Thoughts After Restore 2022

A couple weekends ago, I attended the second day of the Restore Conference outside of Chicago. I hadn’t really planned to go until I heard that some friends from Tears of Eden were attending, and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see them as they’ve been an important part of my healing this past year.

I will be honest: I was nervous about the conference though. I recognized many of the names on the speaker list, which told me that the conference would address spiritual abuse and other abuse in the Christian church, topics I’ve been researching and writing about for a few years now. But the tagline—“A Conference Restoring Faith in God and the Church”—didn’t quite resonate with me and my own journey after abuse…

Book Review: Jesus and John Wayne

Reading Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a little like reading a biography of my upbringing, just not the fun parts. With all that I’ve processed in the past decade, I am so thankful for this book and the work it is doing. The book untangles the web of Christian nationalism, American evangelicalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, and if you don’t think those things are connected, then you definitely need to read it. . . .

How to Know You're in a Christian Fundamentalist Church

If you’re like me and you grew up under Christian fundamentalist teaching, then you probably know the Bible backward and forward, never dated (or at least wore a purity ring), and were told Democrats are demonic and Halloween is Satan’s holiday. And maybe, like me, you’ve since grown up and learned a lot about the world outside church walls, talked with people from different backgrounds, and looked at the Bible with fresh eyes and lots of questions. You might be deconstructing or reconstructing your faith, finding real freedom in the escape from legalism.

I’ve been working on deconstructing the worldview I was brought up in for quite a while now, and the more I move away, the more I notice fundamentalism, legalism, and patriarchy growing in evangelical churches. And I’ve been thinking about the people in these churches who didn’t grow up with this ideology--who didn’t have the consequences of living with perpetual shame and false guilt--because they probably won’t understand right away the impact that Christian fundamentalism and patriarchy can have on people seeking God. I’m concerned for the children who will grow up being imprisoned by legalism and distanced from the love of God.

So I’ve been thinking about signs or red flags that warn me that fundamentalism is in play in a church, and I hope my laying these out here might be helpful. . . .