I’ve written here before about the many and various ill effects I’ve suffered following my time in a very extreme church in my teens. Getting involved with charismatic fundamentalists as a vulnerable young person truly is the gift that keeps on giving – it’s a lifetime subscription to weird quirks! Something I’ve only recognised recently is what that belief system does to our ability to make decisions. It’s quite hard to spot when you’re caught up in the culture, and get swept along by it, but if you’re not careful, you can end up losing a lot of your autonomy, and really struggle to get it back again afterwards.

I’ve always been a worrier and an over-thinker, so when it comes to making decisions, I’ve always stewed over them quite a lot more than most people. I fret about doing the wrong thing. Therefore, one of the things that attracted me to Christianity in the first place was a set of rules and ideas that helped govern your behaviour. A lot of those ideas seemed to fit with my natural feelings on things anyway, and so it was nice having something that helped me live the way I wanted. Initially, in the first church I joined as a teenager, it all seemed to help. I had a moral framework to live by, people to support me when I needed help, and a community of like-minded people who wanted to live the way they felt God was telling them to. It was quite hardcore compared to the way a lot of teenagers lived, of course, with a lot of things frowned upon or prohibited, but I wasn’t a particularly rebellious or adventurous kid anyway, so I didn’t have any issues with the sort of moral guidelines I was given.

So far, so good. The problems came when I threw in my lot with Pioneer, and their rather extreme form of charismatic belief. They went to great lengths to appear “cool” and “radical”, and distanced themselves from the stuffy and boring image of traditional churches. However, something I didn’t understand before joining a year out programme with them was that they were actually far more conservative and strict about behaviour than my home church was. They were obsessed with not only doing the right thing, but being seen to be doing the right thing. On top of that, they threw in a God who actively intervened in people’s lives as well, so things like “prophecies” and “words of knowledge” would get tossed around like they were completely normal. What this could do – and certainly did to me – was elevate even the most mundane and trivial choices we could make into HUGE MASSIVE ISSUES WITH ETERNAL COSMIC CONSEQUENCES. These consequences didn’t just affect me, they potentially affected everyone I came into contact with as well. As I’m sure you can imagine, that’s a terrible burden for a rather naive young person to carry around, especially one who was terrified of making mistakes anyway.

It took me a long time to realise that about 99% of the decisions and choices we make are actually extremely trivial. They have vanishingly small effects on our lives, and even smaller effects on others. What we eat, wear, think, watch, listen to, enjoy, read, etc. – none of these things ultimately really matter very much. However, I was immersed in a culture that thinks these things matter very much indeed, and that all of them have to be surrendered to God in full. Even the absolute tiniest aspect of your life has to be lived the way God wants. This led to agonised wrestling over every decision I had to make, and huge worries and stresses about my behaviour. It seemed that I got just about everything wrong, having stumbled into an environment with a million unwritten rules.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. Needless to say, they were obsessed with sexual purity, and this resulted in all kinds of strange rules about how men and women interacted with each other. It came as particularly surprising, as my old church youth group seemed a haven of enlightenment on this stuff, where I made my first close friendships with girls. Not so here. I lived in a large house with a group of men who went to the church I worked for, and it was completely verboten for any women to be in the house after a certain hour of night. This was because if a neighbour saw, they might assume someone was (shock horror) having sex outside marriage. It seems ridiculous that we were even thinking about this, because of course no-one cared, and it’s weird and creepy to pay so much attention to a stranger’s sex life anyway. We were led to believe that if a non-Christian thought we were shagging someone we weren’t meant to be shagging, we’d put their salvation at risk. It meant that when I invited a female friend over to a party we held at our house, she had to go and stay the night in an all-female house afterwards. What if people in our house were gay? Oh, man, don’t open that can of worms…

Similarly, I managed to get into hot water not long after I started my year out, when a group of us went to the cinema. It included a bunch of church people and some of their “friends”. I use the quotes because these people had been invited along purely because we were trying to get them to convert to our particular form of faith, and join the church. That’s such a dick move, but hey, it’s what I was doing at the time, and of course I fervently believed that it was the right thing for them. Anyway, the film we went to see wasn’t to my taste at all, and featured a fair bit of violence. The fellow (female) year-out-participant sitting next to me wasn’t happy about the film either, so we decided to leave early and wait in the foyer for everyone else to emerge. At my next meeting with my mentor, I was hauled over the coals for this and made to feel like an absolute scumbag, because being alone with a woman looked like I was up to no good. FFS, I really couldn’t win.

Making all these mistakes is, supposedly, of course, not a problem, because God is so forgiving, but it’s a serious burden for anyone to feel they have to go around grovelling for forgiveness all the time, for the tiniest of mistakes (which, of course, often aren’t mistakes at all – they’re just choices). This does serious damage to your self-esteem and your perception of yourself. It also makes you doubt your ability to make decisions at all. Given the horrendously heavy-handed and bullying mentoring I was given during my year out, it allowed me to be pushed around and manipulated into making all sorts of decisions I wish I hadn’t made, and that carried on for years after I’d got out. I agonised over the tiniest things, felt I had to justify everything I did to others, and I spent decades fretting about whether I’d done the right thing in just about every circumstance. In a sense this really has had eternal consequences – because I still keep thinking about things I did and said decades ago, that I was coerced into saying and doing. In a culture that encourages accountability to leaders, and a belief that these people are placed in your life by God to guide you, you can end up handing over a lot of authority to other people. It just becomes normal to do what these people say in all sorts of situations. Your relationships, your career, your private thoughts, ideas and goals – you’re made to spit out all of them, and have your opinions and ideas on them all ripped to pieces. It takes a brave person in that environment to stand up for themselves and resist the “guidance” given – try that once or twice, and you’ll be labelled “rebellious”, and run the risk of being punished in some gruesomely humiliating way. When I tried complaining to Pioneer and Revelation about the way I was abused by them, one of their chief comebacks was that I was supposedly free to raise problems and issues at the time. Quite apart from this being gaslighting of the highest order, I was so engulfed in all this crap that it took me at least a decade after the event to realise I’d been abused at all.

It seemed completely normal to me for some years to just accept a whole level of authority in my life that had no right or need to be there. It seems really strange now, but we somehow just accepted that some self-appointed, non-qualified, “leader” had a right to be applying pressure to us to make the “right” decisions, which could often have really serious implications on the direction of our lives.

It’s taken a lot of therapy and a lot of hard work to get to a point where I’ve realised that even my worst mistakes aren’t really that awful. Many of them aren’t even mistakes, they’re just things that maybe didn’t go as well as they could have done. I’ve forgiven myself, and learned from what’s happened. It took a long time, though – for so many years I tried to act in accordance with “God’s will”, but that was essentially doing the bidding of some seriously dodgy people who really didn’t have my best interests at heart. It’s taken me a long time to trust my own instincts and values, and I often still don’t, choosing instead to eat myself up with guilt and worry when I don’t immediately get things right (according to a belief system I no longer actually hold).

If you are or were in a highly-controlling religious group, you’re likely to be affected by this to some degree. You’ll be strongly encouraged to delegate a lot of your decision-making to others, and this will affect your job, your friendships, your private life, the media you consume, and the things you’re allowed to think about. It can make you very isolated, and make you think you’re responsible for the eternal destiny of everyone you meet. That’s pretty horrific when you think about it – you’re essentially being told that someone could end up being tortured for all eternity just because you chose to stay in bed for an extra half-hour, or something else equally trivial.

If you need to hear this, rest assured that whatever you do is OK. You don’t need other people constantly telling you what to do, think or feel. You can make your own decisions, and your own mistakes, and it’s highly likely that everything will be OK. We’ve all done dumb things at some point or other, and honestly, it’s fine. If you screw up, own your shit and deal with it, but at least screw up on your own terms, rather than someone else’s. Just try your best, and try to act with decent motives. Your life is your own, and you only get one shot at it. Don’t let someone else decide how to live it for you.