Church

My father has been an ordained minister my whole life. He didn’t have his own church until I was seventeen, but I grew up in church and everyone knew my father was a preacher.

I have many issues with organized religion now as an adult. I have many issues with a lot of things as an adult because of things that happened when I was a child or teen, but that’s neither here nor there.

This recollection of events happened from the time I was twelve until the age of seventeen when my family moved out of state.

When I was a teen my parents made the decision to attend a church that had a decent sized youth group, for my sake. Most of the churches we’d attended throughout my life up till then had been evangelical churches that were just putting down roots and maybe had one or two other children besides myself. So, I didn’t have many friends in church growing up and since church was a huge part of my life, I didn’t have many friends. So, they did me the kindness of joining an already well established church with many teens with which I could form friendships. As if!

It would seem that I was a bit out of place in this church. I was constantly picked on by the elders of the church, thought to be a slut by some members because I wore make up, ostracized and downright bullied by the adult members of the church. And, since it was okay for the adults, it was clearly okay for the teens to do it too.

I was sexually assaulted by two of the youth group’s most upstanding young men, more than once, bullied into going to their secret strip poker games, blackmailed into sexual favors, and then slut-shamed by the lot of them.

The girls were just as bad. Because I went to public school and wasn’t homeschooled, that obviously made me a whore, because everyone knows that public school kids have no morals. I hadn’t been a member of their clique since infancy, and I didn’t have a purity ring, despite the fact that most of them were having sex and I wasn’t. (Despite the sexual assault, being bullied into going to strip poker games, and being blackmailed into sexual favors, I was still a virgin).

I cannot specify a single occasion when I didn’t fit in with this church, because for the entire 5 years we attended, I never once felt like I belonged. I watched others join and fit right in and would cry at night because they did it and I couldn’t. It was hell and no church professing to be full of loving Christians should be hell, but this place was.

The hypocrisy was rampant, the judgment was harsh and came from every direction, and left me with emotional scars I still deal with to this day. In fact, in 2019, I was diagnosed with PTSD from childhood trauma, and this place was just the tip of the iceberg.

While I may have been a preacher’s daughter fitting in at church was not my forté, especially this church. On top of the aforementioned, I was also opinionated, had spiritual questions no one was willing to answer, questioned the blatant sexism within the church, wore make up, suffered from depression, and sucked at church politics. Not a good combination of personality traits.

Now that I’m an adult and can choose my form of worship, when older people ask me, a preacher’s kid, why young people don’t want to come to church, I always tell them about my experience and quote the hypocrisy, and tell them that maybe we’re just done turning a blind eye and maybe, just maybe, we’re done trying to fit in.