Reflections on Reading My Evangelical Journals
...I don't think current me would have liked myself very much 😬
While hiding Easter eggs in my mom’s garage last weekend, I stumbled upon a box filled with various high school and college mementos. I found a few journals I hadn’t seen in a long time, so obviously I had to sit down and read them. I was struck by a few observations that I thought I’d share with you, mostly revolving around this: being a hardcore evangelical for 20+ years most definitely emotionally stunted younger me. Maybe you will resonate with some of the themes I found.
I was reminded how much I seemed to always be in hopelessly unrequited “like” (is it maybe an evangelical holdover that saying “love” requires a VERY high bar??). I know this is partially a hormonal teenager thing. But I couldn’t like a person, much less do anything that indicated this to the other person, without turning around and panicking that I was going against God’s plan. My job, especially as a female, was to wait patiently for a [Christian] boy to discover me and decide that I was worth dating. Wanting was out of bounds. Attraction was equivalent to lust. Taking action myself was turning my back on God’s plan.
Also, this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this, but many of the teens I see in therapy have much more emotional acuity than I did at their age, and I don’t think it’s only because of TikTok and the normalization of therapy speak (though that’s part of it). Again, I think that being evangelical meant that everything had to filtered through the lens of God’s will and what would be pleasing to God.
In my sophomore year of college, I now know I was depressed and in the midst of an eating disorder, but that never seemed to break through my consciousness at the time. I mean, that would hardly bring praise to God, right?? Instead, I had the typical irritations at friends (quickly skimmed over and asking God for a change of heart), feelings of loneliness (and expressing my desire to rely only on God for love), worries about schoolwork, and… sermon notes. Notes on Bible readings. And praise to a god that loves us lowly, sinful, unlovable humans even though we don’t deserve it.
Ugh. I kinda just wanna give young me a hug. Such a tortured soul. I thought I was in the good place (YES I JUST STARTED WATCHING IT FINALLY AND I’M OBSESSED), but I was actually in the very bad place.
On a less sympathetic note, I cannot stand how superior I thought I was to everyone. I wouldn’t have wanted to be friends with me, if current me knew me back then! Every friendship interaction with a “non-believer” (UGH!) was an opportunity for low-key evangelizing. I can’t tell you how many times I was praying “God, please draw so-and-so close to you, make them fall in love with you, make them want to commit to you 100%!” I was so sure that I had all the answers, that I was the one on the right path, that they had it wrong. I expressed my concern to my journal when a friend shared that she saw God as primarily loving and forgiving. I was convinced that if she just had a closer relationship with [my] god, she would see the error of her ways.
I prayed for another friend that God would work on her, then expressed my confusion to my journal that “I thought that meant turning her towards you, not the Unitarian Universalist church!” I laugh about it now. I mean…maybe I’ve had power in my prayers all along, it’s just that I had no idea what the actual best outcome would be!
I left a Campus Crusade college group because I didn’t feel like I was on the same level as the other girls — they wanted to talk about boys, and I wanted to talk about Serious Spiritual Issues. (I mean, that one’s fair. Also maybe a sign that I didn’t actually fit in with neurotypical people, a struggle that stayed with me for almost all of college). My spiritual condescension towards others compensated for my social inadequacies, and I found solace in this.
Today, these reflections make me think about how to have compassion for people who are still firmly in a faith that makes them into moralizing, condescending, spiritually superior people with an agenda to convert. [And I acknowledge that it’s more difficult to have compassion for evangelicals since 2016 when the cover was really blown with the election of Donald Trump, so I’m not saying it’s apples to apples as it was before this].
Our memories are often deceiving, and I think I’ve fancied myself to be more skeptical of the evangelical system when I was in it than I was in reality. Lol sorry kid, you were 110% in it; you believed the whole thing for a long time, and yes you were incredibly judgmental of others. Part of me wants to issue an apology to the people whose paths I crossed and internally demeaned for their lack of/faith. But I also recognize I truly didn’t know better, and I got out as soon as I was externally (not living at home) and internally (felt safety from a wrathful god) able to do so.
I would LOVE to hear from you about your past selves, or what you remember of it. Have you ever combed through the evidence of your former life? How were you different then, and what remains the same? What do you wish you could have a do-over on — what are you embarrassed about — and where can you offer yourself compassion? This comment section is so safe and supportive and I can’t wait to chat with you all about this.
You are braver than me I haven’t been able to re-read any old journals yet!!! I was also such a tortured evangelical soul. It kinda speaks to how well the indoctrination systems work on vulnerable (autistic) people . . .
A very insightful set of remarks. I relate to pretty much all of what you wrote, but found two of your insights and/or phrasings particularly helpful for my own clarity and therefore my healing.
You wrote that you perceived your non-evangelical friend to be mistaken about the nature of God when she speculated God's nature to be primarily loving and forgiving. Exactly! For her to fail to see just how important God's *punitive* side is would have, to your young evangelical self's mind, seemed such an error, a very dangerous error. If your friend isn't running scared, dreading God's punishment, how can she get truly "saved"?
You also wrote about the fear of God revealing to you and/or your current beau that it was God's will for you to break up, due to how you got a message that God cares about your holiness, not your happiness. Wow. I have never heard that concept phrased so succinctly and pointedly. Very helpful! That matches very well the implications of the doctrines I had crammed down my throat, such as that suffering is redemptive. So destructive to mental health.
I want you to know I feel so much compassion for your young evangelical self, including her penchant for moralizing and her holding of the assumption she knew the answers that her non-evangelical friends needed. That was me all the way at that age, also.
And in fact, I have noticed the most powerful of my IFS protectors, now, today, is, yikes, my moralizer part. I felt very embarrassed about this truth when I first realized that, despite the fact that I, now, today, am an atheist, my most important IFS part is, ugh, a Christian. She sometimes even preaches at me about how I am going against God's will, being immoral, and will be punished, accordingly. This makes sense, though. Like you, I was all-in, 110%, with an autistic person's 110% sincere authentic embrace of the absolutist doctrines I'd had crammed down my throat.
May we extend compassion to every center of consciousness both internal to, and external to, ourselves, and lead lives we unapologetically make our own. Much love to you, Christine.