The Bait and Switch of Evangelical Christianity
Lured by grace, but handed shame
My religion was advertised so positively. All you need to do is accept the good news of Jesus and ask him into your heart (as they told us kids) and you would experience immediate transformation. Best of all, you’d avoid the fiery, eternal damnation of hell that was waiting for you at death if you didn’t become a Christian, so that was an important benefit. Ok, so maybe that ad was more scare tactic – more stick than carrot – but that aside, it was because God loves you SO FREAKING MUCH that he was willing to die, or at least kill his son, who was also God, to avoid sending you to hell himself. What’s not to love?
I guess I still can’t describe the basic theology without a side of snark, but I’ve also not said anything that’s precisely in line with what we were taught. But they used so many nice words to try and package it! Love, grace, forgiveness. God as holy and perfect but willing to love us poor sinners. Plus, religion in general is *supposed* to be a force for good; something that helps people live better lives. What was there to be mad about, right?
Well.
I wish I could see it this way. I’m writing this paragraph in a coffee shop that plays Christian music (I stuff my headphones in my ears to try and drown it out), and I see literally in front of me how much religion means to people and gives shape and meaning to their lives. I’ve been there, too. But I’ve walked away and have no intentions of walking back to anything like what I came from.
I’m from the kind of evangelicalism where we called ourselves born-again, Bible-believing Christians (nondenominational of course, because denominations are just a way to create unneeded hierarchy and distance from God). Salvation stories were a key part of the faith.
Being born into the tradition meant it never felt like I had a chance to truly choose it myself, though. I had no powerful salvation story. There was no marked before and after where I was convicted by my own sin, repented, and turned onto the path of Jesus. When your worst sin as a 5-year-old is that you are sometimes mean to your brother, it isn’t very impressive to tell people later on about how you knew you needed Jesus because your life was clearly going down the wrong path.
Rather than being grateful that I was fortunate enough to land in the one “right” path for all humankind from the get-go, I instead felt a weird shame that I’d never have my own powerful conversion story with which I could evangelize others to the faith. Though if I had had the wild pre-conversion life, it would have been something to be ashamed of, at least while I was in it. But what was my before-and-after? How would I be able to convince others that Jesus really would change their lives, when I had no evidence of a pre-Jesus life that was clearly in desperate need of him?
Shame, it turns out, was the quiet theme all along.
I was also envious of the people who so clearly knew what it meant to feel in need of conversion. Who could feel the sweet relief of turning away from a life that seemed to be plaguing them with problems and into the loving arms of Jesus, who offered a way out of their troubles. I realize now that they, at least initially, got the benefits of the lure of grace. I, on the other hand, was merely told about those benefits.
What I got instead was fear, guilt, and shame. Behavioral motivators that last for as long as the person buys into the source of that fear, guilt, and shame, and that lose all power once the person stops — truly stops — buying into it. (More on all that in future posts). But while I bought into it, I had those emotions in spades. If you’re reading this, you probably did too.
Shame. They told me I was a bad person without Jesus, and that life without him meant I would wander down the wrong path and that I’d be forever without a moral compass. (Which is pretty frightening if you think about them only having a moral compass because of certain Jesus-centric beliefs…). Guilt. They told me a perfect God couldn’t stand to be in the presence of sin, oh and that so many of my behaviors were sinful, sorry. Fear. They told me that I’d end up in hell if I didn’t accept Jesus into my heart.
Just to name a few beliefs.
But what they were doing was creating a problem to be afraid of (lack of morality outside God; being cast outside God’s presence; and of course, going to hell), then telling me not to worry: they had the solution. To the problem they manufactured.
The really tricky part of all of this is that any negative feelings about the situation have to be unconscious to the believer for as long as they believe. On the conscious level, they think of Christianity, and God, as described: God is love, perfect, holy. Christianity is based on forgiveness and grace. Doubts are disallowed (doubt is usually construed as lack of faith and resolved by turning more fiercely towards Jesus). Any thoughts that go against those teachings have to be repressed, pushed down, ignored. Or better yet, blamed on their own insufficient faith.
As a therapist, I hate throwing the word “gaslighting” around lightly because it’s so popularized, but this is literally the essence of gaslighting. A person experiences perfectly reasonable responses to a situation (fear / shame / guilt) but is told that those responses don’t arise because of the situation itself, but because of flaws in the individual. Meanwhile, the situation continues to reinforce the emotional responses by encouraging the behavioral adaptations people do in response: trying harder, believing harder, attending church as often as possible, praying harder, repenting harder…
Now, I know probably 99.9% of these believers genuinely believe the “problem” is as described. They believe they have The Answer to this dark and scary world we live in, and they’re often motivated by compassion to share the answers with other people. Though they’re also often motivated by fear and judgment, because that’s what this system ends up creating. If I’m picking a fight, it’s not really with everyday lay believers.
The fight I’m picking is with the Christian religious system. Or to use a biblical term for it: the powers and principalities of a religious system. One that has manufactured a problem to be scared of, and then uses manipulative tactics of fear, guilt, and shame to coerce people into staying in the system and doing its bidding.
To revisit my opening thoughts, the god manufactured by the system is a god they call all-powerful, perfect, all-knowing, and Love. It can be a tempting lure. For many people, it continues to work its magic and the “switch” of the bait-and-switch somehow never manifests, as least in the person’s consciousness.
But for many others of us, we walk away after years or even a lifetime of being a believer with a bad taste in our mouths. It might have taken a long time to see, but it dawned on us that things weren’t as rosy and wonderful as they were supposed to be in this religion. And that the god who supposedly loved us and that we were supposed to love and adore was maybe not all that loving when it came down to it.
To be continued…next newsletter. For now, I’d love to hear from you in the comments: what has your journey through faith deconstruction and religious trauma looked like? What resonated with you in today’s content, or what got under your skin? What do you need to hear more about? Talk to me and each other in the comments!
Hello! First time commenting, but I’ve been lurking for a little while. So much of this resonated, but two things in particular stood out:
1) Feeling like my testimony wasn’t “good enough” because I didn’t have a huge “come to Jesus” moment that utterly up-ended my life. I was also around 5 years old when I prayed the Jesus prayer, and I was determined to be a good church kid, so my list of sins I confessed before every Sunday (all the way through high school) included things like being mean to my sister, not listening to my parents, being selfish, etc. No rebellion or prodigal-son-worthy behavior, like the big fancy testimonies had. I remember around 11th/12th grade, I was hanging onto my faith by a thread, too scared to let go. “But what if I have to let go and fall far far down so I can slingshot back into all-in-for-Jesus with a gorgeous testimony like everyone else has? But then what if I let go and fall but I never slingshot back?” The fear of hell and losing everything kept me clinging to my tiny faith because I wasn’t yet in a place where I was questioning the actual doctrine; I was just tired of trying to be perfect (but also too terrified to let down the façade). Fast forward 10 years, and I’m in the midst of deconstruction, where anything is up for debate/open for questioning and I’m learning to let go instead of cling. Sometimes it feels like I’m falling, but not in the ominous falling into the deep dark that I thought letting go meant back in high school. And absolutely still working through that shame/guilt/fear (and still working on letting down that façade of perfection)!
2) Christianity having the solution to the problem it creates. Something I’ve been puzzling over for the last few month is “how can the gospel be good news for everyone if you have to adhere to a certain theology in order for the gospel to rescue you?” For example: If you don’t believe in hell, you have no fear of hell and no reason to turn from your sin to avoid a fiery eternity. If you have to believe that Jesus died to save you from your sins, you have to believe that you are sinful (and that that’s not a good thing).
But what if the good news is that life can be different, that there’s a different, more freeing, more loving way of doing things? What if the good news is that the harmful things we believe are wrong? I simply have musings, not answers, and this is just the beginning of this leg of my journey. It’s just that I grew up believing that believing a specific/right way is what saved you (something I’m only recently understanding), and that just doesn’t seem right or good anymore.
Thanks for creating a space to discuss these things, and for giving words and a voice to these sometimes-hard-to-describe experiences!
All of this--but the gaslighting comment stood out to me. Because the belief system is never what's wrong - it's always you. You can't trust yourself, because all of your thoughts, desires, and impulses are evil and sinful. “The heart is deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9). So what you're supposed to do is put your faith in this God who always knows better than you, and who will keep pointing out your sins to you as you go on in life, because you're so depraved that you can't even see your own sins. All of the pieces of the belief system work together to make you constantly doubt yourself and never figure out what you actually want or need. You just have to trust that this higher being knows what you need, and trust that the happenings in your life are his way of providing what you need, even when you can't see how. To me, all of this is more than just gaslighting... it's narcissistic abuse.