Religion WAY Off the Rails

Girlscamp

Host Haley Rall presents a collection of listener-submitted stories centered on religious trauma and the complexities of deconstructing fait

Key takeaways

• Listeners recount experiences of being manipulated into 'speaking in\'s tongues' during childhood church camps.
• The host discusses the psychological damage caused by 'purity culture' lessons, such as the 'dog poop brownie' metaphor for sin.

Main topics

• Religious deconstruction
• Mormonism and Evangelicalism

Notable quotes

God is a bit of a freak. Why is he watching me?

Conclusion

The episode serves as a visceral critique of how religious indoctrinat

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) G-I-M-P, it's Girl Scam. Speaker 2 (0:12) Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Girls Camp Podcast. I'm your host, Haley Rall, and today we are doing part two of your wildcard religious stories because one episode was not enough. I almost feel like two episodes is not enough, but that's okay. We will certainly revisit this topic again because it is one of my favorite submission topics because I don't know what I'm going to get. I just say, tell me. a crazy story that has something to do with religion. And so reading through these always has me on the edge of my seat. I always end up laughing, feeling sad, feeling enraged, lots of feelings that we will be feeling together as I read through these stories today. I'm feeling great right now and a little hyped up because this morning I tried cold brew. For my first time, I ended up having a chat about coffee at a friend's birthday party last night with someone who is really into their coffee. They were a barista in Portland, Oregon, for a long time. And apparently Portland, Oregon is like the mecca for coffee snobs, according to this person. Non-derogatory. And I was telling them about my coffee journey, of course. And he was just giving me some more information on coffee. And he was telling me about cold brew, which I knew. I mean, I knew kind of what cold brew was, but he was telling me how it's made and also telling me that it is more highly caffeinated, which I didn't realize because you're using more of the coffee beans than you do for an espresso. So this morning at my coffee shop, which. I debated going into all of this right now, but I might put you on the edge of your seat, do a little cliffhanger, because I think I'm going to do a full entire episode dedicated to coffee. Because I have so many thoughts and feelings now that I'm a coffee drinker about coffee, about coffee culture, and about my particular coffee shop and how much it means to me to go there every day. I just have a lot to say about coffee. So I'm not going to go into all of that as not to distract from the crazy stories. But I went this morning to my coffee shop and I told my guy, my barista, that I want to try cold brew. I didn't want to try it this morning. I wanted to get my iced oat milk latte with just a little splash of vanilla. And he was like, well, let me give you a sample. So he gave me a little cup of cold brew. So in addition to my latte, I had I don't know, maybe a few ounces of cold brew. No, probably two ounces. And it was good. It's different. It's very different. I feel like it's almost citrusy, more acidic. But all that to say, I just finished my latte and I had that cold brew. So I'm feeling really good. And coffee kind of hits me. I've never done meth. In the office, Pam makes a joke. comparing something to crack like this is as addicting as crack or something and then ryan is like have you ever done crack why don't you make a comparison to something you know like scrapbooking um and i almost made a comparison to meth though i've never done meth but coffee it's like adderall which is also like meth right adderall is like in that same world it just makes me feel really good feels like a drug honestly it's kind of worn off a little bit over time like you know, as I've grown more tolerance to it. But the caffeine just hits in such a different way than my 44 ounce Diet Cokes could ever. And yeah, just feeling great on my morning dose of oat milk iced vanilla latte plus some cold brew. Speaker 1 (4:08) Let's dive in to the stories. Speaker 2 (4:09) And I'm starting out with an evangelical story, not Mormon. And you know what? Reading through this round of submissions, I was noticing more and more stories from other ex-religious folks, from ex-evangelicals, ex-Muslim, ex-Catholic. And that made me feel so happy and emotional to think that we can all relate. Like being able to relate even beyond ex-Mormonism in the faith deconstruction journey is always just really, really meaningful for me. So always. grateful for anyone who writes in, but that was really fun this time to get more stories from people who grew up in other faith traditions. Plus, you know, I know the Mormon experience, but I don't know all the ins and outs of the Pentecostal experience, et cetera, et cetera. So I feel like I get to learn when I read these stories. Okay, jumping in. Hi, Haley. I would love to share this quintessential ex-evangelical story. It was the first story I told to my therapist to start deconstructing my childhood church trauma. Real. I think we all have one or two of those. Here goes. When I was in elementary school, probably around 10 or 11 years old, I attended our church's week-long sleepaway summer camp. During the day, we would do fun camp activities, and at night, we would attend a church service. The camp was put on by a bigger church that hosted smaller churches to join. So the pastor was not our typical children's pastor that preached at our church. It was a man that none of us kids were familiar with. On the last night of camp, our counselors, or women from our church, gathered us all in the hallway of our cabin to explain what that night's sermon would be about, speaking in tongues. Our church never taught speaking in tongues, so most of us were unfamiliar. I had heard my mother speak in tongues before, so I had some idea. I was very excited but nervous for the sermon. I was about to witness something magical. We would all get to leave this camp with the power of speaking in tongues. When it came to the actual bestowing of the gift, picture this. A dark room, the band playing emotional music, and the preacher on the microphone commanding all of us children to accept this gift of speaking in tongues. I begged God to give me the gift. One by one, I watched my peers confess their new gift to our counselors and get to leave. Speaker 2 (6:41) Wow. That is incredibly intense for a child. of that age, to be in an environment where the expectation is so high to receive this magical gift. I'm sure there was very little explanation of how receiving that gift might feel or even what exactly that gift is. I feel like speaking in tongues is one of those ambiguous ones. a bit of a strange one. And it's so crazy because it's almost like you were set up, as were all of those other kids, because you cannot convince me that all of those other kids felt this magic gift bestowed upon them to lie. And the adults in that situation were manipulating you to lie and say you got that gift. And then I guess maybe hoping that you believed the lie you were having to tell yourself. When I read this, I was like, I swear I've heard this exact story before. So I looked it up and there is an essay by Langston Hughes. It's called Salvation. It's not about the gift of tongues, but it's a very, very similar story of a young boy. He is at a church revival meeting and the adults basically. tell all these kids like you are going to receive like the light of Jesus and you're going to be saved and then they kind of have to come up the kids one by one and say like yes I've received it I'm saved and Langston Hughes talks about exactly what this person who wrote in experienced which is being like embarrassed it not happening and not coming and then ultimately he Well, sorry, spoiler alert. I won't get to like the fun. You should just read it. You should read it, especially you who wrote in. But it's a fantastic essay. I didn't realize it was living somewhere in my brain. I read it at some point getting my English literature degree, I'm pretty sure, or maybe in high school. But it's really fantastic. And now I want to dig more into Langston Hughes. Oh, it was written in 1940. So that gives you an idea of like the time period. But now I want to read more about Langston Hughes because when I looked up this essay, I didn't realize that so much of his work is about being ex-religious and like deconstructing religion, even when he was quite young. So I'll be digging into some Langston Hughes and crazy how universal, I mean, not the exact same, but that experience that this person described is and how, yeah. fucked up to be putting children in that situation. Speaking of speaking in tongues, that's not a Mormon thing at all. Mormons don't do the speaking in tongues thing. The closest they get is they say, when you get called, on a Mormon mission to a foreign country and learn a foreign language, God will help you learn the language. And that's like the modern day speaking in tongues or like, I guess, learning a new language in order to spread the gospel in any context. But Mormons do not do the like talking in gibberish type of speaking in tongues at all. And I've actually never seen that, I don't think, in real life. Speaker 1 (10:03) Maybe when I went to, Speaker 2 (10:04) I believe, a Pentecostal service. On my mission, we were teaching someone who went to this church and we kind of like swapped going to each other's churches. And maybe there was a little bit of that. But I would be very curious to see that in real life, like the speaking in tongues, the more revival, like writhing around type of thing. Because yeah, the psychology behind that fascinates me. And also, to be frank, disturbs me. Someone said, My Mormon mom once told me that pubic hair was one of God's ways to make that area less attractive to deter people from premarital sex, LMAO. Oh gosh. Lots of oh goshes to come in this episode, I'm sure. I mean, talk about shame around just body hair. just the normal functions of the body where the hair grows. And I feel like this also calls to mind like this big deal that was made when girls, like I remember this in high school, like started wanting to wear thongs because they didn't want underwear lines under their skinny jeans. And it was always like, oh my gosh, that's so promiscuous. That's so sexually charged for these teenagers to want to wear thongs. But it's like, actually. They just don't want the underwear lines or maybe they want to wear them to be sexy. I don't know. I don't care. But I feel like there's a lot of that type of thinking. And I'm thinking this with pubic hair where it is kind of like, I feel like I picked up on this taboo around like grooming your pubic hair or shaving because it felt like then you were, you know, the only reason you would do that is because you were going to have sex or you wanted to have sex. And just a lot of shame and taboo and weirdness around the reproductive organs of our bodies that we were born with. You know I feel strongly about this because of my history with vaginismus, which is a disorder where you experience excruciating pain with sex, with inserting a tampon. And the rates of that are much higher for women who grow up. in these cultures that have these kind of attitudes about their bodies. And I don't like it one bit. Someone said, you've heard about the chewed up gum lesson or the bite taken out of the cupcake lesson. How about dog poop brownies? Not even kidding. I had this lesson at nine years old at a steak activity. The leader made two batches of brownies, one with literal dog shit in them, and the topic was virtue. The whole idea was that Satan can make evil look exciting and desirable, and compromising our virtue is like taking a bite out of the dog poop brownies. Looks great on the surface, but not so much once you've bitten in. I believe the leader also made the comparison that if we compromised our virtue, we would appear like the dog poop brownies to our future husbands. You might look like a brownie on the outside, but on the inside, you'll actually be a dog poop non-virgin brownie. Keep in mind, I didn't even know what chastity or sex was at the time. To say I had a hard time eating brownies at any church event from that point on would be an understatement. My God, speaking of shame around bodies and around sex and teaching these type of lessons. is already insanity, but doing it to such young children when, like this person said, like that's another thing that I feel like always comes up with Mormons and sex is like that's not even on the mind of like a 12 year old girl oftentimes. And sometimes it is, but oftentimes it's not. And then the first exposure they even have to knowing what masturbation is or like understanding sex is in this type of context. So your first association with sex is dog poop brownies. Also, that is so unsanitary for that leader to have. brought dog poop into her kitchen to bake brownies. I almost feel like she must have just been saying it was dog poop brownies and they weren't really like, please, I hope so. Way worse than the chewed up gum or the bite out of a cupcake virtue lesson. Didn't know it could get worse, but yeah, that got way worse. Something that always seems to come up as I talk about religious deconstruction is deconstructing sexual shame. I know that's been a big part of this journey for me personally. It can feel difficult, even still, to get in touch with my own desire because of the purity culture conditioning from my youth. I'm excited for this reason to recommend Desire, which is a provider prescribed tablet that works on your brain's desire system to get you in the mood for intimacy. You take Desire 30 minutes before