My husband grew up watching Family Guy—an animated comedy about a suburban family led by an abusive, incompetent father (Peter) and an enabling mother (Lois). They have three kids: Meg, the abused and neglected oldest daughter, Chris, the oft-forgotten middle child who takes after his father, and Stewie, a maniacal infant who hates his entire family and often plots against them. They also have an anthropomorphic dog, Brian (and somehow he is the most normal character).
I only know all of this because my husband is a very nostalgic man, so when there are no sports on, he watches this show almost every night. Being in a small apartment, it’s easy for me to get sucked in too.
I find the show to be very disturbing and rarely funny. The wife/mother (Lois) and daughter (Meg) are most often the punching bags of the show (literally, they are often punched or physically hurt by other characters). The side characters–an 80-something pedophile neighbor always trying to get kids to touch him and an overly-lustful, perverted friend of Peter’s–pop up often as “comedic relief.” Jokes about rape, murder and women’s bodies are also common.
The episode on deck last week was about Meg, who, on the verge of suicide after being infected with mumps because of her father, finds God. As I mentioned, Meg is the biggest victim in her family, especially to her father’s abuse. She is never shown love, never validated, and regularly bullied at home. Her mother is neglectful and never protects Meg from the abuse. On top of that, she is heavily bullied and outcast at school. It’s no surprise then that she is psychologically distraught and has suicidal thoughts.
Convinced by the TV preacher that Jesus loves her and that she has a reason to continue living because of it, Meg announces that she is saved and joins the cult of religiosity. She becomes an evangelical Christian and engages in rituals with other townspeople such as burning books and spreading the gospel. At the end of the episode, a disheartened Meg loses faith, when Brian tells her, “if God were real, why would he give you a hot mom and make you such a loser?” She renounces Christianity and goes back to her life pre-mumps.
Meg did not “wake up” and find God. She was still sleeping, overwhelmed with emotional pain and no safe outlet to release it. Christianity appeared to her as a means of bypassing her pain and cosplaying as a beloved daughter. She was an outcasted, rejected, neglected, abused, “lost” child simply trying to find an escape from her pain. Religion provided her the temporary gaslighting she needed to survive. She needed to believe that someone loved her enough to make life worth living, because as it was, she did not feel that way.
Religion appeals to traumatized people as an escape from their pain. If I can convince myself that God loves me, that belief can negate the impact of the suffering and lovelessness I’ve experienced. Instead of metabolizing my pain and finding myself by looking within, I look without, and deny my pain even more, by pretending that God made it all better. God presents like the magical microwave from Spy Kids; you put in clay, push a button, and out comes food. Except, it’s not real. The idea of God is not enough to heal you from your inner pain, nor is having a “relationship” with God enough to help you find yourself. Ask me how I know.
knowing who we are
In The Matrix trilogy, Neo repeatedly visits The Oracle, a program who is believed to be a prophet regarding the “war” between the machines and humans. He goes to her at first to find out if he is the One who will save humanity. She tells him no, but he eventually realizes that he is the One. When he returns to her, she says she just told him what he needed to hear. During his subsequent visits to her, she teaches him about the need to understand why he makes certain choices, and also, to trust his inner voice.
She teaches him not to keep going back to her for answers, but to turn within to find, and more importantly accept, the answers he already has.
In order words, she taught him how to connect to himself, how to trust himself. She taught him about intuition. The One is not a god; he is just a human, also controlled and designed by the machines. He goes to seek counsel from another program, before he learns that everything he needs to know comes to him when he is ready for it.
To the traumatized person, even the thought of “looking within” is terrifying. It is much more comfortable to look without, to cling to an idea of a God who loves me, rather than seek to understand why I so desperately crave love. The answers to my deepest questions must be outside of me, I hope, because if they were within me, I would have to face myself to find them. Facing myself, in all my pain, feels like death. I might even choose self-inflicted physical death over facing myself.
People with emotional pain are desperate. Desperate people don’t slow down long enough to see the truth. They are usually just trying to survive and cope. They do what they can to avoid the reality of living with pain. They drink, they smoke, they watch porn, they pray to God. Religion is a vice like any other. It is addictive, often hallucinogenic, and engineered for desperate people.
A telltale sign of this is that religion is the antidote for other vices. Alcoholics turn to God on the path to recovery. When a serial cheater like Pete Hegseth confesses to the terrible violations he’s committed, but follows up with “but that was before I knew God,” he receives immediate social atonement. God is a fireproof blanket over people’s horrible choices. It may put out the fire, but it won’t tell you what started it, nor will it ensure that another disaster doesn’t occur. Right now, it just keeps you alive. And maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. Religion is not nearly as self-destructive as other vices. But, it is loaded with just as much self-rejection, self-hatred and shame. You still carry the shame that caused you to pick up the vice in the first place, you just get better at denying it. Why? Because “God loves you.”
the purpose of spirituality
Religion requires denial of self in totality. Spirituality requires unity with self in totality. It requires inner wholeness. In fact, spirituality is a quality that emerges or a trait one comes into when the inner self is unified. People with fragmented selves love religion because it is just another, more socially acceptable escape from self.
It hurts to be real, to discover the truth from within yourself. It is easier to let someone else tell you what is true, what you should believe, how you should feel, and so on. But submission always requires denial of self, or self-abandonment in some way. It requires you to reject your feelings and label them as bad. To the traumatized person, it’s something they’ve already been doing their whole lives. Their perception of reality is already distorted from years of being gaslit and self-abandoning to survive. Religion feels like home to such a person.
Why would a God who created you with bodily urges deem those urges morally unacceptable? Religion goes so far as to convince you that God judges your thoughts, and so you begin to feel shame for having thoughts in congruence with natural feelings. Liking a boy/girl, feeling aroused, daydreaming about intimacy, wanting to be wealthy, wanting to have power and influence, wanting to own a lot of expensive material things. It’s all demonized and labeled as bad; in the cult of religiosity, you cannot want what you want. You must want what God wants you to want, and you must also determine what that is for yourself. It is usually what everyone at church is telling you is okay to do, whatever others are not judging you for. How ironic for a faith based on the doctrine that says “Do not conform to the patterns of people in the world.”
Most church people are not reading the Bible for themselves and trying to ascertain its meaning. If they did, they would probably wake up much sooner. Some people leave the faith without ever waking up; they also do not actively seek the truth within. To “wake up” is to look within and see a glimpse of truth. To “wake up” is to let your questions lead you somewhere new, closer to your soul.
I am not an atheist or agnostic. I believe in a Creator. The closer I get to my soul, the more I am sure that none of this was an accident. But I am also more sure that it’s not what I was told it was. That is a scary thought, because it leads to an even scarier thought: of all these religious people tailing behind man-made dogmatic variations of religion, who knows the truth? Who is actually “saved” by what they know?
Narcissism tells religious men, what I know is true, and everyone else who doesn’t agree with me has it wrong. So it’s not like I can seek counsel among other humans to arrive at the truth. Like Neo, I must seek counsel from a program, something designed to support me. What is that? My connection to consciousness–my soul.
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