Even Boys Can Be Victims of Christians’ Unhealthy Views About Sex

When Hitch said “religion poisons everything” he wasn’t joking.

Here we have a father telling his son that he is perverse for doing something completely normal – something the dad knows he himself does- and that any prospective wife will reject him, and that he needs to reject the part of his nature that would make him attracted to the hypothetical wife in the first place.

Madness!

Yeah that dad was kind of creepy

This is seriously fucked up.

I’m so glad that we never treated sex as a complete taboo

Catholicism: Not as fucked up as fundamentalism.™

(note: I apologize. I did not intend for this comment to be so long… I just felt the need to get this out of my system…)Goodness…  Kylar’s story is an eye-opening and very sad moment for me.My father was rarely in my life, so my mother had to take on the role of “sex education”.  She was very similar to Kylar’s father but was more “motherly” about it. (does that make sense?)  She was religiously fanatical (fundamentalist Christian) about sexual “purity” and ruined my initial child-like and innocent perception that it’s OK to appreciate the opposite sex.  The consequences of this particular part of my upbringing was devastating and impacted nearly every aspect of my life into adulthood.
So, I had to repress my sexual feelings growing up.  I had a few girlfriends, one that I loved with all my heart like only a geeky 15 year old boy can.  She and I were like best friends and highly compatible together.  I was told that I could not see her or be her boyfriend any longer, because her parents were Catholic. (I suspect my girlfriend then had a similar conversation with her parents)  When my mother found out that this girlfriend and I (gasp!) had been “experimenting” together, she went ballistic and my young life became just like Kylar’s.  Humiliation, depression, anger, confusion. I was forced to endure the “laying on of hands” at church as they “prayed” for me in front of my friends.  It spiraled out of control and I contemplated suicide on many occasions.  I ran away from home a few times, but of course had to come back because I had nowhere else to go.  The stress became so bad, that I suffered hallucinations of demons “attacking” me, because my mother told me that I was a “child of satan”.  I was forced to read “This Present Darkness” and was told that it was real.  My mind became so indoctrinated, the hallucinations of “demons” and “seeing” things that did not exist impaired me so much that at times I would become catatonic for hours at a time.

My only solace was my high school history teacher. He was an agnostic and I confided in him the troubles I was going through.  He had a daughter my age that went to the same school that was a good friend of mine and my girlfriend.  The three of us would spend a lot of time together at my teacher’s home.  No, not for the purpose of finding “private” time with my girlfriend.  It was simply a way for us to be together…. and to be happy.  This teacher taught me more about life, growing up, and what it means to be a man.  I found out that he died a few months ago.  I wish that I could have told him how much he meant to me and that I loved him like a father, because he truly was the only father figure I had. 

These experiences affected my life so profoundly that it continued to poison my relationships into adulthood.  I simply could not function in most relationships, because the “purity” aspect was always at the forefront.  It became difficult to even speak to a female without thinking that I was somehow “sinning” or that I was being “bad”.  

This “abuse” of my mind resulted in a severe personality disorder, a couple hospitalizations, years of drug concoctions to alleviate the depression and pain.But, as time went on, I stumbled into the best thing that ever happened to me.  My psychologist.  Curiously enough, she’s a woman.  But it is her mind that I love and admire, because she has picked me up out of the pit of religious despair and has helped me to “repair” the damage done.  We’ve been working together for 5 years, once sometimes two/three times a week.In the course of this intense therapy, I realized that it was completely OK for me to NOT believe that god existed.  I read a lot of science fiction growing up and so was a natural skeptic….  feelings I NEVER expressed to my mother as a boy.  And yet the religious dogma inflicted upon me overwhelmed my curiosity for other ideas and opinions on religion.  But thank goodness my interest in science and science fiction flourished despite my indoctrination.  My therapist uncovered these deeply buried ideas in my mind and encouraged me to explore them.  I did and one way I am healing myself is that I have allowed myself to not believe.  i.e. I’m an atheist.  Being released from religion is the freedom I have needed to heal myself from the “sexual abuse of another kind” that has haunted me since childhood.I’m still not completely there, as I have a lot of work to do to reverse my thinking about relationships, people, religion, and humanity.  It will be a life-long endeavor.Thank you, Kylar, for your story.  It only reaffirms that I’m not the only person who had to endure things like this.To you parents out there who freak out about sexuality: think very hard about what you’re doing.  Your children may not be as lucky as I was.  I survived.  Your children may not.  Let them be who they are and simply give them safe boundaries within which they can operate!  They will thank you later in life.

When I was 9 or 10, I was invited over to a friend’s house for dinner and met his father  for the first time. He took me aside and told me that this was a Christian household and that he expected me to behave accordingly, respecting God and himself and his wife. He asked if I knew what happened to children who disrespected their elders.

“They get grounded?” I aksed.

“They go to Hell. Do you know what Hell is? I have a picture of it I can show you.”

“You’ve been there?”

For some reason, I was never invited back.Poor kids. They all grew up to be very dysfunctional. A few years ago their dad died of liver failure from years of alcoholism. If there were a Hell, I’m pretty sure he’d have sent me a postcard from there by now.

And you can’t pray it away either…just feel guilty about it.  Swear you won’t touch sex and dampen all desire. 

If you feel that way, then your family was pretty mild as far as Catholics go. 

They’re both equally and exquisitely messed up, in slightly different ways. 

Only “kind of”?

The worst part about this is the thought crime aspect

They don’t just forbid action, which may be somewhat understandable. But they instill extreme guilt about merely having sexual thoughts. That’s just screwed up. Even they have to realize that there is no way to prevent that and it just happens

That’s what I’ve always thought about Catholic priests in confessionals, and reading about all-male panels of priests “interviewing witches” during the Inquisition, too.  As Alanis Morrisette wrote, “I confessed my darkest deeds to an envious man.”

It wasn’t isolated to my family. Nor my friends’ families. Nor anyone else in my parish’s families.

Perhaps your family was more fucked up than most Catholics are?

I grew up in the same program as Kylar did. Its a program called ATI based in Chicago started by Bill Gothard, called ATI.

We’re both in the same Facebook group for ATI student survivors, and he’s a friend of mine on Facebook.

The amount of bullshit that we went through growing up is astounding. So many of the people who came out of it though, use the “no true scotsman” defence of Bill Gothard saying, well a true christian wouldn’t act like that. Looking at the history of christianity, this kind of shit is kinda par for the course.

I decided to not get involved with the recovering grace project, as it is still very christian, and the operators of the group are still fairly fundamentalist. But its moving away from the  extreamly fundamentilst group, of ATI. While the ideal would be humanism and skeptical inquiry, if anyone knows anyone in ATI or used to do ATI’s program, Recovering Grace may be a good place to point people. It moves them more into evangelical christianity from the fringe which is ATI.

Considering the rampant sexual abuse that occurs among Catholic churches, I would guess that your experience is atypical.

My mother never talked much about anything of the sort.  But she fastforwarded the sexual parts of movies so we couldn’t see it.  I ended up thinking masturbation was a sin anyways, and having similar thoughts to:
 “There was no way, I, as man who desired the best for the
women in his life, could ever subject any poor girl to the perversion
that I was. It might even be better for everyone in the world if I didn’t exist.”The whole mindset of self-policing because god has random rules about looking at a woman lustfully is simply a poisonous disaster.  I’d like health officials to speak out about this more, or something.

Thanks for sharing what you’ve been through, and your healing process.  I was subjected to a great deal of ‘sexual repression’ messages from my mother, though it wasn’t very religiously-based.  She was severely mentally ill & untreated, and it thoroughly messed me up.  I spent years in verbally abusive friendships and (occasionally) relationships.  I still am not where I hope to be, in terms of how I view men.  But at least I’m working on it.

A couple of years someone published statistics that showed that Utah had one of the highest rates of porn consumption. Not really surprising

What a very awful and sick father – there’s no excuse for that kind of thing.   I had some of the same from my mom, though it was more a psychiatric issue than a religious one, but it did its damage.  Even though I know it’s irrational, I still have trouble trusting men in any kind of sexual setting.  (Thank you, no offers please lol)

I was home schooled and grew up under a similar program, no sex and no sexual thoughts. When one of my younger brothers was 13, my parents caught him looking at Victoria’s Secret ads from the newspaper. He was grilled intensely, and admitted to looking at pictures of girls in their underwear from Google image searches. He got all his computer privileges revoked and had to do a weekly check-in to make sure he wasn’t looking at “porn” anymore or having impure thoughts. My other siblings and I also got grilled on whether we had ever looked at porn or had inappropriate thoughts about the opposite sex.

Fortunately for me, I never had any problems with “impure thoughts” until I went to college and figured out I was gay, and by that point I was well on my way to atheism. So I’ve never had to deal with guilt associated with thoughts. I worry about my brothers though. They’re still at home and very religious, and I wonder how it’s going to affect them.

Thanks for posting this.

I would never want to try and detract from the severity of what christian beliefs do to a woman’s sexuality. However, I often feel like the way christians fuck with their young boy’s minds is ignored.

I spent a year of my adolescence wrapping duct tape around my dick to stop myself from masturbating. This was a self-imposed punishment.

Not exactly the healthiest views of sex.

The Duggars (of 19 Kids and Counting) are probably the most famous example of ATI/Gothard.

It is definitely a scary and poisonous belief system. I recommend checking out Kathryn Joyce’s Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement for a closer look.

I tend to agree. On paper, Catholic doctrine is just as messed up as fundamentalist doctrine. But Catholics are more willing to ignore the official party line and are therefore less likely to take things to extremes.

Next time, read the article.

I think yes and no. I think it’s mostly sexuality in general that is seen as something to be feared, but female sexuality is seen as nonexistent.

Kind of?

*shudders*

Makes sense to me.

So sad. My own parents’ strategy has been to never talk about sex, except in vague euphemistic terms a couple of times. The part about his parents helping him choose a spouse sounded similar to what my parents’ attitude is, though. I feel so sad for him and all he went through. Hopefully, he’ll be able to build better relationships than the ones his parents taught him to have.

I think you meant perverted, not perverse.

I am a Christian and was taught to value and love my body and my self as God’s creation, not hate it.

This is what bothers me the most about those who judge the Christian faith; the rampant idea that all Christians are the same. We’re simply not. Stories like Kylar’s break my heart and the hearts of most of the Christians I know. In fact most of us would not count Gothard’s followers as our brethren.

Of course not all Christians are the same. There are extreme fundamentalists like Kylar’s parents, there are ultra-progressives who are sex positive, and there are millions more who are somewhere in between. It’s not a given that Christianity teaches people to be ashamed of their bodies and their sexuality, but such thinking is indeed rampant in the fundamentalist and evangelical world. If your sect/denomination does not believe that masturbation, homosexuality, and sex outside of marriage are sinful, then good for them! I’m happy that children in your group aren’t being taught guilt and shame. But it doesn’t erase the very real harm being done to other children around the world in the name of Christianity.

It’s funny how many of us that read this were associated with Gothard, and my father so brainwashed me that I did confess to my future father-in-law and my future wife my impure thoughts. Let’s say that I will handle it very differently with my son