Brad speaks with Emily Torres, who is behind the Life She Wrote blog and podcast. Emily tells her story of growing up--and eventually leaving--Evangelicalism and describes the religious trauma that ensued from her experiences. She explains the mechanics of purity culture and how young women learn that their bodies are not their own, their bodies are stumbling blocks, and that they should never trust them. This leads to a prolonged conversation about how purity culture inflicts trauma on young people through both subtle and explicit cues, signals, and messages.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
SWAJ Apparel is here! https://straight-white-american-jesus.creator-spring.com/listing/not-today-uncle-ron
To Donate:
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
Venmo: @straightwhitejc
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
AXIS Moondi AXIS Moondi You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and I'm joined today by Emily Torres, who's a podcaster, a writer, a survivor, and just generally an advocate for those who have survived religious trauma, something we're talking about more often on our show and just generally.
And so, Emily, thanks for joining me.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for having me.
We've been in the same Twitter tribe for a long time, this never-ending DM thread and other stuff with other folks.
And just in the last few months, you've really launched some amazing stuff.
You have your podcast going.
You've been writing for a long time at The Life She Wrote.
So I guess one of the first questions I have is just, what is your story?
You work sort of tirelessly to advocate for a lot of things, but one of them is religious trauma.
And I really want to sort of like zero in on that.
So what is your story?
How did you arrive at this point?
Well, I'll kind of give the short version of it here, but I was born and raised in more charismatic denominations.
So assemblies of God and as it were in California, and Then later on, in junior high and high school, I went to a non-denominational church that was mostly filled with agey people, so it wasn't really... We just didn't belong to the conference, but it was very similar.
In my early 20s, I kind of stopped going to church for a while, because I just didn't feel like I fit in, because I wasn't married yet and I didn't have kids, and there's no place really in the ministry calendar when you're that age.
And that was when I met my husband and started dating in our early 20s.
And by the time we were engaged, we stumbled upon a non-denominational church in the city we were living in.
And it was actually pretty Calvinist, but we didn't know that.
It was more subtle.
It was like, here, maybe you should try this ESV study Bible instead of the NIV that you were reading.
And the marriage small group we ever did was the Mark Driscoll Song of Songs series.
Wow.
I know.
Yeah, yeah.
And we're still married.
So yay.
No, my husband never really bought into all that.
He grew up Catholic, so he was really only evangelical because of me.
But I actually ended up on staff at that church for about two years.
And then we moved to the Bay Area.
Didn't really find a church home, I guess you could say, over there.
And then we got pregnant.
We started having kids.
And then I started to feel that inevitable guilt of, oh, we got to find a church.
We got to find a church.
We have to have a church home because we're raising kids.
And it was just kind of that ingrained need, I guess.
So fast forward to like 2017.
We're in the town right now.
I was a mom of just one at that time.
My son was two going on three.
I had burned out of another church staff job that past winter and it was short-lived because of a really Paranoid, narcissistic senior pastor.
So that kind of, I guess you could say that kind of like jump-started my leaving.
I was being in that kind of toxic situation.
We tried out the local Omega Church off and on here in town because some other friends attended, but we always felt really uncomfortable there.
And I was really struggling with my mental health, feeling overwhelmed as a stay-at-home parent.
I was confused and really Struggling with these biblical ideas that a woman's highest calling was supposedly a wife and a mother and really feeling like, starting to feel like I missed out on a lot of life because I didn't ever try to have like a career on my own or have something of my own or a different identity.
I think I was really struggling with identity, but I didn't have the language for it then.
And so on top of that, I was following a lot of the like white evangelical women authors and speakers on social media.
And I just started to become increasingly frustrated with, at that time in the US, it kind of felt like the world was kind of burning down a little.
We had the Me Too movement kind of starting, it kicking into full gear.
With every day that passed with Trump in the office, something crazier and crazier was happening, and I often said I felt like I was in an upside-down world, because I was seeing these Christian influencers, these white Christian influencers, women, on social media with these huge platforms, and not speaking about it at all.
Just like radio silence.
They're still tweeting out their one verse scripture and like talking about discipleship.
And I'm like, this doesn't add up.
Like this doesn't, this doesn't make sense.
And it was probably around that time, I would say like maybe fall of 2017, I found out I was pregnant again with my daughter, with our second child.
And I found this crazy little pocket of Twitter with these people that called themselves exvangelicals.
And I was like, who are these people?
First of all, they sound like me, but I didn't know anyone else like me existed.
I just thought I was like this rebellious kid.
And that's how I always felt in my mind, even though I was a grown ass woman.
And it wasn't long after that, that I found somebody said, Oh, you need to read Rachel Held Evans.
You need to read Searching for Sunday.
And I did, and I was blown away because this woman was saying all the things I've been thinking in my head for so long, and here they were on paper in front of me.
And so when she was writing Inspired, I got on the advanced reader copy list so I could get an advanced copy and review it, and I read through the whole thing in like a weekend.
And I was pregnant too, so my emotions were just like on high.
Like, I'm sorry, I have to go.
I'm so sorry I have to go lock myself away and read this book for the entire weekend.
Like, I need to go.
And again, the same thing.
I felt like somebody had crawled inside my head and was writing down all of the words.
And we were the same exact age.
Our children were the same age.
She was pregnant at the time, also, with her second child.
So there was a lot of these parallels that I felt like this person, here she was, she was this respected author in progressive circles.
And so instead of just feeling like this rebellious child, Rebelling against my past, I felt empowered and like I had permission to ask the questions I needed to ask.
So that was kind of how I dove into that world and started deconstructing.
I actually bought a ticket for Evolving Faith in 2019 before she got sick.
Yeah.
And then I still went.
So I went that year in Denver, and it was a really healing experience, but it was also kind of what made me realize that I didn't need to hold on to that label of Christian anymore.
And it was a little traumatic.
I still think at that point, I didn't understand or grasp that evangelicals are not good at lament.
Or grief.
And I didn't really understand what those things meant, but I knew I had all these feelings about Rachel's passing and about my own past.
And so it was a really, it was definitely something, a very unique experience.
I've never sat in a hockey arena and sobbed uncontrollably with 2000 strangers who are also sobbing uncontrollably.
It was a very, and I don't think I'll ever experience that again.
Yeah, but it was and I cherish all those people and I still follow all those authors and I will buy their books and I will gift them to people and I will but I've definitely kind of removed myself from that that label of Christian as it were.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWADGE episode.
In order to get access to the full episode and so much more, become a Straight White American Jesus Premium Subscriber by clicking the link in the show notes.
It'll take you like two clicks, I promise.
In addition to getting access to this episode, you'll have access to the entire SWADGE archive, over 550 episodes.
You'll also get an extra episode every month, ad-free listening, Discord access, and so much more.
All that for less than six bucks a month, and it helps us keep our flag up and continue to safeguard democracy from religious nationalism, extremism, and rising authoritarianism.
