After hearing that my alma mater had fired a member of its theology faculty for coming out as a trans man, I put out a call on Twitter for stories from men who grew up in a deeply religious culture and asked how it affected their sexual development and gender identity. Here are a few of their stories.
D.D.
The religious culture I grew up in was different: predominantly Catholic, but not conventional. I was initially raised by my mother, who identified as a Catholic witch and installed some of her “fairy angelic magical” practices in me. She was not the most stable person, which led me to staying with my grandparents, who were more traditional. This was all within the same small, poor town in Scotland, where the church played a key role in the community. I remember going to Sunday school, where in one lesson we covered sin and Jesus’s role, looking at disease: a leper, and a homosexual, and Jesus cured them both.
This installed dread in me, as at this point I was beginning to realize my sexual orientation. This was around the age when I first started masturbating, and it often concerned thoughts of kissing another boy who went to Sunday school. I adopted a strange ritual approach to combating this, petitioning to God and the angels each night, that my penis would have turned into a vagina when I awoke, making me a heterosexual female rather than a gay male. Alas, my ritual had disappointing results.
The message I received loud and clear was that I had to have acceptance from Jesus, and in order for Jesus to accept me, my community had to. So I saw my sexuality as a public spectacle. When I came out I ached for acceptance, and for some reason I thought that calling myself bisexual was the best route. Maybe if Jesus wasn’t keen on my homosexuality he could at least relate to my straight side. I was wrong. However, my mother’s approach: “Being gay is up to you, it doesn’t affect me, unless you are a lesbian and hitting on me” strangely enough helped me to realise that sexuality could in fact be a private thing.
So, I was incredibly confused. This confusion led to rejection, of Jesus and the sexual and gender binaries — although this could have been a result of my strange ritual, who knows.
R.C.
I wasn’t raised in a religious household. I found God on my own. I didn’t become born-again until I was 20, when I fell in love with the daughter of a pentecostal preacher.
But I always had a curious fascination with God. I prayed every night. When I didn’t get cast in a play in seventh grade, I decided I was an atheist. Of course, I was praying again by eighth grade.
So, when I converted, it wasn’t out of nowhere, though my friends and family certainly thought it was. I’d been going to Catholic services fairly regularly. Jane’s type of faith was a mystery to me; it wasn’t even really something we discussed early on in our dating.
Jane was two years older than me. We’d been friends a while, but fell for each other at a theater conference. We held hands on the bus ride home. Her friends told me she was off the market, but Jane ended up making all the moves. We’d make out on my bed and I’d play emo music. One night, she started to cry. She said she couldn’t keep doing that. She said, if we were going to keep dating, that I had to become a Christian. I said I already was a Christian, and she said, “Well, you have to become born again.”
I was in love, and I was pretty sure I believed in God. Or, at least, I really wanted to believe in God. So I said, sure. I got baptized though this campus group called His House, which was absurd and “hip” and, even then, sort of made me want to claw my eyes out. After this, I began attending her church. It was a small place in Shepherd, MI that served as a daycare during the week (we had to set up the toys and play stations after our Sunday night services), oscillating between 15 and 25 members.
It was a Holy Ghost church. Lots of hands in the air. I began playing guitar in the worship band, I was baptized by fire and began speaking in tongues. I stopped drinking. My friends all said I changed. I lost some of them. But I was in love.
I had told Jane that I was a virgin. A few months before I’d met her, I’d had sex for about thirty seconds with a girl who was really into the Talking Heads before I called it off, feeling like what I was doing was wrong. Wrong, perhaps, is the wrong word. It wasn’t a moral thing. I wasn’t waiting for marriage. I don’t know what I was waiting for. But I said that since I’d pulled out, I was still a virgin.
Jane and I kissed, a lot. After she cried, we’d slowed down considerably, but we still kissed. Once, a woman in our church said we were setting a bad example for her kids by holding hands so much. I tried to stop masturbating on my own time, partly out of my faith and partly out of my commitment to her. Lusting after another person is a form of adultery, after all. The longest I ever lasted was three weeks. I did my best to think of her as I did it, and mostly succeeded. But once, in a fit of anxiety and mild depression (I’m diagnosed), I looked at some porn. And that pretty much destroyed me. I stayed up all night, crying and praying to God, making commitments and promises and everything else you could do. I told Jane the next day, tears pouring down my face, and she smiled and forgave me.
I bought books on “sexual addiction,” books that demonized masturbation. I met with a male friend early in the morning, one I considered virtuous, and discussed my “addiction.” I read them, underlined them. They did nothing. Jane and I would joke about all the sex we’d have once we got married. I used to masturbate to the idea of it. The years passed.
For the first two years, we barely did anything beyond kissing and caressing each other. She’d never even touched me below the waist. We almost split for a while and I’d say for about two months, we barely touched each other. I remember things changed around our two-year anniversary. It was Labor Day and we were staying with my parents. They were out of town, so we slept in my bed together (we did this occasionally). I saw her in her underwear and was reminded of how beautiful she was. We lay there in the dark, both awake. Finally, I said, “do you want to mess around?” And she basically tackled me. Even then, we didn’t have sex.
Our last year together, she moved to take an internship. We grew apart. I’d go stay with her occasionally. Things weren’t the same. I saw her without a bra for the first time. She touched me down there for the first time. We had oral sex for the first time. She was self-conscious. I didn’t know what to tell her. We lay there in silence. I think that was one of the last times we saw each other before she broke up with me.
The night she broke up with me, I immediately went home, tears in my eyes, and masturbated to pornography for the first time in months. I lost it, overwhelmed with guilt. I was still a Christian, but it seemed harder all of a sudden. Just because I was single didn’t make it okay. I was up all night, apologizing, poring over my Bible, looking for comfort. It was pretty much the worst night of my life.
I lost my virginity “for real” about two months later. I went to grad school in another state, where I didn’t know anybody and could start over. I started seeing a girl named Rachel. She was horrible to me. She was a Wiccan who converted to Christianity even though I never asked her to. We went to church. She told me she loved me. It took lots of coaxing for me to have sex with her, not because I didn’t want to, but because I felt I was giving up something I’d always meant for Jane.
But it was so much easier to sin without her in my life. Because, if I want to break down lots of therapy and years of reflection, Christ was never really my God, she was. I lost faith near the end of that school year. I was just grasping at straws by that point, anyway. I’m not a Christian anymore, by the way. Not an atheist, either.
This wouldn’t have been so difficult if Rachel and I hadn’t been so toxic to each other. I spent years resenting Jane, resenting Rachel, resenting Christ. I was supposed to have sex with Jane. Instead, I had sex with Rachel. So I resented Christianity for not letting me have sex with the one person I ever loved. So sex sucked. I always felt guilty. And that didn’t stop for a long time. The aftermath of sex was always sort of miserable for me as I went through grad school, and even beyond.
So now I write lots of plays about the intersection of sex and evangelicalism. What always got me deep down was the idea of purity, not as it honored God, but as it bound two people together, the way it could help eclipse your regrets, even your heartbreaks. The idea of being a “born-again virgin,” as silly as it is, is something a lot of my writing still centers on.
M.S.
I grew up in Missouri, where my father was a Southern Baptist pastor. When I was twelve, I went to a summer camp where they split up the girls and boys. I remember being told that girls would try to seduce me, that I would have to be strong in order to resist these hypothetical temptresses. I remember the speaker outlining a situation in which a girl would be kissing me while sitting in my lap, and she would lean in and whisper next to my ear, her voice throaty and straining, “I want you.” This was to encourage us to avoid any situations that might provoke temptation, but I’m confident it had the opposite effect.
I also remember my father and I listening to some pastoral tape in the car regarding sex, the break-down of which was that both masturbation and premarital sex was a sin, but in the instance that you had to choose (at gunpoint, or perhaps to save a life), then choose masturbation. I think masturbation generated less sin or something. I had already started masturbating when I listened to that, and despite my best efforts couldn’t manage to give it up for more than a week, and so from then until I was about twenty years old masturbation felt pleasurable, but sandwiched between bouts of guilt.
My youth pastor in high school was removed from his position because he got a woman pregnant. My father used this as a teachable moment, but condoms weren’t mentioned once.
I got my hands on my very first condom on a Boy Scout trip to Florida. Our trip to Key West hilariously coincided with Key West Pride Week, and while there one of the other boys found one of those coin-operated bathroom machines, and we all shelled out for one. I saved it until I got home, and, since I knew I wasn’t going to get any use out of it, I just put it on to see what it felt like – turned out it just felt illicit, and I made sure to bury it deep into the trash so my parents wouldn’t see it.
I majored in religion in college, which, when combined with the non-American literature I’d encountered in high school and through my own reading, did a marvelous job of widening my perspective. By the end of my sophomore year I had come to think that the Bible had a totally human source, that religion was a social construct, and was eager my own religious values. That summer I worked as a children and youth pastor at a church halfway across the country, on the East Coast. I started dating somebody out there, and although we were afforded almost no private space, I did manage to have my first sexual experience in the youth office late one night. Though the location was a bit awkward (the same couch on which I had counseled high school kids), it went well enough, except that the prospect of intercourse made me extremely conflicted. I definitely wanted it, but the “old thought” lodged in deep, and I was surprised to find that I still loathed my own desire for sex – much to her dismay, I turned her down at every opportunity until I went home. We broke up about a month after.
During my last year of under-grad, I realized that calling myself an atheist was more intellectually honest than being a Christian whose God was a function of physics. To celebrate, I moved out to Boston, and got a Master’s degree focusing on atheist-theist dialogue, postmodern thought, and erotic poetry. During the summer between my first and second years of grad school, I drove out to that same ex-girlfriend’s house and we finally slept together. It was a weird trip. She got married about a year later.
I’m still mostly straight (John Barrowman was the Incident that made me “incidentally homosexual” on Kinsey’s scale), but the way I treat sex is unrecognizable from the way I did when I grew up. I’ve not really fallen in love since I became sexually active, so my sex life has consisted entirely of friends-with-benefits situations. But I still do, occasionally, have feelings of guilt – it appeared multiple times while writing this, in fact. There is a part of me that is still very ashamed of my sexuality, and I haven’t yet figured out how to exorcise it.
Mo
Except for Head Start, I attended Catholic schools my whole life. I was “Catholic” as much as I am vaguely “ethnic” – you could apply those labels but they don’t have any real meaning to me. Being a child of divorce and a half-Arab guy growing up in a lower-middle class Irish neighborhood, I was conditioned early on to try to fit in and please everyone. I learned how to mumble out the grace before meals prayer in some slipshod Gaelic and had a Kidz Bop understanding of the Catechism. Aside from the time in third grade I fell asleep during mandatory monthly Mass, I never really stuck out in matters involving faith.
I went to an all-boys high school, where most of us didn’t have the patience to go deeper into the Bible than “give unto Caesar.” Faith and the role of the spiritual self gave way to loud farts and macho posturing. “Faggot” was a term of endearment. One particularly ebullient chemistry teacher threatened to stick his cock in our ears if we didn’t quiet down and learn the mole formula. This got big laughs.
My senior year of high school was the first time I was presented with anything having to do with sexuality and faith. Our teacher, Mrs. O’Reilly (not her real name), was a holy roller of the highest order and was determined to put the fear of God in us about everything from abortion to the perils of young men and rape culture. One class focused on the idea that “women can say anything; you need to be careful,” as if leering young jezebels drunk on power and Mike’s Hard Lemonade were looking to get you into bed and then ruin your life if they felt like it. We were taught that our bodies were beautiful, precious things that needed to be kept pure, even if by 9th period those very same bodies were routinely producing hideous, vile odors.
Almost every day after school I had sex with my girlfriend, who went to the all-girls school down the street. I would ride the bus to her place with a head full of guilt and belly full of anxiety at the prospect of sullying my beautiful gift. This blessedly went away as soon as I slipped a condom on and would come back with a vengeance during each pregnancy scare.
By the time I got to college, I had tuned out Mrs. O’Reilly’s sex shaming but was presented with a whole new kind of embarrassment: the single-sex dorms at my Catholic university. Parietal rules meant that girls weren’t allowed in your room after midnight on the weekdays and 2 AM on the weekends. You could be expelled if a particularly enterprising RA heard noises, busted into your room, and caught you having sex on your shitty loft bed. It was a dirty, secret kind of fun, but still dirty and secret. I made it a point to have everywhere on campus as an affront to every stupid fucking rule they had in place. This culminated in an ill-conceived plot to have sex with my then-girlfriend in the on campus basilica, a venture that ended with the two of us scurrying out of the chapel with our pants around our ankles thanks to a particularly creaky pew.
In short, the story of my sexual awakening was first apathy to, and then a battle against, a faith that I was surrounded by but never really embraced. I never really learned to value my body because I was too busy being told how awful I would be if I got hot and sweaty with pretty white girls. I’ll let my therapist sort out why I’ve never had a functional relationship with a woman, but it probably has something to do with that unique rush of Catholic guilt and unholy rebellion I feel every time I see a brunette with fair skin and big eyes.
Tags: lgbt, relationships, religion, sex
Mallory, these are killer, and also uncomfortably close to home.
Ahh yep. I don’t remember feeling bad about anything except pre-marital sex, and having read these stories makes me glad I will not be instilling guilt in my own kids re sex (not intentionally anyway). that shit can take a long time to unlearn!
I find it difficult to know how to approach the whole thing with my almost-teenager. I reject the guilt that was laid on me when I was young, but I don’t have the framework to talk about sex in less black-and-white terms. Sometimes it’s tricky. It does take a long time to unlearn!
Yeah luckily I had comprehensive sex ed at school (which parents did not opt me out of, luckily) but the sex talk at home was Part One: This is how babies are made, and Part Two: Don’t have sex until you’re married, so the message I took away from that was it’s totally cool to do everything up until PiV sex as long as you don’t tell us you’re doing it. I plan to focus on the concept of being *emotionally* ready and responsible for whatever they want to do.
Mine was more like “anything beyond holding hands is pushing it, but we’re not going to tell you where to draw the line. Just feel guilty about ALL your normal urges.” I did get comprehensive sex ed at school too, in the glory days before W. Bush pressured most of the U.S. into abandoning decent education.
I talk a lot with my almost-teenager about enthusiastic consent. Right now it’s more in terms of holding hands and kissing, because that’s where she’s at right now, but it obviously applies to everything. And we do talk about sex, but I get from her cues that she is not ready for that to be more than an abstract conversation (like, she’s not interested right now and doesn’t want to acknowledge that she ever will be, so we talk about safety and consent in theoretical instead of personal terms).
Where I stumble is stuff like, I wasn’t allowed to ever have a boy in my room. Ever. Even when I was 19, paying rent, and living at home for one year. I don’t want to go that far, but maybe doors stay open? But then isn’t that super heteronormative? Maybe she’ll want to mess around with girls, and so maybe the door always stays open? But that seems weird. And maybe it’s not a big deal if they mess around at home anyway when they’re older, even though I kind of don’t want to know, but it’s better than being parked on a back road somewhere? But??? And then I have the weird urge to just be like “DON’T EVER DO IT!” because the nuances are too tricky. haha
Oh I feel you totally on all of that!
AHHH my super long detailed comment disappeared. Basically what I was trying to say were some things that helped me when I was a teen, and things that I wish I had been taught (I was raised in a mostly sex positive household in a sex positive country (go Germany!) with comprehensive sex ed from elementary school on but there were still some gaps and missteps). I’m not a parent, but I’m 23 so I feel like I’m pretty close to adolescence still and maybe can offer an interesting perspective?
So my first tip is communication which you seem like you have 100% down right now. But I just wanted to mention it because for me, it made a huge impact in how safe the sex I had was both as a teen and as an adult (I started having sex at 16, technically lost my “virginity” at 18, and continue to have sex now). My parents started talking about sex with my beginning when I asked about babies at age 5 (I think I first got full sex ed with diagrams and everything in 3rd grade or so) and feeling like I could talk to them about this gave me so many advantages over my friends who didn’t have that kind of home environment. It meant that when I started having sex I was able to not only get a doctors appointment but that I could go on birth control under my parents insurance and that I could get tested for STIs. Later on it enabled me to get an IUD (it needed to be under my dad’s insurance to not pay like 5 million dollars for it). This set up a really healthy pattern where I felt confident always demanding on condoms, always got tested, required my boyfriends/sex partners to get tested as well, and go for regular checkups (I also got the HPV vaccine when it came out). I feel like when your kid isn’t close to having sex yet it’s easy to forget how important this stuff is but it makes huge impacts way down the line in life and put me in a much better position than many of my friends who didn’t have the same upbringing.
Two is books! I may be biased because I was one of those shy, studious, spends all her time in the library types but I feel like sex ed books are really important. Medical information changes and it’s good to stay up to date, especially if you’re upbringing wasn’t super sex positive. It also helps if your child (like me) is a reader and will devour a book but will pay 0 attention to anything you say to her. I highly recommend the Scarleteen book. It’s wonderful, up to date, positive, and very accessible (it’s one of my favorites). It does say for high school and college but honestly I think it’s perfect for middle schoolers, very accessible, and reads like an updated version of a book I got as a christmas gift in 5th or 6th grade and loved. The website is better for high schoolers on up though but is one of the best sex ed websites I’ve seen.
Books are great because you can just leave them on her dresser or in the bathroom and let her peruse whenever she is comfortable. And you can read the book first to get a heads up on any questions she may have. In high school I also recommend Flow a GREAT book about periods. Also The Purity Myth, Yes means Yes, and He’s a Stud She’s a Slut (all by Jessica Valenti).
The last thing I want to mention, which you seem like you already are thinking of, is that it’s super important for girls to remember that they have sex drives, that those sex drives can be just as strong (or stronger) than those of boys, and that that’s not a bad thing. For me, I have a high sex drive and that wasn’t any less true as a teen and it didn’t disappear just because the door was open and wasn’t cured by masturbation. It just meant that I found weirder places to have sex in until my parents got more comfortable with me bringing my boyfriend over to the house. Obviously you know what’s best for you and your kid and I totally get that not everyone is comfortable with their kids (even adult children) having sex at their home and that’s 100% ok and up to you. But I think it’s important to remember these things because if your daughter does decide to have sex despite not having a safe place to do it in it’s good to prepare yourself for that so it’s not a surprise and maybe talk about it with her before it happens.
Oh and also, the last thing I wish someone would have talked to me about is that girls can totally pressure boys just as much as boys can pressure them. That was a huge problem for me, and maybe my first boyfriend could have been spared some of the discomfort I inflicted upon him had someone sat me down and taught me about reading facial cues, and making sure that you’re sure they’re saying yes, and not pushing them into more they are ready for.
Omg sorry that was so long, I just find sex and sex ed so fascinating (reading and talking about this stuff has been my hobby since elementary school) and love talking to people about these things and what kinds of stuff I learned as a kid. I hope I didn’t seem like a know it all or like I was trying to tell you what to do with your kid, I just wanted to offer the perspective of someone who is still close to teenagerdom but it also past it.
I really appreciate learning about other people’s experiences! We definitely talk about consent from both sides (like, make sure you’re not pressuring or being pressured). I think that’s really important. We have tried to be open and matter-of-fact about sex and genital-related issues from a very early age. The big How Babies Are Made talk was prompted by 1,000 questions about our dog getting fixed when my daughters were really little. Convenient. 🙂
I appreciate the book recommendations! I was totally the studious type too, and so is my oldest daughter. She and her little sister have been given age-appropriate books along the way, but I had not really found anything I loved for the next step. Those look like good ones to check out.
So far, she’s reluctant to grow up. Like, a year ago I got her a book that was just about puberty (not really about sex, because I could tell that for her she needed those two subjects to be presented separately, if that makes sense) and she was not into reading it. We moved and she tried to leave it behind! But recently I noticed it on her desk, so I think it just takes time. But I want to have a few ideas for books ready when she’s ready.
Thanks for sharing your stories, guys. This really stuck out to me:
I said I already was a Christian, and she said, “Well, you have to become born again.”
As a Christian who is neither born again nor Catholic, I’m not sure if I’m more frustrated with the above sentiment or with being barred from taking communion in a Catholic church. My faith and baptism are not second-class, people.
Word. My sister became born again and was even re-baptized after she started dating her super conservative now-husband, and it makes me so uncomfortable and angry. I can’t stand when any of the members of the divisions of Christianity (Orthodox, Catholic, evangelical Protestant) start talking about how they’re the only “true” Christians. It’s gross.
In one of many very memorable sex talks I heard while growing up evangelical, the youth pastor at a big rally told us that there were two major issues that defined your commitment to Christ, one which would apply more to teens, and one more to adults. Let’s guess, shall we? Did it have anything to do with what James said was true religion– to look after orphans and widows? Nope! Did it have to do with what Jesus said was the sum of all God’s laws– to love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself? No. It was sex and money. Yup.
As a teenager/unwed person, according to this dude and, really, most teachings I heard although they were not so blatant, if you really loved God you would stay celibate because this was the most difficult command to follow and the most important. As a wage-earner, especially as an adult who was married and could finally sex it up, the most difficult one was tithing 10% or more of your money to the church. Pretty much sums up American Evangelical culture completely– obsession with sex and money, ignoring the true calling to sacrificially care for other people. Lovely.
Facebook was fairly new when I matriculated at APU, and I distinctly remember being invited to join the group “I’m going to have amazing sex on my honeymoon.”
OMG yes. I graduated from a Christian college in ’07 and I definately remember all the girls on my floor pressuring me to join that group. So creepy. Meanwhile I never (and still don’t) have a religion listed on my FB profile because that was around the time I was starting to distance myself from Christianity (and to hang around with all the professors who were closet atheists or at least were cool liberal vegans).
Seems highly unlikely. Sorry NSTM’ers!
Our deeply Episcopal girl’s school had a detailed sex ed plan that was nothing compared to the internet, and I sympathize intensely with the final post above; the guilt plus the rush of rebellion every time I see a girl I _know_ it’s going to be great with is a terrible thing to take out of adolescence. As Margaret Cho says: “If you are hated for who you like to fuck, you are gonna kick up your heels and fuck.”
Attaching intense religious secrecy to this makes it worse, not better.
This is so sad to me. I grew up in a loving, Christian home that celebrated and taught a sex positive outlook on life. It’s sad that so many Christian sects demonize sex, because that’s not what the Bible teaches. That leaves people feeling pretty screwed up about getting screwed.
I feel sad too. I am trying really hard to remember what – if anything – my church said to me about sexuality as a teen. I think the only discussion we had about it was that it was maybe 2001, and my denomination had just made it official that any sort of person – straight or otherwise – could marry or become a pastor in our church. We might have had a discussion about waiting till we were ‘ready’ for sex? but whatever it was definitely wasn’t scarring.
Incidentally, I left the church for a while during my teenage years… and when I came back at 20 with a 3 year old son and no man in tow, no one batted an eye. They just wanted to play with my kid and ask me if I needed help with babysitting. Which, basically, was the best response I could have imagined.
I don’t know if it can be attributed to my family’s liberal, lax (heretical?) version of Christianity, but my guilt about sexual acts has always been very weak or nonexistent. Then again I’ve had an apostate streak in me from a young age. The guilt from even the possibility of hurting someone’s feelings or breaking someone’s heart has always been strong and very present though. Is there an advocacy group for guilt-free ethical sexual behavior? Sex-ed in middle school and high school were probably really good for some kids, I can’t believe the crap kids are and are not taught these days.
First off, I have great respect for a lot of what organized religion brings to the table. But when human sexuality gets involved, sometimes things go very very wrong. Case in point:
My southern, all-girls, Episcopal school was generally pretty moderate, and although we had sex-ed literally every other year from 4th grade on, things stayed relatively matter of fact. Then, once, they brought in an abstinence-only speaker. (I like to think they didn’t actually fully understand her message before they let her loose on the high school-aged crowd). I’m sure she did a lot of the usual scare tactics about STDs and accidental pregnancy, but the thing I really remember was her grand finale. At the end, she pulled out a huge, beautifully wrapped birthday-type present. And she said to us “Girls, your virginity is like a present. And you can only give it away once.” Then she unwrapped the present and allowed us to contemplate the devastation of paper and ribbon, a sloppy spectacle that unmistakably illustrated the plight fallen woman. Then she told us, “But, if you decide you’ve made a mistake, you can pray about it and make a different choice. You can always decide to save yourself for your husband: the man God has chosen for you.” And then she removed from the unwrapped box, a smaller, clearly inferior, wrapped present; some sort of paltry, second-best offering that would clearly require extreme generosity of spirit and forgiveness for feminine weakness from whatever dope was fool enough to rescue the harlot that you’d become and sanctify you in the bonds of [a very slightly ruined-by-you] marriage.
A few years later, after I lost my virginity to Mr. Very Very Wrong and regretted it (mostly because he was so horrifically and exquisitely wrong), I thought about that smaller, pathetic little secondary present and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. This shit is pernicious, y’all.
AHHHHHH omg that present analogy is so horrifying. I don’t understand why anyone would inflict that story on kids!!!
Thanks so much to the people who shared these stories.
I grew up mostly United Methodist but attended a Southern Baptist church for a few years as a young teen. I was a big old nerd and had no boys interested in me at that time, so refraining from having sex was not a problem for me—and for whatever reason I don’t remember hearing much about masturbation, either. Even so, I came home sometime in 10th grade and told my parents that I didn’t want to attend that church anymore, because they tried to make me feel guilty even though I never did anything bad. I wasn’t a particularly forward-thinking young person, so I’m still proud of myself for speaking up and getting out when I did.
Mo’s ending paragraph really hit home for me. Reproduced:
The main takeaway lesson from all of my experiences at Christ Church seemed to be “you are broken,” and even though they were, in theory, preaching about how Jesus could fix all that, that wasn’t ever really discussed. Being Saved was the end goal (and I never was officially “Saved” there), but there was no discussion of what that meant or how on earth anyone was supposed to go about their daily lives without feeling like worthless sinners.
I went to a Catholic school from K-12 and tried very hard to be a good Catholic at my first year at a super liberal hippy college, and even without the “Saved” nonsense of evangelical protestant churches, I had this same problem. Though I was seriously traumatized by the Baptist and Church of God Fire’n’Brimstone ™ preaching that I was subjected to as a kid (I’ve never handled shouting well; even now, simply being around raised voices makes me terrified and feel like I must have done something wrong, even if the voices are raised in happy excitement, or if they’re nowhere near being directed towards me).
It’s probably part of having depression from a very young age and the self-loathing, and also what I suspect is asperger’s syndrome that made me feel unable to understand anyone else and Wrong for being so different. I think Mo mentioned the depression, too, or someone else did. But being told constantly that you’re a sinner and sins are black marks and you don’t deserve love, so you’re damn lucky that Jesus loves you – that is something I’ve seen in all the Christian religions I’ve ever dealt with (Southern Baptist, Church of God, Catholicism, Episcopalian, whatever weird non-denomination my mom is now, Presbyterian… I’ve attended services or prayer studies for all of these).
Then, on top of that, being told that your sexuality is Wrong…? It’s all awful. It makes me really upset that people inculcate children in these kinds of beliefs. Yes, some Christian households don’t, but I can’t really accept that you’re a Christian household if you don’t believe/teach the sin thing, since the whole point of Christianity is that Jesus died for your sins, and we are all Sinners. (Which doesn’t really make a lot of sense these days, also, because legal rules about punishment and guilt are so different.) (Though, I guess, in my world, it’s no so bad to not be a Real Christian :P)
These are really wonderful, and on a really meta note, I like reading stories from men’s POVs on The Toast. I’m not even asking for more with this remark, I just really them when they do come up. I like the particular balance you’re striking here.
They get one a year. Then it’s back to the Man Caves, mining salt.
OH wow. This was a great read but I feel so so so bad for some of these kids. This was basically the exact opposite of how I was raised and I can’t imagine how communities like this could even go about dismantling some of the horrible guilt ridden information they spread to kids.
That picture looks kind of like a weeping angel!
Word. My sister became born again and was even re-baptized after she started dating her super conservative now-husband, and it makes me so uncomfortable and angry. I can't stand when any of the members of the divisions of Christianity (Orthodox, Catholic, evangelical Protestant) start talking about how they're the only "true" Christians. It's gross.
True Love Waits! I’m pretty sure I signed a bunch of those in my years in church youth groups. Texas does the “abstinence only sex education” thing, which basically means no sex education at all in schools. Not only was I supposed to wait until marriage, but my mother convinced me that no form of birth control actually works, and that I would immediately become pregnant the first time I ever had sex.
Flash forward to my first sexual relationship (age 20), when I was convinced I would become pregnant no matter what I did (and thus took many, many unnecessary pregnancy tests), and that I should marry this asshole because I had already given him my virginity. He was terrible and a cheater, and I was stuck on him for longer than I should have been, and I’m convinced that part of the reason was that I thought I was “meant to” marry him because I’d given him my virginity.
All of this has convinced me that my sex-ed strategy for my own children will be very, very different. “When you’re in love! When you’re ready! When you’re safe! I will take you to the doctor to get birth control, and it will work 99.9% of the time.”