Deborah, thank you for the honesty in this piece. Parts of your story felt very familiar.
I was also raised in a fear-heavy religious system where the emphasis often felt less like formation and more like surveillance. For me it wasn’t just sin language—it was rapture teaching. The constant message (even if unintended) was that you could be left behind, rejected, or excluded by God if you didn’t get things right.
Looking back, I don’t think anyone was trying to cause harm. I think many leaders sincerely believed fear would produce faithfulness. But what it often produced instead was anxiety and performance. Fear is very effective at producing compliance, but much less effective at producing maturity.
Like you, I spent years assuming what I was taught represented historic Christianity. I was in my 40s before I learned most of global Christianity—both historically and today—never believed in the kind of rapture teaching I was raised with, something I had been told was essential to faith. That realization was disorienting. I defended what I had been taught pretty aggressively at first because it felt like defending God, when in reality I was mostly defending an inherited framework.
What surprised me most was that the Christians who helped me re-examine things weren’t trying to win arguments. They simply lived differently. They seemed less driven by fear and more grounded in justice, mercy, patience, and love in ways that reminded me more of the Acts community than the systems I grew up in.
What I slowly began to suspect is that sometimes what wounds people isn’t Christianity itself, but what happens when fear becomes the primary teaching tool. Fear can produce compliance, but only love produces transformation. Historically, Christian formation aimed at restoration of the person, not management of behavior. Jesus’ harshest criticism was often directed at religious leaders who placed heavy burdens on people but did little to help them carry them.
Your line about people being hurt not because they broke the rules but because they tried so hard to follow them really stayed with me. I’ve seen that too. And I sometimes wonder if part of the work ahead for many Christian communities is learning how to take sin seriously without making fear the motivator, and how to form people morally without activating shame.
I’ve come to believe fear is a terrible master but a very faithful teacher when we learn how to listen to it.
Thank you for writing this. Conversations like this probably help more people than we realize.
Bryan, thank you so much for this very eloquent response. Surveillance is exactly how it was for me and I live with this legacy of never quite meeting some sort of mythical standards. For example I’ve always been very careful with my own kids not to demand compliance and also not to suggest they repent for errors of judgement! As part of my unravelling of things, I’m trying to work out what was cultural/inherited and what was biblical/truth so to speak. You’re right in that perhaps it wasn’t intentional - it was just how people lived in many ways. My parents were very focused on their reputation and didn’t want their children to let them down which is fear-based. There was more I wanted to say in this piece about how we need to establish a new/better understanding of sin as it is there in all of us. Christianity focused on love and justice and mercy is what I am searching for rather than a rules-based value system. I hope you continue to discover new truths. If you haven’t read it, I really do recommend Sarah McCammon’s book The Exvangelicals. Many in that are still believers in God and have a faith. They just walked away from some of the things that no longer felt right. Thank you again for this.
Deborah, thank you for the honesty in this piece. Parts of your story felt very familiar.
I was also raised in a fear-heavy religious system where the emphasis often felt less like formation and more like surveillance. For me it wasn’t just sin language—it was rapture teaching. The constant message (even if unintended) was that you could be left behind, rejected, or excluded by God if you didn’t get things right.
Looking back, I don’t think anyone was trying to cause harm. I think many leaders sincerely believed fear would produce faithfulness. But what it often produced instead was anxiety and performance. Fear is very effective at producing compliance, but much less effective at producing maturity.
Like you, I spent years assuming what I was taught represented historic Christianity. I was in my 40s before I learned most of global Christianity—both historically and today—never believed in the kind of rapture teaching I was raised with, something I had been told was essential to faith. That realization was disorienting. I defended what I had been taught pretty aggressively at first because it felt like defending God, when in reality I was mostly defending an inherited framework.
What surprised me most was that the Christians who helped me re-examine things weren’t trying to win arguments. They simply lived differently. They seemed less driven by fear and more grounded in justice, mercy, patience, and love in ways that reminded me more of the Acts community than the systems I grew up in.
What I slowly began to suspect is that sometimes what wounds people isn’t Christianity itself, but what happens when fear becomes the primary teaching tool. Fear can produce compliance, but only love produces transformation. Historically, Christian formation aimed at restoration of the person, not management of behavior. Jesus’ harshest criticism was often directed at religious leaders who placed heavy burdens on people but did little to help them carry them.
Your line about people being hurt not because they broke the rules but because they tried so hard to follow them really stayed with me. I’ve seen that too. And I sometimes wonder if part of the work ahead for many Christian communities is learning how to take sin seriously without making fear the motivator, and how to form people morally without activating shame.
I’ve come to believe fear is a terrible master but a very faithful teacher when we learn how to listen to it.
Thank you for writing this. Conversations like this probably help more people than we realize.
Bryan, thank you so much for this very eloquent response. Surveillance is exactly how it was for me and I live with this legacy of never quite meeting some sort of mythical standards. For example I’ve always been very careful with my own kids not to demand compliance and also not to suggest they repent for errors of judgement! As part of my unravelling of things, I’m trying to work out what was cultural/inherited and what was biblical/truth so to speak. You’re right in that perhaps it wasn’t intentional - it was just how people lived in many ways. My parents were very focused on their reputation and didn’t want their children to let them down which is fear-based. There was more I wanted to say in this piece about how we need to establish a new/better understanding of sin as it is there in all of us. Christianity focused on love and justice and mercy is what I am searching for rather than a rules-based value system. I hope you continue to discover new truths. If you haven’t read it, I really do recommend Sarah McCammon’s book The Exvangelicals. Many in that are still believers in God and have a faith. They just walked away from some of the things that no longer felt right. Thank you again for this.
Really thought provoking piece. Accurately portrays the sin framework of many a church, for sure.
Thanks Rosina! I think we need an expanded understanding of sin….
Excellent piece, Deborah. Very thought provoking.
Thanks Cecilia!