Once Upon a Time in My Oceania

With all the dizzying aspects of leaving a cult, I couldn't imagine a life of happiness and fulfillment, let alone a life where kind souls would enter my life and change it for the better. I was concentrating solely on the confusion, grief and surviving of all the years where I was owned by a manipulative and controlling force that was my past church and the movement it belonged to for some time. I was unprepared, so unprepared, and my personal circumstances only complicated my exit and the eventual few years afterwards. I'm thankful I left, but for me, leaving was just another traumatic experience to process. I'd go on to shut down, crippled by that grief, reeling from years and years of living in a constant state of survival mode. To say it was a dark time in my life would be an understatement. I once told someone dear to me that I was like the dead just walking around. I just existed. It felt like a lonely existence, too.  Coming back from trauma isn't an easy task. ...

  I was taught to never lie. Never exaggerate, never utter a falsehood, never "bear false witness." I, like many raised in the strict world of fundamentalism, feared telling anything but the truth. Unless it was a means to avoid punishment, I was that person who would stand by what I perceived as truth. And yet, looking back I found that wasn't always the case. There were many lies I told during my time entrenched in Christian Fundamentalism and often those lies were lies I told to my very self.  These lies had extreme power over me. Power over my actions, my view of the greater world and the isolated one that was my only life. Many of these lies were lies I'd utter for only my ears to hear as I pondered my current circumstances in that environment and how I was unhappy and feeling helpless. Often, I felt like a captive more than a Christian.  These were the lies I told myself in fundamentalism... I'm all alone. I'm the problem. I have to stay. Every church is...

Living life with chronic illness comes with its own struggles to overcome, along with the added reality that your new "normal" may look entirely different. Of all the many things a person faces when confronted with an unexpected health condition, the questions of Why me? Why this? What did I do to deserve my health failing? can often be visited in the mind of a chronically ill patient. I grew up in an environment that always knew the answer to these questions: God made you sick.  Witnessing a manner of all illness afflict many an individual during my time in the Christian Fundamentalist movement, I don't have to traverse long down a path in my mind to recall the reasons why God would allow sickness in a follower's life. It was always one of two reasons: A trial for a believer to overcome and bring God the glory once they were healed, or the direct result of an unrepentant sin committed.  The latter reasoning tended to be the most widely accepted opinion in-group. It s...

If leaving a high control group was difficult, the steps afterwards are equally difficult, and trust me, they are. Taking that scary first step out will be the hardest and most emotional decision you will ever face, even if it is always the absolute right decision in leaving a controlling group, church or relationship. But the days after successfully making that exit are just the beginning of a long and sometimes tedious journey.  Recently during a conversation on trying to navigate life post-cult, the statement was made that every decision, every obstacle is a mountain. Something simple and ordinary to most individuals can seem as a mountain and one that, in order to move forward, a cult survivor has no choice but to climb. I've climbed a lot of mountains in my life. I've made that heartbreaking feat of surviving abuse, of fighting for a sense of justice. I told an unsavory character just recently, "I stared down my abuser at 12 years old, you don't...

This piece isn't a theology debate to try and change your mind on LGBTQ rights. It's not even necessarily a conversation starter on the issue. No, it's just a simple post on how sometimes love becomes stronger after years of hate. It's about choosing love when hate hurts your soul. This is just me sharing a bit of my heart with this post. If you asked those closest to me what is something I am passionate about, it's likely you would hear something along the lines of seeing the world through a more logical lense. The thing is they would also likely add doing this passionately...which is where my putting "logic" into practice can look more like diving head first in understanding something I will soon become passionate about. The thing is this process can very much be a gradual occurrence. Even years in the making. It was this pattern that becoming LGBTQ Affirming came about. First, I did not know whether I believed "homosexuality" was a...

My past faith was a hateful one, and, it taught me that to hate was not only sometimes necessary, it was holy. A holy hate could look like many things; in some cases, it was quite obvious, but other times, subtle. I know my experiences with the Independent Fundamental Baptist Church wasn't just an isolated experience. It is no big secret, at least among formers, that racism is alive and well in the movement. Whether it was the strict rules and bans on interracial dating, or the very limited leadership roles for people of color, covert racism was a constant undertone. Not always was the racism covert, however. Bob Jones University, among many other IFB colleges, had strict rules in regards to race and their students. Then, there was J. Frank Norris regarded as the Father of Fundamentalism and the founder of the Independent Fundamental Baptist movement. Norris had known connections to the Ku Klux Klan's top leader of that time in Texas, with the man receiving The Klan...

Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence I can't say I ever witnessed a happy marriage in my time in fundamentalism. Not one couple comes to mind over those twenty-one years where I feel were a relationship to look up to, to use as an example of what to look for in a future partner. The relationships I witnessed were often replicas of each other, with the power dynamics of each one appearing very much the same. The first thing I automatically think of is the fact men called the shots, even for their own wives. Very rarely (if ever) did I witness a woman making a decision without the greenlight by their husband. I knew wives who couldn't even go on a grocery run without their husband's permission. Every step had to be approved by their husband or else it was a step out of line. The inability to make decisions for themselves like where to go, what to wear, how to style their hair or how to apply their make-up are just a few examples. Women were admonished for simple things...