Straight White American Jesus - Religious Trauma and Purity Culture: Part II
Aired: 2021-08-12
Duration: 08:45


=== Felt the Need to Escape (08:02) ===

[00:00:00]  AXIS Moondi AXIS Moondi You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
[00:00:17]  Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
[00:00:21]  Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
[00:00:35]  My name is Brad Onishi.
[00:00:37]  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.
[00:00:55]  And so, Emily, thanks for joining me.
[00:00:57]  Thank you.
[00:00:58]  Thank you so much for having me.
[00:01:03]  We've been in the same Twitter tribe for a long time, this never-ending DM thread and other stuff with other folks.
[00:01:10]  And just in the last few months, you've really launched some amazing stuff.
[00:01:15]  You have your podcast going.
[00:01:16]  You've been writing for a long time at The Life She Wrote.
[00:01:21]  So I guess one of the first questions I have is just, what is your story?
[00:01:26]  You work sort of tirelessly to advocate for a lot of things, but one of them is religious trauma.
[00:01:32]  And I really want to sort of like zero in on that.
[00:01:34]  So what is your story?
[00:01:35]  How did you arrive at this point?
[00:01:38]  Well, I'll kind of give the short version of it here, but I was born and raised in more charismatic denominations.
[00:01:46]  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.
[00:02:02]  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.
[00:02:14]  And that was when I met my husband and started dating in our early 20s.
[00:02:18]  And by the time we were engaged, we stumbled upon a non-denominational church in the city we were living in.
[00:02:26]  And it was actually pretty Calvinist, but we didn't know that.
[00:02:30]  It was more subtle.
[00:02:31]  It was like, here, maybe you should try this ESV study Bible instead of the NIV that you were reading.
[00:02:37]  And the marriage small group we ever did was the Mark Driscoll Song of Songs series.
[00:02:42]  Wow.
[00:02:43]  I know.
[00:02:43]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:02:44]  And we're still married.
[00:02:49]  So yay.
[00:02:50]  No, my husband never really bought into all that.
[00:02:51]  He grew up Catholic, so he was really only evangelical because of me.
[00:02:55]  But I actually ended up on staff at that church for about two years.
[00:02:58]  And then we moved to the Bay Area.
[00:03:00]  Didn't really find a church home, I guess you could say, over there.
[00:03:03]  And then we got pregnant.
[00:03:05]  We started having kids.
[00:03:06]  And then I started to feel that inevitable guilt of, oh, we got to find a church.
[00:03:10]  We got to find a church.
[00:03:10]  We have to have a church home because we're raising kids.
[00:03:13]  And it was just kind of that ingrained need, I guess.
[00:03:17]  So fast forward to like 2017.
[00:03:21]  We're in the town right now.
[00:03:22]  I was a mom of just one at that time.
[00:03:25]  My son was two going on three.
[00:03:26]  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.
[00:03:36]  So that kind of, I guess you could say that kind of like jump-started my leaving.
[00:03:41]  I was being in that kind of toxic situation.
[00:03:44]  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.
[00:03:50]  And I was really struggling with my mental health, feeling overwhelmed as a stay-at-home parent.
[00:03:55]  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.
[00:04:18]  I think I was really struggling with identity, but I didn't have the language for it then.
[00:04:22]  And so on top of that, I was following a lot of the like white evangelical women authors and speakers on social media.
[00:04:31]  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.
[00:04:38]  We had the Me Too movement kind of starting, it kicking into full gear.
[00:04:43]  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.
[00:05:01]  Just like radio silence.
[00:05:03]  They're still tweeting out their one verse scripture and like talking about discipleship.
[00:05:07]  And I'm like, this doesn't add up.
[00:05:10]  Like this doesn't, this doesn't make sense.
[00:05:12]  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.
[00:05:23]  And I found this crazy little pocket of Twitter with these people that called themselves exvangelicals.
[00:05:29]  And I was like, who are these people?
[00:05:32]  First of all, they sound like me, but I didn't know anyone else like me existed.
[00:05:36]  I just thought I was like this rebellious kid.
[00:05:38]  And that's how I always felt in my mind, even though I was a grown ass woman.
[00:05:43]  And it wasn't long after that, that I found somebody said, Oh, you need to read Rachel Held Evans.
[00:05:46]  You need to read Searching for Sunday.
[00:05:48]  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.
[00:05:59]  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.
[00:06:07]  And I was pregnant too, so my emotions were just like on high.
[00:06:10]  Like, I'm sorry, I have to go.
[00:06:12]  I'm so sorry I have to go lock myself away and read this book for the entire weekend.
[00:06:14]  Like, I need to go.
[00:06:16]  And again, the same thing.
[00:06:18]  I felt like somebody had crawled inside my head and was writing down all of the words.
[00:06:22]  And we were the same exact age.
[00:06:24]  Our children were the same age.
[00:06:26]  She was pregnant at the time, also, with her second child.
[00:06:29]  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.
[00:06:37]  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.
[00:06:49]  So that was kind of how I dove into that world and started deconstructing.
[00:06:55]  I actually bought a ticket for Evolving Faith in 2019 before she got sick.
[00:07:02]  Yeah.
[00:07:03]  And then I still went.
[00:07:05]  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.
[00:07:15]  And it was a little traumatic.
[00:07:18]  I still think at that point, I didn't understand or grasp that evangelicals are not good at lament.
[00:07:25]  Or grief.
[00:07:26]  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.
[00:07:35]  And so it was a really, it was definitely something, a very unique experience.
[00:07:39]  I've never sat in a hockey arena and sobbed uncontrollably with 2000 strangers who are also sobbing uncontrollably.
[00:07:46]  It was a very, and I don't think I'll ever experience that again.
[00:07:49]  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.

=== Unique Experience (00:42) ===

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