My Body Was Not My Own

Growing up in the Evangelical Purity Culture movement, I was always aware that my body was not my own. My body belonged to my future husband, and he would be devastated if I let another man see it or touch it. My body belonged to my family, my church, even my friends, and they would experience the fallout if I dared to sully my purity.

It was shame that kept me trapped inside this environment for so long. Shame that if I “went too far” before I got married, no man would want me to be his wife. Shame that if I messed up, everyone around me would be hurt by what I chose to do with my body. Shame that my actions would damage the reputation of the church, of my religion.

Now that I’m out of this culture, I can see that it wasn’t about reputation. It wasn’t even about purity. It was about control. Controlling our actions, our thoughts, and most importantly, our bodies.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of purity culture literature is aimed at women, not men. Sure, there are books for men on the dangers of porn, and marriage manuals on how to treat your wife with respect. But the books on keeping your mind and body pure, on not kissing anyone until your wedding day, on covering up your body so you don’t tempt anyone into sin? Obviously, they’re written for women.

It’s our responsibility to stay pure for our husbands—although few women expect that the man they marry will be a virgin on their wedding night. It’s our responsibility to not tempt men into sin by showing a smidgen of cleavage. It’s our responsibility to uphold the reputation of the church as the bastion of morality in modern society.

It’s all on us. Not just women, but teenage girls.

I was fifteen the first time that I was told that my body had made a man feel uncomfortable. Unbeknownst to me, the way that my shirt revealed a flash of my stomach when I moved was just too much for one of the elderly men in our church. Obviously, it was my body that was the problem—not the creepy guy gawking at teenage girls when he was supposed to be worshipping God.

I didn’t argue or complain. It made sense to me, within the Evangelical framework in which I’d been raised, that my body was a distraction that was preventing men from focusing on God. This was my responsibility. I needed to dress differently, and then my body would be less of a problem.

It wasn’t my body, really. It was a weapon that I could unwittingly use to cause men to lust, to steal them away from their wives, to make them stumble and fall away from God’s path. If they sinned, it was my fault because of the way I’d dressed. The lines between the so-called purity culture and rape culture blurred in the most horrible manner.

I went away to university a couple of years after this incident, and it wasn’t long before my mind was (thankfully) corrupted by the worldly ideas in my liberal arts degree. I began recognising how toxic the purity culture aspect of my upbringing had been, and started the process of shedding all the shame I’d been hanging on to.

It’s probably taken me the better part of ten years to fully unlearn this mindset. To acknowledge that my body is mine—it doesn’t belong to my partner or my child, and certainly not my church. It is mine, and I finally feel like I can dress it and move it and use it however I please.

My body is finally mine, and I could not feel more free.

Writing About Faith Without Actually Saying What I Believe

The other day, someone I’ve met all of twice asked me a very specific question about my faith on a mutual friend’s Facebook page, and I was amazed that I was actually able to write a somewhat coherent answer. But I know the answer I gave would not have satisfied a lot of Christians, because what I wrote was basically just, “Actually, I don’t know what I think about that. I used to think X, but now I have my doubts. My views might change, but for now I’m honestly not sure.” It was surprisingly freeing to actually be able to just say “I don’t know”, but for the longest part of my life, I thought that not having a concrete answer to trot out when someone asked my opinion on something faith-related was, well, a failure of my faith.

It’s called Apologetics, and it’s an branch of Christian theology that many people—especially those in their 20s and 30s—will be familiar with. As a child and a teenager, I wasn’t very good at memorising Bible verses, but I could repeat the arguments for what Christians believed on X, Y and Z. I guess they were my opinions, but now that I’m questioning, well, everything, I can’t tell if I really ever formed an opinion or if I just parroted stuff. I do remember feeling incredibly conflicted because I just didn’t care about the issue of evolution. I was never one of those kids who was particularly into science, so I hadn’t learned a lot about evolution. I know it was a contentious issue, but I didn’t care enough to research it and form an opinion. Maybe it was real, maybe it wasn’t, but did I really have to have an opinion on it? Multiple people told me I did. I needed to have a defence in case a non-Christian questioned me about it. It would be a sign of weak faith to not have an answer prepared.

I call bullshit.

* * *

These days, I don’t do apologetics. Well, I do apologise for a lot of aspects of Christianity. I apologise for purity culture and climate change deniers and Donald Trump and a whole bunch of other stuff. Name a crappy thing, and people claiming to share my faith were probably involved. But I no longer have a defence prepared for every question I receive about my faith. Sometimes I’m not even sure what I believe, aside from “Jesus is pretty rad”. (I wrote this without even thinking about “rad” being short for radical and thus implying that Jesus is an anarchist, but hey, it works). And since becoming less certain about my faith, I’ve actually had some of the best, most open conversations about religion. People are way more interested in talking to you when you admit that you don’t have definitive answers about things, that you’re still figuring things out, and that you’re aware that some pretty awful stuff has been done under the banner of your religion.

For the longest time, I actively avoided discussing my criticisms of Christianity with one of my best friends, because you’re not supposed to talk about things like that in case it “puts people off” your faith. Then I had an all-out crisis and realised this wasn’t something I could hide from them, and it all spilled out, and it was absolutely fine. More than fine, in fact. I’d been hiding my uncertainties because you’re only supposed to talk about your faith when you can defend it with concrete statements, when actually my uncertainties where what made me human and relatable and someone worthy of having a friendship with. We’ve had some fantastic conversations about what my faith means to me, how it’s changed, and what I’m looking for in a faith community. The friend I thought I shouldn’t talk to about these things has been one of my biggest supporters during my faith deconstruction. We’ve even visited a church together. I guess technically this is unintentional evangelism? I don’t really do evangelism—in fact, this started out as a post about my issues with the way most Christians approach evangelism, but it went off in an entirely different direction, so this is something I’m going to write about another day. Maybe. Possibly.

* * *

There’s a lot of vulnerability in being uncertain, and being open and honest about how little you actually know about something so huge as faith and religion and the existence of God. And the people who can be the most harsh about uncertainty are often those who are supposed to be part of your faith community. While I do write publicly about a lot of aspects of my faith, there are some things I’ve only revealed in in-person, in private Facebook groups, on websites where few people from “real life” know my username, on discussions on a friend’s profile where we don’t have enough mutuals for the news of my heresy to spread, because I’m not sure if I’m ready for the potential backlash. Admitting that you’ve changed your mind about crucial aspects of your faith, that you’re no longer certain what you believe, that you’re now critical of things that were once major parts of your belief system, can be terrifying.

This uncertainty has led to many fantastic conversations with fellow Christians who are also revisiting and questioning their beliefs. I’ve had people I don’t know all that well contact me specifically to discuss something I’ve hinted at in a more public forum, because they’re relieved that someone else is also reconsidering these aspects of their faith. It’s opened up conversations with non-Christians who are intrigued and obviously find me non-threatening and reasonable enough to converse with—which probably wouldn’t be how I’d describe myself ten or even five years ago. My uncertainties have put me in a position where I’m thinking about and talking about my faith a whole lot more.

It’s no longer something concrete, something fixed, something that I can take for granted. It’s constantly evolving and changing, and sometimes I wish it would just settle in one place and life could go back to normal. But I know it’s not going to do that. Once you open up the door to rethinking something that’s always been part of you, it’s impossible to shut it. It’s so much a part of me that I can’t just discard it, but I need to reconcile it with what I used to believe, and what I’m now feeling pulled towards. I need to figure out how I’m going to move forward with this part of me.

* * *

I recently read an essay by Rebecca Solnit that described despair as being a form of certainty, while uncertainty is a ground for hope. This explanation has stuck with me. Back in November, I definitely found myself dwelling in despair. The religion that I’d aligned myself with for my entire life had been responsible for something that caused a lot of people—myself included—to fall into despair. I know at least one friend who abandoned their faith altogether—despite the fact that they had degrees and qualifications in theology and had been working in the same industry as me for far longer. It was the breaking point for them, but not quite for me.

I pulled myself out of my despair by turning it into anger, latching on to the resistance movement, and eventually landing in anarchism. I found hope in something entirely unexpected, something I felt very uncertain about aligning myself with, but it was the only thing that made sense. These people were pissed off, but not despairing. And unlike a lot of Christians, they weren’t spouting platitudes about praying for change and then returning to their normal lives—they were doing stuff. Trying to change things—and not just small things. They weren’t willing to settle for this crappy nightmare world.

I’ve found hope in fighting for change, and surrounding myself with people who are doing stuff when I’m too limited by the whole parent thing to be more active and involved. I’ve stopped feeling guilty about what I can’t do, and I’m committed to supporting and lifting up those who are actually manage to make some progress. To holding each other accountable, to reminding each other why we’re part of this in the first place. To not despair.

* * *

I’m still a bit uncertain about the labels I put upon myself. I haven’t yet taken “Accidental” out from in front of “Anarchist” in my social media bios because, well, I am here kind of accidentally. Sometimes I call myself a Christo-Anarchist rather than just a Christian because I’m incredibly aware of how much my faith has shifted in the last year, and I have doubts about whether I can use the label on its own anymore. I know a lot of people wouldn’t consider my faith to be truly Christian. I mean, I think LGBT+ people are human beings deserving of equal rights, so that’s enough to make some people write me off altogether and condemn me to hell. (Sadly, this isn’t an exaggeration).

I jokingly referred to myself as a Christo-Anarcha-Feminist the other day, but I think it works. All of those labels intermingle pretty well. Patriarchy is a system of oppression, so anarchists should advocate for its destruction, thus all feminists are basically anarchists. And since I’ve already made the argument for Christianity as Anarchism, we might as well make it Anarcha-Feminism. I should really devote an entire article to this rather than an overly simplistic paragraph, but yeah, why shouldn’t God be powerful enough to triumph over capitalism and patriarchy? If we’re really free, why should we suffer under such man-made oppression? Thus: Christo-Anarcha-Feminism.

Sometimes labels are limiting, but right now I’m finding it liberating to realise that I don’t have to be confined to one label or one belief system. I can be anti-patriarchy, anti-capitalism, and pro-Jesus. I can call myself a Christian even if I’m not certain about everything, I can call myself an anarchist when I’ve only known that the word means for less than a year, and I can call myself a feminist even if I took my husband’s name when I got married. I can mesh them all together and make a ridiculous label that most people in my life won’t understand, because it helps me anchor myself, and reminds me that I do have a lot of things that I believe in, even if I have many more that I’m not at all sure about.

* * *

I’ve got to the end of this post without explaining what I believe, and I’m okay with that. I’m still figuring that out, and I don’t need to defend my beliefs in order to call myself a Christian or an Anarchist or a Feminist. I’m at a stage where I’m becoming more comfortable with the idea that I may never again have concrete beliefs that I can explain in a succinct statement, because I’m constantly learning, constantly evolving, constantly admitting that I might have got something wrong. Where there was once arrogance and certainty, there’s now vulnerability and uncertainty, and it makes for much stronger friendships and deeper conversations, for which I’m immensely grateful. I’m glad I’ve found my way here, to this place of uncertainty and hope. I’ve never been more uncomfortable, or more free.

Jesus is in the Anarchists

Sometime in the last year, I began a faith deconstruction, and I realise that this is a terrible way to start this post as I don’t even know where to begin describing what that means. What have I deconstructed? Why? What prompted it? What does my faith consist of now that I’ve deconstructed? Have I started reconstructing or am I mostly just sitting around looking lost and wondering what I even believe any more?

I stumbled across this post from Unfundamentalist Christians today and it kind of put into words what I’ve been struggling to explain:

“I’ve asked about every troubling question you can imagine, and yet my faith remains intact. It’s a lot less comfortable than before, and in some ways barely recognizable, but it’s also deeper, richer, and more authentic. It’s constantly changing too, which can be exhausting, but also kind of exhilarating.”

I still believe that God exists so I guess my faith is (mostly) intact, but I’m definitely right in the middle of the constantly changing, exhausting part of reconstructing my beliefs, with the exhilarating moments few and far between. Occasionally I find something that really speaks to me in the midst of this weird deconstruction, and it’s incredibly freeing to realise that other people believe the same things as me–not just in the sense of “God exists”, but “God exists and we should dismantle the patriarchy”. Just knowing that I’m not alone and that other people have come to the same conclusions makes me feel a whole lot saner and a bit less heretical.

One of the conclusions that I’ve come to in the midst of my deconstruction, is that I’m an Anarchist. I mean, I already call myself a Feminist and confuse the heck out of a lot of conservative Christians, so why not add Anarchist into the mix as well to make things even more controversial? I’m not entirely sure when I started labelling my beliefs this way. I have a wonderful, amazing friend–whom I’ve only known for two years but it feels like she’s been there forever–who frequently writes posts on Facebook about her anarchist beliefs, and at some point during the two years we’ve known each other, my internal responses shifted from “This is intriguing but also kind of crazy” to “All of this makes complete sense and I entirely agree with it”. Not going to lie, my utter anger at the post-Brexit, post-Trump world kind of ignited my desire to align myself with anarchism, but it was a gradual process and entirely accidental. I didn’t go looking for anarchism–it found me, or I fell into it, or some other cliche.

So, what even is anarchism, and how has it somewhat saved my faith in God and humanity, and well, just everything? As much as I suck at describing my faith, I also kind of suck at describing anarchism. It’s super tempting to describe what anarchism is against rather than what it advocates for–which, admittedly, kind of happens with Christianity a lot as well. I was initially going to quote from Mark Van Steenwyk’s That Holy Anarchist (which is amazing because it helpfully brings together many of my beliefs in one accessible place and if you’re even remotely intrigued by Christo-Anarchism you should read it because it’s available for free here) but I discovered that Jesus Radicals (to which Van Steenwyk contributes) has a more coherent explanation:

“Anarchism is the name given to the principle under which a group of people may organize without rule.  It is being against one group or person having “power over” others.  For us, anarchism begins with naming and resisting those things that oppress, rejecting social hierarchies that place one group of people over another.  Anarchism rejects the logic that places some over other on the basis of race, ethnic or cultural background, legal status, social status, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, or any other rationale used for one group to exercise domination over another.  It means challenging capitalism with its social inequalities based upon private property and wage labor and instead envisioning a society that emphasizes cooperation, mutual aid, holding land in common, and workers sharing ownership of the means of production.  It means committing ourselves to undoing the legacies of oppression that have been passed down to us as we seek to build communities of hospitality and inclusion.”

In That Holy Anarchist, Van Steenwyk writes that:

“Anarchists are rarely simply against the State—they have (or should) become namers of all forms of oppression, seeking to understand the way oppressions reinforce each other in enslaving creation and seeing, in contrast, a way of liberation and life for all of creation.”

To those who call themselves Christians, this idea of liberation shouldn’t sound particularly radical, because supposedly our faith is about bringing about the liberation of all creation too. That’s not to say that anarchists have just hijacked Christianity and taken Jesus out of it and attempted to rebrand it as their own thing. Anarchism may be considered revolutionary, but it’s not a new movement in any way. Anthropologist David Graeber writes that:

“The basic principles of anarchism—self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid—referred to forms of human behavior they assumed to have been around about as long as humanity. The same goes for the rejection of the State and of all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination…even the assumption that all these forms are somehow related and reinforce each other. None of it was presented as some startling new doctrine. And in fact it was not: one can find records of people making similar arguments throughout history, despite the fact there is every reason to believe that in most times and places, such opinions were the ones least likely to be written down. We are talking less about a body of theory, then, than about an attitude, or perhaps one might even say a faith: the rejection of certain types of social relations, the confidence that certain others would be much better ones on which to build a livable society, the belief that such a society could actually exist.”

If Anarchism has basically been around forever, so has Christo-Anarchism. Van Steenwyk devotes an entire chapter in That Holy Anarchist to Christian movements whose actions have overlapped with anarchism, from the early church right up to the current day. This isn’t some ridiculous new idea that I’ve dreamed up to try to rebuild a faith in the midst of my Trump-prompted deconstruction, some amusing but unrealistic concept dredged out of sleep deprivation and near-delirium from too many mornings spent watching Team Umizoomi with my toddler. Christo-Anarchism (or whatever you want to call it, because apparently no one can decide on an official title) is an actual thing, a thing that people other than me practice. People have been doing it since Christianity existed (you could even be totally radical and argue that it is Christianity), and it just, well, makes a lot of sense.

Christianity that is infused with capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy, that both props up and relies on oppressive political powers while somehow simultaneously discouraging its followers from being “too political” (how does that even make sense?), that doesn’t actually succeed in helping our neighbours beyond telling them the Good News of Jesus, that creates a community that consists of occasional casseroles and platitudes and promises of prayers and not much else—is not what Jesus advocated for. I’m not sure how we ever convinced ourselves that it was.

I’ve believed in God for too long to simply abandon the possibility that he exists, but I need to be part of a faith that allows me to criticise and challenge (and possibly even dismantle) structures of power, that allows me to admit that the rampant imperialism in the Old Testament and Christian history in general is actually pretty uncomfortable. A faith that confesses that it created and contributed to many of the problems in the world, and that’s ready to fix them. A faith that isn’t just for the gainfully employed hetero-normative middle class. A faith that looks around the world and shouts “THIS ISN’T WORKING.” A faith that sees our capitalist, patriarchal, oppressive society and believes that this is not what Jesus’ kingdom is supposed to look like.

Back in November, I seriously struggled to see Jesus anywhere. I couldn’t see him in the colleagues who had voted for Trump and stood behind their decision. I couldn’t see him in the friends who tried to tell me that it wasn’t really that bad, that we just had to wait and see how things panned out. I couldn’t see him in the prayers and the platitudes and out-of-context Bible verses that were spouted in an attempt to convince me that everything would be okay if I just had faith and kept believing. I really struggled to see him anywhere at all, to be honest. But there’s this small anarchist community in my city–where I have one friend who I met through a freaking breastfeeding group, of all places–who actually seemed to be angry about all the same things as me. They didn’t stop being angry after a couple of days or weeks. They attended protests and held discussion groups where they talked about topics like mutual aid and solidarity, which felt like the kind of things my Bible study group should be discussing, to be honest. They seemed to care, to want to change things, to not want to put up with the way things are. It sounds utterly ridiculous, but the one place I saw Jesus was in the anarchists, and the more I read about their beliefs, the more I felt like I’d found my home. 

I’ve been hesitantly owning the Anarchist label for the last six months, and reading That Holy Anarchist confirmed a lot of the ideas that I’ve been mulling over. I don’t feel quite so crazy for believing that Christianity and Anarchism can line up, that this fusion of beliefs does make sense in some way;

“Since Jesus is (as Christians believe) the truest revelation of God, then he defines for us what the reign of God looks like. The social, economic, political, and religious subversions of such an un-reign are almost endless—peace-making instead of war mongering, liberation not exploitation, sacrifice rather than subjugation, mercy not vengeance, care for the vulnerable instead of privileges for the powerful, generosity instead of greed, embrace rather than exclusion. Jesus is calling for a loving anarchy. An unkingdom. Of which he is the unking.”

Our faith has never been about gaining power, and I don’t believe we’re only called to challenge the world in a spiritual sense. If we’re called to love our neighbour, then we’re also called to advocate for them, to bring them out of oppression–and perhaps it’s entirely necessary to bring about freedom from earthly oppression before we broach the subject of spiritual liberation. Maybe dismantling systems of oppression is a form of evangelism. Sometimes loving our neighbour might require us to be uncomfortable, to take a stance that is neither polite nor neutral, to stand beside those who don’t share our faith but do share our desire to completely do away with all forms of oppression forever. As Van Steenwyk writes;

“In the early days—the first century of the Jesus movement—the church was invisible to most people in the Roman empire. However, they had a growing reputation as an alternative and seemingly antisocial community that lived in the nooks and crannies of Empire.

Christians were thought to be extreme, subversive, stubborn, and defiant. The Roman writer Tacitus called them “haters of humanity.” They rejected the central facets of Roman religious and political life. In his view they actively undermined society with their indifference to civic affairs. Some critics even blamed Christians for the fall of Rome.”

I can’t do comfortable, privileged, neutral Christianity any more. I want the subversive kind that seeks to undermine societal norms and systems of oppression, but I’ve seriously struggled to find this radical, disruptive form of Christianity in the church. Reading That Holy Anarchist and discovering that Christo-Anarchism is an actual thing has made me feel a bit less alone. Realising that there are other people who are just as frustrated and disillusioned as me has given me hope that I’m not alone in my anger and desire to change things.

I still don’t really know what I’m doing, and I feel like I should add a disclaimer stating that I’m not an expert on either Christianity or Anarchism, but this is where I’ve ended up. I’m not sure if Anarchists want me or if Christians will finally deem me too heretical to use their label any longer, but here I am. 2017 is turning out to be a pretty insane year, and Christo-Anarchism is one of the few things that makes sense.