Help to Leave the Church

“The content is toxic.Nobody is immune, it’s logical.Programmed only to accept,directed not to question.Go in search, to find your place.Don’t be just a cog that turns the gear.It’s not the truth, bro. What they wantis to try to prevent the facts from revealing themselves,the minds from rebelling,you from being able to go beyond,to search for something that does you good.” — Mussoumano(Tóxico)

Healing from Religious Trauma Syndrome

What’s the probability of a person who has never followed any religion believing in invisible beings and places? That’s right. The greatest proof that religion is brainwashing is that it makes you believe in things that don’t exist.
Even though they have a common base, obviously religions are not the same. Some are worse than others. When it comes to Christianity, the more biblicistic a denomination, the deeper the brainwashing and, consequently, the more painful the deprogramming, which can take longer if the person was, as they say, raised in the church.
Someone who has never been a member of a church, or left one with ease, can’t imagine that Christianity can cause psychological traumas. Although not believing in it (anymore), they see the religion of Jesus as harmless. This is due to the fact that Christianity is old. It was brought to the Americas 500 years ago by Europeans, who had been practicing it already for centuries. In consequence, it’s rooted in our culture. Accustomed to it, the majority of people think only of its cute doctrines, such as forgiveness and charity. The truth is that the New Testament teaches also things with the potential to generate emotional disturbances and that can continue to haunt people who have already left the church, for example:

• Absurd and dangerous promises (It’s not necessary to seek medical help and take medicines, because the sick can be cured by the power of prayer).
• Alienation from reality (The world is under dominion of the Devil and is evil. Almost everything is worldly, that is, sin. Your world is Heaven).
• Aversion to erudition (Intelligence and wisdom are foolishnesses. The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to the poor in spirit).
• Cruelty (Eternal torture in a lake of fire and brimstone, even for simply doubting).
• Fanaticism (Demons exist, enter people, cause illnesses and have to be cast out through exorcism).
• Human sacrifice (The crucifixion of Jesus to placate the wrath of God and the glorification of Abraham and Jephthah, who were willing to immolate their children for God).
• Humiliation (You are bad by birth, insignificant, unworthy, deserving of punishment and in need of salvation).
• Imposition of guilt and shame (You too are responsible for the torture and death of Jesus).
• Impossible and bad teachings (Love your enemies, don’t worry about tomorrow and be perfect like God. With faith, everything is possible. Don’t defend yourself against physical aggressions, never deny loans to people, sell everything to follow Jesus and for his sake hate your own family and your own life).
• Inferiorization of women (Women must be submissive to men because the woman was created after the man and for him. That in the world there are disasters and suffering, which are consequences of sin, is the woman’s fault).
• Injustice (Because Eve and Adam disobeyed God, you too deserve to suffer).
• Sadism (To test your faith, God makes, or lets, you suffer. If you are persecuted and suffer because of Jesus, you must rejoice).
• Sexual repression (Feeling sexual attraction to a person without being married to that person is sin. Homosexuality is bad and homosexuals deserve to die).
• Terrorization (Sin against the Holy Spirit, prophecies about the end of the world and the Last Judgment frighten people and inflict fear of being lost).
• Total control (God is watching you day and night and noting down in a book all your actions and thoughts).
• Unconditional submission (All rulers are instituted by God. Consequently, also the bad ones).

Breaking oneself free from the church is relatively easy, compared to liberating oneself from the psychological structure of the Christian religion. Examples of mental patterns reinforced by Christianity:

• All-or-nothing thinking (There are no sinlets. Jesus said that a person can be thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone just for cursing. Jesus told people to be perfect. Peter tells them to be holy. Moderate Christians are disparaged as lukewarm, for which reason they are vomited out of God’s mouth. You are either saved or lost. Sport? Enjoying is not enough. You need to immerse yourself body and soul [“No pain, no gain”]. Work? You are a real worker only if you return to the computer after dinner. The right to brag start at 60 hours a week. Politics? The more absolutist your statements, the more you’ll gain followers).
• Apocalyptic rupture (Ex-Christians no longer expect the rapture, the mark of the Beast, or Jesus riding on a white horse. Nevertheless, the idea of the end of the world, now in the form, for example, of nuclear holocaust, pandemic or overpopulation, still haunts many of them and affects their world view).
• Good guys and bad guys (Jesus said: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters”. In the black and white thinking, people are either one of us or one of them, either patriots or communists, either anti-racists or racists. Disagreement is synonymous with heresy and separation. When Christians discover the faults of public figures, like Bill Gates, they move them from the good guys box to the bad guys box. Christianity doesn’t offer a mental model in which people are complicated and nevertheless decent. We are all fallen [according to John Calvin, totally depraved] and either washed in the blood of Jesus or tools of Satan).
• Hyperactive guilt detection (Do you know any other religion that blames people even for crimes they didn’t commit [the disobedience of Adam and Eve and the crucifixion of Jesus]? James 5:16 tells Christians to confess their sins to one another, converting them into true weightlifters of the guilt muscle. We live in a world full of things we should and should not do. Since biblicistic Christianity gives everything an enormous weight, day-to-day failures [things we left undone and goals we didn’t achieve] are seen as moral failures).
• Idealizing leaders (Living in a cloud of anxiety makes us more susceptible to demagogues and authoritarians, people who exude the self-confidence we lack, convey to know what is true and right and how to solve problems, feed on our fears and on our desire to be and do good. Taking advantage of our sense of ourselves as sinners, they tell us how we can redeem ourselves. They exploit our dichotomous thinking, reinforcing our sense that people who don’t share our world view are bad and should be silenced or defeated).
• Living for tomorrow (People who consecrate their lives to God focus more on the future than on the present. For those who have their eye on the heavenly prize, the small day-to-day wonders, which constitute the center of the joy of a conscious life, are mere distractions. An American Christian song about Paradise says: “It’s such a joy to know that I am only passing through”. The habit of focusing on the future can make it difficult to concentrate on the present, see and enjoy the beauties of the moment).
• Never feeling sufficiently good (Since they are aware of their faults, many Christians find it difficult to stay themselves out of the bad guys box. Some alternate between “I’m wonderful” and “I’m rubbish”. Others have an irritating internal critic who tells them that nothing they do is good enough. After all, the biblical standard is perfection).
• Sexual problems (For many ex-Christians, it’s impossible to talk about guilt without talking about sex. In the Bible, sex is such a grave thing that committing adultery and coveting the neighbor’s wife even share the list of the ten worst sins with killing and stealing. The virginity and purity of Mary [only an unused woman could be good enough to give birth to a perfect child] is given tremendous value. The book with the black cover conveys the idea that sex is a filthy thing. Proof of this is that, after intercourse, men and women had to ceremonially purify themselves — even though they were married. Most churches, if not all, consider masturbation sin. Some even swear that it’s bad for health. Confirming the Old Testament, the New one throws all homosexuals in the same pot and accuses them of choosing to be homosexuals, on top of that for the mere pleasure of practicing evil).

Some time ago, you realized that the Bible contains absurds. This generates internal conflict: you were induced to consider Christianity good, but you now perceive that the book on which it’s based teaches also evils. For some reason, the religious brainwashing is no longer being able to force you to justify the perverse doctrines of the Word of God. Furthermore, you realize that between much of what the Bible says and reality there is a huge discrepancy.
You want to liberate yourself from this ideological prison, but this is one of those cases in which saying is easy, doing is difficult. After all, the religious brainwashing has spent perhaps decades threatening you with torture in a lake of fire and brimstone for doubting. In you, it instilled that hesitation is bad and your fault: you are being weak and listening to the enemy. Moreover, most probably all your family and all your friends are Evangelicals. Maybe you even work for a church member. Because of this, you feel lonely, are afraid and don’t know how to proceed. I’m sure these reflections will help you:

Become conscious that the fear you may still have of definitely breaking with religion has been embedded into you by religion itself. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the threat of hellish punishment is a weapon to keep you from fleeing the religious prison. It’s God pointing a revolver at your head and saying: “Believe in me, obey me, love me and adore me, otherwise…”. Well, any system of ideas that coerces you to accept and intimidates you not to question is perverse and deserves to be thrown in the trash.
Be honest with yourself. Religion is no longer making sense to you. So, stop forcing it to make sense. Just like in an abusive relationship, religion blames you and tells you to try harder. Get real. You have already realized that religion is a parallel universe. Stop, therefore, trying to live in the parallel universe of religion. If, out of fear of hurting or angering them, you are keeping up appearances, pretending that you still believe, one day you’ll have to tell the truth to your family and friends. It’s not easy, but necessary, in order to have personal integrity and mental health. Don’t spare people from having negative feelings about your loss of faith. You are not committing any evil. Your relationships will go through some challenging adjustments, but it will be worth it. If you are a teenager and your parents threaten you with physical punishment, report them. No one has the right to force you to go to church.
Calm down. By calming down, you’ll retake control of your mind. Religion has spent years intoxicating you. Thus, detoxifying from it takes time. You’ll have to deal with different emotions and feelings, such as anxiety, anger and loneliness. However, little by little you’ll regain confidence in your ability to think for yourself, express your own points of view and make decisions. Eventually, your wounds will heal. You’ll feel stronger and able to love and take care of yourself. Even if you feel alone, you are not. A lot of people have gone through what you are going through. Read deconversion stories. If it’s difficult to leave Christianity, think about how much more difficult it is to leave Islam. Yet, every year thousands of people abandon Islam and become atheists, or irreligious. Some share their experience in books or on the internet.
Religion intoxicates not only intellectually but also psychologically, especially if you have been indoctrinated, that is, intoxicated since childhood. Some people can free themselves from religion and nevertheless continue to be affected by it. Doctrines like Hell and the End Times can still make them have nightmares. Do the work of curing the wounds of religious abuse. Get support and help in every way you can, in online and local groups, but, if necessary, also from a therapist.
Religions have a lot in common with dictatorships. They don’t want you to know too much, discover their rottenness. You have spent years hearing that the Bible is divine and that your church was instituted by none other than the Creator of the Universe himself. Learning about how this pile of copies of copies of more copies of rags of fragments of parchments from the Iron Age with tales also from the Bronze Age was compiled will confirm to you that the Bible has nothing divine about it, and researching the history of the churches will put an end to the last shred of enchantment you still may feel for yours. All denominations spring from discords and rifts. The book with the black cover itself tells that the early Christians fought among themselves over who knew what God really wants. Not long after, the worshipers of Jesus would spend centuries mutually massacring each other because of the Word of God. There are, therefore, no reasons for you to feel bad for rejecting the Bible. A book that generates so much arrogance, confusion, division, hostility and violence deserves to be rejected. Religion is no longer controlling your mind. You are now free to acquire knowledge, for example, in History, Philosophy and Science. Enjoy this freedom.
Christianity infantilizes people. Good things come from Saint Nicholas, aka Santa Claus, (God) and bad things come from Krampus (the Devil). You are a little robot controlled by either Jesus or Satan. The Christian religion makes people also dependent. As a famous gospel song says, you are weak, but God is strong, reason why you don’t leave home without begging for divine protection, and it’s only with the help of God that you achieve something. Freed from this childishness, you’ll need to rethink who you are and what life is. You’ll have to learn to have trust in yourself and take responsibility for your choices. Create a life around new values and that works for you. Life is an adventure. So, venture out. Open up to new experiences and friends.
Evangelicals are conditioned to see their church as their family and trained to repeat “God is in charge”. With its doctrine of reward after death, Christianity makes you deny reality, alienating you from the world. Well, perfection doesn’t exist anywhere in the Universe. Therefore, not on this planet either. It, however, is our world. So, face reality. Facing it will help you get your life back on track. Accept the idea that your home is Earth and your family, Humanity. Any child realizes that no god is in charge. Improving the world depends on us. You can contribute to the solution of some problems. We are all interconnected. Join with others to make our home a more pleasant place.
As you acknowledge that you are part not of an invisible, imaginary world, but of this, the real one, you realize that, contrary to what religion has instilled in you, you are valuable and don’t need to deserve to exist. Embrace this life, without worrying about a next one. Enjoy being alive. You have the right to enjoy life without the feeling of guilt. Your life now is not governed by a bunch of rules, many of them ridiculous, but by only one: do no harm. Instead of judging people, try to appreciate them. Regain your creativity and express yourself any way you want, and no longer to glorify an invisible being. Love yourself and be proud of yourself. Considering that religion still imprisons the minds of billions of people, feel privileged and enjoy the inestimable pleasure of being a freethinker.

[I wrote this text inspired by ideas of two great psychologists, Drs. Marlene Winell and Valerie Tarico, who specialize in deprogramming from religious brainwashing.]