But what qualifies as abuse?


I'm to see yet another pain specialist next week. On the forms he sent was the question, "Have you ever been physically or emotionally abused?" I said no, but a few days later, the following poured from me, and I wondered if I shouldn't have responded differently. I know that the answer comes down to what qualifies as abuse, but after dredging up the following memories, I certainly felt abused. But abused by whom, and if my boyhood was so abusive, how is is that so many who grew up as I did would disagree?

I grew up in an ultra-fundamentalist denomination called the Church of Christ, which holds that the Bible is the dictated Word of God, and is therefore completely clear, consistent, and perfect in every scientific, historical, and theological aspect. Because the Church of Christ recognizes no authority beyond the individual congregation, beliefs and practices vary slightly. At the liberal end, women are allowed to make announcements, teach Sunday school, and ask questions during Bible study. At the conservative end, they aren't allowed to speak at all except to the people near them, yet in both liberal and conservative churches, young boys can speak freely in any role assigned to them. Again at the liberal end, communion wine is served in tiny glasses that are passed around in stackable trays. At the conservative end, communion wine is served in one large glass, the reason being that Jesus spoke in the singular when he said, "Take this cup in memory of me."

The Church of Christ has weekly communion; practices baptism by immersion; and prohibits the use of musical instruments inside the church, even for weddings. It claims to be God's one true church and to have been in continual existence since the time of Christ--it explains the lack of evidence for this by saying that Catholic persecution drove it underground until the 1830s. The church teaches that anyone, anywhere who sincerely seeks God will be led to the Church of Christ, and that anyone who has reached "the age of accountability" (around age twelve) without belonging to the Church of Christ is in willful disobedience to God and is therefore condemned to eternal torment in a "lake of fire." To illustrate the extreme literalism of the Church of Christ, I heard preachers debate whether someone who died in a car wreck on his way to be baptized would go to heaven or hell. The Church of Christ regards religious holidays as "pagan" and politics as "worldly." Because it regards other churches as ruled by Satan, ecumenicalism is unthinkable. I, personally, never knew the Church of Christ to do any good for anyone beyond buying poor families a turkey at Thanksgiving, its entire emphasis being on personal salvation.

Members of the Church of Christ call their preachers Brother (Reverend being considered Satanic and Father even worse), and they call one another Brother ___ and Sister ____. Because Church of Christ members expect every sermon to include talk of hell and an invitation to be saved, my earliest memory of God revolves around being so afraid of him that I hid under the bed when I got home from church. Heavy rains scared me because I worried that they were the start of another worldwide flood, and thunder frightened me because I heard in it the voice of an angry God. Yet most of my early memories of church are good memories, perhaps because I was a desperately lonely child who lived in the country and had no playmates, and the people at church were friendly. 

I was six when I started celebrating "the Lord's Supper" privately with grape juice and saltines (the Church of Christ uses wine and Matzo crackers), and seven when I attended a Catholic wedding, and wished that my bare-walled Church of Christ could be so lavishly decorated. By the time I was eleven, my family had moved into town, and I improvised a backyard pulpit, decorated it with wisteria, and began preaching to the neighborhood kids. When I was twelve, Jehovah Witnesses came to my house, and I began knocking on doors alongside them, saying what I had been told to say and handing out Awakes and Watchtowers. Jehovah's Witnesses were new to our town, and because their services were held in the living room of a small house, I believed that they were like the early church. When my mother told our preacher about my JW involvement, he said that I had to choose one way or the other, so I stayed with the Church of Christ.

I didn't remember my grandfather or great grandfather, but I was told that they had been well respected Church of Christ preachers, and when I reached my teens, I began to accompany Brothers Miller and Stewart on out of state revivals. I took my religion more seriously than did my parents or my sister, which proved to be a good thing when I later left the church and they, at least, didn't shun me. I attended church three times a week, preached short sermons, led singing, offered public prayers, and presided over the communion table, yet from age eleven, I fell victim to a long and desperate struggle to maintain my faith. This struggle left me miserable beyond words because I was convinced (from having heard it continually) that a life without God is one of sadness and desperation. 

What occasioned my first doubt was the Bible itself, specifically a passage in the Old Testament that Brother Miller, read in Bible study one morning. In that passage, God ordered the Jews to invade a city and kill every man, woman, child, and animal, except for the young virgins, which they were allowed to "keep for yourselves." I asked Brother Miller how a just and merciful God could command such a cruel act, and he said that the answers to some questions will only be given in heaven because if God answered them now, faith would be replaced by knowledge, and no one could be saved. Until that day, I had thought that preachers knew everything, and didn't know how I could go on worshiping a god who claimed to be good while commanding his followers to do evil. I was surprised that I was the only person in class who seemed bothered by the reading, but I soon found that I was the only person who seemed bothered by much of anything that was said in church, the Church of Christ belief being that the Bible was true, and questions were of Satan.

After that incident in Bible study, I started paying increasingly close attention both to the Bible and to what my church was telling me about God, and so it was that my doubts increased. I concluded from this that there must be something wrong with me that had caused God to deny me the "gift of faith," and that other people had access to some secret knowledge that I lacked. I continued to cling to my religion, but I could only experience joy to the extent that I was able to find distraction from my questions. I started asking God for faith, and when none came, I berated him for breaking his promise to give faith to those who asked. Hundreds of times, I would pray for guidance, open my King James Bible at random, and point to a verse with my eyes closed in the hope of receiving a message from God, but none came, and when my finger fell on a blank space, a genealogy, a genocide, or some Old Testament ceremonial law, I became furious at God for mocking me. 

I was struck by the irony of having almost no belief in God, yet being obsessed by fear of him. Today, when I hear the continual outpouring of anger, petulance, bullying, narcissism, childishness, and mean-spirited vindictiveness, that comes from my president, I'm reminded of my boyhood image of the Biblical God, only without the white robes and long beard. Of course, the Church of Christ also talked about the gentle Jesus, yet Jesus, like his father, was often insulting, threatening, condescending, hypocritical, and contradictory, plus the context in which Christ was mentioned in church was usually in regard to "his atoning blood," and him being a "ransom for our sins," images that took me right back to the image of an angry God who requires innocent blood to be shed before he can do what he expects us to do freely, that is to forgive.

When I was thirteen, I was running my paper route on my bike when I told God that, since he had ignored my every prayer for faith and because his own son's last words had been an accusation of abandonment, he could hardly expect me to believe in him. As soon I said this, I became terrified that I had committed the unpardonable sin. While I still found church rewarding, I was often consumed by a fear of everlasting hell when I was alone. When I finally concluded that I had to either talk to someone or lose my mind, I went to a preacher's house in search of assurance of God's forgiveness, but when I got there, I couldn't bring myself to tell him why I had come, so we chatted awhile and I left. While still in high school, I tried to help myself by taking a course in psychology at the local college, and we visited the Mandeville, Louisiana, mental asylum as a part of that course. I wondered if I could find peace at Mandeville with the help of wise psychiatrists, but I didn't know what to do to be committed. I thought that maybe setting the woods on fire was the answer, but I worried that I would instead end up in juvenile prison.

By the time I reached my upper teens, I had the thought that maybe my fear and loathing of God wasn't caused by him but by the teachings of my church, and that I either needed to liberalize the church or find a different one. I began writing liberalizing articles for the church newsletter, but none was published, and I began to imagine that the people at church were treating me differently. I then started visiting other churches. Because my options were limited by living in a rural area, I sometimes drove sixty miles north to Jackson (I lived in Mississippi). I stopped counting denominations when I reached fifty, accumulating churches in the same way that other people accumulate states or nations. My search also inspired me to read a set of books on comparative religion, and I took courses in Bible and theology at the local Independent Methodist college, which was only slightly more liberal than the Church of Christ. Early in the process of church shopping, I visited the Episcopal Church, and felt that, at age nineteen, I had finally found my home, so although I visited other denominations, I did so for the joy of it rather than because I had any thought that I might want to become a Pentecostal, a Christian Scientist, etc.

I later joined two other denominations (more about that later), yet the Episcopal Church continued to be the only church I ever loved, although I love it largely because it doesn't even qualify as a church by the standards with which I was raised. I say this for reasons already mentioned, but also because it avoids tackling the Bible directly, but instead cherry-picks passages for its Book of Common Prayer, the result being that most Episcopalians are Biblically illiterate. Yet it is for such reasons that I love the Episcopal Church. I love it so much that I sometimes cry (something I never did in the Church of Christ) while singing a hymn or taking mass, but my tears don't come from any love of a divine being, but from the sweetness, grandeur, and antiquity of the service; from the physical beauty of the sanctuary; and from the shared intimacy with other people. To me, these things and more constitute God, although I avoid the word because I can't to this day separate God from Satan, the one being depicted as hardly less evil than the other in the Bible, and the meaning of God in my life being characterized for far too long by an increasingly desperate and despairing attempt to worship and seek solace from an abusive deity.

More later...

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

A little moving and very personal piece of writing. I consider to bring up children in an extremely religious manner a form of abuse but what else could extremely religious parents be expected to do? While basics of religion guide most people's lives in a good way, what terrible harm has happened and been done in the name of religion. Childhood should be a happy and free experience for children, not being oppressed by a heavy religious overlay. They should not fear a mythical greater being and waste mental energy on religion that would be better used to learn how to live as an adult in a caring and cohesive society.

Emma Springfield said...


The Bible is a confusing piece of literature. I appreciate your struggles with trying to find a truth for yourself.

Marion said...
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Strayer said...

I was constantly warned about the lake of fire and eternal suffering also. The only reward offered for a good religious life was to walk on streets of gold and wear a crown laden with jewels, one for each soul I'd saved. I thought "how awful, I don't want to live like that forever." But the thought died fast in my guilt ridden lake of fire fearful child brain. We were not allowed music in childhood, basically anything fun was not allowed. It was child abuse, if you ask me. I've only mentioned a few of multiple controlling factors of growing up in a cult.

PhilipH said...

If "brainwashing" is a tortuous form of abuse, then YES, you were abused in the most insidious was known.

Judging from your remembrances of childhood, the brainwashing by the church caused you severe fear and anxiety for many young years. It still nags away in later life insofar as you still search for answers from books on religion. Sadly, there are no answers in any form, books least of all. The Bible and ALL religious texts are made by MEN. They were written to keep people, especially children, in fear of an all-powerful deity.

When the school of life and hard knocks kicks in and wakes us up from such ludicrous tales of miracles and other nonsense, logic and common sense takes over, for MOST of humanity. But, sadly, not ALL.

My one-and-only sister-in-law is one sad victim of Billy Graham, the "Born Again" travelling preacher. She spent all her working life in Japan, a disciple of the Japanese Evangelical Band. She spent all her life out there trying to convert the people of Kobe from Shintoism or Buddism to Christianity. She would offer them "free" English lessons if they came to her Bible reading sessions. And they came! To learn English, not for conversion. There are, unfortunately, thousands more like my S-in-L still striving to "spread the word" like this.

It's a MAD, MAD world. And getting Madder each year. Hell is here on Earth and Satan is in the form of other people. End of sermon.

Snowbrush said...

"I consider to bring up children in an extremely religious manner a form of abuse but what else could extremely religious parents be expected to do?"

Thankfully, my parents weren't all that religious, and my sister never did take the least interest in it. My mother feared God but didn't care for church, and my father was an on-again-off-again atheist who went through periods of attending church and periods of staying home. I have no idea that they thought of the Church of Christ doctrines as abusive. The preachers I spoke of were good men, and I believe that many of the people I went to church with were good people, so why, then, did they believe in a deity who seemed to be in a race with Satan for the ethical bottom?

"While basics of religion guide most people's lives in a good way, what terrible harm has happened and been done in the name of religion."

Yes, and God could have prevented all of those bad things and chose not to. (Theodicy, by the way, is the contemplation of how, assuming that God is good, bad things happen.) I haven't found that, in general, atheists (of which I am one inasmuch as God is defined as a supernatural entity) are fans of religion. Most atheists would point out that religion didn't invent morality but rather appropriated it, and that the whole point of religion is maintaining worldly power. Others would argue that religion is a good thing because, without religion, many people might act even worse than they do.

"Abuse?????? Really!"

You are so consumed by your own pain that you are unable to imagine that anyone's else's pain is even worth learning about. Indeed, you become indignant at the mere suggestion that other people might also know what it is to suffer. But think about this, people who have youth, beauty, health, and affluence, often commit suicide, while people who have been through a hundred times worse than you, struggle to survive, and sometimes they excel. Which of the two would you say suffered most? You mistake the part for the whole. You think that by tallying your problems in an attempt to minimize everyone else's, that they will give you the world's first prize for being a worthy object of pity, but suffering is more than a tally, it's an inner state, and there's no way to measure that, and what good is pity anyway? I would be horrified to think I was pitied because when pity enters, respect and intimacy leave.

Snowbrush said...

"God's love is my Rock & my salvation. He's the only reason I'm still alive."

But why should you want to be alive when, by being dead, you could be in heaven and escape all this misery? I recall a quip about heaven being the place that everyone says that they want to be, yet they do everything they can to postpone going there.

"The only reward offered for a good religious life was to walk on streets of gold and wear a crown laden with jewels, one for each soul I'd saved."

At some point, the irony struck me of being expected to despise material wealth in this life, buoyed by the hope of being inundated by it in the next life.

"the brainwashing by the church caused you severe fear and anxiety for many young years. It still nags away in later life insofar as you still search for answers from books on religion."

As you know, I just turned seventy, and I am disappointed in myself that I am not over the trauma, yet to merely say to myself, as you would seem to advise, "Enough time has passed. Let it go," would be fruitless because feelings and traumas can't simply be dropped on the roadside. "Books on religion"? I don't tend to read those, although a year or so back, I delved somewhat into the gnostic gospels that were banned by the compilers of the New Testament (I found that they portrayed a far more sensible view of religion than do the ones that were included). Aside from that, I occasionally watch a documentary on church history or archaeology, and peruse (not read) a rare book that is critical of religion, but never do I read books by people who believe things that I previously examined and found to be untrue. I'm about religion like I am about finding something I lost, by which I mean that, if all else fails, I might look in the same place three times, but I won't look there more than that because I will have determined that it's time to look in previously un-thought of places.

"The Bible and ALL religious texts are made by MEN. They were written to keep people, especially children, in fear of an all-powerful deity."

Yes, of course they were all written by men, yet while the pursuit of wealth and power constitutes a major force behind religion, they are not the only force, religion being a universal human impulse that often continues to exist even when God is taken out of the picture in such secular forms as Communism. Let's not forget that the life of Albert Schweitzer and the Parable of the story of the Good Samaritan, were also the fruits of religion. Also, I don't for a moment believe that those preachers of my childhood cared a fig for wealth and power because, despite all that their teachings cost me, I, perhaps, knew them better than most people by virtue of the fact that I was so young, and young people exist in a privileged world that lies between that of dogs and adults. These people were in my life longterm, and I saw how loving and self-sacrificing they could be. They were wrong, yes, horribly wrong, but they were not selfish or malicious.

A Unitarian friend's daughter became a born-againer, and is also in Japan trying to covert the heathen. She even pirated her mother's address book so she could hit all her mother's friends up for a stream of contributions (one of the letters we received suggested a starting amount of $250). We had rarely even seen this person since she was a child, and she had no reason to think we shared her beliefs, yet she thought nothing of asking us to help her replace other people's ancient religion with her own hellish credo, the one overwhelmingly practiced by people who elected Donald Trump to the White House.

Marion said...
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kylie said...

Your experience of religion was abusive even if nobody intended it as such. Growing up in the time and place that you did means you probably also suffered abuse in the name of discipline at home and at school

Snowbrush said...

Marion, I'm sorry to see you go, and you're always welcome back.

"Growing up in the time and place that you did means you probably also suffered abuse in the name of discipline at home and at school.

As you know, my father was transgender and extremely angry at the unfairness of his life, but while he was certainly emotionally abusive, he never hit me. Although I was often spanked at school, I don't consider it to have been to the point of abuse. What occurred to me in writing this is that I've never know an Episcopalian who grew up as I did, so they don't understand why I'm unable to call anything God and think of it as good, just as I'm unable to understand why they feel a need to use the word God, when the God in which they believe is often so amorphous. Think of all the organizations that require a belief in God without defining what God is. What's the purpose in that. It's as if they think the word itself has some kind of magic.

Tom said...

I guess I wonder, if your parents didn't push you into a religious life, why did you believe with such energy and ferocity? I gave up the Catholic church in 10th grade, and it made virtually no emotional impact on me at all. It might have been partly because while my mother was a devout Catholic, my father was a skeptical Protestant. So I had the role model of someone who accommodated religion without particularly believing in it all. To this day I know plenty of religious people, and while I don't really share their belief, I respect their quest to find meaning in life, and for the most part their religion has made them better people who help out the poor and the sick and the left behind. But then, the people I know are Northeastern Catholics, Jews and Protestants who seem much more liberal and tolerant than what you encountered in 1950s Mississippi.

Starshine Twinkletoes said...

'Snow, you’re an intolerant bigot.' - This is so far from who you really are it's fascinating, combined with the clear mirroring of course.


All cults abuse those they brainwash and when this involves children it's worse and they haven't the tools to question or realise that they won't really go to hell if they don't feel Jesus in their hearts or admit they're sinners. Everyone being a sinner by proxy. It's simply a question of how strong the abuse is. There's nothing wrong with believing in a God if you wish, but threatening others and all the nastiness that goes with it is 100% out of order.

X

Snowbrush said...

"I guess I wonder, if your parents didn't push you into a religious life, why did you believe with such energy and ferocity?"

My parents went through periods of church attendance. I went every time the doors were open.

"All cults abuse those they brainwash and when this involves children..."

This will surely sound odd coming from someone who attends church at times, but I believe that even mainstream religions are inherently abusive. For example, even among liberal Episcopalians, many accept the belief that the "God the Son" is an eternally existing member of a triune Godhead who assumed his earthly existence when another third of the triune Godhead (aka God the Father) impregnated a virgin human through the agency of the final third of the triune Godhead (aka God the Holy Ghost) so that he, the Son of God, could live short but perfect life that culminated in a horrific death, the purpose of which was that God the Son could make a blood offering to God the Father so that God the Father could forgive us for having "sinned," something that he knew we would do quadrillion trillion years before he created us. These things aren't just what a few nutcases believe but what millions of mainstream Christians believe, dismissing its absurdity by calling it a "Divine Mystery." What could be more crazymaking to a child who is new to this earth and struggling to make sense of reality with the help of people whom he is forced by inexperience and circumstance to regard as trustworthy adults? I doubt that anyone can take this stuff seriously, and later turn away from it without being scarred.