ABUSE OF FAI
Story package by Olivia Malick
Women share tales of religious oppression, breaking free For centuries, people have looked to religion for salvation and understanding, seeking a sense of community in their congregations and a sense of purpose. According to the Pew Research Center, approximately 78 percent of Americans identify with a religion, with 70 percent of that group identifying with some form of Christianity, or religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. While religion can be a positive force in a person’s life, it has also been used to justify wars throughout history. Religion can also serve as a conduit for physical, emotional and spiritual abuse. This is the story of two women who left their oppressive religions. “Religion disarms people — their guards go down,” Stuart Wright, chair of the LU sociology, social work and criminal justice department, said. “Religion makes claims to speaking for god and having this kind of cosmic order, so people are less likely to put up defenses and use their analytical skills.” BEGINNINGS As a child, Eleanor Skelton was taught to believe that she was responsible for the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. Every year her family would go see The Passion Play, a dramatic portrayal of Jesus’ life, beginning with his birth and ending in a violent recreation of his death. “I remember going for the first time when I was two and a half,” Skelton, now 31, said. “I remember it being kind of scary, but it wasn’t very graphic yet. He was hung on the cross, but it wasn’t very bloody.” Skelton said the play became increasingly brutal as she got older. She wasn’t able to even approach the man who portrayed Jesus afterwards because she was afraid that he would think she was responsible for his death. By the time she was nine, the actor PAGE 8 • WINTER 2020
who played Jesus was being kicked and spit on, and screamed while he was forcibly nailed to the cross, fake blood cementing the scene in the audience’s minds. “I was told the message that the man on the cross should’ve been me,” she said. “I was told that when I was bad, I was hurting Jesus.” Skelton was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household where the interpretation of the Bible was strict and literal. “A fundamentalist religion is one which tries to reclaim the pure original beliefs of that faith, but I would suggest that those are claims, and not often factual,” Wright said. “(These are) claims that cannot actually be authenticated. “People’s ideas of originality, sometimes are pieced together in certain ways that take
on cultural and political overtones that don’t really have anything to do with the original teachings of the sacred texts, whatever they may be.” Claire Robertson, Beaumont senior, remembers her mother being religious when she was growing up, but everything changed when her mother remarried to her current husband, when Robertson was 11 years old. He was a member of the United Pentecostal Church and Robertson said it wasn’t a big jump for her mother to convert to his religion. “I was a preteen and change is really hard at that age,” Robertson, now 24, said. “Between getting a new stepdad, moving houses and changing churches, I threw a bit of a fit. For a couple of years, they had to really strong arm me into attending church at all.
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But eventually, I was fully a part of the church. “I attained salvation in the way the UPC views attaining salvation, which is being baptized in the name of Jesus. I was filled with the Holy Spirit with evidence of speaking in other tongues, which is an unknown language to you that comes to you while you pray. “I repented my sins, of course, and I began living what they call a ‘holiness lifestyle.’ That involved changing the way I dressed, I stopped cutting my hair, I monitored my media intake and started attending youth groups regularly. I really got into it pretty deep and pretty fast. I think because I was young and impressionable, and so much change had happened in my life, I kind of latched on to that as a coping mechanism,
