2024 best books, part 2

I already started sharing about three of my favorite books of 2024. In part 1, I summarized Introduction to Internal Family Systems by Richard C. Schwartz.

Now, in part 2, let me introduce and commend to you Religious Trauma by Brooke Petersen. Brooke—I mean, Rev. Dr. Petersen—is a dear friend and colleague of mine. We graduated together from seminary, the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, where she now teaches, and it's become a tradition for the Petersen Browns to come to Davenport for Thanksgiving with the Olson-Smiths. So, I'm biased. Deal with it!

Religious Trauma

The term "religious trauma" may be new to you. Or even simply "trauma." If so, a better starting point might be When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion by Laura Anderson. (Note that word "control." It resonates with my third favorite book of 2024: The Uncontrolling Love of God.)

"To understand religious trauma, we must first understand what trauma is," writes Anderson. It's not something that happens to you, it's something that lives in your body and nervous system. Following many recent popular descriptions, she talks of trauma in two ways:

1. "single incident trauma" that "results from a single incident or event such as a car accident, a natural disaster, or sexualized violence" and
2. "complex trauma" that is "the result of experiencing consistent and pervasive threat or overwhelm without being able to escape" and as examples, she names the abusive situations many children grow up in, "domestic violence, war and terrorism, systemic racism and oppression, and cults"

"Religious trauma is trauma" Anderson repeats, meaning it can be result from a single incident or it can be complex. She also means, it is real and deserves to be taken as seriously as any other trauma. I agree!

So does Petersen, though Peterson goes farther. The subtitle of her book is Queer Stories of Estrangement and Return, revealing two differences between her and Anderson's books. First, Petersen gives readers an opportunity to listen specifically to queer Christians' stories of religious trauma. She writes:

Their sexuality, in light of the theological beliefs of their non-accepting congregations, barred them from living a fully human life. Participants in this project anticipated that they would never experience meaningful and life-giving intimate relationships, that they would spend eternity in excruciating pain and torment, and that God no longer loved or cared for them. Not only did their sense of self collapse once they were rejected from their non- accepting congregation, but they no longer could believe with certainty that the future held anything positive for them.

Heart-rending, and all the more because it resonated with my own experiences of high-control Christian communities. I don't identify as queer, and my path to ordination, for one example, was much easier for it. But I lived with the fear of being annihilated by God.

This book is heart-rending but ultimately hopeful, because there's a second way Petersen's book goes farther than Anderson's. In fact, it goes farther than most of the rest of the still-new literature on religious trauma. While they focus on the needfulness of leaving high-control religious communities so healing can begin, Petersen tells stories of estrangement and return.

The return is key, as Petersen witnesses to deep healing that could only take place for queer Christians in an accepting congregation. She writes:

Participants were treated like they had a communicable disease: a disease which would condemn them for all eternity to a place of unimaginable suffering. Their stories require us to think about how the accepting church can be a place of refuge and healing for those who have been cast out and shattered by their community of faith. ... [they] describe experiences of trauma that were healed only when they were able to live out their identity in a progressive church community.

So hers can be a book to help the church repent of harm done to queer brothers and sisters, yes, and even more it can help us become wiser, more skilled healers. That's the kind of church I want to be part of and the kind of Christian I want to be: repenting and healing both.