Episode 025 – Leaving Christian Fundamentalism with Dr Josie McSkimming
10 September 2021
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This transcript has been edited for clarity.
T: Well hey everyone, welcome to episode 25 of season 2. This is the I was a Teenage Fundamentalist podcast, I’m T and this is…
B: I’m B. I’m an easy one, just one letter, that’s all I’ve got to say.
T: Easy peasy. Today we’ve got someone really exciting coming in to talk to us. Remember we said we’re going to get someone to come in who’s a bit of an expert on leaving fundamentalism, and what’s the process and all that kind of thing – well, I think we may have found someone, B.
B: Absolutely, and it is super exciting because such a big part for people is the leaving. Not just the act of leaving – what do you do afterwards? How do you rebuild it? How do you contextualise it? How do you make sense of all the shit you’ve been through?
T: Yes, so we’ve got Dr Josie McSkimming who’s written a book called Leaving Christian Fundamentalism, and the reconstruction of identity. Josie, why don’t we throw to you and you can tell us all about who you are now, and then I think we’d really like to hear about who you were and how you ended up where you are now.
J: Thank you. I’m most happy to do that. Who am I now? I am a Clinical Social Worker. I work mostly with individuals and couples about mental health. I am also a lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, and I teach a particular style of therapy. I have been involved in the counselling world for a very long time, but I wasn’t always, I guess, in the role I am now where I do assist a lot of Christians, ex-Christians, and people who call themselves all sorts of different variations on Christian, make sense of their experience and help them (if they want to) consider their journey of reconstruction, if they have left a particularly fundamentalist church. Having said that, I see lots of people who are still very much a part of the church. As a therapist, I guess stating the obvious, it’s other people’s journeys, not mine, so I don’t impose or prescribe how people should undertake their own journey. I didn’t used to be in the situation I am in now. I used to be on the list of all the preferred Christian counsellors in Sydney. There is a list from Moore college and various other organisations where they had the list of preferred Christian counsellors. I was on that list, and I believe I’m not on that list anymore. Since I wrote my book there’s been a deafening silence from a lot of people about my book, my experience, my work, and the fact that I have been quite public – in fact, very public – in calling out what I see are the real dangers of evangelicalism and fundamentalism on people’s lives and people’s senses of self.
T: So does that mean you’re still working with clients, like people could come to see you and talk about leaving fundamentalism.
J: Oh absolutely. Absolutely. It’s what I do all the time. The only thing I kind of need to say is that I get very busy and people have to wait to see me. I would love to see more people than I do, because there aren’t many people who do this sort of work. I know a couple who were really involved in the church and have now left – therapists, like myself, and when you’re doing psychotherapy you need to be appropriately qualified, so I can’t just refer people onto anybody. I remember back in the day when we used to just refer people to someone who was called a Christian Counsellor, and sometimes they didn’t even have any appropriate qualifications, apart from being Christian and going to the right church. That’s completely unacceptable to me now, and this is such an important issue for people, not only do I like to refer somebody to someone who was an evangelical or fundamentalist themselves, but also has appropriate qualifications to assist.
T: So Josie, it sounds to me like you’re saying it was more important the person was a Christian than they were a counsellor.
J: When I was more involved, or involved in church communities, when people needed assistance they were referred only to a Christian counsellor. Of course I don’t think like this anymore, but people were only referred to somebody who not only was a Christian counsellor but went to the right sort of church. So what seemed to be more important was the church they went to was the right brand, rather than their qualifications. I think that still goes on – in fact, I’m sure it goes on. I think it’s very worrying, when the qualifications of the counsellor would seem to me to be paramount.
T: So Josie, tell us about your story. At what age did you end up in a fundamentalist church, how long were you there, what was your journey?
J: I was there for far too long. Well, I was converted at Camp Howard when I was ten. A Christian camp, it’s not called Camp Howard anymore, I think it’s called Anglican Youth Works. All the camps are the same, down on the Port Hacking river. You’d go along on the January school holidays. I remember the counsellor, the leader, saying I needed to make Jesus Lord of my life, so I did, and was given a whole array of reading materials, Scripture Union and the like. I came home and told my family that this is what had happened to me. I come from a rather unusual family, my parents were high church Anglicans but we are also of Jewish background, so this was somewhat appalling to come into the family and start talking about Jesus my Saviour and Redeemer in a high church family with a Jewish background, but my fervour and fevered obsession with this brand of Christianity from Camp Howard remained. It continued through my school life and my adolescence. I was the leader of the Christian group at school, I was very involved in my local church, I was involved in the music, the youth fellowship, you name it. When I went to university, that probably was when I made quite an extreme turn, I think, to the more conservative elements. I became involved in the campus bible ministry on the campus of the University of New South Wales under the leadership of Phillip Jensen at the time, and became very involved during my four years at university. That’s when I became schooled in two ways to live, discipleship training, I was involved in the Billy Graham Crusade, training for the crusade, following up from the crusade, I was asked to become part of the ministry training scheme which I declined, and I’m very grateful for that decision, but I was very involved. So you can see this has been a very long term involvement. I also was involved in Saint Matthias for many years. Saint Matthias church. Just slowly, over time, and I can explain this in a moment, I started very slowly to have these points of incongruence and points of distress and disturbance, where I realised that I wasn’t agreeing with a lot of what was being said. I felt quite disturbed by what was being said, and I think I started to cultivate a rather subterranean sense of self – what I call in my book, a double life, where I was thinking some things quietly, maintaining some outsider status, while participating on the surface in a very engaged and full throated, wholehearted way. This took about 20 years before I left, when eventually there’s too many of these episodes. The incongruence is too much, and in the end you just say well what the fuck, I can’t do it. That was probably my journey, excuse the language.
B: We like the language, Josie.
T: Yeah, we do like the language. So Josie, for the sake of people listening, because a lot of people listening have come from charismatic backgrounds – certainly not everybody, but a lot of people tuning in will come from charismatic or Pentecostal background. Tell us a little bit about the different kinds of Anglicanism, because I think for most of us we think it’s quite respectable, it’s quite staid, and yet you’re painting a picture of quite extreme fundamentalism.
J: Well, ironically enough, I did have some involvement with Pentecostalism as a teenager, when we were encouraged to go along by some of our leaders, to various Pentecostal church and try to talk in tongues. I remember that very distinctly, as other people listening will remember that, as you try and find it in yourself, or wave it around inside yourself, or say these phrases. I remember at the time thinking this is so fake, but that’s what we were encouraged to do. So I did have some taste of it as a teenager, but it was too much for me. The church that I went to, particularly while I was at university, was very academic, very learned, very bible focused, less experience focused. We were taught not to trust Pentecostalism because it was all based on experience. We weren’t to trust Catholicism because it was based on the authority of the church. We were to only, only put our faith in the revealed word. It was all about this biblification of your life, according to a particular understanding of the bible. A particularly evangelical understanding – which is meant to be the more intellectual, or the more learned edge of fundamentalism, but to my way of thinking there is a very blurred line between them. The sort of evangelicalism I experienced is more a fundamentalism, I think in the modern sense, in that this is what the bible says, because we the experts are telling you this is what it means. If I say it means this, then it means this. That’s a form of fundamentalism, which very much creeps into evangelicalism, and you’ll be very familiar with there being certain shibboleths or tests, bible statements, to see whether you’re a true Christian or not. In that kind of charismatic tradition it’s whether you’ve had the second blessing, whether you talk in tongues, whether you’ve experienced that form of Christianity. For me, as a kind of an Anglican evangelical, there are certain tests to see whether you’re a TRUE Christian and they generally relate, sadly, to your understanding of men and women, and their relationship, your understanding to the inerrancy of scripture, your understanding in relation to sexuality and queer sexuality. These things are the tests, and if you don’t accept those as proof of your Christianity, you don’t subscribe to certain conservative views on those matters, then you’re not a proper Christian. It was kind of said we were free to explore the bible and we should never just listen to what was said at the front, we should always explore the text for ourselves. But let me suggest you’re in this bubble of what I would call rather textual unfreedoms. You actually do not, in reality, have the freedom to intellectually question, to explore, to consider things differently. If you do, you are rapidly brought into line. There are lots of ways of controlling what you think, what you say, and what you do.
B: I think there are similarities between what you’re describing from your Anglican evangelical experience to what T and I have often spoken about in our Pentecostal experience. Even though there’s quite different flavours, there’s definitely quite similar experiences.
J: Hmmm.
T: It’s funny listening to you, because when you hear about Sydney Anglicanism, when we were embedded in Pentecostalism, that was considered to be very intellectual, very biblical, and at the same time very straightlaced, but I hear these smacks of sexism and the diminishing of women. You even said it there, that one of the tests was the role of women. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
J: Oh look, that was a huge test. I think this became much more apparent when I was older. What seemed to happen is that there was a lot of discussion in the 80s about ordination of women, and the evangelical church doubled down on its argument around the differences between men and women in church communities and this kind of God-given hierarchical relationship. When I was in university I didn’t experience it quite as strongly, but it seemed to really creep in through the 80s and 90s. Previously we were called co-leaders of groups; then we’d have a male leader, and the female was called the assistant leader. These really subtle ways of discriminating between men and women. A group sprung up called Equal but Different, which I think was a very mischievous group. I still do, because it implies that there’s this kind of equality, but there’s anything but. It’s a really immutable subordination of women and this subjection of women. This is what I experienced particularly in my 20s and 30s when I was having children and going back to work. A lot of control, and a lot of condemnation of working women, and of women being a certain way – a cultivation of this quiet, gentle, servile spirit. And of course, the controlling of sexuality. In my book I talk about this phrase docile bodies in a docile community. You need to keep people from rebelling and resisting and refuting and protesting, so there was various rules about sexual expression. These are laid down again as these immutable interpretations of scripture, and this is the standard that you need to apply to your life. You’re kind of immersed in this bubble, and you have to enact this way of behaving, definitely heterosexual sex, only within marriage, that’s it. That’s the rule from scripture, and that is very strictly reinforced. And it’s reinforced – and I argue this in my book – some people think power is something more authoritarian, but I think in Christian communities it’s more disseminated or dispersed through the whole social body; hence, I use the phrase the Christian normalising gaze. This idea that we’re all under this gaze all the time, which invites self-monitoring, self-surveillance, confession in small groups, correction in small groups, so yes there is an authoritarianism about it and yes there are certain leaders, but it’s reinforced all through the social body of the church. We enact it ourselves, we’re the recipients of power and we also enact power on other people. You know, that’s what I came to realise – I was a vehicle of this power in terms of changing and challenging people’s identity beyond what might be their own preferences for their life. It just became such an unethical position to be holding. I hope that makes sense.
B: Yeah, it makes sense. You said before it took you about 20 years to unpack a lot of the stuff before you finally left the church. What were some of those key indicators for you? What were some of those things you remember – I’m sure there were hundreds if not thousands of moments around that period, but what were some of the key things where you just went what the fuck? What have I been believing?
J: Ohhh, there was a lot. In the 80s when I started – and probably some people listening to this weren’t even born then, but in the 80s when I started reading books about women in ministry, and honouring women in ministry, and the equality between men and women in church, and I said to my minister I’m reading these, I’m finding them very interesting. This minister came over to my husband and I, to our home, and spoke to us – it must have been til the early hours of the morning, about why I shouldn’t be reading them, and the dangers of reading them, and my complete lack of theological expertise to be reading such things. I was sort of horrified, but chastened at the same time. So that was one of those sites of injury, and there was many others. I remember this very clearly – I was at a church meeting, and even the name of it makes me squirm – What Women Need to Know about Men. This was basically a very long-winded sort of apology for men behaving badly, and women having to tolerate and manage it, because boys will be boys, and girls will be girls, sort of thing. In this group I stood up, and it took a lot of courage because I knew it wouldn’t be accepted, to say that I didn’t like the ideas that were being presented about men and women, and about how we needed to raise our boys in this very stereotypical way – playing competitive sport, learning to use tools, etc. I was told in this meeting – subtly, but not that subtly – that if I raise my voice this way they will probably turn out gay. So I sat down humiliated, shamed – these were years before I left, but they were these sort of sites of micro-injury (well, more than that, perhaps) where I realised I did not agree, and I did not think the same and if I expressed it, I would be brought into line. The big thing for me was seeing men and women in these unequal relationships. It was just unacceptable. I had to process that. My late sister was gay, and kind of that terrible pain that I know I caused her by my judgementalism still pains me, because that interfered in our relationship in ways I wish it never did. Perhaps I realised also, as I was reading and thinking, and I remember a distinct moment where I thought I really don’t believe in hell, because even if God is real, the concept of hell we have is so narrow, so small, so cruel, that I thought it was illogical, irrational, and decidedly unhelpful, and I thought that is gone. That is gone from my palate of belief.
B: What did that do for you? Having those things really start to pierce and start to question to the point where you did eventually leave. What did that do to you? Describe what was going on for you at the time.
J: Well like lots of people, it was agonising. It was agonising. I had my gay sister while I was also involved in organisations that were just on the edge of conversion therapy. That creates such a dissonance inside you, such an internal ruction and shattering. That’s what I mean about that double life, until eventually it breaks forth. There’s an awful lot of pain, and probably what a lot of people relate to, I had enormous fear. When I first started speaking publicly, I wrote letters to the Herald, I wrote my book, I’ve written opinion pieces, I made a couple television appearances, I was terrified of the condemnation and shaming I would experience. Ironically enough, quite the opposite happened. I just got frozen out. The waters close over the top of you like you never existed. People don’t want to know what you had to say. Somebody said to me, Josie they think you’re the anti-Christ, which is so cruel and terrible. It would have frightened me once, it doesn’t now. But it just goes to show the shaming and ostracism when you really start to call this out can be quite devastating. It’s devastated many people that I’ve worked with. Thankfully it’s nearly 20 years now since I left – actually, that’s not quite true. The last time I attended a proper church service was January 2009, I remember it very clearly, so it’s not quite that long. That internal distress is very real. Ironically enough – and I say this in the book – and I’ve experienced this in my clinical work, is that some of that depression and anxiety that people experience tends to dissipate once they leave. The idea that leaving is the terrible part is not quite the same. Maybe it’s like coming out when you’re gay – the staying in is much harder than the coming out. I think sometimes when you eventually do come out, it’s not so terrible once you’ve had a little bit of distance between you and some of those really bad experiences.
T: Josie, you talked about the sites of injury. I thought that was a really interesting term, because we would probably more talk about – remember when this happened, remember when that happened. But you talk about these sites of injury – did they build up over a period of time? Did you look back one day and go hold on, I’ve got all these things that have happened to me, all these sites of injury, this isn’t worth staying?
J: Well I think what’s interesting is that you often discover, along with the sites of injury, a whole alternative story of who you are that has resisted and refused. What I call an anti-pastoral revolt, and you don’t realise until you have enough of these incidents. So you’ve got a lot of these oh remember when that happened, but if somebody asks you what did you do? And you realise you responded to protect yourself; to protest, to really say no. I think that can be quite helpful for people to realise that they have been, over time, protesting and resisting and refusing to comply. There’s another whole story of who they can be underneath. I think it’s not so much discovering who you are, when you come out of fundamentalism, but sometimes refusing to be who you were. It’s not so much a kind of discovery, a who am I, but refusing to be that person. Then the reconstruction of the self can come from there once you really refuse.
B: So Josie, how did it come to be that you became this therapist that people who are coming out of fundamentalism were attracted to? Was it from your book? Or was it prior to that which lead you to write your book?
J: I think it was prior to that. I wrote a piece a long time ago when I wasn’t out, saying I had a lot of ethical dilemmas. I was working for a Christian based organisation when my own questions were in parallel with the clients I was working with. So I wrote a piece about how I was managing that ethically, because I was going through this process of questioning, and the clients were too. As I say, I was in a church-based organisation, so I had to manage that respectfully, and I also wasn’t quite sure what I thought, so I was in this very grey zone. Perhaps I got a reputation as somebody that could understand this, and I started talking about it a bit more publicly. I think probably on that ever-present grapevine people realised there was somebody they could talk to. I’ve been a therapist in private practise on and off since 1996, so I’ve been around a long time, but people have realised perhaps more recently that I might be someone to talk to about these really tricky spiritual issues. My work pre-dated the Sydney ex-vangelical movement. That all came afterwards.
T: Tell us about that. What’s the Sydney ex-vangelical movement?
J: I think it’s very interesting. This term ex-vangelical was coined in the US, I believe by Blake Chastain and used extensively by Dr Chrissy Stroop, who has also written a book about this called Empty the Pews. It was in huge response to authoritarian Christianity, and that you’re not an evangelical, you’re now an ex-vangelical. Various groups have sprung up through social media, saying we’re ex-vangelicals, and there’s one of those in Sydney. They’re all over social media now, of people wanting to talk about deconstruction and reconstruction. A lot of queer people saying I need to find a community where I can talk about this. I think the legacy of guilt and fear and shame for people who have been so condemned, their sexuality so condemned – and women too, actually – have a real journey (cliché as that is) to really embrace with great joy and acceptance their sexual expression, their sexual identity, their sexual orientation.
T: So what about the afterwards? We’ve talked about what it’s like to be in there, we’ve talked about what it’s like to leave. What advice do you give people or what things would you highlight for the afterwards? I’ve left, what do I do now?
J: I think one of the main things is for people to understand that it does take time. It really doesn’t happen quickly, either the leaving or the new sense of self. But I think what I’ve discovered from my work with people, and my research into this, because I did a PhD on this, is that the new ethical substances, or the new ethical frame or living that you discover afterwards can be very freeing, and in a liberal democracy like ours, when you have not really experienced a lot of freedom – you thought there was freedom, you thought you were getting community and freedom within the church. A lot of people who are quite vulnerable, and have been abused and have a traumatic background join the church in the hope of finding community and freedom, and they don’t really find it. They can feel marginalised. Of course do I need the disclaimer, not all churches? I’m certainly happy to say that – I still work with lots of Christian people. But I think it’s important for people to understand that it is a long journey, but there is something very important you can discover about yourself along the way, and to be curious about that, and to be affirming and acknowledging about what you discover, particularly on this journey about times of refusal and protest, what you might learn and discover about yourself, what you might know about yourself, and what you hold really dear – what values, commitments and principles are emerging about you that you didn’t know before. I think that can be a really exciting process. Once you’re unencumbered you can go back to first principles and think ok, well what do I think about abortion? What do I think about men and women in relationship? What are the different ideas about this? What can I sift through and accept and discard? How can I go on a journey here, and that can be invigorating for people. You’re less being seen by your church community and being told who you should be, and you’re more doing the looking. I think that can be really interesting and inviting. That’s not to say it’s not incredibly hard. The main thing I think people really struggle with is the loss of community. The church is of course – what would I say – I think it’s part of their game plan. You invest so much time, so much money, so much energy into these communities. They take up your whole week. When you leave, there are some people who try a little bit to call you back in but if you’re not being compliant, they don’t want to know you. As you withdraw, they withdraw from you, and so it goes on. Often some fundamentalist Christians are quite threatened by the questions you throw up – I suspect because they might be thinking them themselves, so they withdraw from you. That can be a really hard time trying to find a new community. People talk to me a lot about that, trying to find a new community of like-minded folks who they could just relate to, because they really miss that. There’s so much sure-ness in being a part of one of these communities. You’ve got the answer to the problems of the universe, and if you can just get it right, you’re part of God’s plan and once you start moving away from that, you don’t have the community and you realise perhaps that what was safe and secure, at least for a time, may not be anymore. It’s not easy, yeah.
B: No! It sounds incredibly difficult. Obviously you’re quite passionate about this space. How is it for you when you’re in a therapeutic relationship with a client, they’re really starting to explore some of those trigger points that you saw, some of those things that are starting to really be in their face and they’re starting to question. That must be difficult, because you must want to jump in and go well, this was my experience, but you can’t in a therapeutic relationship. How does that work for you?
J: Oh look, that is hard. I do share from my experience if I think it’s going to be helpful for people. I’m not in that traditional sense like a tabula rasa, I’m not like a blank slate. Therapy is a conversation and I do share of my experience, but the skill is as you share of your experience I don’t want to eclipse or get in the way of other people’s journeys. So I can’t say this is how you should do it. I can say this is something that I found, or other people, because I’ve talked to lots of people. Or this is what people have found from my book, or people I’ve worked with have found might have helped them. So I can certainly make tentative suggestions to people, and people are often really happy to get that information. As long as it’s not given to people as rigid pieces of advice or instruction. They’ve had enough of that, if you get my drift.
B: Yeah, absolutely. So if you had to do a very quick, thematic analysis of the things that come into your space, what are the big things that people are grappling with around fundamentalism, that they’re trying to make sense of?
J: Well, the people I work with, it’s often after a marriage has broken up. I’ve been interested in the whole family violence space, and about how some of these ideas of equal but different, and hierarchical relationships within marriage, that the theology can create situations where women are really are very powerless. Where there can be emotional, sexual, financial, even physical violence. I talk to people coming out of those relationships. Clergy wives, or people who have been in relationships that they haven’t realised have been abusive, and that’s incredibly painful. That’s often very costly because as you’re aware, often the church believes the perpetrator and not the victim or the survivor of the abuse. The victim of the abuse often leaves the church and is sometimes regarded as some kind of Jezebel and whose reputation is tarnished. So that’s very difficult, it’s a real pressure point. I certainly deal with gay people who have been in church communities. This is a big issue for me, probably because of what happened between me and my own sister which thankfully was repaired, but I’m really conscious of what the church does to people who have an alternative sense of sexual identity or sexual orientation. I think it’s cruel. As people resist that Christian gaze and what I’ve called that anti-pastoral kind of revolt, the resistance becomes political, it’s like a political spirituality, and I think that can be powerful too, that people are making some kind of a political statement. They’re just saying no it’s wrong, and I can work with that. The other space I work with, of course, is dealing with families. When my client or even my colleagues and friends are moving away from the really fundamentalist beliefs, and their family, their wife or their children are still very much immersed in the church, or their parents. I talk to a lot of people who love their parents dearly, but they no longer want to subscribe to these particular theological discourses, and that’s incredibly painful. The parents are in pain too. Some of them think they’ve been praying for their children for so many years, that God owes them to give them Christian obedient children, and these young adults I work with have to say to their parents I’m gay, or I don’t want to be part of the church, or I’m leaving my husband, or I’m leaving my wife, and these are very difficult transitions. You can appreciate that.
T: Josie, maybe I’m about to show my naivety or ignorance of Anglicanism in Australia, but I was always of the point of view that there were liberal factions, there were conservative factions, and they tended to usually be high church/low church, but within Anglicanism is there a role for those liberal factions to be there to pick up the pieces, or are they so distant from each other that people just won’t go there? How does that all work?
J: I actually think that’s a really good point, because in fact a lot of those liberal churches have become refuges for people that I’ve worked with and people that I know, so those more liberal churches, high churches, the ones that are more honouring of women and wanting women in equal roles with men, churches where women are ministers, Uniting Church, they’ve been an oasis – water in the desert. A lot of people I work with are still in those more liberal churches. Sydney Anglicanism is somewhat unique, even in Australia. I think it’s got more akin to some of the churches that we read about in the United States. It’s different. What’s the history? People have written history books about this, from the time of the so called flogging parson – that’s Samuel Marsden – Sydney has been regarded as this hotbed of sin for years and has needed correction. I also think that there was a deliberate plan, perhaps in the early 80s amongst certain very evangelical conservative Christians to try and control the diocese, so that it could go in a certain direction. There were plans that certain key people would be put into certain positions to control the diocese so it wouldn’t go into more liberal territory. But the liberal territory still remains, and yes those churches are very important to people. Very.
B: So Josie, for those people that are listening that are grappling with their faith or with fundamentalism, or grappling with coming out or have come out of fundamentalism, trying to move forward. What are your tips for them? What are the things you think they should be pursuing to help them as they journey along?
J: I don’t want this to sound like a cliché, but it is important for people to know you’re not alone, and that there are lots of people who have gone along this kind of trajectory also. You can reach out and find people quite easily on social media. There are many books written now about deconversion, there are many memoirs written about why I left the church. There’s my book – mine is slightly more academic, but there are many that are written, so start looking for those things so you can feel connected so you’re not alone. That’s important, particularly if you are losing community. Then find people to talk to about it. Find people who won’t judge you or tell you what to do. Again it kind of sounds obvious, but there might be some people that say yes but what about the person of Jesus, or yes you can give up this other stuff but don’t give up Jesus – you really don’t need people to tell you what you can and can’t give up. You need somebody to say where are you up to? You’re not anybody’s mission field. I think that’s important because when you’re immersed in Christianity for a long time, you understand that everybody else is a mission field and your job is to go out and tell them the good news. You’re not anybody’s mission field. You don’t have to justify your doubts or confusion to anybody. And if people start giving you the usual apologetics – you probably know them anyway – you don’t have to answer questions, you can have your own integrity, because some well-meaning Christian friends will talk to you about well, what about the historicity of the bible? You don’t actually have to answer these questions. You can say I don’t know, and I’m not sure, and I don’t know if that’s important anymore. Just knowing you can stay in this I Don’t Know space for as long as you need to stay in an I Don’t Know space – even that itself can be freeing. You don’t have to be sure, you don’t have to have all the answers sown up. You can talk to professional people sure, but you can also talk to other people who you know have left the church, or you can just talk to people who are trust, who you know will give you the freedom to just be in the place you’re in, without judgement, without advice and without condemnation. That sounds easy, and it isn’t always easy, but it is important to stay connected. To not think I’m on my own with this, because that can lead to terror and fear, and a whole lot of guilt and worry, rather than talking to other people.
B: I think that’s really important, the power of just being. And being comfortable of sitting with I Don’t Know is a place that took me a long time to get to. I’m very comfortable there – I’m possibly too comfortable there, and become quite complacent. I know T, you’ve had some similar experiences as well.
T: Yeah, most definitely. I think people can listen to this and go wow this is very different from Pentecostalism. I think when you get past the music and the songs we sing, and some of the issues here and there, I think it’s very similar. I love the way you framed it Josie, I’m going to stick with that sites of injury. I love that term. So my question to you now Josie, is how do people find your book? And how do people connect with you if they choose to?
J: Well look, I’ve got a website, I’m very easy to find. People can connect with me however they want to. I just need to say to people that I’m not just available to chat on the phone. If you want to come and see me professionally, certainly come talk to me but you may have to wait to do that. If I can’t see you, I will try and refer you to someone who can. I speak quite frankly on Twitter about ex-vangelical issues, which hasn’t earned me a whole lot of friends, but that’s part of – I think – the activism that comes from my own experience. I feel I owe it to my research participants for my book, I owe it to my clients to get out there and publicly say stuff and cop the eggs, because I’m older now. I’ve been through a lot. I’m a big grown up, and there’s a lot of my clients who just need somebody else to do it for them, because they’re not in a position to do that, they’re too tender. So I’m happy to do that, because I believe in activism and this is what I call a political spirituality, or political action. People can get in touch with me, follow me on social media if they want to, and connect with me that way. Email me, or consult with me professionally.
T: I think what we’ll do Josie is put your professional contact details in the show notes. If you’re listening to this and you think that there’s some value in connecting with Josie or at least with her publications, then check out the show notes.
B: Look, thank you so much Josie. It really has been a gap that’s come up when we’re speaking about many different topics, about how do people access help, how do people contextualise, unpack, deconstruct, reconstruct – all that stuff, and I think you’ve spoken to a lot of that today. There’s been some really fantastic insight, so I want to thank you for making time, and all the best for your future – and your agitating. I love how you agitate, so well done.
J: Oh well, there you are. I suppose what I’ve realised over the years is that it’s not me. It’s this gaze I was under, and I think it’s helpful for people to know it’s not you. Don’t get caught up in a whole lot of self-blame and self-condemnation. This is a system of power, like any system of power, and I think that’s what really came out for me when I did the research, was analysing what kind of power it was. That helped me take the pressure off myself, and the self-blame and self-criticism and guilt that goes along with leaving, to understand that it’s ok to move away from a system of power. Once you jump out of the frog pond, you realise it was just a frog pond, but you’ve got to jump out. It’s not the greatest metaphor, because as I’ve said you jump out, you jump back in, which I did over many, many years.
B: Thank you again, and next week T – dating and marriage.
T: Dating and marriage – I think it’s a follow on from what we’re talking about here. I think we’re going to talk about some of those unequal power structures we saw as Pentecostals. I don’t think we’re going to use quite the academic language. I feel like this has been quite a different episode from what we’re used to, but I think it’s been really powerful. I was sitting there going uh huh, yep, yep, that’s it, yep, uh huh – sites of injury, yep. It’s been absolutely brilliant.
B: Thank you. See you next week everyone.