Losing my religion

As a girl raised in a Southern Baptist church, I don’t think I ever truly believed in the message they were peddling. I wanted to. I wanted to be the good girl. One that fit the description of a “good christian girl.”

Not because I wanted to get closer to God, but mostly so I could get closer to my own mama. I love my mom. She is the quintessential southern mom that bakes the cookies and gives the hugs and tells you she loves you. But like most parents of GenX kids, ya know, the ones who had to be reminded by a commercial every night to ask them where their kids were, I was just as feral as all of my peers.

It took me healing almost five decades of carrying around trauma before I realized that my mama had her own trauma that caused her to swing the pendulum too far. Mostly because I did the same with my own kids, back to the other side.

My mama had a rough childhood. My grandmother was an amazing grandma – but not so much as a mom. She was a wild, witchy woman born in the 1930s and wasn’t really concerned much with being a “godly” woman. She lived life on her own terms, from partying way too much, to divorcing my grandad so she could be with her true love – in an interracial relationship (in a small southern town) in the 1970s. She was unconventional in her parenting and left my mom and her siblings on their own for far too long, far too many times.

My mama wanted to learn the lessons of her mother failing her, and so she decided that focusing on religion was the path for her to be the mom she wishes she had.

Like I said, though, she was an amazing grandma. Once she divorced my grandad that abused her heavily, she was a much more present parent and grandparent. And that was before I was born, so I never knew her any other way except happy and full of life. She was my protector. She was my safe space. It’s heartbreaking to know my mom didn’t have the same from her mom.

My mama also had her hands full. My special needs sister was born with major problems when I was about 2 1/2 years old – from mental to physical, so caring for her took all my mom’s energy, focus and attention. I’m not bitter about it, I know that my sister needed that from my mom.

But my mom found a community of folks trying to be “good christian women” like her in the church. They surrounded her and supported her. She found the family she had always dreamt of. Especially after my grandmother passed away when I was five.

When I was about six years old, I remember going to a revival at church – one of those week-long revivals in a Southern Baptist church that are emotional, energy charged and adrenaline inducing. The goal is shock and awe. It is the pure definition of emotional manipulation.

Every night, there is an “alter call” where sinners are supposed to come down, profess their love of christ and pledge to get baptized. AKA indoctrinated into the church.

So six year old me, I’m standing there, swaying along with my mama, who has her hands full with not only my special needs sister, but an additional little baby boy she had a couple of years later, singing another verse of “Just As I Am” along with the congregation….

and I tugged on her skirt and asked to go down to the alter.

Looking back, I had zero clue what was going on. I just watched my mama get excited and praise the other lost lambs who were fleeing to the alter and could see just how proud she was for them. Six year old me just wanted to see my mama be proud of me the same way. And mission accomplished.

How in the world there were hundreds of fully grown adults and no one stopped for a single second to have the thought “Hmmm… she’s not old enough to know what she’s doing”… that baffles me all these years later, but I digress.

Off to the alter we went, baptized a few days later, then a long path through lots of classes each Sunday on how to be a good christian girl. And if you are a southern baptist survivor, too, then you know all about the shame, guilt and torment that they dealt out to young girls in their adolescent years.

Ones where we were to be “cautious” about causing the boys to lust. We’d have talks with slimy men telling us to “hold tight to our gift and virtue”… or even worse, put us in a room and pressure us to take an oath of chastity. Where we were scrutinized over every single thing we wore and all our choices about secular things were through the lens of satanic panic.

Satanic panic was rough on me, since I was surrounded by so many wonderfully witchy women in my life. I learned to hone the gift of cartomancy at 5 years old from my Aunt Gertie. I learned to whip up healing potions from my grandma before that. I was obsessed with ghost stories, ouija boards and all things witchy from a very young age. But I hid all of it very well.

I was probably about twelve or thirteen when our Wednesday night classes started talking about other religions and how they were going to hell if they did not convert and it was our job to save them. Since my grandparents were catholic, I was super worried about not seeing my devout paternal grandparents in heaven one day. Or my mormon neighbors that we dearly loved.

Somewhere along the way in that series of them teaching us this indoctrination, the word “CULT” kept popping up. And so I got curious about what do cults mean?

I kinda knew the word, but I was a thinker. I liked research and craved understanding. In the school library, I looked it up, read the definition and wondered “Is our church a cult?” So I asked my mom, and she gave me some rhetoric about how baptists aren’t cults because we were the true believers of god’s word.

So I let it go until a few years later until the Davidian compound in Waco, TX. That’s when I realllllly started to question religion. But it was just three weeks before I had my first baby at 19, so my world was a lot to handle at the time.

Also…. during my pregnancy, I was still going to church, but the looks of disapproval from a the church ladies on the “sinning” 19 year old unwed me was a bit much. So I stopped going shortly before she was born.

I tried again a few years later… but it still felt off. I had so many questions about how could god be a “loving” god and still allow so much turmoil, hate, war and devastation on a planet he created. If he’s ‘all-powerful’ – how does he let babies suffer? It just never made sense.

Noah and the ark never made sense, even as a child. Jonah and the big fish? David and Golliath? All those stories I heard and even taught later in high school as a Sunday School helper? They never, ever made sense.

Fast forward a few years, I started college, had another baby – still without getting married – and was just trying to get my life together. I was a mom with two young girls, 6 years apart, going to college full time, working full time and trying to get my life back on track after years of it running off the rails.

So I tried church again. I mean… it was all I had ever known. That was the road to redemption. Then shortly after, I met Mitch. He was raised mormon, but he didn’t care where he went to church as long as he went.

We started going to church together with his two kids and my two kids, so we were all one, big, happy family. We decided to get married, yet I was denied the opportunity to get married in the church we were attending. The one I grew up in. The one I was sold the dream of walking down the aisle in one day in all those chastity classes.

I never stepped foot in that church again after that day. Then the mormon missionaries started showing up at my door to give me their word of god. I had no desire to hear it, but I did get curious and ask Mitch a lot of questions. When we compared his religious upbringing to mine, we were both floored at how they operate.

I was well into college at this point, and working towards getting a BS degree in history and professional writing. Sitting in all those classes, doing all the research and learning about how the world we live in is basically the way it currently is because of all the wars waged in the name of god, albeit it in different flavors throughout the centuries, with a TON of research, I came to realize this:

Religion is a man-made concept, curated and expanded by man to assert control over humankind so that the patriarchy can remain intact. Thanks, Constantine.

Yeah.

It took me around 25 years from the first time I questioned religion to actually releasing it from my life. That’s how much of a chokehold it had on me. And it’s why it took me an additional 10 years to acknowledge openly that I am a witch.

But the ripple effects throughout my life? The trauma that it caused. That’s an entirely different blog post. In part two, I’ll share some of the ways that religion caused chaos in my life.

Tap to read part two: The Opiate of the Masses