Church is where Christians turn for worship, community, joy, and healing, right? Not always, say writers of several upcoming titles. These authors portray traumatizing encounters with religion and the church, particularly conservative evangelical communities. Publishers describe the new books as validating, comforting, and freeing survivors of control, shame, and abuse, allowing them to move forward to a more compassionate faith community—or out the church door altogether.
In her book, When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion (Brazos, Oct.), psychotherapist and founder of the Center for Trauma Resolution Laura E. Anderson addresses how fear of hell, purity culture, corporal punishment, and authoritarian leaders impact some people's lives for years. Her goal is to help readers find hope for wholeness and a new foundation to stand on.
Brazos editorial director Katelyn Beaty says the book "has real potential to help people who grew up in evangelical or other high control religious environments and were exposed to traumatic experiences that are as real and as painful as PTSD or a car crash." She adds: "They may still be in such an abusive environment or maybe they've moved to a gentler, kinder form of Christianity, but they are still grappling with teachings they heard growing up. The goal of the book is not to convince readers they need to try to retain religious practice or belong to a church. It's written in a compassionate way to help people who find they really just have to go in a new direction."
Author and LGBTQ activist Amber Cantorna-Wylde writes of how she was disowned 10 years ago by her father, an executive with Focus on the Family, in her upcoming book, Out of Focus: My Story of Sexuality, Shame, and Toxic Evangelicalism (WJK, Oct.) in which she will name her father for the first time. She writes: "The teachings of Focus on the Family value and elevate certain families while simultaneously tearing others apart—teaching tough love, shunning into submission, and reparative therapy in order to fix, change, or heal queer people of their detestable desires. When it doesn’t work (because it doesn’t actually work), parents are instructed to kick queer children out of the family unless they change, in an effort to save their own souls from damnation by association."
Jessica Miller Kelley, senior acquisitions editor for Westminster John Knox Press, says, "What sets this book apart for us was its emphasis on the through-line connecting the national influence evangelical organizations have sought to have with the toxic fruit of not just severed family ties but chronic illness, homelessness, violence like that perpetrated at Club Q (a Colorado Springs gay club where five people were murdered) and the political movements currently rolling back women’s and trans rights in states all over the country. Amber has experienced first-hand the strategies organizations like Focus on the Family employ to ensure conservative Christian hegemony in the U.S., and the danger their vision poses for those who do not conform.”
The authors of Pivot: The Priorities, Practices, and Powers That Can Transform Your Church into a Tov Culture (Tyndale Elevate, Sept.), were well acquainted with stories of toxic church culture from their research for an earlier book, A Church Called Tov. Now, Scot McKnight, professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary, and Laura Barringer, a teacher and children's ministry curriculum writer, are zeroing in on pragmatic ways churches can transform from toxicity and "cultivate the Kingdom Gospel-centered qualities that form goodness cultures."
Jon Farrar, Tyndale associate publisher for nonfiction, says Pivot teaches churches how to create a culture of goodness. "In the midst of multiple church scandals within the last several years, Pivot is a clarion call to build church cultures that avoid the traps and pitfalls that ensnared so many previous generations. It is the work that Christians need to do to ensure a better church for our daughters," says Farrar.
Surviving God: A New Vision of God through the Eyes of Sexual Abuse (Broadleaf, Mar., 2024) is by two theologians, both survivors of sexual abuse, who were able to stay within the church by rethinking traditional ways of viewing God. Grace Ji-Sun Kim is a professor of theology at Earlham School of Religion and an ordained PC(USA) minister, and Susan M. Shaw is a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Oregon State University who was ordained as a Baptist minister, but now belongs to the United Church of Christ. According to the publisher, the book will challenge beliefs that contribute to oppression (and that are) "not reflective of the God of love and justice at the heart of the Gospel" and imagine new, hopeful, and healing beliefs.
Acquisitions editor Lisa Kloskin describes the authors as "two powerhouse women academics who have been writing and researching on feminist issues for decades—doing groundbreaking theological work. But they haven’t spoken publicly about their own abuse, until this book. Surviving God is full of firsthand accounts from survivors who simply refuse to keep silent any longer. It's their voices that make this book important for the current moment."
