Evangelical Christianity Gave Me Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

For the past two weeks, I have undergone intensive trauma therapy for complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Sometimes I feel guilty about having PTSD because, in my mind, it is an illness reserved for people who had been brave enough to put themselves in positions of service where they are likely to see and experience traumatic events.

Returned servicemen and women commonly have PTSD. First responders can have PTSD. Health care professionals can have PTSD.

I am none of those things.

And I do not have a heroic story of how I came to suffer from PTSD. My PTSD came to me through evangelical Christianity, specifically through my involvement in church ministry — an environment that hindsight has taught me was toxic and damaging to my mental health.

Surprised?

You shouldn’t be.

While I am uncomfortable with the suggestion that the stresses and terrors of war and disaster are in any way comparable to what one might experience in church, the fact of the matter is that when you get inside the causes and symptoms of PTSD, you can find parallels.

Trauma is trauma.

Psychologist Darrel Ray, who founded the nonprofit Recovering From Religion, observed that most formerly religious people who come to him for help suffered from the constraints of purity culture or a deep-seated fear of hell, likening many of their symptoms to PTSD. “When you see a person with the same symptoms and yet they weren’t in a war, they haven’t been in a tornado, they haven’t been in a shooting, you have to dig a little deeper,” said Ray. “With many people, when you dig deeper you find it came right out of religion.”

We might like to think of the church as a place of healing and transformation, and it is for some people. But for many others, especially those who have become entangled in the inner workings of the church, evangelical Christianity has been more bruising and damaging than healing and transformative.

So it was for me.

How Evangelical Christianity can lead to trauma

What was it about the church that left me with such mental, spiritual, and emotional scars?

Seeing a person get killed would be a traumatizing event for many, if not most people. It’s sudden, violent, and shocking. But, the kinds of things that traumatize a person in a church often occur slowly, even subtly, over many years.

I liken the difference as similar to what happened at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in 1986. In the initial explosion of the nuclear reactor, only two engineers were killed. That must have been traumatizing for those who witnessed it. But, in the months and years that followed, hundreds, if not thousands of others died from gradual exposure to radioactive material.

Also traumatizing.

Exposure to toxic religion is like exposure to radiation. It’s a slow process that can do profound damage to the human psyche. Here are the elements that make up the radiative material of trauma-causing religion.

A culture of shame

Let’s start with the very premise of evangelical Christianity itself. From a very young age, we are taught that we are born into this world intrinsically wicked beyond measure and absent of any kind of inherent value. In fact, we are told that God is offended by our very state of being.

Not a great starting point.

From there, we are taught that our sinfulness is so bad that it left God no choice but to brutalize, torture, and kill his only son so that we could be saved from the consequences of not believing in the fact that God chose to brutalize, torture, and kill his only son.

And despite the sacrificial death of Christ, many Christians just can’t shake the feeling that God is constantly upset with them. This is not an altogether unreasonable conclusion either. I mean, if I had to kill my son to save an undeserving person, that would probably eternally piss me off as well. I would struggle to love the person for whom I had to slaughter my son.

“God’s ways are higher than our ways,” we are told.

But that doesn’t help shake the profound sense we carry that nothing we do could ever reach a standard that would make us acceptable to God. God is forever unimpressed. The logical outworking of this kind of religion is one of continually feeling guilty and ashamed.

I can’t imagine how damaging it would be to my children if they related to me in the same way I was taught to relate to God. By the time they were young adults, they would probably be having cognitive behavior therapy for their feelings of parental rejection.

That is traumatizing.

A culture of fear

What is worse, this Christian indoctrination is reinforced through fear — specifically the fear of punishment. If you do not believe the right things, do the right things, and say the right things, you will go to hell.

In fact, we are taught that God satisfies his holiness by sending the majority of humankind to eternal conscious torment in hell, and we sure as hell don’t want to be part of that crowd. So, the pressure is always on to get it right — to think right, to be right, to do right.

This leads to constant striving and performing to try our best to appease the wrath of God that hangs over our lives like the blade of a guillotine. We are told that Christ took our place and died our death, but it brings us little solace because there is no tangible, measurable way to know for sure that we are in the group that God has saved. We are always wondering if God will accept us.

The other way that fear is used to control the Christians’ behavior is by dumping on them the assumed mission of God: To make everyone else believers in Christ as well. In fact, we are told that the responsibility for every lost soul who perishes rests on our shoulders. If a person ends up in hell, God will turn to us and, sadly shaking his head, say, “If only you’d told them about me?” And so, the saving grace of God is, in fact, limited by our ability to get people across the line rather than God’s ability.

This is a huge burden to bear. When I was in ministry, I carried tremendous guilt every time an “unsaved” person that I knew of died. Convinced that the departed person was in the fires of hell because of my inaction, how could I not be traumatized by that?

Photo by horacio olavarria on Unsplash

Carrying the burdens of others

Turning now to the perils specific to the ministry itself: Many people do not realize that those who work as church employees are often exposed to the profound grief, pain, and suffering of others and are expected to act in a support role for those people — being a pillar of spiritual strength for them.

My very first funeral was for a man who committed suicide on Father’s Day by hanging himself. His sons found him on Father’s Day morning hanging from the rafters by a rope. He had no history of mental health issues and left no note to explain why.

His family asked me to do the funeral. They said to me, “Dan… you’re the connection between God and us.”

Talk about pressure.

It was perhaps one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. I still remember being present in the grieving family’s house — the only person who was not related to the deceased father — as they oscillated wildly between anger, confusion, and sadness. I still remember having to conduct this funeral service where the elephant in the corner — the man’s suicide — loomed large but remained unspoken of.

It was traumatic.

What did the church do to support me through this harrowing experience?

Nothing.

A lack of emotional support

Perhaps part of the reason that I was not offered support was that in the church, we were raised to be suspicious of therapy and mental illness in general. In fact, those who suffered from things like depression and anxiety were treated with the kind of pity reserved for those who were demon-possessed. For that is how they were often thought of.

Suffering from a mental illness meant admitting spiritual defeat. People who were depressed were depressed because they didn’t have enough faith, were listening to the lies of Satan, or simply didn’t understand the truth of the gospel. They were spiritually ostracized.

So, why would anyone in their right mind confess to a mental illness issue in that environment? No, it was better to suffer alone in silence than to lose one’s sense of belonging, or so I thought.

That aloneness was hard.

A lack of privacy

Not only was I a pastor, but I also grew up as a pastor’s kid. So, I can attest to the fact that you and your family are constantly being watched… and talked about by pretty much everyone in the congregation. If your kid steps out of line when you’re the pastor, you will inevitably hear certain people grumbling. “If this man can’t take care of his own family, how can he care of the church?”

As a child, I found myself reported to my parents by supposedly older, more mature believers multiple times, who clearly had nothing better to do with their time than stop a child from acting like a child. Yes, the church is full of “sin watchers.”

Sin watching is sort of like bird watching, except instead of looking for birds, you’re looking for sin. Sin watching is keeping a close eye on someone else’s behavior with the intent of pouncing on them if you perceive they have made a mistake. It is practiced when a person establishes themselves as a kind of moral gatekeeper who believes it is their job to police everyone else’s behavior.

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For example, a woman at my former church would befriend all of the younger people in the church on social media and then keep an eye on their newsfeeds to make sure that they were behaving themselves.

On one occasion, she saw a photo of a group of them enjoying a few drinks at a local club and dutifully reported this to the church leadership. The church disciplined the young people. Most of them ended up leaving. The woman patted herself on the back for faithfully admonishing her brothers and sisters in Christ towards greater godliness.

Once again, this kind of behavior only added to the pressure to both conform and perform — to be good all the time. And where I was not good, to fake it.

Image by bowie15 on iStock

A target for criticism

Perhaps it was because the congregants pay your salary through their personal tithes and offerings, but, more than occasionally, you would find a church member who was more than happy to attack you for something you had said, done, or not done.

Brutally.

It could be that they didn’t like your sermon that day. It could be that it had been too long since you called in to visit them. It could be that they didn’t like the music the church is playing this week. Whatever it is, being a pastor makes you the target of some pretty nasty, vitriolic, and often uncalled-for criticism.

It hurt.

People had no qualms about ringing me up during dinner time with my family to tell me exactly what they thought of my sermon. And when you are a pastor, you are supposed to be a nice guy, and, as such, you are expected to cop it sweet. The inner frustration bubbled away, though. And the outlets for expressing it were non-existent, and there was a very good reason for that…

Spiritual bypassing

Spiritual bypassing is a tactic in the church to negate negative emotions because they seem ungodly, and therefore we must cover them up with bible verses and self-denial.

It includes things like forcing others and ourselves to find a silver lining in the midst of suffering and pain by using religious platitudes like, “God has a plan,” or “God won’t put you through anything you can’t handle,” or even, “All things work together for our good.”

Spiritual bypassing maintains that all negative emotions are ungodly and therefore causes people to adopt the false view that Christians ought always to be nice, agreeable, and happy, or else perhaps Christ is not at work in them — also known as toxic positivity. This leads to feelings of guilt and failure because, ultimately, negative emotions are both a common and inevitable human experience.

The church gave me no way to deal with negative emotions, pain and suffering. We were expected to check our pain out the door, and put on a big smile so that people knew we were living a ‘victorious Christian life.’ After all, we couldn’t have miserable pastors, or people might question the claims we made about the all-sufficiency of Christ.

A highly politicized environment

Many people presume that the intrusion of religion into politics is a more recent development in history. After all, conservative Christians got into bed with Donald Trump and made themselves an object of scorn to pretty much everyone else.

However, I can tell you that behind the scenes, behind the forced smiles and fake niceness, there is a political game unfolding in the background of most churches. And it’s been going on for as long as churches have been around. This usually involved people within the church jostling for power, position and influence. Yes, the most churches have factions and competing agendas.

I wish I were exaggerating, but as someone who has seen behind the veil of how churches run, I am sorry to say that there are church leaders who would more than willingly gaslight and assassinate the character of others in the church before they would give up one inch of control.

Watching men who you presumed to be ‘men of God’ turn on each other as if they were kids in the school yard, it’s troubling to say the least. What is worse, when you got caught in the crossfire or worse, the crosshairs, of these political power struggles, you could find your faith in the system mortally wounded. That is a feeling of betrayal that is hard to describe. This brings me to my final point…

Abandonment and betrayal

After ten long years of slogging away for the Lord, we finally made the difficult decision to leave the church that we had called our spiritual home for over a decade. We had formed some decent friendships at the church, or so we thought. Our children had all been born into the church. Our lives had come to revolve around it.

And that was the problem.

When a person comes to rely on an institution for belonging, protection, resources, and survival, and that institution violates the trust or well-being of that person, the results can be emotionally catastrophic.
And so it was.

I was unprepared for the vitriol that followed our exit from the church. After we walked away, the associate pastor took my wife’s best friend from the church out for a coffee and proceeded to tell her that she should cut all ties with my wife — said that my wife was a bad influence. Meanwhile, the senior Pastor made it his personal mission to assassinate my character by telling anyone who would listen what a faithless and depraved individual I was. He was determined to deflect any blame for our departure squarely onto our shoulders and off his own, radically insecure ones.

Needless to say, many people who we considered friends have not seen us or spoken to us since. We believed that we were loved by them, and that is why it was so traumatizing to find ourself estranged from them. We gave them the best years of our lives, but what was it worth in the end?

Devastating.

Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash

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Finding Healing

And so… for the past two weeks, I have undergone intensive trauma therapy for complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Sometimes I feel guilty about having PTSD because, in my mind, it is an illness reserved for people who had been brave enough to put themselves in positions of service where they are likely to see and experience traumatic events.

I don’t feel brave at all.

And yet, here I am.

I am trying to recover from the trauma of being told over and over again that I was a wicked sinner, destined for hell if not for a ‘loving’ father brutally killing his own son for my sake. I am trying to recover from the trauma of striving so hard to please God and his ‘people’ to the point of emotional exhaustion, without ever feeling the satisfaction of ever having actually pleased God. I am trying to recover from the trauma of carrying the burdens of others, of witnessing their pain, and being a scapegoat for their own unredeeemd anger, fear and insecurity. I am trying to recover from the trauma of being cast aside by the system that was supposed to love and care for me.

It hurts.

Yet, I have gone back into my mind’s eye and revisited the times, places and people who were associated with my wounding. I did what I needed to do to show them to the exit door of my life.

I feel better.

And after they were all gone, I found myself sitting with Jesus. He put his arm around my shoulders and said to me, “You know, Dan… you were good enough for me all along.”

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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