Raleigh Hightower
Lifestyle Editor
rhightower@murraystate.edu
Offering a space where people can recognize “religious violence” but still experience joy and fun in these faith spaces, speaker Alicia Crosby led a discussion on these topics on April 4.
The Episcopal Campus Ministry and the Department of English and Philosophy collaborated sponsoring the discussion.
Zebulun Treloar, who leads the Episcopal Campus Ministry said he decided to try and bring a discussion about religious trauma after observing trauma at play in the community.
“A lot of people connected to the Episcopal Campus Ministry, St. John’s, Murray State, and in the wider community around us have experienced religious trauma. I hear about it a lot and it’s a frequent topic of conversation, especially when we’re sharing our faith journeys together,” said Treloar who also serves as priest of St. John’s Episcopal Church.
The discussion was led by Alicia Crosby, a justice educator, activist and minister whose work is centered on religious trauma, violence and abuse.
The discussion began with Crosby detailing her earlier career, which started in a New York megachurch. Crosby said while working at this megachurch, she experienced an early, fundamental incident of religious trauma that stuck with her throughout her career.
“There was this one service in particular, the choir was singing this song called ‘I Need You To Survive.’ The lyrics are: ‘I pray for you, you pray for me, I love you, I need you to survive,’” Crosby said. “In my body, hearing those lyrics, I froze, my heart was racing and I felt the need to run … the reason I had that embodied response was because this church environment was deeply, deeply violent toward me.”
Crosby said shortly after this experience, she quit her job and separated herself from the megachurch. Though this experience was very significant to her, it was not her first brush with religious trauma.
Crosby said she experienced her first instance of religious trauma growing up in a black Baptist church.
“I was seven years old in this service and very involved with the church,” Crosby said.”The new pastor came along and changed the rules for communion. Something in my little seven-year-old self knew this wasn’t OK, and I spoke up about it. The pastor wasn’t with it … the pastor ignored me as a child.”
Crosby said the religious trauma and violence “clicked” for her while she was working for a civil rights non-profit.
While working at the non-profit, many of Crosby’s younger co-workers began coming out to her as members of the LGBTQ community. Crosby, who herself is a member of the LGBTQ community, said she was confused as to why her co-workers had hidden this part of their identities from her.
“These young folks, high-schoolers and college students, were trusting me as a supportive presence in their lives,” Crosby said. “I said ‘What’s going on where this part of who you are is being left out of conversation and is being left off the table? They said, ‘You are the most religious person we know, and we were afraid you were going to abandon us.’”
Crosby said this experience left her heartbroken and she realized that the abandonment these people had faced was religious violence.
“In my head it clicked, this is violence and we need to call these things what they are,” Crosby said.
Treloar also discussed the possible effect that religious organizations being noninclusive can have on religious trauma.
“I think all communities are diminished when people are excluded from leadership, or even from salvation, based on things like gender and sexuality,” Treloar said. “We were made to compliment one another and work together. Limiting who calls the shots and who gets a say based on class, sexuality, gender or race weakens the community and opens it to corruption.”
Crosby defined terms like religious violence and religious trauma in order to give people the language to explain how they are feeling.
The definition of religious violence Crosby provided is: “the spiritual, physical, emotional, psychological or material harm people experience through, because of or within religion.”
Crosby also spoke on how religion can sometimes create and place people within restrictive environments in which they are not able to fully explore themselves.
“For some of us we have lived in a really restrictive space,” Crosby said. “That means we need space for processing who we are, even as sexual beings.”
The discussion concluded with Crosby advocating that even as individuals face difficult tasks such as repairing and healing from their religious trauma, that there is still room for positivity.
“There is room for joy here,” Crosby said. “Too often people take things like healing and repair as serious things, and they are … but there is still a space for lightness, fun and for being ridiculous.”