong, intelligent, and brave, and so far one of the best people I’ve met on the internet since I started blogging.

She has recently started a new blog, called Plymouth Brethren Dropouts, which is the fundamentalist denomination she grew up in. There are many resources for ex-fundamentalists and spiritual abuse survivors, but as she was looking for people coming out of the Plymouth Brethren denomination, she wasn’t finding very many resources for people like her. So, being amazing, she started her own.

The website already has plenty of resources, so I wanted to recommend it here. I don’t know how many of my readers have experience with the Plymouth Brethren denomination, or if you know anyone who has, but I wanted to point you in this direction just in case. I have some people in my life who grew up in this movement, so I’m really happy Dani’s created this.

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And, it’s Thanksgiving! I’m on holiday, so I’ll see you all again on Monday! Happy holidays!

November 27, 2013 by SamanthaField

Theology

a good tree cannot bear bad fruit

A little while ago, I watched Matthew Vines deliver an hour-long message on all of the passages in the Bible typically use to condemn gay men and women. It was a beautiful message, and I highly encourage all of you to listen to it when you have the time. Hopefully it will be encouraging– and challenging. But, one of the things he said that’s really stuck with me is the way he talked about Matthew 7:15-20. I was practically raised on the Sermon on the Mount, so Matthew 7 is a passage I’ve heard before, many times. However, the way I’d grown up meant that there was only one possible understanding of what Jesus meant by “false prophets” and “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” A false prophet was many things, but it all essentially boiled down to someone who wasn’t a fundamentalist like we were. And they talked about good fruit and bad fruit, but they never really explained what it meant. I sort of made the connection between good fruit and the Fruits of the Spirit, but “fruit” usually meant “how many people you’ve convinced to pray the Sinner’s Prayer in front of you” . . . so, it was a bit of a tangle, for me.

However, Matthew Vines pointed out something, and it helped the light turn on for me. If the whole of the Law and the Prophets and Jesus’ ministry is Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself, then it stands to reason that the difference between good fruit and bad fruit is love. If an interpretation of a passage, if a doctrine that you hold to, does not encourage you to love your neighbor as yourself, then it’s not good fruit.

St. Augustine put it a bit better:

“Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.”

On Christian Doctrine

This seems like a really good starting place. Love.

And, as I’m working through how I think, what I believe, and how I work with the Bible, figuring out how it should be a part of my life, there’s a few things that I’m reaching for. Yesterday we had an amazing discussion about sola scriptura and how we handle Scripture (seriously, you guys, it was spectacular), and some of you articulated some of the things I’ve been mulling over. There’s one comment in particular I’d like to share, since InsanityRanch put it so well:

First, both Jews and Protestants have what you might call a “democratic” tradition of Bible reading. That is, the Bible is not the sole province of an educated elite. At least in theory (and largely in practice) everyone is supposed to study the Bible . . .

That said, there are some interesting differences as well . . . . [One being that] Jews read Bible with commentary. When I first started reading the Torah, I read it with Rashi (11th c. genius commentator on the Bible and Talmud.) The idea that the text of the Bible is free-standing is profoundly unJewish. There are layers and layers of commentary, so interwoven that it’s impossible to read a Bible passage without also thinking of the various strands of commentary on that verse. One has a sense of the different ways the verse has been read through a long history. Reading in this way makes the text seem very much less cut and dried, less susceptible to a single, simple interpretation.

As a consequence of reading with commentary, Jews have read in community, and the currency of community was questioning. Any interpretation offered for a verse tended to evoke a challenge, with one reader arguing according to R. So-and-so’s commentary and another reader arguing according to R. somebody else. This process made it hard to hold calcified interpretations of textual meanings… though of course, not impossible.

I think the idea of reading in community is paramount, and I think this is something that has been lost– or perhaps never present, I’m not sure– in evangelicalism and some Protestant environments. We gather together in church on Sunday, sometimes we do Bible studies or small groups together, but that’s about all we get in community, and it’s somehow separate from how we read Scripture. It seems that there’s been a strong emphasis in evangelicalism on “reading the Bible for yourself” that the result has been a highly Individualistic approach to Scripture. Somehow, though, instead of this resulting in what InsanityRanch described above, it seems that the Modernism so entrenched in evangelical philosophy results in us putting consensus above all other goals. There’s only one right way to interpret a passage. And, in America, with our individualism and exceptionalism and the fact that the evangelical church is so politicized, we wind up with that “one right way” usually feeding into a really harmful and dangerous status quo.

Being willing to embrace the possibility of not knowing when it comes to our Bibles is discomfiting. But, understanding that the Christian faith is not supposed to exist in isolation, but in community,I think could be a really strong first step.

All of this has somehow led me to re-evaluating a deeply ingrained belief that I’ve grown up with, a belief that seems to be synonymous with Protestantism and evangelicalism alike: that Scripture is the final authority, that Scripture alone is all we need to live our faith. And regardless of how the Reformers originally meant this (since Luther himself believed that some parts of Scripture don’t need to be listened to coughcough James)– what it has come to mean in evangelicalism could be encapsulated in the phrase “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

In the theology course I’m taking, they present a concept called the “Stage of Truth,” which some of you are probably familiar with. Some traditions present this similarly to the Wesleyen Quadrilateral, except the Stage of Truth is more prioritized and hierarchal than that. In Protestant and evangelical sola scriptura traditions, the Stage of Truth looks a bit like this:

Scripture, of course, is at the head since it is the final authority in a Christian’s life. But I’m looking at the other elements on this “stage,” and I’m wondering about a good tree cannot bear bad fruit and I’m looking around at the world around me, and I’m wondering if something like Experience or Emotion doesn’t belong closer to the front.

Because in my lived experience, I’ve felt the horror of Deuteronomy 22 being the final authority in my life. I’ve felt the full, brutal weight of the fact that Scripture doesn’t have bodily autonomy or individual agency well articulated in its pages, and I know what that does to a person. I’ve spent most of my adult life (what little there is of it) struggling under “biblical patriarchy” and having to fight with all of the voices screaming at me that being on my own is rebellion against my father. I’ve been depressed and been told that I must “take every thought captive” and that “perfect love casts out fear” and that I’m just not loving God enough, that’s why I’m sick.

And all of these ideas have come from having a “high view of Scripture,” and believing that what it said had complete authority over my entire life. That I had to force myself into alignment with the “clear teaching of Scripture” because it was the only authority I had. If the Bible had something to say about an idea, well, that was what I had to believe. That was the opinion I had.

I didn’t know that all of that was heavily predicated on interpretation, on the fundamentalism I was raised in, that it wasn’t the Bible but an interpretation of the Bible– but thinking like that was actively discouraged by everyone I knew. Pastors and evangelists and missionaries and Sunday school teachers and professors and Bible study leaders and speakers and teachers all telling me that This is what the Bible says This is what the Bible says and somehow they all sounded the same so I believed it.

And it wasn’t until that I understood that my life matters and my experiences matter and what I feel about people matters that I started re-examining what the Bible so clearly says. When I placed my Bible in tension with my life, and the people I care about, and what I can reason to be true, what so many before me have observed to be true, some things became a lot more simple. It wasn’t until I’d set aside my “high view of Scripture” that loving my neighbor really became possible.

November 22, 2013 by SamanthaField

Theology

Martin Luther might have made a huge mess

I wrote a post last week explaining how I’m not entirely sure what I think–and believe– about the Bible. I know that what I was taught as a teenager was egregiously wrong, especially since the veneration of the Holy Scriptures included the heresy of biblical docetism— or, taking the Bible as literally, as factually, as is possible. From my experiences in Independent Fundamental Baptist churches and attending a fundamentalist college, the words and the pages of the Bible are worshiped as an extension of God himself.

So I’m trying to back up from that and look at the Bible all over again, and I’m starting from scratch. I’m beginning with the things that I can solidly know about the Bible that are separate from its status as a divine book. It’s an ancient text, a library compiled over centuries, written by men (and possibly women) from all walks of life. They had a purpose, an underlying argument. They had motivations that they weren’t aware of. Their writing was colored by their perceptions– racism, patriarchy– and everything they recorded was influenced by their philosophy and epistemology. Those are things that are true of all books, of all writers. These are things that I’ve been trained to look for, to parse out, and I know how to handle them.

I haven’t really made any progress since my last post– all I have are more questions. But one thing that I’m seriously beginning to wonder about is the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura.

I’m not a Reformation scholar, but I think it’s safe to claim that one of the founding doctrines of the Reformation was sola scriptura. Luther believed that the Holy Roman Catholic Church had become corrupt and had been abusing its power; the solution for this was to give ordinary people access to the Bible. If they could read the Scriptures for themselves, they could see where and how the Church had been misrepresenting the truth to them– they could read about justification through faith alone for themselves. Luther– and other men like him– appealed to the authority of Scripture above the authority of the Church, or Tradition.

What I’m wondering about now is the connection between sola scriptura and the saying we hear bandied about quite a bit today: “the Bible clearly says.” Are ideas like biblical literalism, the “plain meaning of Scripture” and proof-texted verses the natural– perhaps inevitable– consequence of sola scriptura?

Because, as I’ve been digging into what the Bible means to me, one of the things that’s becoming ever more clear is that trying to understand the Bible is difficult. You have to take into account Hebrew and Greek syntax, ancient customs from a culture wholly removed from modern-day America, literary forms of the ancient world, the importance of genre . . . and it goes on.

Take, for example, the Book of Ecclesiastes. It’s traditionally been attributed to Solomon, and it belongs in the “proverbial” genre. However, it has a narrative structure that is very common in other Near Eastern and Middle Eastern texts written in about the same period. The Man Who was Tired of Life, an ancient Egyptian story, has a strikingly similar narrative form: internal dialog. This story is about a man arguing with himself, trying to decide if he wants to commit suicide or if continuing to live is worth it. A straight, simple reading of Ecclesiastes is going to be confusing, because the book is filled with what, superficially, seem like contradictions and tensions. I’ve seen some creative attempts to interpret this book that had zero awareness of the internal dialog happening– and, if you’re not versed in narrative theory and can separate the two voices in the text (which is easy in some places, more difficult in others) you’re going to run into problems.

Many of the “straight-forward, plain meaning, the Bible clearly says” approaches I’ve seen to Ecclesiastes winds up with the preacher going on at length about how everything is vanity and life is miserable– when that is not really the purpose of Ecclesiastes at all.

When you give ordinary people the Bible– well-educated, hard working, conscionable people who love God– but don’t simultaneously give them any tools to understand the Bible as a library of books from ancient times, it seems like you’re always going to run into problems.

Say, for example, someone reads Genesis 19, where God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah, but they don’t simultaneously read Ezekiel 16. You might wind up with a bunch of people believing that God sent fire and brimstone to destroy Sodom because the people there were gay– when Ezekiel 16 explicitly says that the people there were greedy and selfish, and they did not care for the poor. Or, even ignoring Ezekiel 16, and understanding that Genesis has a narrative structure just like every other book– and that the story of the angels visiting Lot is meant to be a parallel with the angels visiting Abraham. You place these two encounters side-by-side (which they are), and the story is completely transformed to be about how we treat strangers.

So what does this mean for the Church?

I’m worried about the rampant anti-intellectualism I hear from a lot of pulpits. You don’t need religion. You don’t need Tradition. You don’t need education. You don’t need 6 years of training in church history. You don’t need 6 years in biblical languages. You just need the Bible. As long as you read your Bible, you’ll be fine.

But I’ve been reading my Bible, and when I get to passages like Jesus saying “you’re going to eat my flesh and drink my blood” (John 6:56) and people responded with “this is a hard saying” (vs. 60), all I can think is no shit Jesus sounds like a crazy person. And, of course, we modern people go, “Oh, he was talking about Communion!” since that’s something we’ve had for 2,000 years and some of us eat and drink it every Sunday, but that didn’t exist then, and we get all pissy with the people who didn’t get it. “See, look at what Peter said! Jesus has the words of eternal life, where else are we supposed to go?” and I’m just gobsmacked because if I’d been there, all I would have been thinking is how it is an abomination to drink the blood of animals– and forget about cannibalism. And was he really talking about Communion? Was this a metaphor for the Passover Lamb? What does it meeaaaaan and I’m internally wailing because it’s a gigantic mess.

And this is me talking. I went to not one, but two, Bible colleges. I’m almost finished with a two-year theology program. I (almost) have an MA in English. I stumbled my way through Advanced Literary Criticism and Theory. And even with all of that, I barely understand the Bible. I certainly don’t understand it well enough to throw hand-picked verses into arguments. Looking back, proof-texting is singularly ridiculous. No one would say that C.S. Lewis believes that we should all go to strip clubs because he said “You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act– that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage.” (96, Mere Christianity)– but that seems to be exactly what we do to the Bible. A lot.

I’m worried, because I see the Bible being used as a weapon almost everywhere I go. If it’s the only authority Christians are allowed to appeal to– if it’s above our lived experiences, if it’s above our religious heritage and tradition, if it’s above reason and empathy– if it it’s above all of that and then we approach it with our culture, our privileges, our biases, our politics, and don’t believe that it’s necessary to counter any of that . . . it scares me.

November 21, 2013 by SamanthaField

Theology

I don't know what I think about the Bible

In the fundamentalist church I grew up in– and I have no idea if this is a common stance, but in the area I grew up in, this was– what I was taught about inerrancy strays quite a bit from the more common conservative evangelical understandings of the term. I was taught that the Bible is inerrant– that it is wholly, totally, and completely without error. Any error. Factual, literal, scientific, historic, grammatical. It had no form of error whatsoever. I was taught that everything written in the Bible was factually, literally true, and that it was recorded so that the “plain meaning” was accessible to all people of all times of all nations.

So, my sophomore year in college when I found out that the Gospel of Mark contained numerous grammatical errors, I was shaken. I approached one of my college professors during an open period where we “could ask him anything,” and his response was some nonsensical bullshit about Koiné Greek. I realize now that he wasn’t allowed to answer a question like that one honestly because he could have lost his job, but at the time I was frustrated and upset. It was the first domino to fall in what eventually became a 3-year period when I just didn’t care about God or Christianity.

I also somehow unconsciously absorbed that the Bible’s “inerrancy” made it impervious to deconstructionism– so, in graduate school, when a professor assigned my literary theory class the task of deconstructing Genesis chapter three, it rattled me all over again. Even when I didn’t particularly care one way or the other if God existed or Christianity was true, there was still a basic set of “facts” that I “knew,”– and having those beliefs destroyed during the course of a homework assignment that took me ten minutes . . . it was devastating.

And then, this summer, I started re-imagining what it would be like if I understood the Bible principally as a book that fits within the constraints of literary structures and genres. What if Genesis chapters 1 and 2 are really mythological? What if they aren’t factually, literally true, like St. Augustine believed? Does the Bible have to be literally true? And I decided no, no it doesn’t. Metaphor, poetry, allegory, parable, myth . . . they are all literary forms that human beings have used for centuries in order to communicate larger, almost inexpressible, truths. And while that was a huge adjustment for me, it only resulted in expanding my understanding of Scripture in beautiful, meaningful ways.

But . . . back in April, I made a rather specific claim about inerrancy when I first started trying to figure out what it means. I said that “a proper, balanced, and nuanced view of inerrancy is one of the essentials of faith that I hold to.” What I meant at the time that inerrancy has a place in Christianity, but that it has to be held in tension with the fact that the Bible was recorded by fallible men (and possibly women, as some scholars suggest that Hebrews was written by Priscilla and her husband). That it is important to approach the Bible as a human book first, and a divine book second.

Now, though . . . I honestly have no idea what I think.

The only thing– the only thing— that I know about the Bible was that it was written by human beings– deeply flawed people. It was written by people in the Bronze and Iron Ages. It was written by patriarchal, sexist, misogynist, racist men– in both the Old and New Testaments. They were people who were very much a product of their culture, a culture that was largely based on warmongering and violence. The writers of the Old Testament were primarily focused on recording their history– how it developed from a nomadic tribal culture, to a city-state, to a nation, to eventually a conquered people. The “books” of the New Testament were largely personal, private letters– letters sent to specific churches, to individual men.

I don’t know when these books and letters were written. I don’t know who, specifically, wrote many of them.

I don’t know what it means for the Bible to be a divine book, for it to be inspired. I don’t know what to think about how God may have been involved in the writing and preservation of the canon. We know we’re missing whole books, whole letters– like two of the letters Paul wrote to Corinth. Why do we have the letters we have, and not the others? Was that just some mischance of history? Was it because God was personally involved in preserving what he wanted future generations to read? And, if so, why did he step in and keep a few pieces of paper intact but let thousands upon thousands of his children be gassed and incinerated at Auschwitz?

And if the biblical canon is this complicated, and messy, what does that mean for us on a daily, practical level? I have the middle class luxury of being a stay-at-home wife who has the time and energy to research these blasted things. Most people simply don’t have that ability. It doesn’t make them incompetent, it means that they don’t have the resources I do. I have a master’s level education in literature– I have a lot of the necessary tools to understand literary structures, genre, narrative theory, the interplay between author-text-reader, and most people just don’t have that. I don’t even have a seminary degree, with 4-6 years of training in theology and Church history, or a strong background in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Latin.

So what does it mean for the church that the Bible is ancient literature, that it follows forms and patterns that we have no understanding of, that it belongs to a culture that we have absolutely no connection to whatsoever?

I don’t know.

All I know, right now, is that I’m trying to figure these things out. But where I am, right now, is that I if can’t get to a point where it makes consistent, logical, rational sense to accept the Bible as divine . . . that if I can’t arrive at a means for discerning the difference between what misogynistic men recorded and what God intended to be communicated . . . well, the Bible as infallible, as divine, as inspired– it isn’t necessary for my faith. I don’t believe that God exists because the Bible tells me so. I can read the Gospels as examples of ancient Greek biography and learn something about Jesus without having to believe that the Bible is inerrant.

I don’t have to end up on the other side of this a Christian.

It’s taken me since April to really come to terms with that. It doesn’t mean that I’m comfortable with the idea, or that this is the result that I want, because it isn’t. I’d really, really like to be able to stay a Christian. It doesn’t meant that I’d stop believing in God or Jesus. But, I have to be open to the idea that the Bible isn’t anything other than rather unique piece of ancient history. And if it turns out that’s all it is, then… well, that’s ok.

November 6, 2013 by SamanthaField

Social Issues

learning the words: abuse

Tamara Rice is an editor and write and a frequently loud-mouthed advocate for victims of abuse within the church who blogs at Hopefully Known. “Learning the Words” is a series on the words many of us didn’t have in fundamentalism or overly conservative evangelicalism– and how we got them back. If you would like to be a part of this series, you can find my contact information at the top.

trigger warning for child abuse, sexual abuse, and spiritual abuse

Where I come from abuse was a term reserved for vicious violence. I’m not really sure why or how this protection around the word came to be, but I know that great care was taken to distinguish between parents who were abusive and parents who were merely … very bad parents. Between sexual boundaries being crossed in a way that was sexually abusive and in a way that was more … molestation. Between spiritual authority being misused in an evil way that was spiritually abusive and in a way that was simply … unfortunate. Abuse, in short, was reserved for what I now might put in the category of sadistic torment—the stuff they make horror films about.

Under these narrow definitions, abuse was rarely encountered in my growing up years (or so we thought), and maybe that was the whole point. Defined as such, abuse was kept at arm’s length, out of our circles. Abuse happened to people on the news and in salacious Stephen King novels, it didn’t happen to us, it didn’t happen in our fundamentalist Baptist church, it didn’t happen in the missionary community we were part of overseas.

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By the time I reached my 30s I had very little to do with the faith community of my childhood. I had married a man in ministry and had gone on to be part of churches and religious organizations where legalism was rare and the kind of fundamentalism I’d grown up with was rarer still. I got it out of my system and left it behind. And then in 2011, I got sucked back in.

I began to fight alongside several old friends to bring justice for the victims of a missionary from our childhood and to call into account the Baptist mission board who had been mishandling the pedophile’s exposure for over twenty years.

Even now, it’s hard to put this story into a few brief words. The pain is still thick at the back of my throat and the journey isn’t over. But from the moment I stepped back into that fundamentalist world, the term abuse grew to encompass so much more than violence. I grew to understand it in its fullness, as it was meant to be understood–as I wish I had understood it from a very young age.

The justice endeavor began as an effort to bring healing to a friend and her family who had been deeply wounded by the pedophile and mission board, but over time it became very clear that I suffered sexual abuse myself—something I had long pushed back and denied and reasoned away, despite it explaining decades of emotional instability. New information made it undeniable, and I had to face the things my mind had hidden. Then, as I fought for justice, I became the victim of spiritual and emotional abuse as well.

First came the e-mails and blog comments from total strangers calling me a tool of Satan and an enemy of the gospel. Verses were thrown at me—at us—and we, the victims,were admonished not to touch “God’s anointed.” The vile things that self-proclaimed Christians will say in anonymity is appalling. If self-righteous curses of “shame on you, you whore of Satan” could kill, I’d be dead from the anonymous e-mails of vitriol and hate I have read.

The harder we pushed for justice, the closer the abusers came. Now it wasn’t just strangers dishing out spiritual and emotional abuse on the internet, it was people we had called “aunts” and “uncles” in our youth. Verses, again, were thrown at us. We were reminded to forgive, reminded of the supposedly innocent family members who were embarrassed and hurt by the pedophile’s public exposure, but who—let’s face it—probably knew a certain amount but lived in denial all along. “What about them?” the emails would say. “You’re being evil and cruel. They don’t deserve this.” And they, the family, didn’t deserve it. That’s true. But neither did we, and neither did any other child.

False familial titles (the cult-like “aunt”/“uncle” monikers) and childhood nicknames were doled out in long e-mails, phone calls and voicemail messages from those whose were rightly being questioned. I stopped taking the calls, stopped listening to the messages, but not before a few left their mark. “This is your ‘Aunt’ ______. We’re hurting so much over all these accusations. We looove you, Tammy,” she said, her voice thick with emotion I couldn’t understand given we’d hardly known each other, hadn’t seen each other since I was fifteen, and she was using a name no one outside my family had called me in over two decades.

It was a poorly disguised attempt to guilt me into silence over a leadership “mistake” her husband had made. Her husband should have be shouting from the rooftops that he’d been wrong, done something criminal under the mandated reporting laws, done something morally shameful. But instead the wife was sent to sway me, to spare her and their grown children this sadness.

Her voicemail haunted me for weeks, not because she got to me, because she didn’t. It was because she had tried. Because she had invoked love and false familiarity and spiritual obligation in her desperation to silence me. I was shocked—utterly shocked—at the subtle insidiousness of it.

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The misplaced resentment against us, against me, personally, grew to epic proportions when a friend exposed a second pedophile a few years later—and by misplaced resentment I mean more spiritual and emotional abuse. I mean using scripture wrongly and improperly, using relationships and pasts and church authority wrongly and improperly, I mean hurting and injuring by maltreatment, I mean the continuation of corrupt practices and customs, I mean language that condemns and vilifies unjustly and intemperately. I mean all of those things above that Webster’s and Farlex tell us are the definition of abuse. I suffered these things publicly and privately from the mission board, from people I barely knew, and from people I knew well.

At one point, a man who grew up on the same mission field as I did launched a Facebook page vilifying me. His page banner labeled me a fascist, but the reality was he didn’t even know me well enough to use my married name of almost twenty years. One by one, I watched as adults and former friends of my formative years overseas “liked” his page, all because they didn’t like men they admired being exposed for the havoc they had wreaked in the lives of young women who were now middle-aged and grown and no longer being silent.

It wouldn’t have been so bad, really, except that then this Facebook group started in on my faith, mocking me, using my words against me, twisting who I was. Knowing I shouldn’t read their bitter words that came from a narrow view of faith I didn’t even subscribe to, I read anyway, sickened that I had become the target of hate and abuse when there were pedophiles sleeping as free men.

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The spiritual and emotional abuse of these years, and the time I spent coming to terms with my sexual abuse—it’s all left me battered.

I retreated for quite a while after the Facebook incident, and I’ve never made a full comeback to that particular justice effort. I wish so much that I could tell you that justice and truth won out. That doing the right thing and exposing sin (no, make that crimes) paid off. But it didn’t and it hasn’t. It has been the most painful exercise in futility of my life.

My consolation, however, is this: I know what abuse is now. Sexual. Spiritual. Emotional. And because I’ve learned the word I can call it what it is. I can give it a name. I can see it when it happens to me or in front of me. And I can cry and grieve and hurt, but then I can get up and walk away and find healing in a safer place. Because the word has lost its power now that my vocabulary has grown.

October 4, 2013 by SamanthaField

Social Issues

learning the words: even the ugly ones

Today’s guest post is from Dani Kelley, who writes about feminism, abuse, and recovery at Crooked Neighbor, Crooked Heart. Also, I’ve been so freaking excited about this post for a while, and I’m thrilled I get to share it with you.
“Learning the Words” is a series on the words many of us didn’t have in fundamentalism or overly conservative evangelicalism– and how we got them back. If you would like to be a part of this series, you can find my contact information at the top.

The past few years, I have been on an intentional journey into freedom from the panic, rage, and fear that has been the constant undercurrent of my young life. A big part of that journey has included the freedom to look at the horrible things in life and to say with confidence and conviction, “Fuck. This. Shit.”

Profanity was not allowed when I was growing up (and at the time words like “heck,” “gosh,” “darn,” and “shut up” were included). There were always lots of reasons given, mostly in the form of Bible verses about letting no profane word come out of your mouth or letting your speech be always with grace seasoned with salt. One that always stuck out and appealed to me was that people only swear because they lack the intelligence and vocabulary to otherwise express themselves.

I call bullshit.

Another that I heard a lot (and continue to hear) is that profanity just isn’t appropriate. It isn’t very nice. It’s especially not something that good girls use when speaking.

I say, fuck that.

On some level, I’ve always understood the power of words. I remember as a young child, when a terrifying rage I couldn’t understand would boil up inside me, I would brokenly tell God that I didn’t know what the heck to do. (In my more honest moments, I would actually say hell. I’ll give you a moment to gasp and clutch your pearls.)

As a teenager and young adult, I waffled back and forth on my stance on language. Many times I would cling to my moderately impressive vocabulary and spout the “I’m too smart to swear” defense, hiding behind my classism and ableism like a child hides behind his mother’s skirts. Other times, the pain of a dozen betrayals, great and small, would overwhelm me until I swore quietly to myself (or violently to trusted friends) as a release valve.

Then there were the other times, the more dangerous times, when I used the strength of cursing to inflict pain on myself, to condemn myself for my perceived Biblically-declared depravity, filth, and worthlessness. It seemed to me that the Bible’s strongest language was reserved for sinners, to describe the depth of our evil. And so I internalized that message and adopted such language most harshly for myself, because I was convinced that I was unworthy and unclean.

(Allow me a moment to again say, FUCK. THAT. NOISE.)

Ahem.

Without profanity, I never had the words to deal with the horrible situations in my life and in the lives of others — the betrayals, the abuses, the heartbreaks and horrors, the ever-growing doubt about whether God was good or a monster. There simply were not Christian words strong enough to do these things justice. Instead, I made myself as numb as I could to pain, and I kept it carefully bottled inside, shared only with a few trusted friends, and only then what was acceptable to share. I hid my panic, I hid my rage, I hid my doubts, I hid the depth of the wounds that were so deep I couldn’t hide them even though I wanted to. I hid them all with my exemplary vocabulary, Christian platitudes, acceptable euphemisms, and cheap imitation curses.

But after years and years of hiding and self-destructing, it has gotten too damn hard, and I am done.

I’m not hiding the pain anymore. I’m not hiding the doubt, fear, or rage. I am describing them with the most colorful language I can muster, to paint the clearest picture I can. I am living openly and honestly and looking you straight in the eye when I do so instead of ducking my head and muttering, “His ways are higher than our ways,” or “Just trust in the Lord and everything will work out for His glory!” I am grabbing your hand and saying with confidence, “This shit is fucked, and I am so sorry, and I love you and we will get through this.”

And in all of this, the dark places are being exposed, and I can see a little more clearly, breathe a little more freely. I’m finding a smidgen of peace through this seemingly tiny thing of finally allowing the ugly words to describe the ugly things in life.

October 2, 2013 by SamanthaField

Theology

things you should say to a recovering fundamentalist

If you look at the top of this page, you’ll see a single line: “an ongoing journey in overcoming a fundamentalist indoctrination.” That is still a good summation of why I write here, why I write for you all. Because of that, I spend a lot of time critiquing. Criticizing. Rage-stomping. I do everything within my power to stand up for the oppressed, the abused, the silenced. However, although these are some of the reasons why I write, they’re not the only reasons why I write. I do my best to bring a more positive perspective when I can. Anger is healthy, and productive– there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being angry at the way things are some times. However, anger can’t be the end-all, be-all, or I’m going to burn myself out.

So that is what today is about. I got amazing comments yesterday— many of you left behind things you’ve heard that were infuriating, or heartbreaking. Some made me laugh and shake my head, others made me want to throw things. And that, my friends, is good for all of us.

However, there’s something that comes next. What are the things that we desperately want to hear from our friends and our family instead? We get a lot of flack, no matter where we stand as ex-fundamentalists. So, what are some things you’ve always wished people would actually say?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For me, it starts here:

” .”
—sincerely, everyone

That’s where it absolutely must begin, and I think most (if not all) of you would agree with me. It starts with quietness. It starts with listening. Most ex-fundamentalists have spent a lifetime–or most of it– being silenced. Being told to lock away and hide all of our feelings, all the rage at the wrongness of it all, everything. We were told, over and over again, nearly by everyone we knew, that the only option for us was our silence.

And, for many of us, when we finally did start talking, we were told, again, that we should really just remain quiet for all the reasons we talked about yesterday. One reader commented that most of the 15 things from yesterday were really just variations of “shut up,” and he was right. Being told to stay quiet–however I’m told– really makes me want to scream. What I need from you, if you care about me, is to listen. Really listen. It’s more than just hearing my words while simultaneously coming up with all the possible things you could say as either affirmation or rebuttal. At first, I don’t think I need you to say anything. Make me a cup of tea. Offer me a hug. Cuddle with me in a fuzzy blanket. Look me in my eyes. Cry with me. Do everything you can to understand that what I’m coming out of was deeply horrific. It’s left me with serious triggers. It’s left me with scars so bad that sometimes it takes everything I have not to run out of a church auditorium to go vomit.

I’m not making shit up. I’m not crazy. I’m not exaggerating.

And what I really need is for you to believe me.

Believe me when I say that I believe in Jesus– but I have trouble sometimes believing in God. Believe me when I say that I’m desperately searching for answers, but that I have no idea where they’ll take me. And this darkness, the shadows, the not-knowing, the gray, the uncertainty– it’s uncomfortable. It’s hard. It makes me curl up on my bed and weep, sometimes. I’m working through things– and I need to you enter this space with me. To leave your confidence, your unflappability, at the door, and ask the same questions. Maybe you’ll get to a different answer– and that’s ok. But the questions– the quest— is what matters.

“What things could I be looking for in my own church?”

Dear mother in heaven if there’s a question I want asked, it’s this one. Because I’ve been in a lot of churches since I’ve left my fundamentalist one behind, and if there’s one thing that’s been consistent everywhere I’ve gone, it’s that all churches have something about them that could “grow,” in Christian parlance. Maybe it’s no big deal. Maybe it’s a big, big deal. And you don’t have to mimic me– you don’t have to adopt all of my concerns, worries, the things I’m wary or suspicious of. Yesterday, I was talking to a friend and he sent me the doctrinal statement of the church he attends– and they affirm the stance of The Gospel Coalition (of #gagreflex fame, most recently). Which, personally, frightens me. I wouldn’t go anywhere near that church because of it. But, he’s comfortable there, and that’s ok. One of my best, most wonderful friends is much more conservative than I am on pretty much every measurable spectrum, but we love each other because of those differences.

I’m not asking you to be my clone. I’m asking you to take my concerns seriously.

Not every single last church is a hotbed for abusive activity or fundamentalist approaches to faith. But the attitude of “that doesn’t happen at my church“– it’s so common, and you could be wrong. It very well could be happening at your church. And, a lot of the time, it’s not glaringly obvious if it’s there. It could start out as something really small– something so insignificant a lot of people wouldn’t even bother commenting. But then . . . slowly . . . over time . . . it could get worse. The only way to make sure it doesn’t happen at your church is to be aware of what could happen if “good men do nothing.”

“Do you think there are some things in this theology that are harmful?”

This, heads up, will probably not be an easy conversation to have, but it’s a necessary one if the Church universal is going to have any chance of moving forward. My approach to theology is heavily influenced by my background in literary theory. Critical theories are essentially frameworks, ways of approaching and interacting with a text. You can do a Marxist reading of Oliver Twist, analyzing the power struggles and the class warfare in Dickens’ material. Or, you could do a feminist reading of Little Women— how did the patriarchal culture of Alcott’s time influence how she constructed her characters– was a feminist struggle the reason why she gave the principle romantic interest a feminine name? Why is the father absent?

I think there’s similarities between literary theory and systematic theologies. For a simplified example, a Reformed/Calvinist theology searches for God’s sovereignty in the text of the Bible. Because of my training, I’m capable of switching theological “caps”– I can think inside of the different frameworks with help from scholars and commentaries. And something I’ve learned through all of this is that all critical theories– literary or theological– have flaws. There are weaknesses in every argument; that doesn’t automatically make the argument wrong, but the point should be not to eliminate weaknesses but acknowledge the fact that they exist. This week is a syncroblog for queer theology (hint: check it out, it’s awesome)– and there’s other theologies, too. There’s feminist theology. And liberation theology. And all of them– even the neo-Reformed perspective, which makes me itch– have something to offer. Theology, like most things, isn’t a monolith. There isn’t one Supreme, Correct Theory of Everything about God.

And, being willing to admit that there are some things about your average evangelical/Protestant theology that can be incredibly harmful is a really good first step.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now I’m turning it over to you. What are some things you’d like to hear?

September 12, 2013 by SamanthaField

Theology

struggling to find a safe place in church

Every time I walk into a church service, I feel fear.

Every time I listen to a sermon, I wait. Wait for the words to cut and make me bleed again.

Every time I open my Bible, I flinch at the voices in my head.

This is what being a Christian has become for me. I’ve been avoiding writing about this, because anytime I think about it, I feel exposed and raw. But… church, and Christianity itself, rarely feels safe for me anymore. I don’t feel protected, I don’t feel valued, I don’t feel loved.

I am told, by Christian leaders who have followers in the millions, that my existence as a woman is inconvenient for them, these powerful men. My body is distracting to them, merely a temptation. My feelings are unworthy of their attention– the fact that I have emotions and am willing to acknowledge their rightful place makes me week, inferior.

I am told that even though I am a victim of psychological, emotional, physical, sexual, and spiritual abuse, it is within my power to bring healing without their help. They only seek to challenge me to grow outside of my bitterness and hatred. Let it go, they say, in what feels like one voice. You are the one holding yourself back. And when I ask for space, for time, for safety, I am denied. We won’t cater to the lowest common denominator. It’s up to you to bring yourself to our level, not the other way around.

So I run to my Bible, and in the Gospels I find peace. If nothing else, I can cling to Jesus, the man who loved the broken. But every time I start feeling comfortable with a book like Romans, a man in my facebook feed uses chapters 8 and 9 to tell abuse victims that we are not living the life God wants for us. We’re not mature. We’re letting our “Christian depression” get the better of us. Let go and let God they say. Or, I try to find comfort in a book like Galatians, but then I reach chapter 5 and all I want to do is run and cry and scream because all I can hear from those verses is Samantha you are wholly corrupt and doesn’t the fact you desire comfort mean you shouldn’t have it?

And then I read an article, and I spend an entire week digging into yarek naphal, a euphemism for miscarriage, and I go searching, begging for answers. From the Christians, all I receive is silence. I send out letters to famous translators, to the committees that decided to translate it miscarry, asking them why, and all I get back is three lines that mean go away and leave us big, important men alone little girl. So I turn to Judaism, and that’s where the peace begins to come. Because I don’t know what to do, what to think about Numbers 5:27 and God forcing abortions, but they speak calm and comfort. Isn’t it possible that God understood their middle-Eastern Bronze age culture? Isn’t it possible that the Sotah meant protection for innocent wives, protection from jealous husbands who had no cause to be so?

And I struggle. I wrestle with God and his church.

Because I don’t want to leave. I desperately want to stay, but it’s hard when on Sunday morning it’s the men who get a four-week mini-series on how to be epic, on how men have a vision to change the world, but women receive thank you for being our mothers. A man can fight and win against the furies to receive honor, but women, we labor to bring new life into the world, and they give us a rose.

It’s hard when on Tuesday night it seems like no one in that room understands doubt and fear and struggle. If you’re an atheist, it’s because you’re denying God. You are blatantly ignoring mountains of evidence. You are “willfully ignorant,” and look, Peter says so and all I want to do is throw my Bible across the room and scream THAT BOOK WAS PROBABLY NOT EVEN WRITTEN BY PETER.

Some days, I can’t believe in anyone besides Jesus, but I don’t even know what it means to believe. I curl up in a ball and weep, desperately clinging to the last shred of faith it feels that I have left. And then I go to church, and it feels like that last shred is being torn away from me in a cloud of dizzying confidence and practiced ease.

I wonder– am I the only one in this room who doubts? Am I the only one who struggles? I see hands being lifted up, and bodies swaying, people around me sing-shouting about the mercies of God, and I want to know do you know what that means?

I feel like a liar, a cheat, a charlatan. I sit in church, I lead Bible studies, and I realize that I can make-believe, I can pretend. The confidence, the self-assurance? It’s coming from me. I can read Esther and try to find something in it, something worth sharing, and I arrive at Bible study with my neatly-packaged truism about being like Mordecai, who didn’t know what to do, where to turn, but who didn’t spend time agonizing over it– he only did what he thought to be best, and left the rest to God. And that should be us, I say– we can only play the cards we’ve been dealt. But, mostly, I identify with Haman, and I try to say that, but there’s a nervous titter. Haman, the man who wanted to commit genocide? And I think yes, because he’s the only human character in this entire book. Haman is the one who feels real to me.

And I hate that the words of the Bible have been used to damage me, that I can still hear the voice of my cult leader screaming in my head, telling me all I need to know, and I hate that I can listen to someone I know beyond all doubt is a wonderful, loving man, who will say the exact same words. He doesn’t scream them, but he doesn’t have to.

And I hate that walking down the hallway to the auditorium feels like being led to slaughter, that the only thing that’s waiting for me in that darkened room is all my fears. I sit through the song service because of my physical pain, and I know that people probably aren’t staring, but I don’t want to look around, because I’m afraid that they are. Afraid of the people from my childhood that would have seen, and would have told me that the worship of God deserves my respect. I listen to the sermon, barely breathing, because the pastor is a good, good man, a man I know has lived through brutality, but I wait. Wait for him to say the one thing that could start to unravel me. And that won’t be what he wants, I know that, but that doesn’t help. I shrink into my seat and fight with myself just to listen.

I know I’m not alone. I know I’m not the only one struggling. Here, from my readers, I hear the same struggles. I see them played out all over the internet, on twitter, on blogs, in comments. Slowly, I realize that twitter is more my church than anything else has been. I have more communion in talking to friends I’ve never seen than I do in my church building, with people who are looking me in the eye.

I want this from my church: I want a safe place to come, knowing I am not the only one with questions, and walk with people who aren’t more interested in comfortable answers than they with walking in the gray and shadowy place with me, the place where answers come rarely, if at all.

July 26, 2013 by SamanthaField

Theology

my time as an agnostic

I have briefly touched on the few years I spent as an agnostic before, but I’ve never really explored what happened to me in writing. It’s a hard thing for me to do, because I spent those years experiencing intense cognitive dissonance— which is why I describe what I experienced during these years as agnosticism instead of atheism, although it’s more complicated than that.

But, I want to try to stumble through this story because of something that happened last night. If you follow me on twitter, you probably saw me rant about it for a little bit, and I’m glad I got that out there, but I realized that my story could be important for people– especially those of faith– to understand what it’s like to be an non-believer. There are several common stereotypes about unbelief, and many of them revolve around painting atheists, especially, as immoral monsters who reject an “overwhelming flood of evidence” because they “just can’t stand the Truth of God.” That’s certainly what I believed about non-belief . . . until it happened to me.

When I was 16 years old, I developed tendonitis in my wrists, which prevented me from ‘serving’ my church as the pianist. After my “pastor” openly attacked me from the pulpit and then lied to my parents about what he had done, I mentally absented myself from church. I refused to pay attention to any of the sermons. I stopped listening to or practicing Christian or sacred music. I wrote stories during church. I only participated in church activities when absolutely forced to. At this point, I still believed in God, but anything to do with church– I didn’t want any part of it.

Initially, I thought this reticence to engage with church was simply because of what my “church” was– which I now refer to as a church-cult, and was horribly spiritually abusive. Right before I started my sophomore year in college, my parents were finally able to escape the church-cult, but where they decided to attend . . . made everything worse.

Over the years, our church-cult had hemorrhaged a ridiculous number of members– and many of these families began attending another Independent Fundamental Baptist church half an hour further south. The first Sunday I went with my family, I struggled all that morning with what I can now identify as a mild panic attack, although I had no idea what it was at the time. All I knew was that simply going to church made me feel so physically sick (I would get lightheaded, shaky, nervous, and nauseated) that I just didn’t want to go.

My parents forced me out of bed enough Sundays that I was able to get a reliable feel for the people at church, and what I encountered depressed and horrified me. Because, there had been a part of me that had dared to hope that this church would be better. That it would be different. And while it was different and slightly better –the pastor didn’t scream in people’s faces and directly confront them about “sin” in front of the entire congregation — it was still awful.

The pastor was inexcusably racist; he truly, deeply, believed in racial segregation and that interracial marriage is a sin. He told me this, explicitly, to my face, while simultaneously saying that he would “never preach this from the pulpit, because it would step on people’s toes.” This from a man who claimed, from the pulpit, that he would never be ashamed of preaching what he believed. After this conversation, I blatantly refused to ever go back.
The young people at the church were . . . abhorrent, in general. They behaved unconscionably toward my younger sister, which I have never tolerated well. Only one person in the entire church made any effort to befriend her. The rest mocked and belittled her at nearly every opportunity.
A few specific people –men my age — were exalted in true “preacher boy” fashion. One of them used his position as a police officer to degrade me in front of a huge crowd of people, and even though he was lying, the result was that I was painted as the liar for daring to call the “preacher boy” on his abuse. When I followed Matthew 18 to the letter, I was told by a deacon and the pastor that I was making too big a deal of an innocent remark, that he only meant it in good fun.
Certain people obtained celebrity status in the church because of various circumstances; however, while there were two women with severe medical conditions (one who struggled with cancer, another with osteogenesis imperfecta), the only one who received any attention or help from anyone at church was the woman with cancer, while the other woman was completely ignored, to the point of almost being shunned.

I could list many more examples, but the end result was that I couldn’t stomach church any more, because even in a church that was “better,” it was still intolerable. At this point, my aversion to church spread from just my limited experience with the church-cult I’d grown up in, to churches in general.

This aversion extended to my experiences at my fundamentalist college, but this is where it gets complicated. Because it was during my sophomore year in college that I slipped from belief in God to total doubt.

But I hid it.

I hid it so well, that if you asked anyone who knew me at the time, anyone, they would tell you that I was most definitely still a Christian. I walked the walk, talked the talk, everything. Nothing, on the surface, changed. I even ended up engaged to a man who claimed that he wanted to be a missionary. I went to prayer group, I led devotionals, I prayed with friends, I talked about the Bible– hell, I defended the Bible and Christianity. I even talked about some bizarre re-conversion experience that I had during the early stages of my junior year. Occasionally, I even got excited about Christian discussions and theological discoveries I’d stumbled across in research for my classes.

When I chose a graduate school, I chose Liberty University. It was certainly more liberal than my undergrad college, but it was still a Christian school, and I chose it partly because it was a Christian school (but mostly because I knew they would accept my unaccredited degree without a fight). And during my first year, the first time in my life when I had the freedom not to attend church and I didn’t, I was still at a Christian college. I was still surrounded by believers, and I still looked and talked like one. If you asked the people who I interacted with during grad school, they’d be surprised if they found out I didn’t believe 99% of the things that came out of my mouth (or… maybe not. A lot of the things I said were rather ridiculous).

But, all that time . . . I couldn’t believe.

And while it may have started out as disgust toward my church experiences, it slowly developed into a completely inability to believe in God.

I want to make that perfectly clear, because I think it’s one area that many people skip over, or don’t really understand. It’s not that I went away to college and had some sort of Baptist rumspringa. It’s not that I hadn’t been educated well enough about my faith– I was so well steeped in apologetics and logic that I had a doctoral candidate at Princeton and Duke tell me that I should pursue a career in Philosophy of Religion.

It wasn’t that I was angry at God, although in a small way it started there. I was furiously angry at God for a long time. How could he have let everything happen to me and my family? How did he let evil people exist? How did he let totally evil men lead his churches? How was it that so many people who claimed to believe in Jesus were some of the most awful people I’d ever met?

After a while of being angry, though, the anger just . . . went away. And what replaced it was non-belief. I wasn’t angry at God anymore, because I didn’t even know if he existed. Suddenly, it just . . . didn’t matter to me if he existed or not. Not believing in him wasn’t some conscious decision I made. I didn’t have a sudden epiphany where lightning struck me out of a clear sky and I decided that God’s existence didn’t matter.

I clung, desperately, to my belief. I read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, where he calls God a “genocidal maniac,” and that passage was horrifying and so powerfully compelling, because it was an image of God I innately understood. But, even in that moment, when horror rose up inside of me so fiercely I wanted to scream and cry and rage and vomit, I wanted to believe. And for a while after that experience, I thought I did believe.

Until, one day, I realized that I couldn’t believe, and that I hadn’t really believed in God for a long time. In some ways, I clutched at my faith by constant debates and discussions and research. I spent a long time searching for a way to believe in God. And I didn’t find one.

He just . . . wasn’t there.

July 10, 2013 by SamanthaField

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