Reclaiming Grace: Healing from Religious Trauma
It was my first time at the Women of Faith Conference. I honestly have no clue how many women of all different denominations piled into this arena with the same goal–to grow closer to God and each other, but the majority of the seats were full the entire weekend.
I was young–in my late teens or early twenties. This wasn’t my first Christian conference, and it definitely wasn’t my first conference that was a comingling of denominations. Looking back on it, I think I probably took that for granted and forgot that some of the women in our group had never been to an event outside of our denomination (non-denominational–but still a denomination without a governing body, but that’s a story for another day).
It had been an estrogen-filled weekend of worship and women preachers. The conference was coming to a close, and as is typical at these events, they concluded with an emotion-filled altar call where they asked anyone who wanted to receive Jesus as their savior to raise their hands and repeat this prayer with them. If you’ve been to one of these types of events, you understand the emotions and the response to this type of invitation.
Again, I didn’t really think anything unusual about this. It was a pretty standard procedure, and I knew what to expect. As we stood there as a group with our eyes closed and heads bowed, I heard a familiar voice just a few seats down yelling “What about baptism? You can’t be saved without baptism!”
They were stadium seats, so there was no way I could crawl under the seat and die like I wanted to.
It was at that moment that our fearless leader decided it was time for us to make our exit.
As if I wasn’t already mortified enough, the yelling had caught the attention of one of the very famous and slightly intimidating speakers, and she was making a beeline for us as the rest of us were trying to slyly escape from this nightmare.
Not the lady that had yelled about baptism in the middle of the invitation, though. She was poised and ready to pounce on this international speaker for leading these women to hell by making them think they could be saved without being fully immersed in the water by a man of God. So, she stopped, and they went into one of the prayer rooms where she was reassured that Women of Faith was not anti-baptism.
It wasn’t enough, though.
“Yelling Lady” still verbally accosted every member of the Women of Faith team who tried to intervene and assured them we would never be back.
As it turns out, she wasn’t the only one triggered by the lack of baptism talk at the Women of Faith conference. Multiple women in our group went back to their husbands and lamented the woes of the pagans, and we never returned to a Women of Faith conference as a group ever again.
Because heretics.
I think it kind of triggers my PTSD a little just to revisit this story…
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The Importance of Reclamation
Over the course of the next several weeks, I’m going to be digging deep into healing from religious trauma and what it looks like to reclaim what you might have lost as a result of that.
This is heavy stuff, and I recognize that it might be very triggering content for some of you.
While I’m going to be focusing on my own healing and the different things I’ve had to reclaim over the years, for those of you who have survived religious trauma, these things will likely look familiar and hopefully help you heal and grow–if you haven’t already been through that process–or encourage you in your own reclamation if you’ve already achieved that.
For those of us who have deconstructed and reconstructed or are attempting to reconstruct, this is important work.
Just like we have to do the hard work to heal from any other trauma, if we want to be healthy and have healthy relationships with the church and within the faith communities in the church, we have to do the hard work to heal from our religious trauma as well, to identify our triggers, and to reclaim what we have lost.
And, that’s what I hope I’m going to help you do over the course of this series, as well as through my book that’s coming out next year (**insert shameless plug**)
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The Gospel of Baptism
Let me be completely transparent here–I believe in the importance of baptism as the analogy and symbol of life, death, and rebirth that it very, very clearly is. I’ve been baptized–although it was a traumatizing experience, but I’ll get to that–all of my family members have been baptized, my church holds baptism services, and I would encourage everyone who chooses to follow Christ to choose baptism when it’s right for them.
I am not anti-baptism.
However, I am very much pro-grace.
For me, one of the most traumatic religious experiences was the indoctrination of what I’m choosing to call “The Gospel of Baptism.”
I was taught that if you were not baptized–fully immersed in the name of Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit–you were going to he**.
There was no hope for your salvation without full immersion baptism.
I literally sat in sermons on Sunday mornings around Easter where preachers spent their entire sermons explaining how the thief on the cross didn’t have to be baptized because he was likely Jewish and living under the Mosaic law in order to explain Jesus’s words to him that he would be with Christ in Paradise.
I heard manmade arguments as to why deathbed confessions weren’t enough and why sprinkling the water instead of immersing someone in it wasn’t enough to save them.
Honestly, it’s exhausting for me just thinking about it.
Because I grew up in this theology, there was an unstated expectation that you would get baptized anywhere between 10-12. See, that was another belief–you had to reach the age of accountability in order to be able to understand the decision you were making.
So, infant baptism was out too.
I went to church camp every year, and there was this giant push on Thursday night to get as many people dipped as possible.
I never bought into that.
My parents, worried about my salvation, put one of the camp counselors on cornering me and getting to the bottom of my lack of a decision when I was in 6th grade.
It was mortifying.
But, it wasn’t as mortifying, or guilt-inducing–as sitting in church every Sunday at the end of the church service and white-knuckling that back of the pew in front of me as I tried to get my feet to move to propel me up the aisle, despite my hatred of being the center of attention or having all eyes on me.
Eventually, my fear won out, and I went to the front of the church to get baptized so I wouldn’t go to he**.
Great motive, right?
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The Gospel of Grace
It wasn’t until I was well into my thirties that I began to actually think about the gospel of grace. Even though I had been separated from the church that inflicted my religious trauma for decades, I hadn’t deconstructed. I think I was so content to be out of that toxic religious environment that I didn’t want to think about it or the damage it had done to me. I was content to say, “Glad I’m out of there,” but that was the extent to which I would allow myself to go in my deconstruction.
The door to grace opened gradually for me.
While I had moved beyond the gospel of baptism, and I believed in grace, I hadn’t actually paused long enough to consider the implications of grace or to claim it for myself. Once the door opened for me, though, it was life-changing.
Once I claimed God’s grace for myself, it was a freedom I had never truly grasped before, and the reason is simple: in an eternal sense, grace is the antithesis of fear.
Grace cancels out fear.
The gospel of baptism is a gospel that places the emphasis on us, on our actions. The gospel of grace, though, places the emphasis on God, on his giving us the gift of grace. When we attach an action to salvation, we shift the focus from God to ourselves, and we void out grace entirely.
It isn’t about God and his gift any longer; it’s only about us and what we’re doing.
That’s an important distinction that Paul talks about in Ephesians:
For by grace you have been saved by faith. Nothing you did could ever earn this salvation, for it was the love gift from God that brought us to Christ! So no one will ever be able to boast, for salvation is never a reward for good works or human striving.
Ephesians 2:8-9 TPT
It’s funny to me when I think about this because Jesus came to fulfill the law, but He also came so we were no longer bound by the law, but when we preach that we have to be baptized to be saved, we have just replaced the Mosaic Law with our own law.
From Old Testament Law to our own law.
Grace isn’t like that, though.
In Romans, Paul explains:
So then, the law was introduced into God’s plan to bring the reality of human sinfulness out of hiding. And yet, wherever sin increased, there was more than enough of God’s grace to triumph all the more! And just as sin reigned through death, so also this sin-conquering grace will reign as king through righteousness, imparting eternal life through Jesus, our Lord and Messiah!
Romans 5:20-21 TPT
With Jesus’s death, grace conquered sin, thus the law, completely.
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Living in Grace
One of the key pieces of this puzzle for me is the fact that where sin increases, God’s grace triumphs all the more.
Nothing I can say or do will influence God to take his grace away from me. The contrary, actually–grace is not static, but it increases as we need it more.
It’s already a gift we don’t deserve. Nothing we say or do can make us deserve it or not deserve it any more or any less.
If that doesn’t give us a sense of freedom, then I’m not sure what possibly can.
The gift of grace is not a license to sin or to act a fool, though. I don’t think that was ever God’s intent. I’ve talked about this time and time again. As we grow closer to our Creator, our desire to follow Him increases. Thus, as we experience grace and live in that grace in relationship with God, who we are changes, and our hearts and actions are changed by the guidance of the Holy Spirit. I love how this is explained in Titus:
God’s marvelous grace has manifested in person, bringing salvation for everyone. This same grace teaches us how to live each day as we turn our backs on ungodliness and indulgent lifestyles, and it equips us to live self-controlled, upright, godly lives in this present age.
Titus 2:11-12 TPT
God’s gift of grace isn’t a free pass to act a fool. No, it’s what teaches us how to live every day, to turn our backs on ungodliness, and indulgence and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives. That’s part of the gift of grace as well–the constant nudges by the Holy Spirit to live differently and to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit.
That’s another one of those concepts I find myself thinking about often now. I spent so much of my adolescence thinking about and attempting to follow rules/laws instead of falling into grace. That was the focus, and it was what was important. What was missing though was that connection grace gives us to the Holy Spirit, to the nudges of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
I’m so grateful now to understand grace as best as I humanly can and to feel and understand the nudges from the Holy Spirit. It’s such a different feeling than the fear of he** that I grew up feeling.
Friend, if you find yourself in a space today where you need to reclaim God’s grace, I pray that you do that. I pray that you can separate yourself from the rules/laws that govern so many churches, and simply rest in the arms of God’s limitless grace today where you will undoubtedly be able to begin the healing process.
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Reflections:
What have your experiences been like with grace in your faith community?
What have you been taught about baptism?
How are the two ideas reconciled in your own faith community?
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