How You Used Christianity to Silence Me

From abuse to freedom and my complicated relationship with spirituality. *TW: mention of physical and sexual abuse*

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

The building was small but nice, with carved woodwork around the altar and pulpit, fancy linens with gold fringe, and a large gold cross was flanked by two tall white candles. I was six years old, and I’d never seen such a sight.

I was born in rural Easley, South Carolina, and had already been through eight foster homes. Most were humble places, with multiple foster kids, so we didn’t get to get out much. Church definitely wasn’t on the docket for us, except for one excursion to a Vacation Bible School where the church van picked us up and we got coloring sheets and crayons, red Kool-Aid, and cookies shaped like flowers with a hole in the middle, and where we learned some songs about people with weird names.

I had no concept of what Christianity was, who Jesus was, why he was a big deal, and I was dropped directly into the thick of it when my brother and I were adopted by a pastor.

From day one, we were expected to be Christian, to perform like perfect model children when at the church building, and we learned the absolute necessity of keeping our mouths shut.

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From my earliest memory, I’ve had a fiery temper and no problem standing up for myself. I distinctly remember telling my social worker about a foster parent abusing us, my brother in particular, and her sighing deeply as she pulled out her big raggedy briefcase and started pulling out some papers to find us another suitable location, just as she’d had to do mere months before.

I stood up to foster parents and got the expected result, but I’d rather take it than my brother, who has cerebral palsy and was frequently neglected or outright abused.

For all the trauma we were put through in foster care, none of them professed to be or pretended to be particularly religious. Only one set of foster parents went to church themselves; the rest never mentioned it. So while I was nervous upon meeting these adoptive parents and already got an off vibe about them, I figured the fact that he was a pastor meant something. That they would be kind, or different in some way.

They were, but not in any way I could have ever predicted.

First was the immediate insistence that we conform to this religious practice and that we be properly baptized and make a profession of faith. We had no idea what we were doing but dutifully followed orders.

The United Methodist Church itself is not a particularly “hellfire and brimstone” denomination, but some of its followers in rural South Carolina certainly were. I have very distinct memories — like I could sketch out a layout of the fellowship hall and Sunday School rooms if asked to, 35 years later— of being taught very graphic depictions of the crucifixion and what awaits us sinners in hell, by Sunday School teachers.

Very graphic.

I became a little obsessed with the creepy imagery, the bloody Jesus on a cross, his face contorted in pain, the holes in his hands, the dripping blood, and at that age, was trying to put together what my “sin” (a word I still wasn’t understanding but basically boiled down to being naughty or not following commands) had to do with this grisly death.

I had seen a horror movie once, Friday the 13th, and all the bloody and gory imagery reminded me of that.

When a child has been in a church since birth, those words and phrases become part of the fabric of the church “scene”, but when you’ve not been exposed to it and are just hearing it at six and seven years old, it’s very weird and scary.

The message that kept coming through was twofold:

1. You did this. When you “sin”, when you don’t obey those appointed over you, when you think with envy of a neighbor’s toy or possession, when you take a cookie from the kitchen without permission, when you push back against your parents’ words and actions, your “sin” directly contributes to what caused that man’s gruesome, torturous death.

2. As such, it is your duty to keep your soul as “clean” and free from sin as possible. Even as a small child, you must do as you’re told, ask no questions, obey instantaneously, and always conform to the wishes of your parents and other authority figures as they have holy moral authority over you. Failure to ascribe to these tenets will result in your eternal torment in a literal lake of fire.

What a heavy message for a young child, especially a young child coming out of the abuses of foster care. I had no idea I was being transferred from the frying pan into the fire.

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The abuses began almost immediately after moving in with our adoptive family. Under the label of “discipline”, and emboldened with the strength of James Dobson’s words, my adoptive mother set out with a steely conviction that she must ‘break my will’. I was told countless times that I had a “strong, proud will” and that it must be broken.

My heart breaks a little now just hearing that. All of my children are, in one way or another, “strong-willed”, and I absolutely love that for them. It takes a strong will to survive in our world. Breaking a child’s will is setting them up for a lifetime of pain, disappointment, and usually, continual abuse.

As an aside, “breaking the will” of a group of people is a typical tool used by dictators to establish dominance and control over people. Cutting food and supplies, interfering with utilities and other public services, and establishing intimidating and violent police forces, all are tools used by dictators to break the will of a people in order to assume control. Breaking the will of people is only ever used when you intend to directly do harm to them, or you wish them to remain silent when you do harm to others; either way, the intent is to harm, not to help. Ever.

So while physical punishments were routine and I was learning how to shift and move and contort myself to try to please her and stave off spankings and other forms of violence, I could at least look forward to the reprieve of night. I had my own room, a luxury I’d never experienced, but it soon went from being my escape to being just another cell in my prison as the sanctity of my nights began being invaded by their other adopted son, who began molesting me.

I had no place of refuge, no place of peace, no place for my mind and body to be safe.

Part of me crawled inside this room deep inside my mind and didn’t come back out for many decades.

And part of me just died that year.

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As the years passed, I learned — I learned how to move around my adoptive mother to make her believe I was on board, that I was compliant, that I was obedient, and most importantly, that I was a “good Christian girl”. I participated in every club and youth group at our church. I sang the loudest in the choir even when she informed me I “couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket”. I wore stiff, scratchy dresses and tight patent leather shoes. I memorized verse after verse, passage after passage. I recited the books of the Bible in order. After every achievement, I’d look to her for approval and sometimes got the gift of a quick smile.

When we went home after church, I spent equal time avoiding being alone with my rapist, sometimes moving from room to room as he would ‘innocently’ follow me, trying to get me to “play a game”… all under her nose and watchful eyes.

She could spot an undusted baseboard from thirty yards but I’m expected to believe she didn’t see this behavior from her precious golden child, her first adopted child? That she wasn’t aware of the stack of pornographic magazines under the sink in his bathroom? He didn’t even try to hide them, and yet I never heard about his “sin”. I was forced to clean his bathroom, so I sure saw them, and he knew that I saw them. His face held an eternal smirk.

I tried locking my door and he came through my window.

I tried locking my window and he threatened to kill me and make it look like an accident.

My best friend has some pictures from that time, and I look like a walking ghost — big sad eyes with dark circles under them, pale skin, and rarely a smile. I could see the pain on my face. Why could no one else?

The entire time, the entirety of the focus of her energy, her ‘parenting’, her ire and stress and frustration with life, continued to be targeted specifically and solely on me. I continued to be spanked, whipped with switches and belts, dragged by my hair, and slapped for attempting to speak up for myself and maintain some shred of dignity as a human being.

I was fighting for my sanity and my life while being beaten down with a cross and Bible verses.

I was at my lowest when I took my first sex education class in our junior high and realized with a shocking jolt, in a classroom filled with giggling girls, that if he continued to do what he did to me and I started getting my period, I could get pregnant. I knew what I had to do. And I knew how it would go.

I steeled myself, girded with the knowledge that two of my friends had already gotten their monthly visitor and mine could be coming anytime, to crack open the facade we’d all been existing behind and inform my adoptive mother that her precious boy was a rapist.

I knew I had to deal with whatever came of it, but the time was now.

So I finally spilled it all out to her.

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There’s a whirlwind of memories, blocked memories, hazy timelines, but somewhere in the process, I was stood up spread eagle in a doorway, arms outstretched to touch the doorframe on either side, in a pink and white striped nightgown that matched that of my American Girl doll, and whipped with a belt. For my sin. For seducing him.

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On the outside, we had the facade to keep up. Their adopted son was sent to a residential psychiatric treatment facility for several months. I was forced to visit him.

At the end of his “treatment”, he came back home. I was forced to live with my rapist and pretend things were normal for another three and a half years (by my count- again, CPTSD makes some timelines hazy). He had an electronic alarm on his door so he could not leave his room at night.

We lived like that. In a parsonage. Provided by the church.

I was taken to a Christian counselor, never an actual therapist, who quietly but forcefully explained to me what the concept of forgiveness was and that it was vitally important to the health of my soul and my salvation that I forgive him for what he did. I was also asked to look to myself and ask myself how I could have contributed to his “stumbling”.

I wish I was making this up.

I wish this was all a horrific horror story written to be propaganda against organized religion, against Christianity.

But this is just my life. And since joining multiple Facebook groups of thousands of other individuals who have left the Christian church, I’m sad to say my story is hardly unique or rare. The cult of Christianity has eaten thousands and thousands of children alive, only to spit us out at 18 and call us ungrateful sinners.

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Since becoming an adult and distancing myself from them, I moved through many phases of spirituality.

At first, I embraced the religion even if I didn’t embrace those people. Some things about the church experience I really miss… the routine, the rituals, the community (when it is a reasonably healthy church with good people). The covered-dish dinners, summer picnics, the children all playing outside while adults mingled over deviled eggs and pound cakes. The music.

I always wrestled with the theology, especially that of the United Methodist Church- predestination has never made logical sense to me, on any level, so I began exploring other spiritual practices and ultimately chose to major in Philosophy when I returned to college in 2008. I dove headfirst into existential discussions and even voluntarily took a seminar course on Aquinas.

Slowly but surely, the threads of what I had woven together to call my ‘religion’ unraveled as I discovered, bit by bit, little by little, that the entire fabric of my spiritual practice had only been an ugly blanket to hide our family’s shame. Nothing about it was real, and I truly believed very, very little of it.

The more I backed away and studied it critically, the more holes I saw in the theology and psychology of Christianity. In fact, the picture that was becoming clear was that Christianity is the shape of a big hammer, beating down anyone and anything that dares to question, explore, or express disbelief in absolutely every word and every tenet they profess.

You’re 100% in or you’re 100% out, and if you’re in, prepared to be beaten down to fit in. If you’re out, prepare to be lonely and rejected for the rest of your life.

By this time, I was a mother and had children of my own whom I had been taking to church, as a dutiful Christian mother does. Once I clearly saw the big picture for myself, I was absolutely out, and I took my children with me.

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I’ve spent years studying various religions and am very cautious about committing myself to any, but when someone asks, I usually respond that I washed up on the beaches of an island next to Buddhism. I like the Noble Eightfold Path as a guide to having a life that is healthy for you, not for some deity. I like respecting others, respecting the earth, respecting the energy that flows throughout us all.

I don’t like having to “claim” a religion. I don’t like having to follow an arbitrary set of rules or laws set in place thousands of years ago by men, and only men, which are inevitably misogynistic, patriarchal, racist, and discriminatory. If a religion, any religion, can’t love every human being as they are, without condition or exception, I want no part of it.

For me, and thousands of people like me, the disgusting people who are not just sheltered within the Christian church but literally guided, developed, taught, and instructed to be the way they are, aren’t just “bad apples”, they define the religion for us. There are too many of them — abusers, rapists, and predators — who are not just participants in Christianity but leaders within it, for them to be “bad apples” — they are the natural result of bad theology.

Christianity is just, fundamentally, bad theology and it holds the tools to empower terrible people to do terrible things. The Christians I know personally who are genuinely good and loving people operate in many ways, if we’re speaking legalistically, outside the traditional theology of Christianity.

These good people are redefining Christianity for a 21st-century world, and while that is appreciated and I love them dearly, they are unfortunately not the mainstream representation of what Christianity is.

Christianity has become a huge bully, a wrecking ball to the psyches and hearts of LGBTQ individuals, to abused women, to abused children, to immigrants, to anyone they deem to be “sinners”, and a political steamroller crushing the independence of American citizens who do not practice this religion nor follow its tenets while also being the driving force behind electing a thrice-divorced philanderer and swindler who openly said he did not need to ask for forgiveness (a major core tenet of Christianity) to the highest political office in our nation.

Christianity has become the single largest threat to American freedoms thus far this century.

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There is so much I mourn these days. I mourn the parts of me that died in that house, the bits and pieces of my fiery, beautiful soul that were murdered under physical, mental, and sexual abuse. I mourn that little girl who never got to have an actual childhood and be free and innocent and discover who she truly was.

There are the years I spent attending Christian churches and wrestling with the gross discrepancies I saw between the words in red on the page and the behavior of the people around me, even and especially those up on stage and behind the pulpit, and I mourn all the time and energy I lost during those years.

I mourn pieces of my children’s childhoods where I was still wrapped in the teachings of the church and so I, too, spanked and demanded obedience. I became the monster, in the name of God. I elevated myself to the “Because I Said So” theology of ego and self-glorification.

I found that when a woman who was abused by the church as a child grows up, she has two choices: change and get out, which requires tons of work and sacrifice, or gleefully take her position as the matriarch of the household and gladly take up the belt, wooden spoon, and palm to physically break her children into submission, usually expending some of the pent up anger at her abusers and turns it on her small, vulnerable children.

You can’t beat your mom’s ass for beating you, so you beat your kid’s ass.

“I got spanked and I turned out fine. What’s the big deal?” ask the people who hit small children for ‘infractions’ they can’t control or are part of regular child development.

How much of that reflects the peace and love of Jesus Christ, the Nazarene?

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I was six years old and the church was something new and ornate, mystical and reverent, a place I thought may finally be a refuge from cruel adults. The hardest thing I’ve ever had to realize and come to accept is that I was sitting in the training camp for my worst abusers. The hush between hymns was a thousand stifled cries. The music was a momentary balm to the senses, lyrics weaving promises that would never be kept. The silent moment of prayer carried fervent pleas to the heavens for relief from the pain, words that drifted into the ether, never receiving an answer.

In the pew, my feet dangling inches above the red carpet, I was but a child, holding the weight of two thousand years of man’s sin in the marks on my buttocks, the pain between my legs, and in my achingly young heart.

My name is Melissa Corrigan, and I’m a freelance writer/thought sharer/philosopher in coastal Virginia. I am a mom, a wife, a veteran, and so much more. I deeply enjoy sharing my thoughts and receiving feedback that sparks genuine, respectful conversation.

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