4 Ways Church Trauma Has Affected LGBTQ+ Individuals
If you grew up in any mainline denomination or evangelical Christian church and are LGBTQ+, chances are you have experienced church trauma.
Essentially the trauma and pain that queer people experience in the church leads to symptoms that arise due to that stress; intrusive and pervasive feelings of guilt, nightmares, dissociation, difficulty with intimate relationships, substance abuse just to name a few. What makes this all the more complicated is that when it comes to spiritual abuse or church trauma there are facets of God blended in with all of this making it sometimes feel as if God is responsible for our pain, not the church. This brings about a lasting and profound impact on someone's spiritual life and relationship with God.
Sheri Heller defines it as,
“a form of psychological abuse and brainwashing that inculcates the shameful message that we are sinful and must live in a constant state of penance and atonement to escape the ravages of hell and God’s punishment”.
This story might help you understand religious trauma a little better. When I was 7 I was told that even the thought of a curse word would send me straight to hell, so I spent the next 7 years continually asking Jesus into my heart in the hopes I wouldn’t go to hell. You see, the church convinced me at a young age that I would have to spend my life trying to be better and do better. Over the last 10 years I have slowly realized that there are 4 lies (at least) that we are told in the Christian world that lead to religious trauma.
The lie that we have to forgive everyone that has wronged us and not just forgive but let them into our lives.
The lie that certain leaders in the church have a better, closer and more accurate connection to God.
The lie that we can’t love ___ (fill in the blank)
The lie that our bodies, gut and minds can’t be trusted.
These lies lead people in the LQBTQ+t community to become traumatized, without even realizing it. As I have worked through my religious trauma I have become more aware of the lies I was told.
The lie that you have to forgive everyone that has wronged you and not just forgive but them them into our lives:
I’m not talking about someone cutting you off on the freeway or hurting your feelings, although you don’t have to forgive those people either. What I am referring to is when someone is sexually, physically, or emotionally abused and they are encouraged to pray and forgive the person who abused them. When I was 8 I was sexually abused by a cousin. For the next several decades when I shared about the abuse, in a religious setting, I was encouraged to forgive him and pray for him. That was my first experience of religious trauma. Not only did it confuse me that I had to forgive someone that had assaulted me, but it was the beginning of my religious trauma and my need to forgive even the most egregious acts done to me.
Religion aims for people to forgive those that wronged them (in most cases - we will get back to that a little later) but not for the sake of the person that was wronged, for the sake of the wrongdoers. Because it would be better to let them live in peace, knowing they are forgiven, then for you to live in peace. Not only does the church ask you to forgive those who have wronged you, but then they take it a step further and ask that you give them a second chance or let them back into your life. If you have ever had someone do harm to you, you know that it is not that simple. Not only are you traumatized by the event (abuse, neglect, etc) but then you are asked to face the person and let them back into your life where they could do harm again.
For myself, I am triggered just by the idea of having to see my abusers again, let alone actually let them be part of my life. I still suffer from nightmares and anxiety related to the abuse I experienced as a child and as an adult I am working on dealing with those side effects, but that does not mean that I need to let these people into my life in order to be whole. I am writing this having not forgiven multiple people for the things they have done and what I can tell you is most days I actually do not even think about it. The days I do, it is because the church has traumatized me into believing I should feel bad about it.
The lie that certain leaders in the church have a better, closer and more accurate connection to God
I grew up in the church and I did all the right things. I went to a bible college, I married my first serious boyfriend. I got a job right out of college. I ignored the abuse (mental and physical) because that’s what any good wife would do. I got a second job to help pay the bills when my (then) husband wasn’t working. I played the part. And that was good. Until it wasn’t.
When you grow up in the church you constantly hear ways of how to do better and be better. Sometimes you end up exhausting yourself trying to be a person that you are not, all so you can fit into this “good christian” box. This trauma that the church and church leaders put on individuals forces us to think that we are not in a good place with God. We end up feeling as though the leaders of the church are the closest to God and we spend our whole lives trying to get to that place, as if there is a final destination.
Don’t get me wrong, leaders in the church often have more training, more education, and a different perspective than the average church-goer. However, as a church-goer that also happened to minor in biblical studies, and as a person who at one point felt really close to God, it was (and still is) very difficult to balance what I feel in my heart about the God I follow and what I hear from the pulpit about how I should be living. It is almost as if we are in a tug-of-war between what we know in our spirit and what the church believes is true. So in order to quiet the war, we give in and we subject ourselves to rituals and routines that are supposed to make us closer to God.
The lie that our bodies, gut’s, and minds cannot be trusted
The fact that we are convinced that church leaders are closer to God, leads us to believe that we are not to be trusted to our own devices. Think about it, if you grew up in the church, the story that continues to be shared over and over and over again is the story of how Adam and Eve fall short and eat from the forbidden tree. This leads into lessons about how humans are innately sinful and cannot ever be fully “right” with god. Somehow, we are supposed to juggle that with the idea that we are, “fearfully and wonderfully made” and “created in the image of God”.
I remember when I became old enough to be in a relationship how many lessons were taught about denying urges and staying faithful to God. So every time I felt attracted to someone I would automatically think it was bad. I spent my middle school and high school years chasing after relationships that would fulfill my need to be holy in the eyes of God (but mostly the church). I dated people that I thought would hold the same values as me and yet, I still felt as if I was wrong for having attractions and for feeling differently about my body.
When I met my wife and decided to enter into a relationship with her, people were shocked for many reasons but the most common response was, “This cannot be right, you are not gay. You were married to a man before”. As if they knew my body more than I did. As if it was impossible for me to know in my soul that I had met my person.
This constant onslaught of messages telling you that you are not good enough or that you cannot trust yourself leads to a significant amount of trauma. What you know in your heart is true for you gets repressed in order to fulfill the role of the good christian. So you are in a battle of what you know to be true and what you are being told is true.
The lie that we can’t love ___ (fill in the blank)
Let me tell you a little bit about who I was and who my wife was before we met. I was the ultimate “feminine” Jesus freak. And my (now) wife was what people have perpetually called a “beard”; someone who married a man to cover up the fact that she was actually gay. Neither of these pictures truly portrays who we were or are as people. Everyone decided our fates before we could decide our own. The people closest to us decided she was a lesbian and I was straight. They put us in those boxes and when we didn’t fulfill that story for them we broke their grace filter. They decided we no longer deserved the grace we grew up hearing we would always receive. Because it’s not okay to love someone that that the Bible allegedly condemns. Don’t even get me started with what the Bible says about divorce.
The trauma happens when the church takes a handful of verses out of context and use them to sell a story about the immortality of same sex relationships. The church has abused the Bible by pulling these verses out and throwing them in the faces of youth and adults looking for love and acceptance. I will never forget the time I walked out of a Bible study because the youth pastor told the whole room of high schoolers that prop 8 was an abomination and that the family unit needed to stay intact.
Or the time I went to an evening Bible study and the pastor made a joke, on a felt board, about putting two grooms together. As we all walked up we were supposed to be shocked to see such a thing. When the lesson started he proceeded to throw one of the grooms on the ground and replace it with a bride. The real shock to me was that it would be acceptable to do such a thing. The real truth is that the God I know would never disown me for who I know, but the religious trauma I experienced growing up is still ingrained in me so deeply that I often find myself questioning if I really will end up in hell after all. Religious trauma is growing up knowing that some people get forgiven for their sins and affairs but not everyone, and especially not someone in a same sex relationship.
Religion has and continues to traumatize people who have gone through huge life changes and make them think that everything will be okay if they just pray more or if they just read the Bible more. What if you never repair the broken relationship with family members? What happens if “all things work together for good” really just means that we stop rushing people to move on or recover and just let them be? What a relief it would be to hear, “I am so sorry, what can I do to help?” Rather than, “It will all work out sweetie”. For a person in the LGBTQ+ community, it is rare to hear, “what can I do to help?” Because religion has convinced everyone that what you do to help is pray, read the bible, and ask for forgiveness in order for your life to be complete. I’m not seeking forgiveness, I’m seeking acceptance.
Those are the lies. They are the things, to me, that are at the root of religious trauma and they are what causes LGBTQ+ people to spend their whole life searching for true happiness. LGBTQ+ individuals already struggle with so much in terms of what the world throws at us, so why does the church have so much power us? Because we grew up hearing lies about what we needed to do in order to be fully happy. We were traumatized into thinking we weren’t good enough, we didn’t deserve to love who we wanted, and we had to pray harder to find a good life. My hope is that in naming these lies so explicitly you will be able to define them in your own lives and that you will begin to experience freedom and healing. May it be so.