Religious Trauma

ART DIRECTOR & MODEL SRIRAM NATHAN PHOTOGRAPHED BY COLTIN HILL

I. Genesis

The first lesson the Christian church taught me was obedience.

Honor thy father and thy mother. Love thy neighbor. Thou shalt not steal. The Lord detests lying lips.

In the beginning you are taught to be good.

I was raised Christian; I was baptized in the Nazarene church that my parents met through and were married in. My childhood was filled with memorizing Bible verses, sitting silently in rows of dusty pews, Sunday school, and prayer circles. I attended a Christian school until the fourth grade, and spent my summers at Vacation Bible School. Every waking moment of my childhood revolved around God.

Among the virtues Christianity teaches, the main one is obedience. To listen, behave, be truthful, be kind, and be good. And I was.

I was an obedient child. I was described as mild and reserved, and although I was quiet and polite like God wanted, it wasn’t out of sheer devotion, but out of fear.

There were countless nights when I was little where I would lay awake and weep not because of the monster that was hiding in my closet, or the fear of the dark, but because of the dread and terror I had about spending eternity in Hell. I would tally everything I did during the day that could be seen as bad or sinful and beg for forgiveness in my nightly prayers.

I would beg God to forgive me for everything. I thought everything I did was going to send me to Hell.

When my family switched to a non-denominational church, the fear didn’t go away.

This church praised enthusiasm, and the ones who showed the most eagerness for being at church were given the invisible badge of loving God the most.

At this point, I had been led to believe that being a good Christian meant to keep my head down and silently follow instruction, but I wasn’t being rewarded for that anymore. Now, I was being judged by how devout I was.

The workings of the world were explained to me as black and white, good or bad. All I knew was that I had to be on the good side, and this ideology was poison to me.

II. Rebirth

III. Reckoning

I was around seventeen when I stopped going to church regularly. The Church had stopped making me feel good. What used to bring me some semblance of comfort now made me feel worse every time I sat through a service.

At this point, my whole belief system was to be seen as and thought of as good. I did everything I could to fit the mold of a good person, but I was always left feeling empty— not good enough.

When the church taught me the fundamentals of being good, they also taught that people are inherently bad, but that we have the choice to be better. Although I hadn’t yet connected this to my religious background, this concept corrupted good and bad for me as a child, and as a teen and young adult, sent me into a spiral of self-hatred and low confidence.

I was no longer crying myself to sleep out of fear of going to Hell, but rather I was staring at the ceiling for hours contemplating my morality. I didn’t know how to be a good person when I was taught that I was innately bad.

I didn’t start contemplating my religious identity until I entered my twenties and was beginning to figure out who I was. This was where I struggled the most, actually. I had separated myself from Christianity and was trying to find solace in myself, but I only felt adulterated without religion as a foundation.

This inherent evil was looming over me and there was no way to cleave it from myself; I was stuck with it. It was this thought process that sent me into a spiral of unhealthy coping skills and depleting mental health.

This period of time forced me to rebuild. The structure that had been assembled for me to be a good person crumbled, and I had to dig myself out of the rubble.

Writing and literature were comforting to me at this time. I put my pondering thoughts to paper and allowed myself to question everything, even if it felt sinful in and of itself. I sought a lot of comfort in Transcendentalism and delved into mythologies from many cultures which taught me different ideologies of selfdiscovery and transformation.

Only after I gave myself the freedom to explore did I connect my childhood in the church to my conflicting identity. I started unraveling what I had been taught and how it polluted my perspective of myself. I didn’t realize how it subconsciously stayed with me or how my whole character had been twisted and molded to fit into it.

Once I identified the origin of my insecurities, I was able to correct my course, although it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Even today I still struggle with the idea of if I’m a good person or not.

My whole childhood was built on the premise of being a good person. I was given the Bible, told to follow its rules, and when I broke them, confess my sins and ask for forgiveness.

My upbringing in the church gave me a lot of good things. It built my moral code and gave me good values to take with me in life, but it also built the foundation of a belief system that would become detrimental to my personal growth.

I don’t dwell on my religious trauma or the things in Christianity that I disagree with, rather I focus on my personal healing and growing away from the skewed perception of the world I was taught. I still believe in divinity and a higher power, but I believe a person could be good without it.

My experience with religion brought me more fear than peace. I strived for goodness out of fear that badness would damn me eternally, but really I was damned from the start. Until I severed myself from that fear, I found that you aren’t a good person just because you tell the truth, because you follow instructions, or because you’re not a thief.

What makes you a good person is yourself.