By: Fern Ridley, SFU Student and Valeria Gomez, SFU Student
Content warning: mentions of child sexualization, rape culture, abortion, purity culture, and queerphobia.
Fern: The extent of my religious trauma wasn’t apparent to me until a few years after my high school graduation. I went to a Christian school from kindergarten to grade 12 — and as you can probably imagine, it took a toll on me. My school was obsessed with preserving purity among its student body, and often meddled in students’ personal lives. We were frequently subjected to speeches, lessons, and one-on-one conversations about “honourable” Christian lifestyles. Growing up as a closeted queer girl in this environment was challenging, to put it simply. Years after entering what my school called “the real world,” I realized many of my private school experiences were harmful, and sometimes violating. Why were my teachers, who were often men in their ‘50s, speaking to me about “tempting” children and adults by wearing a bathing suit? Why were they so preoccupied with preserving the presumed innocence of young girls, while letting the boys do whatever they wanted?
Valeria: This is something I struggled with going to religious schools as well. It felt like the teachers and staff were obsessed with making sure girls’ uniform skirts were low enough on the knee, but boys who would come to school shirtless on non-uniform days, or wearing short shorts, were allowed to do so. All the discussions around modesty focused on “not showing your shoulders,” and “not tempting men” — it made me feel disgusting in my body and took so many years to unlearn. Schools should be teaching young boys to be respectful, not telling girls to cover up. In my memory, we never once had a formal discussion about what “consent” means. I learned more on the internet about consent than what they taught at school, and that’s very dangerous.
Fern: I also had this experience — it really is devastating what it does to your sense of self. I actually once had a teacher approach me explaining that another staff member told her my skirt was too short, and wanted her to let me know “as a woman.” My first thought was: great, some old man was probably staring up my skirt as I walked upstairs. Of course he didn’t want to confront me himself — it’s creepy! You’re also right that consent was rarely taught in religious schools when we grew up. Instead, we endured conversations upholding rape culture under the guise of caring for students. Phrases like “men are visual creatures,” and “they can’t help themselves,” were used to guilt young girls into feeling ashamed of their bodies. We internalized these ideas as if they held real value to ourselves as women.
Valeria: Modesty is something people can choose for themselves if they’d like to, but I despise how this is being forced on women and girls in so many religious institutions. It sends the message that women are not worthy of respect unless they are “modest,” and even then, purity culture is so harmful to sex education. The entirety of my sex ed in school was abstinence-only education — I was never taught about birth control, their alternative uses (like hormone regulation), or even the basics around ovulation. We were even told that partners shouldn’t use condoms between one another because it’s “against God’s will,” even if your partner has a known transmissible disease. I promise “God’s will” isn’t about infecting loved ones.
Fern: I always found it disturbing how religious institutions can use the concept of “God’s will” to manipulate and indoctrinate young people. Often, their perception of “God’s will” is closer to right-wing political values than Biblical text. For example, abortion is never mentioned in the Bible, and in fact, Judaism holds the pro-choice view that a fetus attains personhood after being born. Despite this, today’s Christian culture generally stands against bodily autonomy when it comes to abortion. In my school, abortion was a taboo topic, and was often compared to murder. I can’t begin to describe the shame and confusion young girls in this environment feel — with a sex ed system that revolves around protecting their “purity” while offering no resources for staying safe. It felt like my school didn’t care about our safety as much as they did our ability to get married and raise Christian children. Even in marriage, you need to know about things like contraceptives, consent, and abortion. It took a long time for me to realize religious trauma is very real — I still live with uncontrollable guilt around engaging in sexual activity, using drugs or alcohol, and being queer.
Valeria: Very true. In schools they always talk about how Jesus judges no one but then they turn around and judge everyone for their “sins.” The Old Testament also punishes women who are victims of sexual violence, and moralizes how they react to it, rather than punishing the men who commit the crime. While my high school teachers were accepting of the 2SLBGTQIA+ community, too many religious people — the Pope included — view same-sex attraction as a “sin.” How can it be a sin to love? It took me years to unlearn the shame I felt for myself. I never understood what was supposed to be so terrible about being gay, but I quickly understood that other people did not like it. Upon rumors spread about me being a lesbian in elementary school, I didn’t understand what the big deal was. However, for weeks people harassed me, called me slurs, and said disgusting things about queer people. At first, the institution did not care and wouldn’t protect me against harassment unless I wasn’t queer. It made me fearful of identifying as anything other than straight, and took me years to even consider the possibility of being queer, and longer to accept myself.
The whole idea around virginity is harmful because “you can’t tell if someone has had sex by looking at their genitalia — the shape and size of the vagina doesn’t change size with penetrative sex, nor does the hymen change from penis-in-vagina sex.” Tampons were moralized, horseback riding was moralized — all for a ridiculous construct around “purity.” The obsession with a young girl’s “purity” to begin with is disgusting. I shouldn’t have been made to feel like a sexual being at 13 or 14, just because adults around me were obsessed with girls’ purity. I should have been allowed to be me without shame of my body or paranoia around whether what I was wearing was “too revealing.”
Fern: The least harmful advice about sexuality we were told in my school was to love queer people because we were also “sinners” ourselves — but that’s still such a backwards way of thinking, and it still moralizes people’s sexualities. It took me a while to recognize that the popularity of these ideas is rooted in the Christian church’s institutional power, and not necessarily truth. This goes for many religions, but my personal experience is with Christianity. Whether or not you’re still religious, you don’t need to follow in the footsteps of your pastor or fellow church-goers to live an honourable life — whatever that means to you. Instead of cherry-picking values from scripture and church, why not focus on being a genuinely kind and charitable human being? I think that’s often forgotten about in Christian circles, or it’s used as an excuse to judge others.
The shame around our bodies and sexuality lingers long after we leave religious school, and has a strong effect on women and queer people especially. Talking about these experiences with peers has been one of the most cathartic forms of relief for me, but the issue persists. Private schools have too many protections around what they’re allowed to teach students and how they operate — especially private schools that are also religious institutions. These schools have the ability to operate outside the Ministry’s secular curriculum, which allows them to skirt around regulations and do things that would get a public school in deep trouble, such as rejecting applicants who have queer parents. Children shouldn’t be subjected to moralistic conversations about their bodies and sexuality in school — that isn’t a teacher’s place and it should be illegal.
