Apr 14, 2021

CultNEWS101 Articles: 4/13/2021: Religious Trauma, PTSD, Recovery, GraceLife Church, Covid, Religious Freedom, Canada, Bountiful, FLDS, Polygamy

Religious Trauma, PTSD, Recovery, GraceLife Church, Covid, Religious Freedom, Canada, Bountiful, FLDS, Polygamy
The New Republic: Can Religion Give You PTSD?
" ... Williamson had grown up believing that complementarianism (the belief men and women complement each other through distinct and separate roles) and purity culture (which demands that women remain sexless virgins until marriage) were divine ordinance. "You're taught that your body belongs to God, then your dad, then your husband," she said. "Your dad protects your virginity, then you get married and your dad gives you to your husband, and your body belongs to him." (Purity culture also assumes men to be lustful and places the responsibility on women to avoid tempting them sexually—an issue spotlighted by the Atlanta mass shooting earlier this month, allegedly carried out by a member of a conservative Baptist church with a "religious mania" who claimed he had been plagued by "sexual addiction.")

Williamson believes this worldview caused her to stay for several years in an abusive relationship with a man who pressured her to have all kinds of nonvaginal sex. Williamson didn't want to but didn't have a way to say it. She recalls hearing one verse from Jeremiah over and over: The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? "The message was: Don't listen to your feelings," she said. So when her boyfriend told her, "prove to me from the Bible that it's wrong to give head," Williamson was at a loss: She couldn't.

"There are jokes about doing anal for Jesus, and yeah, that's pretty much how it was," she told me. "I felt awful about it as we were doing those things, and after." After seeing him, she would sit in her car and cry. "I didn't know that wasn't normal."

It wasn't just the abusive relationship that traumatized Williamson. It was the entire ideology of purity, wrapped up with her sense of identity, self-worth, and relationship to God. "I didn't know what it meant to be a woman," she said. "I had no concept of gender identity beyond evangelicalism."

Religious trauma, like sexual trauma, is not new. "It's as old as religion," according to Religious Trauma Institute co-founder Brian Peck. Peck grew up in a conservative evangelical family and attended a K-12 Christian school. He began the process of leaving his religion more than two decades ago, when he was in his twenties. Along the way, he met other former evangelicals who were living in opposition to their former beliefs, "feeling stuck in this inflexible way that I was familiar with."

"This led me to realizing it's not just a cognitive problem that people experience," said Peck, now a licensed clinical social worker based in Boise, Idaho. "A lot of the deconstruction journey is a cognitive process. It's about reading and studying. It's about beliefs and ideas: Are they true or not true? During that process, we often lose sight of the fact that we're social mammals living in bodies, and the way that trauma impacts us is not just in our head, it's in our body as well."

In recent years, mental health practitioners have begun the work of cataloging and defining religious trauma. Many of them, like Peck and Anderson, grew up in fundamentalist or conservative religious environments.

In 1993, psychologist Marlene Winell published Leaving the Fold, a self-help book for former Christian fundamentalists deciding to forsake their religion. Winell, who refers to herself as a "recovering fundamentalist," coined the term "religious trauma syndrome" more than a decade ago. It's "the condition experienced by people who are struggling with leaving an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and coping with the damage of indoctrination," Winell has written.

Psychologist Darrel Ray founded the nonprofit Recovering From Religion in 2009 as a resource for people doubting or leaving their faith. In 2012, he launched the Secular Therapy Project, a database of nearly 500 vetted secular therapists who will not tell clients they just need to pray more."

" ... The self-help therapeutic nature of the current ex-evangelical movement has its roots back in the 1980s with the formation of Fundamentalists Anonymous. Kraft notes that in 1993 psychologist Marlene Winell published Leaving the Fold, a self-help book for former Christian fundamentalists deciding to forsake their religion. Winell coined the term "religious trauma syndrome," defining it as "the condition experienced by people who are struggling with leaving an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and coping with the damage of indoctrination." Like Fundamentalists Anonymous, which emerged during the rise of the Moral Majority in the 1980s, the current movement of ex-evangelicals is shaped by and engaged in politics in the Trump and post-Trump era. Kraft cites political scientist Paul A. Djupe, who estimates that just over 20 percent of American evangelicals, or eight million people, left their churches between 2016 and 2020. "It's a pretty sizable number, and of course they're really loud on Twitter," Djupe said"

" ... Alberta Health Services said it "physically closed" the building and will be preventing access to it until GraceLife "can demonstrate the ability to comply with Alberta's Chief Medical Officer of Health's restrictions."

Mounties were called in to enforce the closure.

Coates was charged – and jailed for nearly seven weeks – for refusing to comply with Alberta's public health orders, and the church as an entity was charged itself earlier in the year and ordered to close by AHS.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, who is representing Coates and GraceLife in court, called the Wednesday closure a denial of charter freedoms."

St. George News: New memoir on growing up in polygamy to be featured in virtual event hosted by St. George bookstore
" ... Canadian author Mary Jayne Blackmore recently published her memoir, a story that recounts lessons she learned about feminism from her polygamist grandmothers. The book is featured on a St. George bookstore website and will host a virtual event April 17.

In an email to St. George News, Blackmore described her book, "Balancing Bountiful," as a story about both the light and darkness of growing up in a Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints community in Bountiful, British Columbia.

"It's about overcoming the adversity I faced in my life, and how it made me the strong woman I am today," she wrote."

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1 comment:

Andre Leonard said...

"Religious trauma, like sexual trauma, is not new. "It's as old as religion,"

Williamson and others like her caught in these terribly compromising positions and faced with further degradation if they stay rooted in these church/cult/s

Special care needs to be given both psychological and emotional to victims leaving and the hope of normalcy restored until they can heal.