Something like 10 years ago, a therapist I was seeing for other reasons told me he thought I had PTSD stemming from religious trauma. I had all the symptoms, he said, and I should think about working on it.
We spent a few sessions talking about me growing up gay in an evangelical church with a preacher dad. But we really weren’t getting anywhere. My dad had been supportive for decades, and in those days I barely paid attention to religious news about LGBTQ issues.
Then at the beginning of one hour-long session, I mentioned a year of sleepless nights I experienced as a small child after watching a film about the Rapture and hell. I told my kindly Episcopal therapist I spent that year afraid to look at the sky, agonizing over the torture I knew almost all human beings who had ever been born were experiencing in hell.
Then the damn burst, manifested as sobs and tears.
Yes, my experiences as a gay teenager in an Evangelical church were bad. Yes, I came within a cat’s whisker of being sent to a conversion-therapy camp. But that stuff didn’t and doesn’t prompt tears of pain.
The real trauma for my preacher’s kid’s self came from believing Evangelical doctrine about original sin and eternal torture. As a 10-year-old, I just couldn’t stand it. It wasn’t so much the thought that I might end up being eternally tortured by a vengeful God, but that pretty much everyone else I knew would suffer the flames and the worms.
That’s a horrible thought for a tender 10-year-old, especially when he knows without any doubt that it’s completely true.
Dad told me once when I was 10 or 11 that the only way that he could cope with it was by getting as many people saved as possible. Didn’t help me though, because I couldn’t cope with the idea of a God who would put that responsibility on my dad’s shoulders.
He had a nervous breakdown a few years later, which I feel less reticent about talking about now that he’s passed. His conflict with the religion that he believed in without question played a large role in that. He left the ministry and never returned, but he never stopped believing in a torturing God, which always made me sad, especially since I knew he believed that he and I would be eternally separated.
