COGNITIVE SCARS OF CHILDHOOD INDOCTRINATION

Evangelist Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892) said "The preacher's work is to throw sinners down into utter helplessness that they may be compelled to look up to Him Who alone can help them."

We feel utterly helpless without God because we are thrown into that state. Our preachers and parents threw us there. We learned helplessness.

Our parents told us to pray and listen for God's voice but all we had up in there was ourselves and we were just kids.

Still even as we grew up and began to develop critical thinking skills, we were commanded to lean not on our own understanding. Our values and knowledge had to come from the Word of God. So we tried. We tried to make sense of it. We tried to align our values. We tried to trust our preachers and parents. We tried to trust God's voice in our minds.

Maybe we even tried to believe that all of the academic world was a conspiracy.

We do not leave fundamentalist communities for lack of trying. But all that trying takes its toll. Our minds begged and yearned for intellectual honesty.

Now that we're there, our scarred minds wonder if we're satisfied. We never felt satisfied in the church and we bring that imposter syndrome with us out into the world when we deconstruct.

Having your own mind was sinful. It was judged to be a lack of faith. It was condemned. And I have to say that it has only been in recent years, it's been a huge struggle for me to critically evaluate, to ask questions, because it was so forbidden in my growing up years. And as part of when I did my master's degree and more recently, my doctorate, learning to critically evaluate at quite a mature age, rather than being able to do that in my growing up years, it's been a huge battle."

Dr. Jill Harvey

Making decisions is harder when you can't just attribute a thought to God's voice and go with that one. The church teaches Jesus had said "My sheep know my voice" (John 10:27) and if you want to be a sheep bad enough people tell yourself you are hearing it. We comfort ourselves with it and punish ourselves by withholding its comfort when we felt sinful. Now the voice is silent. We don't know who to trust. Can we trust ourselves?

Even our values require reevaluation. In some cases we may have internalized stereotypes pushed by the church and this affects our thoughts about people or even behaviors toward them. They say not to judge but then they spend a lot of time doing it.

Then there is a tendency to demonstrate black and white thinking. When you grow up with these really clear dichotomies of good versus evil it offers this false sense of security. Personal interpretation and nuanced thought is discouraged. Even though your mind is wide open now it can still fall into those old thinking patterns.

Part of healing from trauma is learning to recognize this as a cognitive distortion that hinders personal development and creates conflict by promoting an all-or-nothing mentality.

Indoctrination can actually damage the development or proper functioning of the prefrontal regions of the brain in a way that hinders cognitive flexibility and openness. Indeed religiousness, and religious fundamentalism in particular, are associated with rigidity in the processing of information, low cognitive complexity, and a lack of openness to new experience.

We were not born with a closed mind; religion closed it. When we deconstruct that worldview, we open it up again.