The Name Unveiling!
Plus being an (ex) daughter of Focus on the Family
Thanks to everyone who weighed in with thoughts and suggestions about how to rename my newsletter to better capture the spirit and content of what I write about! I had lots of fun bandying about some options for my title, and the new title is ready to be unveiled! (YES I KNOW YOU CAN SEE IT ALREADY IN THE HEADER JUST PLAY ALONG!)
“Recasting Religious Trauma”
/rēˈkast/: to give a different form by melting down and reshaping.
Once I Googled the Oxford Dictionary definition, I knew this was the word I wanted. That’s what we’re doing here: we’re exploring how religious trauma has shaped and molded us, and then we’re melting it down so we can reshape ourselves into something new.
Sometimes that reshaping takes the form of another form of Christianity. Sometimes it’s being spiritual but not religious, whether that’s deeply spiritual, wishfully spiritual, or not-religious-but-not-nothing. And sometimes it means being an atheist, but still one interested enough in exvangelicalism that you’re along for the ride in this newsletter. There’s room for all in this tent.
I’m so excited about the clarified vision for the newsletter, and grateful to the anonymous person who lobbed this suggestion my way! [My internal policy of truthfulness makes it so I can’t claim credit for something that isn’t mine - so just know I had help in this department!]
Now on to the content of this week’s newsletter…
I came across a tweet that made me chuckle the other day (perhaps you saw it too): “We are the daughters of the Families you Focused on.”
If you were a female raised on Focus on the Family who has, shall we say, not exactly done what they want, you probably know exactly what this tweet means! And side note, she’s an excellent Twitter follow, as I just discovered, so you might want to hop over to Twitter and discover this yourself - after you finish reading this, of course.
I was raised pretty hardcore on Focus on the Family. I listened to Dr. James Dobson’s radio show, I was given the birds and the bees talk from a recording by Dr. Dobson, we had the FoF literature everywhere in the house (from fiction teenie-bopper books to parenting books to spiritual living books). I was an avid reader so I consumed a lot of those materials. Plus we only lived an hour away from the FoF headquarters in Colorado Springs, so I even got to see the inner workings of this evangelical machine and get a tour through a pretend Adventures in Odyssey! IYKYK, right??
Focus on the Family is an evangelical (fundamentalist) “parachurch” organization, meaning they provide copious amounts of resources and programs to evangelical churches. Their name is innocuous enough… sort of. Like many things in the church, it comes with strings attached.
Focus on [i.e., only support and actively work to dismantle or make illegal other kinds of families] the [patriarchal, heterosexual, gender-normative, authoritarian, evangelical Christian] Family.
There! I fixed it. I think that’s what they meant to say.
From the outside, my life can look quite a lot like I Focused on their Family outcome. I’ve worked my whole adult life in underpaid service professions, usually with children (which is women’s work, right?). I’m now a counselor, and I used to work in a Christian counseling center. I have two little children. I married a man who’s a PASTOR, for Pete’s sake (granted, one who doesn’t even know all the evangelical worship songs that I know by heart, whether I want to or not!).
But despite these shallow descriptions, I am anything but what Focus on the Family hoped I would turn out as. I am fiercely pro-choice, fiercely pro-LGBTQ+, fiercely racial justice supporting, and anti-religious indoctrination. I’ve experienced the opposites of all those things enough to be clear on what I do want.
And I am a woman, a daughter of Focus on the Family indoctrination, loudly conveying my beliefs through written word. They tried their hardest, but I and countless others of us found our way out. And we’re pretty passionate in shouting just how much harm we received from our time in the indoctrination camp.
This is why the tweet “We are the daughters of the Families you Focused on” should send a little chill through the bones of the evangelicals - because we’re here, we’re unafraid, and we came ready to play. Just not on their side anymore.
For further good reads about exvangelicals from this week, you might try:
If you liked this newsletter, please hit the “heart” button, leave me a comment, or share it with someone who might appreciate it!
I love the new name!
Great title!!! So many interesting connotations! To cast again. And what can you recast? A piece of molded clay, a bronze sculpture, a broken limb, a roll of the dice, a fishing line, an enchanting spell…. All have interesting figurative meanings as regards religious trauma. Congratulations on recasting your newsletter, Christine!