by Brenda Wilbee, in Christianity

Christa Brown, Baptistland
..
"...the trust and obey stuff was so embedded it was as though the church had implanted some chip in my brain to control me from within. Nowadays, I find it impossible to segregate any part of my faith that didn't somehow factor into the grooming for abuse." (p 25)

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IN MY OWN LIFE, my parents didn't intentionally groom me for abuse. Nonetheless, they and circumstances aligned to make me prey for the unscrupulous. The same for Christa Brown, author of Baptistland.

But why us? Why were we sitting ducks? And not, let's say, our sisters?

We were all raised to obey. Our families and churches had the Bible verses to underscore obedience. "All authority is given by God" was a doozy. There were others. And when innate distrust of someone kicked in, we'd already memorized "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding." It was inevitable we learn to distrust ourselves.

Hymns too reinforced. From the pew on the we sang, "Trust and obey, for there's no other way, to be happy in Jesus, than to trust and obey."

We obeyed and ended up prey. But not my sisters. Not hers. Why us?

Brown answers this question in an interview she did with Julie Roys of the RoysReport in May of this year, 2024.

"THE REALITY is what made me vulnerable, what made me a target, what made me easy prey was the very fact that I loved God so much. My faith was earnest and pure and all, and that is precisely what was weaponized against me."

Which is exactly why so many of us can't parse our faith into anything safe. "I find it impossible," Brown writes in her book, "to segregate any part of my faith that didn't somehow factor into the grooming for abuse."

This is the problem. Weaponize the Bible, faith takes a beating and sometimes doesn't survive.

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