Generations of believers have been taught gossip is a sin. After years of reporting on women who have broken out of high-control religious environments, I can’t help but think this is because church leaders learned how dangerous “women talking” can be to pristine pastoral reputations when their esteem is built on lies and cover-ups.
I’ve had women tell me that when they were raped by their pastor, their rapist claimed it was God’s will. I’ve had a mother tell me how the pastors in her church told her that not forgiving the boy who molested her two-year-old would be a sin and treated her pain and resistance as though it were on par with what the boy had done to her child.
I’ve spoken to people raised as girls inside Christian patriarchy who were told they must submit to their father until they are married and then move under the authority of their husband. These girls’ lives are arranged like chess pieces—the smallest, least powerful ones. They are pawns.
It’s as though their church leaders don’t know that the pawns that survive become queens.
As a religion reporter who specializes in writing stories of survival—people who evolve within a church and those who run and never look back—I was curious to attend American Atheists’ annual convention and share my work, including my book Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors, and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning. In some audiences, I meet former churchgoers who are nervous to tell me how they can no longer walk into a sanctuary. They tell me about their abusive Pentecostal upbringing. I’ve had someone in their eighties whisper to me that they were abused over a half-century prior, with a burning look that made me wonder if I was the first person they’d ever told. Often, I sense a pull to toe old rules. I can feel them struggling to overcome lifelong training that taught them not to speak ill of the church.
But wrongdoing, exposed plainly and truthfully, deserves to be held to account.
At American Atheists’ convention, however, I suspected I would find folks who no longer tread so lightly around the reputations of their former churches. What I found were people who were compassionate to survivors of spiritual trauma because some of the atheists who gathered in Philadelphia were survivors, too.
I met a woman whose family had been upended by some of the same evangelical texts that wreaked havoc for many of my sources. I met a man who wanted to share my book with his mother who is still a believer. It’s too late, he felt, to tear out such a vital part of her identity, but he also seemed to feel they might find common ground sharing a book that confronts the danger of high-control spirituality and lifts up those brave enough to fight back against abuse.
Another woman quizzed me about my thoughts on religion, trying to discern whether I was overtly opposed to it, a believer, or what else. As a reporter I need to remain objective, and as a person I don’t especially care what other people believe. I’m equally curious (though differently concerned) to talk to someone who waxes on about prophecies as I am to learn the life story of a friendly atheist. The woman who wanted to know my views appeared thrilled that I wasn’t interested in ripping up religion for the sake of doing so and was also disinterested in convincing people of any theological view.
After years reporting these stories, I know there’s too much at stake. That’s what I’ve learned from communities of women who have organized over the past two decades to expose church abuse. Believers, atheists, and everyone in between find common ground when faced with the triple tragedies of spiritual manipulation, histories of abuse, and institutions too interested in self-protection to hold predators to account. I see allies I don’t often see elsewhere in this country: conservative churchgoers who warn about high-control religion partnering up with atheists who share their concern. And because these are all people who were raised in communities that seek dominion—over women, queer people, non-white races—they see the looming threat of Christian nationalism for what it is: the logical culmination of the Christian right’s investment in faith and politics of high-control.
They hope truth punctures that control.
One of the most powerful forces in exposing abuse within religious environments has been the internet. On old-school message boards and blogs, then later social media, people discovered they weren’t the only ones who were abused in their childhood homes—what was coded as “discipline” justified by the books of evangelical leaders like Focus on the Family’s James Dobson. Women who were coached to serve God by producing as many babies as their bodies would allow discovered they weren’t the only ones who felt exhausted, depleted, and treated as mere vessels, not human beings. Those who needed to escape found others who had done so. Those who had been abused discovered patterns that spanned denominations and parachurch groups.
Then they used the internet to organize.
Before the internet, people were easier to isolate and control. Fear of ostracization was more powerful.
As someone who came out as a nonbeliever in my early twenties (toward the start of the Millennium), I had a similar experience. I had been a good church girl who wanted to become a minister, but then a collision with evangelicalism destroyed my faith. I didn’t know anyone else who had been part of a faith group and then gave it all up. But as I started sharing my own story on a tiny blog, I found others sharing similar stories. They too lived in regions where atheism seemed rare. But as people started seeing echoes of their story all across the web, the impulse to keep disbelief quiet began to evaporate. Sharing the truth of the matter with strangers created new communities.
The American Atheists National Convention was a more tangible version of that network-building, a readily observable manifestation of such connections. I found an assemblage of people from all across the country with a vested interest in freedom of expression and a necessary eagerness to protect all of us from forces that currently seek to impose their dominionist impulses on this country. Many of the attendees and speakers I met had already lived under the pain and oppression of those forces within the church, and they are ready to speak the hard truths.