@dlmayfield
🇵🇸 Free Palestine 🇵🇸 Autistic non-binary, exvangelical, tired. Co-founder of STRONGWILLED, a multi-media project focused on survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods. http://strongwilledproject.com
Predators are always thinking about two things:
1). How to have access to a steady supply of victims and
2). How to not be held accountable for their crimes if they get caught.
Unfortunately, religious authoritarian spaces create the opportunities for both.
they always tell on themselves
If we can't hold people accountable for their abuse in our own families, churches, and communities, this will just keep happening. I prioritize the safety of vulnerable people over in-group status, and I have paid for it. But it's been worth it to be free to be honest about the harms in xian spaces.
Some of the most popular progressive Christian women writers stopped speaking to me after that. All because I dared to break the norms by speaking out about abusers and those who enable them who were in my own community. But it truly all is connected.
Plus in this piece I finally get to talk my shit about Bill Hybels and the entire Christian publishing apparatus that refused to engage with the reality that he was an abusive man who never faced accountability. I will NEVER forget the ways I was treated when I tried to bring this up in 2018.
The idea of Christian supremacy -- that Christianity is somehow a moral force of good in the world -- and the doctrine of forgiveness for abusers both play into the lack of accountability in these spaces. Both of these beliefs need to be questioned and interrogated if we are going to stop abuse.
Predators are always thinking about two things:
1). How to have access to a steady supply of victims and
2). How to not be held accountable for their crimes if they get caught.
Unfortunately, religious authoritarian spaces create the opportunities for both.
Here is the last part of my purity culture series (and hopefully one of the last posts we publish on Substack before we transfer to ghost). strongwilled.substack.com/p/how-predat...
You absolutely do not have to hand it to the people who put 12 year old me in a white dress, had me stand up in front of the church in a pseudo-wedding ceremony, and promise not to have sex before marriage.
I hope my brain gets to be hyper-fixated on something more fun next time! Right now I am really into analyzing coming-of-age movies, which feels nice and different.
Tomorrow the last post (part 5!) of my Purity Culture is Pedophile Culture series goes out and whew. That's like . . . 2 years of my brain space out into the world. A world that weirdly enough is finally ready to start talking about pedophilia in religious authoritarian spaces.
Also they were SEXUALLY ABUSING AND EXPLOITING YOUNG PEOPLE THE ENTIRE FUCKING TIME, going "gotta hand it to them, they did have a point" is infuriating
She consistently has some of the *worst* takes
well jokes on you my nervous system has felt like we were living through WWIII since I was 8 so I guess today's not all that different
Similar to people in leadership positions in churches who claim they have no idea that DV or abuse occurs within Christian patriarchal families. I believe that being naive and uneducated about the dangers of a program you are pushing is not only unethical, it is dangerous.
Any time my 10th grader brings up their concerns about AI -- environmental impacts, social impacts (deepfakes, propaganda), the thin line between using AI to help re-write and plagiarism -- the teachers act as if they have never heard of these negative views of AI. Ever. Which enrages me.
To me it is truly wild to tell students constantly how they can use AI to rewrite sentences in their resume to make it more professional, for instance. My 10th grader's point is -- aren't they supposed to learn how to write well without offloading that to AI?
Hey Bluesky, do you know of any organizations that support high schoolers who want to advocate against the push for AI in schools? It is reaching ridiculous levels for my 10th grader and they are wondering about how to best make their concerns heard.
I was feeling like an imposter while writing my screenplay so I decided to re-watch some of my favorite movies from the past few decades. The casual misogyny in so many of them is giving me the burst of righteous anger to keep working away.
I don't know who needs to hear this but it's actually a good thing to dishonor your mother and your father if they are Christian fascists who do not care what happens to the planet and to humanity thanks to their political choices.
It's truly as simple as that
As long as children think adults are allowed to violate their bodily autonomy and consent by hitting their erogenous zones out of “love,” they are vulnerable to sexual abuse just as much as they are to physical abuse. Ending corporal punishment is child sexual abuse prevention.
Yes. The pressure to not speak up for fear of hurting the reputation of Christianity was not subtle. It was very much explicit! And who does this ultimately benefit?
I wish every person who practices a religion/faith would sit with this. This is one of the main silencing tactics of victims in religious spaces. They don't speak up because they have been told over and over again the work of the church is good and important. Much more important than their abuse 💔
Yes and this usually lines up neatly with who has power. Those with power get listened to, and those without power get silenced, dismissed, and ignored.
I'll go first: the doctrine of forgiveness for men who "stumble"
as someone who attended an evangelical seminary these guys actually spend a lot of time thinking about god's cock and probably can describe it pretty well using their theological terms
What do you think are some of the elements that need to be in place for men to not be held accountable in Christian patriarchal spaces?
Part 5 of my Purity Culture is Pedophile Culture series is going up Monday. This time I focus in on how predators get away with their crimes against children in religious authoritarian spaces.
