It was a beautiful experience when I became a Christian and read the Bible for the very first time at the age of thirteen. Lying in the hammock in my parents’ back yard, I read about how Jesus welcomed the people that no one else wanted, and I was bathed in a spiritual Presence that radiated unconditional love and acceptance for me. It was a pure awareness of God that only a child could have, a tranquility that was truly a “peace that passes all understanding.” That was twenty-one years ago. Now I look back wistfully on that experience and sadly wonder, where has that sweet Presence gone? I don’t feel it anymore. Instead, I’m like the author of the 88th psalm, whose only intuition of God was that he had utterly abandoned him. How did this happen to me?
When I was fourteen, I joined a pentecostal church a few blocks from my home, ignorant of what Christian Fundamentalism is all about. Within months of my involvement with that congregation, my vision of God had changed dramatically. I didn’t perceive him as a friend of the outcast anymore but as a sadistic, genocidal tyrant that even Adolf Hitler would have envied. This church preached that every non-Christian—past, present, and future—will spend eternity in hell even they have never heard the Good News. It preached that stealing a pack of bubble gum at the age of ten would consign a person to the same everlasting fate as a mass murderer, for hell was the judgment that God had ordained every form of disobedience. It even preached that the bulk of Christendom would be damned since most people who considered themselves Christians had never been “born again.” Guilt, shame, and fear began to take their toll on me until I began seriously to doubt my own salvation.
I began to miss the God that I had known before joining that church, the Jesus who had welcomed the prostitutes, tax collectors, demon-possessed, Samaritans, and other “sinners” without ever condemning them for their sins. This Fundamentalist Jesus was nothing like the Jesus who had invited me into the kingdom but was, in fact, his evil twin–the Antichrist. Being a mixed up teenager, I didn’t fully understand what was happening, but I nonetheless sensed that I had to escape it for my own well-being, so I abandoned that church without even saying good-bye. Tragically, I abandoned God the same way, for I was too young in the faith (perhaps too young, period) to discern clearly which vision of God was true.
Only recently did I learn that what happened to me is called “spiritual abuse.” It’s the misuse of religion to harm rather than to heal, a crime against the soul all too common in churches today. To recognize spiritual abuse, to acknowledge that it happened to me, and to denounce it publicly is my first step toward healing, but it will nonetheless be a long and difficult journey to full recovery. Still I have faith that I will know God again, the God that I had known in Jesus before my personal fall from grace. That is what this journal is all about– the journey home.
