Unpacking Religious Trauma & Growing My Faith

There was fear in the evangelical air in the 1990s-early 2000s. The Left Behind series took the evangelical world by storm, homeschooling was on the rise, and Y2K conspiracies abounded. Fear of hell was baked into sermons and Sunday school classes. I remember the terror well. I feared that everyone who loved me would be in heaven while I was sent to hell. Or worse, fearing that the people I loved would end up in hell.

This fear caused me to pray incessantly that my Lutheran grandmother and agnostic family members would be saved. My compassion and love for them drove me to anxiously worry about their eternal future. Compassion mixed with fear is not healthy. It led me to doubt the veracity of other faith traditions and fostered a judgmental attitude toward anyone I was told was “worldly.”

Teaching children about the future, particularly fear of hell and judgment, will either go right over their young heads or will settle into their bones as an anxiety-inducing complex. I was the latter child, and still remember so vividly the fear that the future held over me. There is plenty to fear about the future, but focusing religious teaching on it is not productive. Fear is already in the air we breathe, it’s all over the news and running the halls of our schools. The church should be a place of respite from fear, not a manipulative attendance monitor on God’s behalf.

Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. 
 —Luke 12:32, NRSVUE

The trauma of being sentenced to eternal pain, losing your salvation, or somehow failing to live a godly enough life is not a new one. Centuries of church reformers have asked questions about the validity of expectations that religion places on people. Some condemned existing practices while some added new practices—the ebb and flow of religion combined with political power created safety for some and torment for others. This kind of religious trauma is behind a growing number of adults who are now deconstructing their faith, examining their religion, and determining what, if any, value it adds to their lives. 

As I continue unpacking the layers of religious trauma I have accumulated over the years, I find the antidote to fear comes with growing my faith. A faith trusting that I am a beloved child of God and that God welcomes all my questions, concerns, and doubts. A faith that can overcome the judgment I have both given and received. As a child, I was handed a script and told to accept it, and doing so affirmed my salvation. Now, my faith says that God loves me. I no longer have a heaven or hell metric by which to sort people. They are all people, made in God’s image, beloved by Jesus Christ.

Faith is not a blind acceptance of the status quo. In a healthy environment, there is space for all feelings, including anger, sorrow, doubt, and even denial. I am learning to see Jesus as someone who welcomes you and me with all these things. I now bring my fear to God and know that God does not judge me for it. 

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us.
 —1 John 4:18-19, NRSVUE

I have left behind the evangelical bible-thumping and am raising my children with the traditional liturgies of the Episcopal church. It will be several years before I learn how my choices of faith and religion impact them. I certainly hope that I am not giving them any religious trauma to cope with later in life. As a parent, I try to be honest about the many things I don’t have the answers to. Often, my children and I learn and grow together, asking questions and seeking answers. 

As my children walk off to school each morning, I remind them that they are beloved children of God. It’s a reminder that it is as much for my sake as theirs. A reminder that I pray they’ll internalize and turn to when navigating the struggles of relationships, identity, and universal truths. We are all beloved children of God, and they never need to walk around wondering who is going to hell and who is going to heaven.

Our worship on Sunday mornings settles those questions in the words of the Eucharistic Prayer.

Holy and gracious Father: In your infinite love, you made us for yourself, and when we had fallen into sin and become subject to evil and death, you, in your mercy, sent Jesus Christ, your only and eternal Son, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all.  —Book of Common Prayer, Rite II Prayer A

God made us, all of us, out of infinite love. And, through Jesus Christ, all of us are reconciled to God.