It's been years since I've done this.
I mean, I started blogging in 2009. I've had students younger than that (a realization that I just had this exact second, and am currently refusing to think about any further). I've posted everything from fiction to weird little essays to random posts about Tumblr memes I thought were cool in 2014 - hell, if anyone finds my old profiles, they'll probably find a bunch of arguments I had with my friends when I was in high school, splashed across weird corners of the internet in comment sections and vagueposts. It seems like whenever I start to have Thoughts and Opinions and Feelings about something, I head right back to Blogger and start typing. (And yes, the title is a Mr. Brightside reference, because a. that song is iconic, b. my fiancée and I reference that song at LEAST once a week, and c. that video is somehow the gayest thing on earth despite its ostensible heterosexuality.)
So what is it this time? What inner turmoil brought me back to the first place I ever had Opinions On The Internet? Could it be the stress of being an English teacher during a historic rise in book bans and challenges? The global pandemic? The impending crash of a late-stage capitalism economy? Elon Musk buying Twitter?
Nope. Instead, like the refrain of a much worse song than Mr. Brightside, a church person did something shitty to me because I'm queer, and it ripped open religious trauma scars that I thought had healed years ago. Great.
It's so frustrating, because despite everything I know about trauma and the brain, I genuinely thought I had worked through all of the grief and pain of growing up in a homophobic Christian church. Like, "ah yes, I was in a deeply toxic and repressive religious environment for nearly every year my brain was growing and developing, but I've done my Deconstruction™, so now I don't have trauma anymore and everything is all fine!" And yes, that's an almost insulting degree of oversimplification of how brains and trauma work, but I really thought I was in, like, the advanced track now. Or something. But then last Christmas, the pastor at my parents' church denied me communion on Christmas Day, one minute after I introduced him to my (woman) fiancée and twenty minutes before the service started. I couldn't take communion at this church - the church where I sang and played music for more services that I can count. The church where I first claimed my faith as my own. The church that helped me pay for college, confirmed me, and was my home for over fifteen years.
It's been months since the Christmas incident, and in that time, it's like I got plopped right back to the headspace I was at during college. Wounded by homophobic asshole pastors, on the defensive all the damn time, and afraid to go anywhere near a Christian space that I hadn't thoroughly vetted already. And every time I try to explain how much this hurts, I fall short. No matter how many times I tell this story, no matter the audience that hears it, I can't think of the words. What the fuck do you even say about a wound like this? What metaphor can you use to get people to understand the depth of this kind of betrayal? How in the world do you even start?
Well, exactly.
In thinking about this, I've realized that it's not just this one incident that I need to work through. My religious trauma encompasses so much more than one pastor doing a shitty thing... because I grew up in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. To a lot of people, that sounds like a fairly neutral name for some random Christian denomination, but for some of you, everything about the past few paragraphs just clicked into place and you went "Oh, no." Trust me, I've seen the faces people make when they Get It. (True story: I once mentioned growing up LCMS to a queer pastor, and she immediately replied with "Do you need a hug?")
The people who know, really know. Instead of fire-and-brimstone sermons, we heard reminders not to be "of the world." Instead of pastors explicitly saying that women belong in the kitchen, they urged us to find "joy in submission." Instead of telling us outright we'd go to hell for being queer, our Confirmation teachers reminded us of "the blessings of a call to celibacy." Everything wrapped in layers of code and euphemisms and so-called "positions of love." Until you stepped out of line, and someone - the pastor, your parents, the youth group leader, the religion teacher - dropped all the pretenses and reminded you exactly what white, straight, Republican Jesus expected of you.
So many Christian deconstruction spaces (at least, the ones I've been in) discuss a kind of Christianity with which I am significantly less familiar. Evangelicalism, fundamentalism, whatever the hell Hillsong has going on... none of these quite match up with the specific brand of repressed misery that a conservative liturgical church breeds. And while I will be endlessly, overwhelmingly grateful for those deconstruction spaces I mentioned earlier, I wanted to create a space for people whose journeys might look a little different.
So, hi. Welcome to Something Something Religious Trauma, a name that might stick around and might change if I think of something better. Nice to have you here.
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