In the past few episodes, we’ve learned about the important role that other people play in one’s spiritual experience: we see, feel, and hear from God in part through our encounters with other people. This makes sense if the church is “the body of Christ.”

Unfortunately, there’s a dark side to this fact: many people are traumatized by their encounters with other believers and with the church. From childhood, they are raised to see themselves as evil, wicked, and worthless; to always be fearful of an eternal, fiery hell, especially if they think they might have committed “the unpardonable sin” (which is never fully defined); to feel always surrounded by demons hell-bent on a mission to attack us at every step. Women are taught that they are second-class citizens in the kingdom (“After all, it was ‘the woman’ who deceived Adam”), and are responsible for tempting men in the way that they act and dress (“you don’t want to cause the brothers to stumble, do you?”). Indigenous people are taught that their heritage is evil; their children can be taken away in order to “give them a better life.”

And when believers struggle in their faith, and begin to ask questions, or find that they can’t walk the walk anymore, they’re shunned by their family and their community. They become a pariah. Ghosted. “The Christian army is the only army on earth that kills its wounded and leaves them on the battlefield, rather than trying to bring them back.”

This is all religious trauma.

And the problem is, these things go on all around us all the time, and yet we don’t recognize it as evil. Or we don’t admit it: “see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.”

In this episode, we talk to Janice Selbie, an ex-Fundamentalist believer who experienced religious trauma on a national level (her family were part of the Canadian version of the indigenous people story), on a personal level (her own religious deconstruction story), and a clinical level (she is now a certified counselor specializing in religious trauma).

Boyd and I found we had much to learn from her.

As always, tell us what you think.

If you want to find more from Janice Selbie: https://www.divorcing-religion.com/

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