Religious Truama: How Christianity can be "Utterly Aberrant"

Trauma is defined as "an emotional response to an intense event that threatens or causes harm."

For countless numbers of children like myself, Religious Trauma (RT) can therefore be defined as "an emotional response to an intense event that threatens or causes harm, with everything from children being thrown out of their garden home by an irate father for eating forbidden fruit, to apocalyptic floods, crucifixions of the innocent, drinking of blood, days of atonement and threats of hell and purgatory for failing to obey God, being the 'intense event that threatens physical harms which causes emotional harm' like nothing else in the universe." 

The religion being referred to is Christianity, of course. But Christianity need not necessarily always cause RT. When the ultimate focus of the religion is on love, and the other ideas are limited or excluded, no RT may be suffered. But the more threats of hell and a focus on suffering as atonement for one's flaws is increased, the more traumatic the experience of Christianity can be to a child, for the child is defenseless to what they are being taught to believe about both themselves and the world they have been born into. In effect, the child is being taught they are born on a treadmill headed for the mouth of a volcano. And the only way they can avoid being thrown into that volcano is if they obey a Church. )

When faced with the dire threat of eternal torture for failing to obey a Church, mixed with beliefs that suffering makes one like Christ and ensures access to heaven, is it any wonder a child will obey a priest who tells them to engage in illegal sexual activities?  But I digress.

 To illustrate just how much Christianity can indeed operate as the cause of so much trauma to innocent children around the world, even as it also operates to provide hope for being saved from the suffering it may cause, and the tortures is threatens, consider the following quotes from the book, The Myth of Normal by one of the leading educators on trauma today, Dr. Gabor Mate. 

The quote itself is in boldface. And I have broken it up to add my own comments to help to describe how the causes of trauma that Mate is discussing can be found in the traumatizing ideas being used to shape children's minds through Christian education and indoctrination.

 Quote:

"No hominin species could have survived long enough to evolve had its members seen themselves as atomized individuals, pitted by Nature against their fellow beings."

While Christianity publicly claims to be working to make us all one big happy family, in truth, the "family" it desires is one in which everyone must obey the commands of a father who threatens to throw any of his children who do not obey his demands into the furnace in the basement. As such, it preaches community while it sows seeds of division by requiring each child, or each tribe, to obey its rules, and reject every other. Christianity can therefore be understood as essentially forcing people to work on saving others as the only way to save themselves. Hence, it is simply a religion that preaches like a lamb but acts like a self interested wolf that will do whatever it takes to avoid hell and win heaven. Whenever Mate therefore says "self interest," consider how Christianity is about one's ultimate self interest in salvation. No one - not even Jesus - is willing to suffer for all eternity. Doing so allows us to see a truer face of the Christian religion, one in which the primary goal for the "believer" is not about obtaining peace on earth, but avoiding hell and getting the apple of salvation, even if that requires making hell on earth.

 "Contrary to our present ways of operating, a traditional view of self-interest would be enhancing one’s connection and membership in the (diverse) community, to everyone’s benefit. (Even those who believe different from ourselves.) Authentic self-interest need not be conflated with a suspicious and competitive stance toward others."

 Christianity has always been competitive with other religions, but also of different forms of Christianity. There is a long history of conflict between different brands of Christianity, starting with the ones being practiced during the days of St. Augustine up through the Puritans in the colonies and even the Catholics vs the Protestants. It was those differences that Augustine sought to stamp out using torture.

"Hence my working assumption that our nature, all else being equal, expects or even prefers as its baseline state a condition of caring, relative harmony, and equilibrium, of the kind that obtains when interconnectedness rules the day. It is not that our nature is to be those ways, but that it wants them to be present. When they are, we thrive; when denied, we suffer."

It is not our nature to be born sinners, in other words, hell bent on selfishness and self interest, especially in saving our own hide from Hades.

"What to make, then, of the modern received wisdom that we are fundamentally aggressive, selfish? Where does such an idea come from?"

Like the Christian concept of "God," so the entire premise of "original sin" has never been proven, nor an eternal soul to which such a sin is said to be a stain. In is from this "belief" in the stain of original sin that Christians claim to have been given a "divine revelation" that we are born fundamentally selfish and aggressive, and the only thing that can help us with that is to incentivize us into striving for Heaven by teaching us to be scared as hell of Hell.

"Under a capitalist system notions and expressions of human nature will both mirror the individualized, competitive ideal  and justify it as being the inevitable status quo."

 Christianity does the same thing, mirroring the idea that we are sinners in need of saving, and calling anyone who challenges such a status quo a heretic.

It makes sense: if what’s normal is assumed to be natural, the norm will endure; on the other hand, when suspicions emerge that the way things are may not be how they’re meant to be . . . well, the quo may not be status for long. Thus do (Christian) cultures generate notions— myths, in effect—of selfish, aggressive striving and dominance as behavioral baselines, encouraging characteristics that place a lesser value on connectedness to others (i.e., diversity)  and to Nature itself (that is, the natural world, rather than worshiping a spiritual ideal, as if your eternal soul depended on it).

 In our present capitalist society, Darcia Narvaez suggested to me, we have become “species-atypical,” a sobering idea when you think about it: no other species has ever had the ability to be untrue to itself, to forsake its own needs, never mind to convince itself that such is the way things ought to be. (Christianity likewise teaches us to forsake our own needs for those of God and, since he chooses to remain largely inaccessible to our best efforts to know "him," his Church. Martyrdom is a prime example of how a person can come to believe that sacrificing their earthly life will win them eternal life.)

As the following chapters will explore, today’s culture (Christianity on the one hand, and unfettered consumption on the other) hastens human development along unhealthy lines from conception onward (like the stain of original sin idea), leading to a “normal” that, from the perspective of the needs and evolutionary history of our species (a need to feel safe and loved, which we can only feel when we are not constantly judged), is utterly aberrant.