The Fear Is Excruciating, but Therein Lies the Answer

• Which in hindsight is odd, because it turns out when women share stories of harm – including religious harm – they will, in fact, often be questioned.
• Review: Women We Buried, Women we Burned – Rachel Louise Snyder (Scribe); In/Out – Steph Lentz (ABC Books) I sit here with two memoirs full of women’s experiences.
• Not testimonies of conversion to Christianity, but testimonies to surviving religious harm.
• Rachel Louise Snyder, author of Women We Buried, Women We Burned, grew up in Pittsburgh and Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s.
• A sense of searching or longing – perhaps for answers, or justice, or maybe freedom – carries these memoirs forward.

Stories of death and new beginnings

• Snyder’s memoir is framed by a story of new beginnings – and a story of cancer, loss and death.
• On the ship, watching the night sky, Snyder sees day and night split across the horizon.
• It fractures her father’s life:
  Her death was the one story that nothing in my dad’s life had prepared him for.
• Her death was the one story that nothing in my dad’s life had prepared him for.
• This death and disappearance double-act is the story at the centre of Snyder’s memoir, one that flows into the unravelling of Snyder’s family, her home, her life.

Making trouble: religious harm and family violence

• But religion would take my life.” Snyder’s story unravels into loss, grief, family violence, running away (again and again) and homelessness.
• He justifies his physical violence by retelling a story that will, unfortunately, be common to many: obedience to a parent is a sign of obedience to God, discipline is an act of love, violence is an act of love.
• Snyder recalls:
  He’d hit us ten times, a dozen, however many it took until he felt he’d broken us down enough to be truly repentant.
• Cry, because at the end of the day it was necessary to see how all this was done out of love.
• Discipline that does harm, whether in the home or in the church, can never be loving.

Doing damage

• But first, I had to do some damage.
• But first, I had to do some damage.
• Lentz declares she will do damage – and yes, we could count an affair, a divorce and fractured friendships as damage done by her.
• But the church culture she grew up in, which taught her homosexuality was sinful and incompatible with Christian faith, had already done damage of its own.

Christianity, sexuality and religious harm

• Continually telling a story that places queer people outside faith communities causes harm and trauma for queer people.
• She boldly invites the reader into her experience of religious harm.
• Yet belonging to an evangelical community is often contingent on the “right” expression of gender and sexuality.
• For those who have been harmed, or who are still in a place of harm, Lentz’s book may remind them they are not alone.

A scandalous story

• She recounts in detail what it was like to finally let herself fall in love with a woman.
• I waited for God’s judgement to fall upon me in some manner or other.
• If anything, I felt closer to God: finally, neither of us was pretending I was that good Christian woman anymore.
• I was committing the sins of adultery and lying and homosexuality […] I waited for the sense of wrongness to kick in.
• If anything, I felt closer to God: finally, neither of us was pretending I was that good Christian woman anymore.

‘The goal is simply to endure’

• While some people may seek recovery from religious and spiritual trauma, others know they can never recover the person they were before.
• […] what is the goal of the trauma survivor in this aftermath?
• The goal is simply to endure.
• […] what is the goal of the trauma survivor in this aftermath?
• The goal is simply to endure.
• Lentz closes her book saying she’s “growing up all over again, learning who I am, learning to choose”.

Freedom from the past

• Freedom from the past comes from being able to narrate our stories truthfully.
• It was not a freedom like the one that had been sold to me, squashed into a small box of constrained choices and limited options.
• For Snyder, freedom is knowing she doesn’t have to say her parents “did the best they could under the circumstances with the resources they had”.
• They could view our collective past through whatever lens they wanted, but I was going to free myself.