Brad speaks with journalist Anna Beahm from Reckon South. Anna shares her harrowing stories from living through (and surviving) purity culture. Over the last few years she has become one of the few journalists whose beat is purity culture, abstinence only sex ed programs, and related issues. She shares her perspectives on the negative effects that these phenomena have on physical health, mental health, and public health, not to mention relationships and self-development.
Anna Beahm: https://www.reckon.news/author/abeahm/
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
To Donate: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
SWAJ Apparel is here! https://straight-white-american-jesus.creator-spring.com/listing/not-today-uncle-ron
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY 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, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And I am back with our first interview of the new year.
Has been a while.
We've been doing our New Apostolic Reformation series with Matt Taylor and other stuff and holidays and all that.
So I have a fantastic guest and that is Anna Boehm from Reckon Media, Reckon South.
And so first, let me just say, Anna, thanks for joining me.
Thanks for having me, Brad.
Let me tell people about you and just all the kind of cool stuff you do.
And I'm really excited to discuss your reporting and your work today.
You are a North Alabama native.
One of the things that is just really unique about you as a journalist is you focus on purity culture, religion, faith, sex education in ways that are pretty singular in the journalistic landscape of the United States.
And I think especially in the South.
And so you've written just some amazing work over the last number of years on these topics.
And we want to get into those and talk about them, especially given just the spate of legislative proposals that are just across the South and across the nation as it comes to LGBT youth, as it comes to gender affirming care, as it comes to all kinds of things. as it comes to gender affirming care, as it comes Let me start here.
I know you're a journalist and usually get to ask the questions, so I'm going to turn it around.
Yeah, this is a new experience for me.
I have a bunch of journalist friends and I swear when we like go out to coffee, for the first 40 minutes, they ask me questions and I'm like, hey, stop.
I'm going to ask you now.
Yeah.
Well, sometimes my husband, you know, he gets home from work and he's like, are you still in interview mode?
Like, I'm not a source, like I'm your husband.
So, yeah.
Sorry, friends and family.
It's what makes it good at your job.
So, I guess first question is, again, I'm not sure that there's anyone else who's really just focused on purity culture, faith, sex ed, so on and so forth.
How did this kind of become an important focus for you and how did this become your journalistic beat?
Yeah, so just a little more like kind of context for who I am and my connection to purity culture and what kind of got me into talking about it.
So I grew up in church first.
I started going to church at a Baptist church, Southern Baptist Church.
As a little kid, you know, in the womb, I was there every Sunday, every Wednesday.
And my parents also sent me to a private Christian school, which was, I mean, they were non-denominational, but they definitely had a kind of a Calvinist, Presbyterian type bent to their theology and their teaching.
And so, you know, I had this like, Southern Baptist background, and then I've gotten this kind of like Reformed background from school.
I had this Reformed kind of background and a Southern Baptist background, and then when I was a teenager, my family started attending an Assemblies of God church.
Wait a minute, so you grew up in the South, and so the Southern Baptist stuff makes total sense, but then you get the Reformed Slice of the pie.
And then you get the Assemblies of God.
It's like you are, you ticked every box before you were like in junior high.
That's incredible.
Oh yeah, like I got all the t-shirts and all the ribbons, you know.
And also, keep this in mind too, at my school, you know, they allowed students of any Christian denomination to attend.
So I had, you know, students at my school that were Methodist, Catholic, Church of Christ, other flavors of charismatic church, you know, Church of God, Assemblies of God, Pentecostal, like it kind of ran the gamut.
And for there to be that much, you know, religious diversity in the tiny town I grew up in really exposed me to just a ton of different theological ideas and backgrounds.
And, you know, I was a very, I was serious about church.
I was serious about God and my faith.
And it really, it meant something to me.
And it meant something to me to try to be You know, a moral person who was not only in good standing with my family and my parents, but also with God, because like that just, I don't know, it was, it's always been something that's been a very deep and important thing for me.
And, you know, same today, I still have that strong sense of justice, which I think has very much influenced my reporting.
I was a virgin on my wedding night.
I got married when I was 20, like legit was a virgin.
During, you know, this wedding night first time experience, you know, I'm about to have sex with my new husband for the very first time and I break out in hives and I also have very sensitive skin.
And so like my husband thought, are you allergic to something in the sheets?
Which was like, is sadly a common occurrence for me to be some detergent on a towel and I put it on my face and then like, so his first thought was an allergic reaction.
And I was like, I didn't know what was happening.
I just like kind of like froze of like, What's going on?
Like, why do I feel like there's just like all this like heat and like tension welling up in my body?
And, you know, in my brain, I knew I'm married, it's okay to have sex now.
But my body was very, very good at that resistance, or of that kind of flush of heat that's like that signal of Oh, maybe I need to think about what I'm doing or consider what's going on.
And that continued actually for a few months after we were married.
But I didn't really like Put two and two together that it was purity culture or that, you know, this framework of sexuality that I was raised in was like affecting my marriage, which was supposed to be perfect.
You know, that was the whole, the whole spiel with purity culture was like, if you do all this right and if you marry a virgin and if you're a virgin, then you're going to have this like Magical, fulfilling sex life that's just going to be way better than if you would have slept around and gotten some experience before you were married.
But it turned out my husband, who is not a virgin, had less like weird baggage with that than I did.
A virgin and someone who was like, Who really like tried to live up to the purity culture ethics.
But you know, I just kind of filed that away and pushed it away.
But then in 2019, I saw the headlines about Joshua Harris denouncing his book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and saying he was getting divorced.
He was no longer a Christian.
And I remember seeing that headline.
And like sharing it with some of my other, you know, young female co-workers.
And it was just like this moment of like, whoa, like, holy cow, like Josh Harris is now denouncing this.
So like, what's going on here?
And throughout my early years of marriage, I'd had many, many conversations with, you know, girlfriends of mine.
Like I had one girlfriend who Was just distraught about her sex life with her husband and didn't understand what was going on or why there wasn't this connection happening.
And I remember sitting in the floor of my apartment with her eating McDonald's fries and crying at midnight.
And it's like, I don't know, some of those experiences, like those are the people that came to mind when I thought about like... Yeah.
Okay, it's not just me, you know, and there's got to be something going on.
And so in 2020, me and several other of my co-workers at Reckon, Anna-Claire Vollers, Abby Crane, we wrote a series of stories about purity culture.
And that was strictly a series.
I didn't really plan for that to be like my beat.
I was more like the person who was like, I know about all this stuff because I read all these books and I read, you know, Every Young Woman's Battle and How to Be a Godly Woman.
And actually, I had never read Josh Harris's book.
I did read it when I was researching him.
But obviously, I knew about it and I knew about that whole movement.
And so I had a purity ring and like signed a purity pledge.
So You did it.
You had it.
Yeah, I did it.
And so, gosh, I just lost my train of thought.
Oh, the series.
So we did the series.
And as part of that series, I had written this op-ed about my wedding night experience.
And at first I was like, I don't really know if I want to like talk about this.
And because I kind of shared the story with, I believe it was Abby who was the one who really encouraged me.
So I sent it to her and I was like, will you just like read this?
Like, I don't know, you know, like, is this okay?
Like, I need to talk about this.
And she was like, oh my God, Annie, you have to publish this.
I was like, My dad's gonna read it!
But I did publish it.
And after that happened, I got just a flood of messages from people I went to church with, people I went to school with, people who I'd never met before online, but were just sending me emails about their own horrific experiences.
And just seeing the influx of that not only validated to me that I wasn't the only one who was trying to figure out, like, what went wrong?
Why does this feel weird?
How do we make sense of what's going on here?
And so from there, I just here and there wrote another story about purity culture, purity culture news.
I started covering some like Church 2 stuff, Me Too stuff, Josh Duggar, the SBC abuse crisis, and I mean those stories did well, and people obviously wanted to talk about it.
So I guess it was just like late last year, I know like the Faith and sex person at Reckon.
Which is awesome.
And as you're talking, I'm thinking, you know, I think some people listening will know that there has been a lot written about purity culture over the last 20 years.
And there's been really, I think some of the most influential writing has been memoir, you know, and memoir mixed with sort of storytelling.
So like Linda K. Klein's Pure and Jamie Lee Finch has done a lot in this area and many others.
But The way that you've approached it is really you shared your story in ways that was so vulnerable and yet so helpful to so many people.
And then this is really like blossomed into this set of writing that you've done, this journalism that really provides like Windows into the ongoing effects of purity culture and these approaches to sex and gender from conservative Christian communities on our public square and on individuals and communities which I think is really just essential.
So I want to sort of just jump into that.
I want to come back to purity culture as a kind of something that is really harmful.
It's kind of where you started and in your own story, your own wedding night.
I was the same way.
And, and, and we've talked about this.
I'm, I'm obviously a man.
And then I want to recognize that like, uh, purity culture unduly affects women in terms of its pressure and its standards.
But I did, I too, like thought I did everything right.
And I too, was just like kind of surprised that, um, doing everything right in purity culture doesn't mean a fabulous sex life, uh, like at the snap of a fingers.
So anyway, or even respect from like people around you.
Like I had, I mean, I, I, I wasn't like this teenager who was like dressing provocatively to try to get attention, but you know, there was at least, well, it was really just one incident where a teacher publicly berated me in front of the entire class for what I was wearing.
And as I was like looking around the room, I'm like, there's way more cleavage going on than what tiny bit I have in this room.
So I didn't really, I didn't understand it.
And that was another like point of confusion for me.
It was like, okay, so I do everything right.
I'm not having sex.
I read my Bible every day.
I'm involved in my youth leadership team.
I'm trying to dress appropriately, but also like kind of be pretty and like, That's not enough.
Yeah.
Still.
Yeah.
So.
No, that's... Oh yeah, yeah, alright.
So, let's do it this way.
There's some people listening who are thinking, okay, you know, like, your story is harrowing and it's not uncommon, but is purity culture a thing of the 90s?
Is it a thing that just sort of went by the wayside?
Are there, like, sort of just ongoing instances of Absentence-only education, these understandings of gender as binary and as patriarchal, are these affecting our public square?
And I know for you, you're up to date on this sort of legislative currents across the country in state houses and so on.
So, would you just give us a few examples of how, like, in 2023, this is just still on the agenda in state houses, state legislatures, and so on and so forth?
Yeah, so when I think about like purity culture, especially in the context of like abstinence only education, and this was something I didn't really have a concept of in my head until I actually started like researching it and digging into like the actual Like, facts of what's going on.
So, of course, my Christian school had an abstinence-only sex ed, and a crisis pregnancy center came in to do it, and basically they just showed us pictures of diseased genitals and told us about all the diseases we could get from having sex.
There was no information about Safer sex, nothing about condoms, nothing about birth control, like absolutely like zero, like nothing for like actually preparing you to be an adult or to be a sexual person except for don't have sex.
And I thought that that was something that was confined to my Christian school.
It's not.
It's not at all.
In fact, I believe, well, actually Mississippi sex ed law expired, the legislature let it expire last year, but in Mississippi, you could talk about condoms, but you could not demonstrate how to use one.
And so, like, I found this wild video of a man telling someone how to put a sock on.
And he's, like, rolling the sock up his foot, and I'm like, that's not how anybody puts socks on, but it's definitely how a condom goes on.
You know?
And so, like...
No, I've seen it.
I've seen you post this stuff and it's just funny thinking of someone being in a class and just being like, let's practice putting on socks just because, I don't know, no unrelated reason and doing it in this most awkward, weird way that like, as you say, no one ever puts a sock on that way.
Yeah, and like, and just when I think about that, and then, because I was trying to figure out like, what happened at my school, you know, like, why was, um...
Why was I shown photos of genitals as a 14-year-old and advanced AIDS and disease as like a scare tactic?
Like, is this something?
Because it very much felt like a scare tactic for me and obviously my peers, but I started digging in and there's lots of places in America where you can't talk about condoms, you can't talk about LGBTQ people without talking about the risk of AIDS.
in LGBTQ sexual activity.
And then there's, even until last year, or maybe two years ago, I'm sorry, time is just flying in these pandemic worlds.
But Alabama just recently updated their sex ed curriculum to no longer include a phrase that says that homosexuality is like not considered an acceptable practice or behavior.
Um to most people in society so like there's just already there's so much of this like Restricting information going on.
And we know from federal budget data that the federal government has funded abstinence only sex education programs, has sent grants to crisis pregnancy centers that are often, you know, religiously run to do these sort of sex ed programs, create sex ed curriculum in schools.
And there's just a lot of there's a lot of pseudoscience in there.
I mean, I'm not a scientist, but As a journalist who's looked at a lot of data and a lot of curriculum, I know that abstinence-only sex education not only does it does not work, when I say it doesn't work, I mean it doesn't reduce teen pregnancy rates, it doesn't reduce STI rates, it does not reduce, you know, Unintended pregnancies, it only, at best, does nothing.
But there was just some recent data that showed that in conservative states, abstinence-only sex ed made the teen birth rate increase.
Yeah.
So, like, just on its face, if we look at, like, you know, this push of abstinence-only sex education, which often includes this message of, like, self-respect and making good choices and being, you know, smart and Basically not having sex.
In fact, now that the term that sex educators are using is not abstinence only sex ed, they will call it sexual risk avoidance education, which is kind of a new term that's a little more ambiguous and doesn't actually... Yeah, yep.
Teach people about risk avoidance, which would include like condoms and PrEP and birth control and how to get testing for STIs and all these other things that do include safer sex.
So, yeah, I mean, it's very much still funded in our culture today.
and now we also have a number of bills that are trying to prevent conversations about gender and sexual orientation in the classroom now I mean that was never something that was brought up in my classroom obviously but it was very much stressed that you know it's not okay to be gay if the
That would be a violation of purity culture to be having sex with anyone who is not your opposite gender in a heterosexual, monogamous marriage.
So... Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
I think that last point is one I just want to make sure folks like really hover on and I think it's really important what you just said is like, So we've gone from don't talk about sex at all, let's scare you, let's avoid the topic, we're not going to teach you anything about how sex works, how to be a sexual person, just nothing.
You're going to go into this with no knowledge of how your body works, of how, as you say, how to find various forms of birth control, condoms, testing.
So on and so how to communicate about these things with partners, like none of that.
Like, how do you talk about this?
How do you actually communicate?
And there's also no teaching on consent either.
Yeah.
Like, how do you communicate?
Yes.
No.
What like anything related to consent?
That's none of that's included.
But what we have now is this like expansion.
And I really hope people make the connection of like abstinence only sex education, purity culture, and then Don't say gay in the classroom, right?
And so you can't talk about, like if I'm in England, I'm not teaching health.
I'm not in a public school teaching anatomy, health, sex ed.
I'm teaching literature and we're reading Shakespeare.
I'm teaching history and we're talking about various instances from history.
And if I mention the sexuality or the gender orientation of one of the characters or one of the figures historically, I'm now perhaps in danger if I teach in Florida or other parts of the country of like losing my job.
So the expansion of this from the sex ed domain or non-domain to the like history, literature, any mention, any mention of like gender and sex is like, you know, you might be fired It's like a progression.
And I think one of the things that's great about your reporting is you really just are relentless on the fact that purity culture and these approaches to sex ed, to gender, sexuality, and so on, really hurt trans and other LGB youth.
And so, would you mind just going over that for some of us?
I think there are people listening, many, and we talk about this on the show quite often, but There's folks listening that are like, they know that there are bills across the country that are trying to prevent gender affirming care and so on, but I feel like you're in the weeds.
The details, would you help us like sort of see a more granular image of like what this looks like on the ground across the nation?
Yeah.
And this is actually a really great transition into my philosophy of purity culture.
Because I know that purity culture has kind of become a buzzword, unfortunately, when I was growing up in church.
We didn't call it purity culture.
It was just what you did.
It was true love waits or You know, we didn't have this term, purity culture, to describe this, like, set of ideology.
But as I started processing my own experience with it, hearing about other people's experiences, researching about absence, always sex ed, and the purity culture movement of the 90s, I saw this, like, huge web of, like, tentacles Not to give like a scary image, but it was like, in my mind I could picture this just like web of stuff that purity culture was just...
Touching everything in many ways.
Because if you think about the issues of sexuality and religion, those are two very deep and personal issues that are very integral to people's well-being, their sense of self, their sense of their standing and acceptance in their families and their communities.
This is all very deep-rooted stuff.
And so when you have this purity culture ideal of One cisgender man, one cisgender woman, forever or else.
I mean, that frames a lot of things.
That frames our concepts of dating.
It frames our concepts of interacting with people of the opposite sex, regardless of your sexual orientation.
It frames what you do for work, how your work is perceived.
I used to be, once upon a time, I was a pastor's wife, and people were just flabbergasted that I was a journalist and I didn't sing.
And I was just like, I don't fit.
I realized very quickly that I didn't fit this prescribed gender role for what a pastor's wife or an upstanding Christian woman was.
It was like, I couldn't be my full self and feel like I could fully fit into that mold.
And when you see all these things with, like, don't say gay, anti-trans legislation, it's this effort to push back on this expansion that's happening.
And unfortunately, it... Okay, for me as a rational, factual person who observes facts and tries to construct my beliefs and opinions based on those facts, it doesn't make any sense why people would promote this, you know?
People have been transitioning for a long time.
Like, trans people are not a new phenomenon at all.
They've been around for a very long time, and there's been, you know, different versions of gender-affirming care For a very long time.
Like, for example, I think I wrote about this.
I did write about this.
This fall, Christian blogger Matt Walsh had released this kind of expose of Vanderbilt and their gender-affirming care program.
And Vanderbilt has been providing various levels of gender-affirming care to people in the Mid-South and in Tennessee since the 70s.
Yeah.
This is not, it's not necessarily a new thing, but I think because it's become more prominent and the fact of being trans is considered, you know, a violation of purity culture or a violation of like You know, these sexual norms that are established, one cis man, one cis woman, forever or else.
I have to give credit to that quote.
That's Emily Joy Allison's definition of purity culture, and it's really my favorite.
And y'all should read her book.
But yeah, I think all this legislation, as these things have become more visible, and LGBTQ people have And I guess you could probably answer this too.
I don't know if people feel threatened by this.
And there's other various expansions going on with the law.
I don't, and I guess you could probably answer this too.
I don't know if people feel threatened by this.
Yeah.
It's like fear of changing a norm.
I don't know.
I wish I knew exactly what it is because it's just so many factors, I feel like.
It's so nuanced, but all of these laws are absolutely directly related to purity culture and this ideal, what's painted as this sexual ideal, which Really isn't practiced in a lot of places around the world.
And it's not really a human behavior that's considered like typical either.
So, I mean, humans are not very good at monogamy.
That's just a fact.
Yeah.
But this legislation is, I feel like an outpouring or like a reaction to the progress that's happened.
Yeah.
And it's unfortunate because These are people's lives, you know?
And of course, I know many trans people, and even there was a trans person at my high school, and he has since transitioned after high school, but knowing him and knowing how much happier he is now, how much better his life is, his health has improved, When you restrict those things from people, you know, people who want to make their own decisions about their lives and their identities, it can cause real harm.
Yeah.
And that's something, another thing that comes to mind when you talk about the harm of purity culture on trans and LGBT people is conversion therapy, which is a really gross practice.
In my mind, there's been lots written about it.
If anyone wants to go on a Google deep dive, there's lots of stuff to be about conversion therapy and how the industry has collapsed as, you know, its founders have said, oh, I'm still gay.
You know, conversion didn't work.
But the unfortunate truth of conversion therapy is there's absolutely a link between conversion therapy or families and communities that are unaccepting of LGBTQ youth.
There's a much higher suicide rate.
Yeah.
Much higher rates of self-harm, much higher rates of depression, mental illness, higher rates of substance abuse.
And those things can't be ignored.
Yeah.
I mean, speaking of public health concerns, that's a public health concern as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and what I'll do is I'll link to your Reckon profile in the show notes.
So folks, if you're listening and you really want to see how Anna has drilled down into the details of these things, I mean, Anna has written about how cervical cancer rates go up when people are in an abstinence-only sex education context, has written about all of the money Anna has written about how cervical cancer rates go up when people are in an abstinence-only sex education context, And yet they usually lead to outcomes of greater teen pregnancy, a higher percentages of teen pregnancy.
But also in what you just discussed, the ways that this just has an overwhelmingly negative effect on trans youth and what it does to mental health, the suicide rates, the depression rates.
There is a very real sense, and I think this is the thing that I would love for people to take away here, It's a purity culture, abstinence of the education and everything related to it is a public health risk.
It's a public health concern.
It has a negative effect on the health of Americans.
It's not just old-fashioned Christian teaching.
It's not just, oh, those traditional kind of Christian folks, they just they have their ways.
And I saw in my Orange Wave series, I put in an interview with Rick Perry and somebody said, hey, Governor Perry, who used to be the governor of Texas, Absence only doesn't work.
Everything you've just said, Anna.
And here's the statistics.
And he was like, so what else should we do?
Meaning, like, we should teach people about comprehensive sex ed.
And Rick Perry's response was like, well, it does work.
And the other interviewer was like, well, I just told you why it doesn't.
He was like, but it does.
Because if you don't have sex, you don't get pregnant.
So that's what I learned.
And you could tell.
But people don't do that.
I know.
It doesn't work, though, because they're not doing it.
You could see on Rick Perry's face, like, A, I can't advocate for anything else because I'm governor of Texas and I can't do that.
But B, you know, Rick Perry, not the not the most nimble on the stage there.
And so he just it was clear he didn't have a tape to play.
He was not he had not given a been given like a file to play.
And he was just like, well, it does work.
You don't have sex.
You don't get pregnant.
And the interviewer just kept at him like, Like you would, and it was just amazing to watch him just have no response.
So I really hope people will just take away that very clear thing.
These cultures and these approaches to sex ed are having deleterious and sometimes tragic effects on American lives, especially American youth.
They hurt us, and yet the government funds them, right?
And we as taxpayers have given billions of dollars to these programs over the last two, three decades.
All right, we're going to run out of time.
So, I do want to talk about something that I'm sure many people don't know about, and that's the fact that January is Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month.
My co-host, Dan Miller, works with the Religious Trauma Institute as a trauma-informed coach and practitioner.
I have in the past.
I know I'm not doing that right now, but I have worked with them in the past.
They're doing great things around this.
Would you tell us about Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month.
You have a great definition of spiritual abuse in a piece you wrote a while back on Purity Culture.
You say that spiritual abuse is when a spiritual leader uses religion or beliefs to exert power or control of another person or group of people.
It can happen in large and small groups and on an individual level.
So, Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month.
What can people do?
What is happening?
Are there resources?
Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions?
Yeah, so these terms, spiritual abuse and religious trauma, and more specifically, religious trauma syndrome, which might be a term that you've heard floating around, these are not official, like, diagnostic terms.
I want to make that clear.
Like, there's not, there's not like, you know, Religious trauma syndrome is not in the DSM, though there are efforts to have it included.
You know, it's not an officially recognized issue, but more and more therapists and psychiatrists are noticing these trends in their clients, and they're looking for resources and looking to educate other therapists and psychiatrists about how to approach and how to treat these issues.
Because often, you know, in therapy, there will be some sort of, you know, a therapist will encourage you to like find some connection to something deeper in you that can give you hope or, you know, peace during whatever you're dealing with.
And when you've experienced spiritual abuse, if your youth pastor molested you, if you're, you know, the pastor at the church that you work at is horribly abusive and coercive, and neglectful.
A lot of times, unfortunately, and this is just reality, that spirituality can become clouded, you know, because you've got something that used to be or at one point was the source of joy and peace and contentment and meaning.
Yeah.
And gosh, grappling with that is a lot of work, because it's like, for me, with my purity culture experience, I was in this place of like, what do I do now that this paradigm has shattered for me?
But with spiritual abuse and religious trauma syndrome, you mentioned the Religious Trauma Institute.
They're a really incredible group.
They'll help you find a therapist who's educated in religious trauma.
They offer courses for other therapists and practitioners who are hoping to treat patients that are dealing with These issues and also just having like a what I think is the biggest push or the thing that I think is just in my opinion, the thing that I see is
The biggest sign of progression is this openness and willingness to understand that spirituality is not a sense of peace for everyone and that these spiritual environments can sometimes and often, as we've seen over and over again, do involve abuse or coercion of some way that can be very detrimental to the human psyche.
So but yeah, and there's there's a number of podcasts out there.
There's lots and lots of books.
I'd be totally down to give you a list.
I actually I have a list somewhere.
Maybe I can share that.
But um, there's just lots of resources.
Out there and I'm really anxious to see what happens with this research group that the Religious Trauma Institute has.
I've actually, I've got to email Laura Anderson today.
I'm hoping to interview her for a kind of a bigger piece on explaining more about You know, kind of more of an intergranular way of this version of what I'm saying about Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month, but I mean, there's research happening.
Academics are researching what's going on.
Psychiatrists are researching this phenomenon of people who've left a religion or have been abused in a religion and are seeking help and feel like Where do I go?
You know?
So that's what I think is the most important aspect to talk about with Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month and also just let people know like if you're had some experience in a religious setting And you're trying to grapple with your own faith and this experience you had.
Like, there's people out there also dealing with that, too.
Because that's a very isolating place to be.
It's incredibly isolating, especially if maybe your partner or your family is still deeply religious, but because of your experience, you're like, ugh.
It's hard.
Who do I talk to?
Yeah, so that's kind of, that's really what I think is important about what's happening right now in the conversation about religious trauma.
No, when I was working with folks over at Religious Trauma Institute, one of the most common refrains was just, I kind of thought I was the only one, I didn't have any idea where to go, I didn't know any resources on how to kind of rebuild my understanding of myself, of my sexuality, my understandings of gender, but also I think there's ways that people feel like What they've experienced doesn't always like amount to either religious trauma or spiritual abuse.
And I think, look, today you've shared these experiences and I had similar ones where religious leaders who have spiritual authority in your eyes are telling you that if you have sex, you'll die.
Or if you go have sex before you're married at age 16 or age 18, there's a good chance you'll die.
And it's like, that's bordering on abuse because it's somebody telling you that your body is, right, a certain way, your sexuality is so dangerous that if you go do this, you should, and if you do do it, you should feel so guilty and so wracked with a sense of shame that, you know, it will follow you and live in your body for a long time.
So one of the things I think is really important is just to say to people like, You don't need to have the most harrowing story ever to feel as if you're somebody that can talk about spiritual abuse or religious trauma.
And if that's something that's on your mind and you're already thinking about it, It's probably already worth figuring out if there's some way to talk to someone, to get help, to join a small group, to read a few resources, a couple of books and so on and so forth.
So all right, we're out of time.
And so I just want to say first, thank you, Anna, for sharing just all the things that you personally and professionally are Living through and putting in the world.
Would you help folks find you?
Where can they link up with your work?
I'll put some stuff in the show notes, but Twitter, other places, where are you?
So, everyone should go follow Reckon News.
Our website is Reckon.News.
Twitter is at Reckon News.
Same with Facebook and Instagram.
I am at underscore Anna Beahm.
That's A-N-N-A B-E-A-H-M.
And I'm that on Instagram, Twitter, all the places.
But yeah, thank you so much for having me on, Brad.
I think this is just, I'm so glad we got to do this because, you know, as I've been reading your book and learning more about your experience in the church and Hearing from Dan about his experience as well.
I think it's really important that we have people who grew up in these communities researching and talking about this because I think a lot of times when you have like an outside secular perspective, there's a lot of stuff that gets lost about the deep humanity that is related to all of these topics and how it's Way more complicated than just that makes no sense.
It's always so much deeper.
Amen.
I'm so stoked about this podcast and stoked to be on it.
No, well, thank you.
I agree.
I think those of us who've lived it, It really does hit different to talk about it because it's in our bodies, it's in our spirits in ways that just... hard to get that.
And don't get me wrong, I have so many friends who did not live it and are great journalists and great researchers on this, so I'm not trying to... Right, of course.
Yeah.
But there is a different perspective.
And what you said at the end there, I think is really also so important, is it's really easy for folks on the outside to be like, how could you believe something so stupid?
That's just idiotic, you know?
And it's like, well...
That's A, not going to help anybody, and B, it is, as you said, much more complicated than that.
So, all right, friends, as usual, find us at Straight White JC, excuse me, find me at Bradley Onishi.
I have some events coming up to talk about my book and Christian nationalism, so if you are in San Francisco, Or if you are in Philadelphia or you're in Seattle, check out our show notes and our link tree and you'll see some links to events there.
Trying to get out to Nashville.
So if I get out to Nashville and can hang with Anna and some other cool people, we'll let you know.
But we'll be back later this week with It's In The Code and the weekly roundup.
But for now, we'll just say thanks for being here.
