A few weeks ago I got involved in a conversation on X (I still think of it as Twitter) about how to reach women in evangelical spaces who are miserable–but would never Google the problem.
How do we let them know that there are other ways to see God? That their misery with the way they’re being treated is actually natural, and not a sin, and that God grieves with them over this injustice?
A woman named Liz Daye, who is studying these sorts of issues right now, replied and we got into a great conversation. I invited her to write today’s post about what she wants to say to these women who are hurting!
Here’s Liz, whom you can also find at her Substack For Flourishing.
Megan’s hands shook as she leaned across the table.
She peered over her shoulder not once, but twice, and whispered to me, “I don’t know how to ask this. I feel like I don’t even have the language to form the question, and I don’t know what to do next.” She steadied her hands only to all but strangle her coffee mug.
“I know everything looks perfectly fine from the outside looking in, but deep in my bones I know something feels terribly wrong, and I can’t figure out why. I did everything right. I did everything they told me to do. And I feel miserable. I feel so small.”
Despite her position as a prestigious pastor’s wife in a prominent evangelical community, Megan felt alone and disoriented as she began to poke and prod at the harmful parts of the complementarian theology that the church taught her. The parts where men with power used scripture to excuse sexual abuse and platform predators, while simultaneously insisting upon her silence, her smallness, and her complicity.
Megan’s experience reflects a broader reality among Christian women.
Many find themselves isolated, questioning their faith spaces, and struggling to separate truth from lies. Bluntly, Megan witnessed too much sin behind closed doors. She saw the effects of forced NDA’s firsthand. She witnessed the wheelings and dealings behind wrongful terminations and settlements for situations that would make your skin crawl.
And she confessed that in her own marriage her spouse rarely seems to value her dreams, champion her voice and respect her individual agency. But in reaching a place of inescapable reckoning, she now finds herself managing waves of shame and grief by oscillating between numbness and whiplash.
She felt theologically disoriented, and utterly alone.
While Megan’s struggle highlights a more widespread issue, many women find themselves in similar predicaments, feeling trapped underneath the very systems they once trusted.
But as they discover the truth about their faith spaces too late, they struggle to find a safe place to flesh out all of these conflicting thoughts. Their husband works on staff. Their friends all married elders. Not one person in sight appears safe. And for some reason, when women like Megan feel like they might just explode and they cannot seem to find a safe place to land, we wind up finally grabbing a cup of coffee together.
So, if that sounds like you too, let’s pause for a moment.
I want you to imagine us sitting face-to-face— just you and me. Safe space.
These tender truths belong to you. Take what you need.
- First, sister, God cherishes the sound of your voice and your passion for truth. Don’t doubt yourself for asking questions. Don’t condemn yourself for daring to believe that your ministry, your family, and your faith community could better support women. Don’t silence yourself for speaking the truth. God loves justice and shalom and your heart for those things comes directly from your creator. God’s dream for the world and eternity includes brothers and sisters living in harmony together. You’re right in thinking that perhaps we should practice living like that now.
- Next, I want you to know that you can trust God. Bring your frustrations, your honesty—God welcomes it all. Explore your curiosity with God and the Bible. Dream boldly, knowing God holds space for that too. As you hope for a better path forward, navigating what it means in real time, God walks with you. I want to remind you that God loves you deeply. God is with you, working in, around, through, and for you. You matter to God.
And lastly, others stand with you.
I know it can feel lonely right now. But you belong to a remnant of women charged with empowering others to live subversively.
I spent a good bit of time on the mission field in Muslim majority countries and often recall that subversive and creative ministry in much of the world doesn’t just happen occasionally—it thrives as the norm. How can you live subversively right now?
How can you encourage and empower and equip the women around you to know that God loves then right now? How can you extend the mercy and compassion of Jesus to the women who still cling to these systems? Remind them repeatedly that they bear God’s image and deserve his love, while also affirming that truth for yourself.
You can’t keep wearing a mask.
Sister, the agony you feel while brightly grinning through expectations and simultaneously squelching your screams will soon reach a point of unsustainability.
I know systems like complementarianism and fundamentalism led you to believe that Christian freedom in the context of the American dream equals comfort and ease. And perhaps now you feel like you realized too late that the shiny prison your faith discipled you towards offers no exit door. “Marriage is just hard,” you tell yourself. “Can I even call it abuse? Maybe it’s all in my head. I just have to keep him happy, that’s all.” But day by day you feel yourself dying inside.
This matters because in a moralistic culture that loves performance and behavior modification, I can’t tell you how many prosperity gospel sermons that I sat through where I too believed that “If you just do things the right way, in the right order, nothing bad will happen. You’ll keep God and your husband happy.” And it breaks my heart when women enveloped by theologies that fixate on subordination and authority struggle to cope after learning that systems like fundamentalist complementarianism exploit women by design and treat their flourishing like an optional afterthought.
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Over and over women wind up at my table, because they can’t help but wonder if maybe they fell for some elaborate deception; perhaps trapped on the outside of an inside joke. They did everything right, but for what? And in the wake of their tears, they can’t help but ask “What is God like, for the faker like me?” For the one who feels like she’s screaming through her faux grin while she readies herself to work the front desk of the church offices or lead a high school bible study. For the woman who feels wedged between a rock and a hard place. For the one crushed by the weight of too little too late?
Gentle reader, God doesn’t want to use you more than God wants to love you and reveal his nearness to you.
Dive into that holy curiosity of yours headfirst and make a splash, because God is with you in the freefall, in the plunge, and as you come up for air. Know that God is safe, trustworthy, and true. And most importantly, know you aren’t alone—not by a long shot.
A vibrant community of faithful women surrounds you, cheering you on towards flourishing.
“ Know that God is safe, trustworthy, and true.”
That’s the problem though.
This is exactly what I’m struggling to even believe right now after all I’ve seen and read. How do I come back to a faith that actually feels real and safe, to a God who I’m not sure I even know after all these years…a God I’m not sure I can trust and believe in and still be safe??
I don’t know what doctrines to believe anymore with so many voices yelling for their way to be the only way in so many different ways. I don’t know who to trust anymore.
I understand that, Rebekah. When I was in that place, I spent a few years when all I could read was the gospels. I just wanted to look at Jesus and try to forget everything else I’d been taught. And just listen to His voice. That helped a lot.
So did getting into a safe church. Even a church where people hadn’t ever heard of all these evangelical problems! It was heaven.
Several day? weeks? months? ago, there was a discussion about some of us not even being able to read the words of Jesus without feeling condemnation and even terror.
I found the original comment that I had referenced. It was by Stefanie, on December 15, 2022 at 2:00 AM on the post at https://baremarriage.com/2022/12/what-my-grandson-taught-me-about-how-god-sees-us/.
Amazingly, it was nearly two years ago, and not much has changed for me. Maybe one day.
Oh, that’s me! What a throwback to read my comment from 2 years ago! Yeah, I don’t read the Bible anymore and I don’t feel bad about it. Sometimes I listen to the Bible for Normal People, but I’ve also been listening to a lot of different things/religions, just exploring what’s out there. Haven’t landed anywhere in particular.
Rebekah, I also bristle at the “know God is safe, trustworthy and true” comment. Is he though? What evidence do I have to support that thesis? I was told that God is good and loving by the same people spiritually abusing me and gaslighting me for decades and I was supposed to just accept it as true when my lived experience said otherwise. Anyway, I follow Meredith Anne Miller on Instagram (she does parenting and faith formation). She says our job is not to tell our kids God can be trusted. Our job is to help our children experience God, and they will decide if God can be trusted. So I’m applying that to myself. Right now my honest answer is no.
Jesus was the Prophet of Deuteronomy, the one whose every word was to come from God the Father, face to face with all the people. This was in contrast to Moses, who only talked to God sometimes, then brought a message back to the people. The people found God too terrifying. They only wanted to talk to Moses.
Nobody else in the New Testament canon has the same spiritual authority as Jesus. If some of His words are difficult to understand, it may help you to read the book, Understanding the Difficult Words of Jesus. He frequently used Hebrew idioms. Once you understand those, it can help a lot. He was frequently responding to Pharisee and Sadducee controversies of His time and place in a way that would clarify the Torah. Knowing that context can help at times, too.
Jesus said, “Follow me,” again and again. Women and men both followed Him. Jesus spoke directly to women. They spoke directly to Him. He even said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” when mothers were bringing children and babies to Him to be blessed, after His disciples started becoming annoyed.
Jesus went to the house of Martha and Mary, where Mary sat at His feet, which signified the position of a disciple, something that women were not allowed. When Martha complained, Jesus gently rebuked her and said that Mary’s discipleship would not be taken away from her. Not that Mary’s discipleship should not. Shall not. “It shall not not be taken from her.” It can’t be taken from her. What Jesus gives spiritually, nobody can take away.
The conservative evangelical churches preach Pauline epistles on average 13 times for every one time they preach Jesus in the gospels. There are 35,000 different Protestant denominations in the world today. Most splits and splinters are caused by differing interpretations of Pauline epistles.
In contrast, there are just eight differing interpretations of the gospels. For example, some people believe that the Sermon on the Mount teaches Christians must be pacifists. Some believe in the Social Gospel, while others don’t. Sectarianism will always be inevitable. It’s human nature. But eight different interpretations versus 35,000 is a contrast that speaks for itself.
Don’t worry about the “church fathers.” Jesus said to His disciples to call no man father for you have one Father who is above. Speaking of spiritual authority in a terse Hebrew way that they understood. Not speaking of biological fatherhood, of course.
Recall that Jesus pronounced seven woes on the Pharisees and Scribes. He said to beware the leaven of the Pharisees. He warned us many times in many ways. His warnings are hiding right there in plain sight. But presuppositional theology blinds us to Jesus’ words and warnings. Learn to see Him. Learn to hear Him. He warned you about the wolves in sheep clothing. He warned about the blind leading the blind. He warned about the leaven of the Pharisees. He warned about men inappropriately taking upon themselves spiritual authority that belonged to God the Father and was then delegated to Jesus.
I am right there with you, Rebekah.
And when you look back on the misogynistic teachings of the men who are foundational in the christian faith – Tertullian, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Knox, Calvin, etc. – how can we trust ANY of the theology and interpretations of the bible that we are taught? I guess I can’t. I trusted supposedly good teachers – it turns out that they are all rotten. I won’t do that again. There is no way that people who hate women could have the right perspectives of god.
And right now, as I am still unpacking all of the lies I absorbed from reformed, evangelical, patriarchal, full-quiver type teachings…I am taking a break. I am being honest with myself without fear – I don’t know if the god of the bible is real – I don’t know if anyone hears me when I pray (no one helped me when I tried to do the “right thing” but my marriage got worse and my children and I suffered for many years) – I am ANGRY! – I am DEVASTATED! – I HATE the teachers that wounded me! – and yet, I ♥️♥️ with a greater love than ever! My heart is full of more compassion and grace towards my fellow humans than ever before. I am hurt, but learning to love myself better – growing & healing day by day.
Let’s no push ourselves to get back to god – haven’t we pushed and pushed enough? Let’s just “be”. If He loves us. He loves us. If Jesus died for us to bring us to Himself. It’s done. If He saw what we went through. He understands our ambivalence, our fear, our confusion, our pain, our anger. Let’s not focus on “getting right with god” or figuring out what the bible teaches yet or where a safe church is yet. Let’s breathe. Let’s cry. Let’s rage. Let’s process. We can get so focused on getting to the correct conclusions that we miss the journey and all the stops along the way.
♥️💔♥️💔♥️ to you!
Bema Discipleship, a podcast, has been an absolute breath of fresh air for me.
And Walking the Text.
If I had one piece of advice, it would be study the Bible yourself and keep 4 things in mind: Jesus, context, authorial intent, and it can’t disagree with other passages. As you read through, view everything through those lenses and see if things don’t come into focus. Because odds are, bits and bobs of your theology are right. There’s no way it was completely wrong unless you were in a full fledged cult. So something is probably sound somewhere. The rest, you can rebuild.
Where you are is the “the cake is a lie” stage where it looks like everything is wrong. Odds are, that’s not actually the case. So you’ll start digging away and start finding healthy parts, rotten parts, parts that aren’t heretical, but your perspective has changed so now you more closely align with a different school of thought, and so on.
The truth is, God is truth. Theology is people’s attempt to understand and organize what we know about God and His truth. Ironically, for as absolute as God is, theology on average is not. There is a spectrum of opinions a person can hold on most topics and not be considered a heretic or an apostate. You may wind up leaving familiar theological ground, but that’s not necessarily a problem… So long as whatever you think lines up with Jesus, context, and authorial intent…
Just set aside all the man-made traditions and theology right now and start building yours from scratch. Ask the Holy Spirit to give you wisdom and discernment as you go through this with just you, your Bible, and the Holy Spirit. Don’t quit on Jesus! Don’t give up! If you seek, you will find!
“study the Bible yourself”
Sure. How do I erase three decades’ worth of tapes and the resulting internal talk that I (and so many others) have developed?
“Don’t give up! If you seek, you will find!”
I (and many others) have spent literally decades seeking and not giving up. We never found anything except condemnation, turning ourselves into empty shells who don’t know who we are. We’ve prayed. We’ve studied the Bible. We’ve poured out our hearts and never had the door opened. How, exactly, with much specificity of detail, were we doing it wrong?
And having had those negative and, frankly, traumatic experiences of God and the Bible and the church, how exactly are we supposed to keep going back for more? If I have an open wound, it can’t heal if it keeps getting poked and the scab repeatedly picked off.
In theory, I (and many others) agree with what you suggest. But there’s a foundational healing that needs to occur FIRST, and if that healing never happens, there is no foundation on which to build growth and health.
Yes! Exactly this. If the whole foundation is crap, it’s impossible to scrape away all the crap and be left with anything.
Like Rebekah said, who can I trust after all the false teachings and proclamations of “only my way is the right way”?
I actually asked my sister-in-law this very question 3 years ago. She told me about a college professor of her husband’s who had his tenure revoked after publishing books about the Bible that his conservative, evangelical Christian school found offensive. So I started reading Pete Enns. Scandalous! His books gave me permission to use my brain inside my faith in the same way I used my brain in every other aspect of life.
Through his blog, I found Marg Mowczko who uses her expertise in ancient languages and cultures to explain troublesome Biblical passages from the appropriate 2,000+ year-old lens.
Then I found other bloggers like Natalie Hoffman, Ngina Otiende, and Sheila. I’ve shifted my perspectives on many things with their help. I’ve learned to trust the “that doesn’t seem right” feeling. I’m very angry at organized religion at this stage. So much of it is so bad and not following the teachings they claim while using those teachings to subjugate others.
I’ve had to stop reading the Bible. I can’t hear it apart from the terrible teachings I learned with it. But I can listen to new perspectives of some of the stories, and those help me unhook from the misogynistic messages to reclaim something good. There are a few good concordances that have a healthy perspective for women, but I could only access the free sample. It was enough for me to know that IF I WANT TO, I could study the Bible again with a new perspective. It would be very difficult – I KNOW the Bible I was raised with very well. I’ve read it cover to cover dozens of times. That’s not what I need now.
Right now, I’m building safety for myself & my 5 kids after escaping an abusive marriage of over 20 years. I’ve left the churches that sided with my abuser. I’ve severed relationships with my mom and ex-mil, who both wanted me to stay with the man who tried to kill me multiple times. I’m leaving the religion that condoned and enabled my abuser to keep abusing. I don’t need that religion to access the God in whose image I was made. Just like the Jews got it wrong in the O.T., the “church” is getting it wrong now.
Rebekah,
I am so sorry this is where you are at currently. I am still slogging through some of the same issues, and have questioned whether it is worth it or not. Something that is helping me is advice Mr. Rogers said his mother gave him during scary times such as natural disasters, wars, etc. “Look for the helpers.”
I have encountered so much evil and misdirection at the hands of those claiming Christ. It is abhorrent. However, there are people in this world, some in church, some not in church, that carry on the heart of Jesus. They are the helpers. When I spot them, I can finally see God’s heart in all this, how He wanted His creation to live.
The more I look at just the behavior of Christ- how he treated women in particular- I see a God/man who saw worth, dignity, and value, and gave love and hope. I see a God/man who spoke to some audiences words that are very difficult to hear- because He knew the hearts of many present, particularly the “teachers,” were haughty and thought themselves better than others, and He abhorred that haughtiness. He also knew the haughty ones had access to God yet refused to put their worldly-gain interests aside, and were misleading, lying, and condemning those who were genuinely seeking and following Christ. And I think that really ticked him off so He had hard words for them.
It also helps me to think of the words in this way. My son takes things *extremely* literally. He used to come home crying because his teacher had to re-emphasize some things such as studying, homework assignments, etc. Teachers stressed how important these were- because many kids slacked off and were not learning all they needed to be successful in future. However, he took it as a personal message to himself and really stressed out over how he was failing his teachers. It’s taken years of working through it with him but he finally understands that not all the teachers’ words were meant to have as much emphasis towards him as to others. I view much of Christ’s words, and the Bible, through that lens. Helping my son learn that lesson actually really helped me gain a better understanding of how not all messages are directed at me in the same way as for others, and the condemnation I feel reading/hearing some of those words is because of an evil lens placed by bad or misguided people.
I think we’ve had so many lens filters (advice and theology books, well-meaning friends and preachers, ill-intended preachers, etc.) placed upon us it can be difficult to figure out which ones take us closer or further from the heart of God. So maybe look for the helpers and try to use the lens they use?
I hope this helps. Praying endurance for you to reach a place of feeling loved by Jesus.
I was led to evangelical fundamentalist complementarianism after a childhood raised by angry, cold, cruel atheist or nonbelieving women who refused to clean their house and either lived in filth or expected me to do it all.
I did everything right, really.
I didn’t date until 25, didn’t work until 25, always said “Yes maam” and “Yes sir” to everything my mother/father/aunt/uncle/grandmother/great aunts told me to do.
I spent all my free time living with my grandmother from 17 to 22 who, until now, I saw as my Best Friend, yet I was STILL expected to be her housekeeper/assistant/caregiver/gofer-girl.
I didn’t drink until 30, never smoked cigarettes. I refused to watch anything but Disney Princess movies, LOTR, and children’s movies.
I avoided rap and hip hop (which as a younger teen I’d LOVED).
I didn’t wear makeup until I had married my ex at 27 (he turned out to be a p*do and I was excommunicated for leaving him and remarrying), despite always being drawn to emo/goth/scene style.
I only wore saggy jumper dresses with big floppy collars and oversized sweaters and opaque tights (and I still default to wearing those things).
If someone asked me to spend a Saturday cleaning their house for them, for free, I’d cheerily do so.
I tried to never ask for Christmas gifts or birthday gifts, accepted whatever junk secondhand stuff they grabbed at the last second if they did give me.
I went out of my way to speak well of the shows they watched and the food they ate, even if I found the shows morally bankrupt or boring, even if I found the food bland or disgusting.
I, too, made myself small.
My biological father–who m*lested me from age 1 to age 5–inspired me, at age 23, to become an avid supporter of the Stay at Home Daughter doctrine as presented by the Botkin sisters.
I accepted that I might never get out, that I might never get married.
Now I find, I cannot break myself of these habits.
You see, before I found God–did I even, really?? Or did I find a bunch of coping mechanisms to accept my life, within toxic false doctrine?
I still feel like it is MY JOB, MY DUTY, to take care of everyone. To clean the house, to cook food, to make gifts for everyone, to ask for nothing, to give everything, to take up as little space and be as unnoticeable as I can.
Oh, trust me, I’ve made some progress; I always wanted to go to a comic convention and never got to go to Prom/Homecoming, and when I found a Marvel Comics themed formal ball last spring, I took my husband (not the ex obviously) and we won the Best Dressed prize.
But here, in our little podunk rural town where we live, I find very little motivation to break myself of these toxic habits.
It’s made worse by the fact that at this point, having been s*xually assaulted in the workplace and lacking a college degree, plus only ever having wanted a degree in fields I’ll never succeed in (archaeology, geology, palaeontology, seismology, and volcanology, my Big Five) and that cost far too much, plus still trying (in vain, hopefully not forever but still) to have a baby, I am a housewife, and I don’t really WANT that to change. I do not trust anyone to not be a hoarder like my mother; even my extended family couldn’t hack it to keep up with their laundry, and I ended up spending two weeks at my aunt’s, after my ex was busted for CSAM, doing her laundry. (If you grew up in a hoarded house, you would understand how horrific it is, and how triggering messes can be.)
Perhaps I should leave Christianity altogether. I’ve been contemplating at least visiting the local Reform synagogue for a while now; perhaps I should return to my maternal family’s original Jewish heritage, before they were forced to convert to Catholicism and then eventually turned their back on the Almighty completely (almost all my family are atheist; I was an outlier as first a Wiccan, then evangelical fundamentalist complementarian, then as whatever I am now…)
I don’t know.
I just know I cannot go on like this.
Oh, Wanda, what a background you’ve had! Have you ever talked to a licensed counselor? Even one trained in spiritual abuse? It could be really helpful.
Wanda, please drive to the nearest larger town that has a thriving counseling practice, and find a counselor who can help you work through all this. It took me nine months of the counselor hearing and affirming the things I had to say before my first breakthrough (which was to be able to say that I truly had grown up in an abusive household), but during that whole time, I could feel myself gradually untwisting on the inside as a person actually LISTENED AND ACCEPTED WHAT I HAD TO SAY. I can. not. tell. you. enough, how validating that was, and healing. Just to have someone who would LISTEN. It’s amazing.
And as for school… why would you never “succeed” in these fields that you obviously would love to study? You’d be amazed… I went back to school at age 56 and I am thriving. Please don’t shut yourself out of study just because you don’t think there will be opportunity for success. It is amazing what unexpected opportunities can open up if you are pursuing a degree in a field you love. Maybe not at this time, but never say never.
Just FYI, I live in an area where development projects have been completely altered because of the discovery of fossil beds as they began to grade the land. You never know what might open up for you locally! 🙂
Wanda,
I am so sorry that you have been wounded by those who may have been able to nurture you -had they themselves not been so wounded. I encourage you to pursue professional counseling; perhaps someone who specializes in abuse/trauma/betrayal. My experience with my psychiatrist was the ONLY relationship where I did not try to take care of the other person. Something that helped me as well was to not frame therapy as “working on myself” but to view at “working with myself”. I noticed and modified my interior vocabulary/language and removed shaming language; no “shoulds”. A realization I came to was that my frustration about others not respecting my boundaries was really my rage that was rooted in my own inability to allow my self to be a separate person with needs The codependent dynamic in my FOO made it difficult to have a separate sense of self; we were either enmeshed or severed. For me, episodes of “breakdown” led to “breakthrough”.
Yes, trapped, because even though I consider myself an exvangelical, for many things it’s just too late for me. Instead of cultivating a career, I stayed home to raise kids and homeschool. Instead of cultivating friendships and hobbies, I volunteered my free time at church. Now I’m 55 and because I haven’t worked in decades, I can’t get hired in my field. So I am trapped as a stay-at-home mom to kids who will soon be in college. My house doesn’t feel like my own because my husband makes all the decisions about it, and my efforts to freelance and sell handcrafted items have amounted to very little. I don’t make the money in the household, so I don’t have any sway in what happens. There are things I want to do and places I want to go, but I can’t because the person who has the money has the power. So I feel like I’ve fallen right into the hands of what evangelicals wanted, and I hate that. Congratulations, complementarians! You’ve ruined my life. And the last thing I want to do is go to church because I don’t need to pay a man to tell me how to live my life. Hope that millstone around your neck feels good.
This piece was so very helpful. Thanks for helping us feel more seen.