Important Note
At some points, I talk about things that my parents did that were not very nice. No one should assume my parents are terrible because of this. You (probably) don’t know them whereas I have a good relationship with my parents. They do their best to provide a good home for their children. We merely disagree on religion, which has sparked conflict from time to time.
Also important: I don’t deny Christianity because I might be angry at it, have had a bad experience, hate God, etc. I deny it because it makes no sense. I’ll be writing about that in the future.
From Christian to Critic
I was raised in a very conservative denomination of Christianity known as Laestadian Lutheranism. It has enough ticks on the BITE model that arguments for it being a cult may be valid. Of the examples on the linked pdf of the BITE model, I would say Laestadianism exhibits 10/19 of the Behavior Control examples, 4/6 of the Information Control examples, 7/11 of the Thought Control examples, and 8/8 of the Emotional Control examples.
Growing up Laestadian was not particularly pleasant. They
- Enforce a confession system that requires you to tell others to receive forgiveness
- Have many rules for things you can and can’t do (called guidelines, not rules, of course)
- Look down on anyone outside the church and discourage having friends outside the church
- Discourage listening to any music besides baroque, church music, and classical (Classical might be pushing it a bit far with all it’s rhythm)
- Discourage dance, jewelry, piercings, alcohol, birth control, and anything else considered “worldly” by some older person in the church.
- Start stopping contact if you question anything
There are many many more things I could list. I once wrote a list of complaints I had with Laestadianism, and it was over 100 items long. I should have nailed it to a church door and started a new denomination like their venerated Martin Luther.
I was in High School when I began to question Laestadianism. Some of the claims seemed ludicrous, such as their confession of sins and many many many life restrictions. I hadn’t developed my critical thinking skills at this point, so I turned to silliness such as Energy healing, Spirituality, and other such pseudoscience. It culminated with me eventually becoming a Reiki practitioner.
After completing High School, I started college and eventually settled on sciences after a semester or two. Of the sciences, Biology stands out as important for me because it shattered my belief that humans were special and somehow were not animals. Most importantly, it taught me how cells function, live, die, and how cells are the building blocks of all life as we know it.
I wasn’t being asked to blindly accept this as being handed down on high from authority either, they had labs that made sure I would check this and see for myself. That knowledge was then leveraged to show how species are related to each other. That then began to build a larger picture of inter-species relations. After a while, I couldn’t disbelieve in evolution no matter how much my parents might have wished me to. The evidence for it happening is overwhelming. As I grew to understand how evidence is gathered and used, I realized that Reiki and Laestadianism both suffered from the same flaw: Lack of evidence for it.
Eventually, I told my parents about my lack of belief and my mother threatened to kick me out. Because I had no where else to live, the threat sparked a good deal of fear and I acted like a Christian because I had no choice. I’m not the only one who has received such threatening messages. While I have a great deal I could write about threatening your own child with homelessness because he has a different belief than you, that is a tale for another time. Needless to say, it can be summarized in two words: Not Nice.
For the next 2 years, I continued to attend church, but it was clear my heart wasn’t in it. I spiraled towards a deep depression, not that I knew it. I’d often borrow the key to the church from my dad to go play the piano there. Doing so made me feel better and calmed me down. This probably would have continued for several more years had someone not shown up one day while I was minding my own business and playing on the piano.
I was at a low point, and a guy showed up at the church who was verbally abusive towards me. He ended up calling my dad and getting angry that yes, my dad DID know where I was and what I was doing (at church, by myself, playing piano). He made me get my stuff and locked me out of the church, standing in front of the door to keep me from going back in. I drove somewhere to cry for a while, decided to leave Laestadianism. I’ve only been back to that church once and ended up having a panic attack while I was there.
Leaving Laestadianism was terrifying and forced me to confront a lot of questions head on. I felt panicked, unsure of what life was supposed to be like without religion. I was unsure of my place in the world, and everything felt hopeless. Perhaps the worst part was feeling like I was the one with a problem for leaving. Nowadays, I know enough to classify what I went through as Religious Trauma Syndrome.
My parents found out fairly quickly that I had decided to cut ties with Laestadians. I was lectured by my parents a few times about how Laestadianism is right, and that I’m terrible for not being in it – although, there were no threats of homelessness this time (I’m not sure why). I also had calls and cards from my grandparents and other relatives attempting to guilt trip me into coming back.
People I had met once or twice from entirely different states tried to pressure me back into the religion by sending me letters telling me how much their heart was saddened by all this. My relatives started treating me subtly different, and still do to this day by leaving me out of the secret handshake/greeting combo Laestadians use and whispering to their children that I’m not a Laestadian (yes… I can hear you, I’m not deaf). Given how strongly my parents reacted last time I had mentioned not believing, I was afraid of being kicked out anyways and moved out soon after.
My parents also eventually left Laestadianism, although they remain Christians. After I left, apparently everyone in the church (locally and in the state we lived in) started treating the rest of the family weirdly. I continued to attend the random churches my parents went to for a while after this, but I was not a Christian in any sense of the word. I merely wanted to keep my parents somewhat happy.
Many years later in 2020, I finally became tired of the constant lie and told my parents I was no longer going to go to church with them. This time I was treated to an hour long session where the Christian worldview was thrown at me while anything I brought up was dismissed out of hand, talked over, attacked, or openly mocked. I couldn’t get a word in without fallacious appeals to authority and straw men being thrown at me. Just so I could get on with my day, I agreed to read “The Case for Christ” and get back to them. After reading the Case for Christ (and writing a critique of it), I got the book back to my parents.
Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking on religion. With the ongoing craziness in America from 2020 to 2022, much of it which seems to be religiously motivated, I’ve come to see the harm that can be caused by dogmatically following religion. The authoritative way many public preachers make direct calls for violence or spew hate about specific groups (atheists, gays, democrats, non-trump lovers, etc) has caused me to distance myself from religion even further.