"They cannot survive without fear": A heretic on leaving the evangelical church

[marmar]

"They cannot survive without fear": A heretic on leaving the evangelical church
In "Heretic," Jeanna Kadlec writes of the hard but necessary journey of escaping fundamentalist Christianity

By AMANDA MARCOTTE
Senior Writer
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 31, 2022 6:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) "Iwas leaving the Garden, the evangelical church, and the only version of myself that I had ever known. I was choosing who I wanted to be — but I had no idea who she was."

In her new book, "Heretic," writer and self-declared "recovering academic" Jeanna Kadlec weaves her personal experiences walking away from the faith of her youth with a larger meditation on the larger social and political damage wrought on the U.S. by the popularity of evangelical Christianity. In an era when the hardcore Christian set's hunger for power leads them to back faux-repentant sleazes like Donald Trump and Herschel Walker, that's an even greater need for her insights about how this religion wields so much control over its followers.

Why do people, especially women, stay in a religion that's so abusive? What does it take to leave? Kadlec can't answer those questions for everyone, but as someone who was fully immersed into young adulthood, only to escape after she discovered her lesbian identity while married a preacher's kid, there's much to be learned from her journey.

....(snip)....

In recent years, the percentage of Americans affiliated with a church has declined dramatically. It's almost exclusively due to people leaving evangelical churches when they grow up. So why do you think this is happening? And what do you think the impacts of that are?

The evangelical Church of the past few decades lost a lot of the flexibility that it had cultivated earlier in the century. It refused to evolve and reconsider the humanity of other people in ways that other parts of Christianity did, in light of the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement. In buckling down, and then really getting into bed with far right politicians, they accumulated a lot of power. They were able to do things like introduce abstinence-only education into public schools. They seemed to be very successful in trying to institute their own religious values into the mainstream.

Eventually, those kids that they were raising grew up. We had grown up in this really stringent environment that had no flexibility. And we had specifically grown up increasingly in churches that demanded an absolutely extraordinary amount of cognitive dissonance. Many of us, we're going to public school, we are exposed to different ways of living, we're exposed to people who have different ideas about how the world should be. We see that ideas like purity, no sex before marriage, the Rapture — all of these really extreme tenets — are not necessary in order to be a good person. For so many evangelicals who grow up and leave the church, we can't bear the cognitive dissonance anymore. ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/10/31/anything-that-a-man-does-to-you-is-gods-will-a-heretic-on-leaving-the-evangelical-church/

[patphil]

1. Cognitive Dissonance says it all.

Too many evangelicals preach the teachings of Jesus, while practicing fear and hate...the "teachings" of Satan.

[sanatanadharma]

2. Every human being has confusion but seeks understanding of 'self', 'other' and 'the system'

For some this is self, world and religion.
For others this is self, world and science.

For everyone the need is to know this 'self-aware consciousness'.
For everyone the need is to know the world of all else that is 'not me'.
For everyone the need is to understand how it all fits together.

No one can ever know it all; except the "Self".
Self-knowledge is much less popular than other-knowledge.

Not everyone has any inkling of this; everyone has some disturbances in life, be they from acts of God, nosy-noisy neighbors, or psychological.
Subject, object, relationship.

When children grow up they are all taught answers to these questions. Not always true, correct, or useful answers.
Many teachings are fallacious and do not raise up self-integrated individuals with the ability to recognize and reduce their own subjectivity while accurately seeing and naming objective-reality (actual cause and effect).

[lees1975]

3. I would suggest that the heresy is in the church, not those who are leaving it.

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2022/10/christianity-isnt-matter-of-opinion.html

[republianmushroom]

4. LIKE IT