Things Evangelical Christianity Taught Me

• Human beings are unworthy of love
• I am unworthy of love
• Human beings in general are disgusting pieces of shit with no redeeming qualities
• I am a disgusting piece of shit with no redeeming qualities
• Anything intrinsic to human beings is vile, sinful, dirty
• Anything intrinsic to me is vile, sinful, dirty
• Because of all those things, human beings (despite being children of God) must be grateful for any kind of love, especially God's "perfect" love
• Because of all those things, I (despite being a child of God) must be grateful for any kind of love, especially God's "perfect" love
• Failing to feel and demonstrate this gratitude constitutes a "hardened heart" and is the only unforgivable sin (aka you go to hell if you think you deserve a parent's love)

I wish that the way I applied each of those tenets to myself as an individual was an illustrative tool to show the inherent flaws in that kind of thinking, but it's not.  These are things they hammer into you: you are worthless, you are disgusting, you do not deserve love, you do not deserve anything.  And you believe them, because they have their chokehold on you since birth and your self-worth is entirely determined by what your peers and leaders in that group think of you.  Or they caught you at an extremely emotionally vulnerable time -- say, while you were in a psychiatric hospital after multiple suicide attempts -- and this new identity you forge with them becomes the only one you don't associate with suicide/depression

Except that these ideas are central to the same fallacious thinking that leads/contributes to/keeps you in depression and other kinds of depressive and personality disorders especially present in assault survivors, so you have people going up to "testify God's love" about how worthless they are and how the only value they have is the one they find in the redemption of some invisible savior's approval, talking about how they are worthless, how their rape was their fault, how they need to face their inadequacies, all of the things they did wrong, and you have everyone in the audience clapping and crying and congratulating you for being so brave as to say all those things.  And the kicker is that they'll even shame you for seeking psychiatric help - if you were a good enough Christian, God's love would be enough - if you were a good enough Christian, you wouldn't even be depressed right now - when I became a Christian, my drug addictions suddenly disappeared - look at that great Christian girl, she used to be a lesbian but now she loves God - we love you, God loves you, but you're disgusting and vile and here are all the fucking things you need to fix - etc

I've always always struggled with self-worth, so it's not like these ideas were planted in me at that church (and all the other ones I was dragged to in my childhood), but the culture of shame and self-hatred I found there went a long way in reinforcing and validating them

I am a queer woman of color and the survivor of assault and abuse so I really don't need anyone else telling me that I am worthless

Meta-moment: I never realized how much I hated Evangelical Christianity, how much I resented it, how toxic that culture of shame is, until I had to watch someone else being consumed alive by it all and holy shit I am helpless to do anything for her because she is so paralyzed by all the lies they are feeding her

Tangentially: they teach all these things to children as young as five