Growing up as an Evangelical homeschooled kid, my exposure to secular entertainment was limited. But when the 1998 film The Truman Show came out, filmed in the idyllic beach town of Seaside, Florida, where we vacationed, we made an exception and watched it as a family.
In the movie, Truman lives in a seemingly perfect world unaware that he is the star of a reality show, living as a captive on a TV set where producers are pulling the strings. Anytime Truman tries to make a choice that goes off script, like when he falls in love with an extra instead of the woman cast to become his wife, producers intervene to course correct with strategic manipulations to keep Truman from asking too many questions.
Growing more and more suspicious, Truman is eventually driven to the brink. Finally, Truman paddles out into the ocean in desperation, determined to find his answers even if it costs him his life. The producers send a storm to deter him but he pushes on until reaching the edge of his manmade cage, where he finds a door and sets himself free.
Freedom is a word I heard a lot as a kid. I was told that I was free: I lived in the free-est country in the world and Jesus had set me free from death and destruction by dying for my sins. America was intended to be a Godly nation and anything that threatened that directly threatened that freedom. And anything that threatened my connection to God through Jesus threatened my eternal freedom.
In order to have freedom, I needed the truth with a capital “T.” “The truth will set you free,” John 8:32. Jesus tells his disciples that the way to freedom is through his teachings. Jesus was the way, the truth, and the light. No one comes to the father except through his son Jesus Christ. Truth was simple and it was definitive. No ifs, ands, or buts. And everything hinged on it.
From the start, I had a lot of questions. And the adults were ready with answers citing a sole and unimpeachable source – the word of God.
Suffering, natural disasters, war – they said – were all a consequence of original sin. Adam, due to Eve’s influence, disobeyed God by giving into Satan’s temptation, eating the forbidden fruit, therefore condemning us all to eternal pain and suffering until Jesus came to pay the price and set us free. When things like 9/11 happened, it would be explained as a sign of the end times or a sign that our nation needed to repent for becoming wayward from God’s teachings. The book of Revelation with its elaborate sci-fi-like descriptions of the final days would be referenced followed by talk of the second-coming as a sort of hope to hang onto. Are you ready for Jesus to return? They would ask. A warning to make sure your soul was right with God, ready for judgment day.
Everything seemed to be viewed through a black and white lens of good vs. evil. Though things might appear quite complex, they could be easily simplified by vague reference to an ongoing spiritual battle.
One of my earliest memories is sitting on the edge of the sofa at age four or five praying over and over again to Jesus, professing my belief and my desire to have him “live inside my heart.” I was afraid I was doing it wrong and it might not stick. Did he hear me? Did I say it right?
To be sure, I asked for my dad’s help. I thought that if he guided me with the right words and witnessed the conversation, then Jesus would hear me. After all, my dad was the head of the household according to scripture, next in line under God in the hierarchy of authority. At least this is what I gathered from observing my grandfather’s patriarchal order of things on the Baptist side of the family and from my parents’ wedding vows my mom had proudly told me referenced Ephesians 5:22-33: “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.”
As Presbyterians (I’m not sure how they identify now – possibly charismatic or non-denominational), my parents moved away from fire and brimstone rhetoric leading with the importance of “a personal relationship with Jesus.” I found comfort in that. I had a very active imagination and already had a few imaginary friends. Adding a savior named Jesus to the mix sounded great. I prayed to him often, especially when I had nightmares about demons.
In Sarah McCammon’s brilliant new book the Exvanglicals she recounts her own experience as a kid feeling both this comfort in Jesus and this deep fear surrounding satan, demonic forces, and damnation. Though hellfire was avoided there was always a subtext of caution. If people didn’t have the capital T truth, there would be consequences. Eternal ones.
She writes about her family’s nightly ritual of praying for their grandfather who “wasn’t saved.” Later she finds out he’s gay, and that’s why they didn’t want her spending time with him in fear he might be a “bad influence” – he might present her with a different perspective that would cause her to question their prescribed version of reality.
By five-years-old I had already internalized the pressure that it was not only my responsibility to make sure I was saved but also to make sure everyone was saved. This acute fear of consequence was likely reinforced by the way we were disciplined as kids. I don’t have many memories of being spanked, just that there was a spanking spoon. Like many well-meaning (and in my opinion misguided) parents in the 90s, mine subscribed to Dr. Dobson’s Christian parenting guide instructing the use of corporal punishment. The spanking spoon was an instrument used to teach kids the consequences of making the wrong choice – a means to the end of raising obedient and respectful children. “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you,” Exodus 20:12.
My most visceral memory related to the spanking spoon was the time a babysitter conspired with my older siblings to play a prank on me – weaponizing my fear of punishment for the sake of a good laugh. (Obviously the babysitter’s fault and gross misjudgment – my siblings were young). They acted out the scene of my brother getting in trouble and then taking him to the bathroom where she locked the door. Next I heard my brother fake scream to the sound of a wooden spoon hitting something. I was distressed. I thought my brother was being hit. I thought he was in danger. I thought he was being abused by an adult. Absolutely nothing in me found it remotely funny.
Unsure if I’ve blocked the memories or if I didn’t do much to warrant the use of the spanking spoon (perhaps my parents opted not to use it much, they are very gentle and loving by nature. I suspect they really didn’t want to hit us with a wooden spoon), I do remember being put in time out. I’d sit in the green chair in the corner to think about whatever it was that I had done wrong.
As an adult, I still harbor a deep, crippling subconscious fear of “making the wrong choice.”
Choice was something I was always told I had. I could decide to do the right thing. Later, I could decide where to go to college. I could choose who to date. I could choose my profession and even my belief system. The catch, there would be consequences.
In this paradigm, choice is an illusion. Making the wrong choice could lead me astray. It could separate me from God. It could cost me my salvation.
This instilled in me a deep mistrust of self. Intuition, thoughts, and feelings could all just be whispers from Satan trying to tempt me and separate me from God. In everything, I must submit to the Lord and seek his guidance. Proverbs 3:5-6, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.”
If you can convince someone they are incapable of making choices for themselves – or convince them that certain options will lead to eternal punishment – you can easily control them.
As a pre-teen, I went to Tennessee Right To Life meetings where I was told that Planned Parenthood was farming baby organs for profit while being shown photos of fetuses that had been aborted in the 3rd trimester, and told that millions of babies were being murdered in our country every year.
[Fact check disclaimer according to KFF, “Abortions at or after 21 weeks are uncommon and represent 1% of all abortions in the U.S.” and occur “due to medical concerns such as fetal anomalies or maternal life endangerment, as well as barriers to care that cause delays in obtaining an abortion.”]
I also went to prayer rallies and stadium conferences where people writhed on the floor begging God to end abortion in the United States.
I interned for Republican Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn on the hill in DC in high school, where I toured Family Action Council – a conservative special interest group dedicated to banning abortion, taking comprehensive sex education out of schools, and ending gay marriage.
I gave a high school presentation on why I believed abortion should be illegal, and was interviewed at the Republican National Convention in 2012 about why, as a young woman, I was “pro-life” (aka anti-abortion).
I couldn’t put my finger on it then, but I left the RNC feeling anxious and unsafe. In the stadium seats and later at some cocktail party on a boat, I was blatantly and uncomfortably one of the only young women, if not the only one in plain sight. I could feel the unwanted glances from old men hot on my back while trying to fend off the attention from the one guy my age who had a creepy obsession with my virginity – a fact I disclosed in defense of my stance on abortion and abstinence. He prodded, making jokes and hypotheticals about taking me back to his room. “You would really not have sex with me?” he teased.
My proclivity to politics was a major connection point for me and my dad growing up. I would eagerly attend fundraisers with him and go to polls to campaign by his side for whatever candidate he was endorsing. We’d listen to Rush Limbaugh on the drive to school. Sometimes he’d call in. I always thought that was exciting. He was a delegate at the convention and had invited me to go with him to which I accepted enthusiastically. At that age (19) I thought I wanted to be a lawyer or a FOX News reporter. I’d make my parents proud and do something I was passionate about. I’d make the “right” choices.
When I returned to school from the RNC something began to shift in me. Watching Obama win the election on the TV in my sorority house, I tried to feel despondent but I didn’t. The dissonance was unsettling. I felt untethered. If I wanted to pursue a career in news journalism or politics there was only one acceptable partisan affiliation. Even the consideration of questioning it felt terrifying.
On track to get a degree in journalism with a minor in poli-sci, I changed course to pursue music journalism instead. I needed an escape hatch and having recently seen the movie Almost Famous, the uncharted world of rock’n’roll sounded to me like Penny Lane’s “Morocco” – a fantasy where maybe she’d feel free.
It wasn’t until 2020 that I gained the courage, and urgency, to register as a Democrat. I stared at the button with shaky hands for what felt like ten minutes before clicking the bubble on my online voter registration.
Soon after, my algorithms started feeding me what I would later find out were QAnon conspiracy theories. After going down a terrifying Twitter rabbit hell hole at 3 am, I was dizzy with fear and confusion. Having grown up on conspiracy theories presented as fact (Y2K scare, anti-vax, the birther conspiracy, the rapture, etc), the breadcrumbs of truth interspersed in the outlandish claims caused me just enough anxiety to feel genuinely alarmed. I had just watched the Epstein documentary, so was understandably distressed about realities of human trafficking and sexual abuse. Not to mention, none of the content was labeled as conspiracy theory. The next morning I asked my roommate and her boyfriend if they had ever heard of adrenochrome. They hadn’t, but said it sounded fishy.
Later that day I had a panic attack on the side of the road having to pull off the freeway. I was headed to Malibu to get some fresh air. Still a member of Hillsong Church at the time, I sought reassurance from my pastors, whose response only added fuel to my fire of spiraling fear. The guy I was dating at the time tried to comfort me by offering the suggestion I avoid upsetting content. He then told me a story about his Evangelical mother having what sounded like a mental break due to mounting paranoia related to what she described as unseen spiritual battles. Meanwhile, my mom was sending me cryptic messages about George Sorros and other cautionary jargon urging me to beware the evil of the enemy, and to pray for our nation.
Noticing the blatant anxious and unsafe feeling arise in me again, I put my journalism degree to use and did my own research. QAnon wasn’t being reported on in the mainstream media yet, but a little digging revealed the content was coming from a fringe far-right conspiracy theory starting to take root in the wake of the pandemic. As Forbes later reported in their 2023 article, “The adrenochrome conspiracy, a bizarre theory with antisemitic roots, posits that Satan-worshiping global and Hollywood elites run a massive child trafficking ring to drain their blood and harvest the chemical adrenochrome to stay young, and has been embraced by subscribers of the QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy movements.”
Evangelical fear is easy to exploit. If you can create a boogie man to distract people from real and present danger, you can control them. If you can confuse people’s sense of what is fact and what is fiction, you can control them.
My alarm regarding what I’d seen on the fringes of Twitter, quickly turned to an alarm of what this misinformation might lead to. And unfortunately, we all witnessed that play out on January 6, 2021 and have yet to see its long term effects with the upcoming election.
As I began to find logic-based answers, I tried to warn my Christian family members.
I also shifted my attention to the injustices in plain sight. I was enraged, yes. But I wasn’t confused. I had fact-checked sources and eye-witness accounts.
Aligning myself with BLM in the wake of George Floyd’s death, I got an email from my dad warning me about the “hidden dangers” of the BLM agenda. Protesting police brutality was one thing, but disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement was described by the article he sent as “insanity.”
Eight years prior, the pushback would have either shut me down completely or made me feel I needed to course correct. This time, I took it as a sign I was on the right track. The barrage of confusion only made me want to paddle further into the storm like Truman. I sensed there was something out there to be discovered.
Suddenly the guise of family values I had always been taught had the moral high ground revealed itself to be something much more sinister.
Thanks to the FX show Mrs. America, I became familiarized with Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative activist who effectively led the movement to block the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. She helped hoodwink an entire generation of women to do the work of the patriarchy for the men in a girl boss power grab to rise in the ranks of a male dominated political world. Thus came the demonization of abortion as a tactic to once again convince women they are the problem. Phyllis Schlafly’s campaign then made way for the rise of the Moral Majority – the right-wing christian political movement founded in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell Sr. followed by groups like the Heritage Foundation and Family Research Council (co-founded by Focus on the Family’s Dr. Dobson).
The political strategy shaped a generation of conservative women.
I recently had a conversation with an elderly woman in my neighborhood who said she was donating items to a women’s shelter. “I’m for women,” she said. I nodded and said I was too with a smile. After vaguely alluding to what sounded like traumatic experiences with men over the course of her long life, I chimed in to offer what I hoped would feel empathetic. I said how it still astounds me that in such recent history women didn’t have basic rights like the ability to have their own credit card (Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) 1974).
Thinking we were about to have an empowering intergenerational moment for the girls, she abruptly added that “women’s lib had screwed it all up” – or something to the effect.
“They really didn’t need to burn their bras,” she scoffed going on to tell a story about how Bach’s mother was told to have an abortion due to syphilis but didn't and thank god, because otherwise we wouldn’t have the musical legend (I could not find any source to verify this, though I do know Bach was born in 1685).
I asked what she thought about situations like in my homestate of Tennessee where doctors are required to wait until the moment a mother’s life is in active danger before being able to legally perform an abortion, with no exception for rape or incest. She said she thought it should be an option. Unfortunately, it’s not.
If you can convince people to protest their own rights, you can control them.
When Roe v Wade was overturned I was horrified, but I wasn’t surprised. What came as a shock to many, I knew, had been in the works for decades.
The women’s liberation movement demanded agency for women. A direct threat to Christian family values.
During a recent interview when asked if women would have the right to vote if America became a Christian nation, Pastor Joel Webbon of Texas’ Covenant Bible Church and Right Response Ministries proudly said no. “If we had a Christian nation tomorrow, and women did have the right to vote, we would not have a Christian nation within 50 years,” he says in an interview. “The husband has been appointed by God as the head of his home. And no fault divorce and women's suffrage more than anything else, ultimately split the household… I believe that women's suffrage was just one liberal attempt by people who hated Christ to sever the covenant bond between husband and wife and that's what happened. We would not have one Democrat president. This is a statistic fact. We would not have one Democrat president in the last 50 years if women couldn't vote. Well, I don't want women to vote because I want strong marriages. I want cohesive households. I want representative government all the way down to the family. And I also want babies not murdered. Yeah, I don't want drag queen story hour. I don't want rainbow jihad. And none of that could happen if women couldn't vote.”
Obviously absurd and alarming, the interview corroborates the fear that many of us stitched together over the years and have been subsequently gaslit about.
As the dissonance between what I had been told about freedom and what I was experiencing set in, I became increasingly suspicious, paranoid and eventually enraged as I uncovered truths that had been either hidden from me, minimized, or explained using “alternative facts” (McCammon).
It was very confusing to grow up in a household where my parents’ actions indicated I was valued and my intellect and tenacity were encouraged to then use that intellect to dig deeper into the belief system I was told to follow only to find at its core it demanded my subservience to men.
For a while I tried earnestly to bring this to their attention. My parents’ relationship always appeared to be closer to an egalitarian partnership. There seemed to be a disconnect. Surely they would want to be aware that their earnest hope for kids to be raised in loving homes was being weaponized by a backward, misogynistic, transphobic, homophobic, racist agenda.
These attempts usually devolved into heated debates, arguments, or what I can only describe as emotional meltdowns. The more I pulled on the string, the more unraveled and it felt as if I was the only one who was losing the thread.
As the veil lifted, I also began facing uncomfortable truths about trauma I had personally experienced as well as injustices and violence on a societal level that felt unavoidable everywhere I looked. Like Truman, I was on the brink.
Ironically, while on a family trip to an idyllic beach town not too dissimilar to the set of The Truman Show I lost it. A triggering dinner table conversation sent me searching for reprieve to regulate my nervous system. Flight response activated, I was then shamed for leaving the room mid conversation and forced to face the audience anyways. I felt trapped, alone, and crazy. I was tired of feeling like I was the problem. Like I was the crazy one.
Unfortunately in that moment, to any fly on the wall I probably did look crazy. I had a complete breakdown and said things I both can’t remember and likely regret.
I then retreated down the stairs towards the beach. It was freezing, so I came back inside to get a blanket. While walking up the stairs, I could hear my dad explaining to the family that my fit of rage was simply a symptom of the Marxist agenda I had “fallen prey to.”
I didn’t sleep that night. I wasn’t sure I would make it through the night, so I sat on the beach until the sun rose.
It was my mom’s 60th birthday party trip and I still blame myself for ruining it.
When we got back, my parents and I later reconciled. I’ve never questioned their love. It has always been wildly apparent to me how fiercely they love me.
I don’t blame them. I blame the producers pulling the strings.
It’s heartbreaking to lose common language with those you love. When words as fundamental as truth and freedom can no longer be shared, your entire sense of reality is different.
My investigation of freedom and truth led me to demand agency. I often wonder if Evangelicals have a history of discouraging seeing licensed therapists vs a Christian counselor on account that talk therapy helps people learn to observe, sit with, and process their thoughts and emotions. This process helps people develop a sense of agency.
When your foundational reality is warped, it’s very hard to trust your own experience. I wonder if Truman, once integrated into the real world, sometimes convinced himself the show never happened. I mean, how could it? It’s ludacris. I imagine the relief of a friend saying, no, I watched it, it was real.
Finding other Exvanglicals and reading books like Sarah McCammon’s offers corroboration of the experience. The validation of a lived reality you’ve been made to feel was never real.
Sarah McCammon’s book brilliantly details the phenomenon – the growing number of people who have left the Evangelical church and begun deconstructing. A reporter for NPR who covered the Trump campaign and was raised Evangelical, she weaves her journalistic insights with her personal experience to offer a straight-forward, pragmatic, and powerfully validating account of how it’s not all in our heads. The trauma is real. White Christian Nationalism is real and continues to be a clear and present danger to democracy. Women, children, queer and trans folks, people of color, have been hurt by the Evangelical church and its teachings.
You’re not crazy. The producers are just sending a storm because you’re almost there. Keep paddling.
And though my fear of getting it wrong or getting in trouble still crops up, it has become smaller than my fear of being controlled.
And though I wish my family would come with me, I have a sense they always knew the sea would call me.
CURRENTLY:
Listening to: Chappell Roan “Good Luck, Babe!”, Waxahatachee “Right Back To It”
Watching: Fallout, Shōgun
Reading: The Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammon
Additional resources: this TikTok, this IG Reel
The majority of the work is free to view. The paid model is available primarily for patronage for those who are able and wish to financially support my work as an artist.
Thank you for reading!!