Shiny Unhappy People

trigger warning: descriptions of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse

Amazon's new season of Shiny Happy People focuses on Teen Mania, an extremist evangelical movement in the 90s and early 2000s. Despite not being associated with this specific church and movement, I felt very connected to the trauma that people in this documentary experienced.

Throughout the season, past members of Teen Mania explore their traumatic experiences. They were led to assume a holy war against Christianity would soon be taking place (like those as imagined in the End Times), and that our generation needed to be ready for this and anything else that came our way. They went to camps that abused them in order to test their faith and devotion to Christ in dangerous situations. They were exposed to harsh elements, combat training, and shameful experiences in Christ's name. They were publicly shunned and shamed for even the littlest of sins. The women were exposed to sexual exploitation from male leaders. This documentary shows the negative effects of when radical politics seeps into Christianity.

Shiny Happy People season 2 trailer: a man crowdsurfing amongst hands. All faces are covered by smileys.

Levels of Abuse & PTSD

As I watched this documentary, I felt a strong kinship with the victims of Teen Mania despite not going through the exact same traumatic experiences. I wasn't physically or sexually abused by the church like they were. Still, you can't compare trauma directly to experience alone; it is the time-based reaction of the bodymind to trauma-triggering experiences that differentiates between those who develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and those who are simply survivors of traumatic experiences. Most people eventually adjust after traumatic experiences; those who get worse rather than adjust tend to get diagnosed with PTSD regardless of what the traumatic experience is and how traumatic different people classify the event as.

I have PTSD. I was diagnosed with it in the fall of 2014, when I wasn't recovering well from a traumatic car accident. I wasn't sleeping well. When I did sleep, I experienced night terrors. Over time, my memories of the accident would shift and change. In some memories, I was at fault. In some, the big rig who switched lanes while I was next to it was at fault. Some night terrors the scratching of the metal played on repeat. Others, I remember looking down see my dress covered in blood and the bone of my elbow sticking out amongst the red. Driving has been a challenge for me ever since.

Christian Trauma

As I became an adult, I started realizing my Christian experience as fear-based and traumatic. While I didn't have to experience the physical torture the people in Teen Mania did, I did experience psychological and spiritual warfare instilled in me by the church. Growing up, I was raised to believe the End Times were near and if I didn't pass some kind of spirituality test, I would be left behind. Like those in Teen Mania, the horror of Matthew 24 and 25 stoked anxiety in me whenever signs of the End Times occurred through politics, war, natural disaster, and mainstream culture. I was just a child, then just a teen, then just a young adult. I felt I had little to no control over my life, as I was told the End Times would whisk me away from earth before I had the chance to grow up and do anything with my life.

As a teenager, I tried to make and maintain stronger relationships with Christian friends from church. My mainstream friends were not Christian, and it scared me to think of myself going to heaven and having no friends to spend eternity with. I'm not quite sure those friendships worked out in my favor. I often felt like a third wheel to my friend and her boyfriend at the time, as if I was invited places to be the unassuming chaperone or the female that made the friend group more than just a date. Memories of our misadventures not feel very shallow and fake to me. I think back to my surprise 16th birthday party, where most of my friends from church chose to skip my birthday for a Bible study. Or the birthday of mine that my mom brought to church and all the pictures of that night were with people I wasn't close with, while my "friends" carried on as usual with worship practice or doing homework. Then, I think about when I started dating the pastor's brother-in-law and was soon excluded from hang-outs with my friends. I lost trust in them, with rumors spreading about my sexuality before we even had a first kiss or held hands. It all feels so hollow to me now, whether that was any of their intentions or not. I was nothing compared to God. I was nothing as a friend. I'm thankful my Christian mentor, Debbie, moved to another state after I graduated. At least she didn't turn away from me.

I felt mentally primed and prepared to have a short life. Every time I made it past a milestone like my 18th birthday or graduating from college, I was surprised in the worst of ways. It wasn't a "thank God I'm alive another year" feeling. It was more like a "How much longer will I live now" feeling. I would never know when my time had come, but I knew the pastors in my life were saying it'd be any day now based on prophecy. For a lot of moments, I worried I would be stuck to suffer in the End Times instead of looking forward to it. Fear buried itself in my soul with what I consider the scariest verses in the Bible, Matthew 7:21-23:

²¹ “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. ²² On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ ²³ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ (ESV)

While my fear felt godly at times, for I wanted to do good while still here, it also felt like a burden. If I was afraid of God's next coming, was I really a Christian? My own fear was circular in logic: I am afraid He will say I never knew Him, because I'm afraid I never knew Him. The mental torture itself was traumatizing. During graduate school, I would learn from my therapist about CPTSD, or Complex PTSD. Unlike PTSD, CPTSD came from repetitive, long-lasting exposure to trauma and abuse. It was worse than just the one traumatic experience like my singular car accident. I wasn't quite able to piece together my religious trauma until 2019, when I broke up with the pastor's brother-in-law after ~8 years of trauma.

Naming What We Know

Dating my first boyfriend is one of the biggest regrets in my life because it led to so much trauma. I felt ostracized from the church I called my second home after he asked me to be his girlfriend. I was under surveillance every time I went to church or every time I met up with him. In the Bible studies I tried to connect with others at, I felt unable to talk about my traumatic experiences or confess sins in fears that more rumors would spread about me. Then when I moved to a different church across the valley, I was judged for not staying where I was planted, at the church that was rejecting me like a bad liver transplant. Even at the new church there were people from my past, people with connections to my old church who could share gossip about me. I was never truly safe in my neighborhood churches.

Part of being unsafe there only elongated my relationship trauma. I couldn't tell people about what happened in my relationship or my own anxieties. I had no help. God didn't give me any divine interventions and discernment that He used to bless me with in childhood. It wasn't until I moved to Minnesota that I was able to slowly clean the lenses that I saw my relationship with God and my boyfriend through to see more truth than fear. Though my boyfriend claimed to often pray for me and have Christian morals, he also manipulated me emotionally a lot, using God as a reason for me not to have male friends, to stay devoted to him when I felt the need to end our relationship, and to not do good things I felt called to do.

My friends in Minnesota had nothing good to say about my boyfriend, who usually felt the need to charm and be liked by people because of his own childhood trauma. They'd describe him as angry, hearing him yell at me over the phone if I spent too much time with friends instead of texting him. They said I'd be sad after talking with him; not a good sign. My therapist helped me through sexual trauma he caused when I told him about my asexuality and he didn't respect my wishes. I only made the trauma worse by pretending it didn't hurt my feelings. When I broke up with him after he spammed me with threats to kill himself and clicked the gun while we were on a phone call, it took me a long time to trust people again. The emotional trauma of being held responsible for something I didn't want weighed heavy on me for most of the early Pandemic, when I developed the first symptoms of long-lasting chronic illness. Identifying that CPTSD in me was harder than I remember my PTSD being. It was just as long to process though.

So where does that leave me? Shamed for the same things and taught to fear the same things but experiencing less physical trauma than those who experienced Teen Mania... We are different sides of the same coin, both victims of Evangelical rhetoric and abuse at the hands of those who claimed to be ordained by God. Let us call it what it is: PTSD, CPTSD, spiritual abuse, torture. Though our experiences are different, they are also the same. I still believe in God, but my faith in the church body is broken. My faith in those leaders who claim to be Christian, such as those in Trump's administration currently, is empty. My fear remains, a scar of my past I'm not sure will ever heal.

Alternative Christianity

I don't like to inspire fear in people. As I've grown and learned, I've come to value serving and helping others as the love of Christ, not shunning or shaming people. I stand up for the abused, the broken, those who need help. I believe in treating people with respect and kindness instead of abuse. I try to remain respectful of people's wishes if they aren't Christian; they're still loved by God and should therefore be loved by me. I believe in calling out overt evil when I see it: war, abuse, suffering, toxicity. I know even God's chosen ones can be abusive and wrong. I hope this is enough, that God will say He knew me because of the love I show others now instead of the hatred and fear that originally motivated me. My fear still remains, peeking out in times of anxiety, but I have to hope that God is not done with me yet. I can still heal and be healed. I can still love. I can still be better. I hope other victims of religious abuse can too. If you need faith, Shiny Happy People may be a good place to start.

#IDMD #IDisappointMyDad #religion #christianity #abuse #trauma #PTSD #CPTSD #ShinyHappyPeople #documentary