Keep Your God Out of My Fucking Life

They handed me a religion before I could consent. It took me thirty years to hand it back and ten years to perform the autopsy.

My christening in 1982.

I was born into religion. I don’t remember feeling indoctrinated because it just always was. I was baptized as a baby, because babies are sinners and need to be cleansed immediately out of the womb. When I was young, I wondered about the babies who weren’t baptized and died — were they burning in hell? It horrified me. My little brain struggled to understand the concept of babies needing baptism to be saved. And then in the same breath, I’d hear an adult say things like, “Babies are innocent. Protect the innocent.” The contradictions drove me batshit, even as a child.

I didn’t mind church, honestly. I got to wear my fancy dresses, see my friends, and as long as I had snacks and my books, I was cool as a cucumber. There was a separate set of pews in the back, behind thick glass, called the “cry-room.” That’s where mothers sat with children who couldn’t shut the fuck up for an entire boring hour. I was one of those children. I had so many questions, and if I was next to a friend or a cousin, you couldn’t shut me up for nothin’. Even my whispers were loud. But that’s how it was. Children were to be seen and not heard — especially during church. So, to the cry-room we went.

My friend and I at church. I’m the little blondie on the right.

After the service, the adults would gather outside or in the church hall for breakfast and gab away. Usually about one another. Patriarchal white women are notorious for nefarious gossip. I learned very quickly, very early, that those who gossip TO you will gossip ABOUT you. So I either said what I had to say bluntly or stayed quiet and kept it locked away forever. Mostly, I stayed quiet. I observed. I know a lot of secrets, about a lot of people in my tiny little town, especially my parents. I was sneaky as a kid, too — always peeking around corners, watching like a creepy little curly, tow-headed peeping tom. And what I learned, watching the adults who ran my world, was that they were pretending. All of them. Nobody knew what they were doing. Everyone was just winging it.

My Dad was an idiot who thought he knew everything. I clocked this in preschool. My Mom was book smart but naive, and so riddled with her own unhealed trauma that she buried herself, and I only got glimpses of the real her, here and there. She never talked about her problems and never fixed them. But she loved projecting, blaming, and taking them out on people she perceived as weaker. Like me. She used gossip and silent treatments and cruelty to get what she wanted. I occasionally look back and wonder how my grandmother and grandfather treated her. Because we are all products of our parents, and we either continue the cycles or we break them.

I realized eventually that the cycles weren’t just my parents’. They were the whole machine.

Patriarchy doesn’t need every father to be a tyrant. It just needs God to be one. Once you’ve installed an all-powerful daddy in the sky, one who watches everything, keeps a ledger, and punishes disobedience with eternal fire, you don’t have to do much enforcing yourself. The system runs on autopilot. Every father demanding silence from his daughter, every priest behind the altar, every woman policing another woman’s hemline and tone and choices — that’s not the source of the control. No, it’s more like middle management.

Go back to that cry-room with me for a second. The church built a literal room, with thick glass, to remove women and children from the sacred space. Think about what that unspoken blueprint says to women and children. The men stand at the front and speak for God. The women and the children who ask too many questions go behind the glass, where they can watch, but not be heard. They didn’t hide what they were doing. They built it into the fucking floor plan.

And the gossip? I used to think that was just women being catty. It’s not. When you give women no actual power, no pulpit, no authority, no voice in the room where decisions get made, the only power left is the power to police each other. Gossip is the weaponized surveillance system the patriarchy outsources to its prisoners. Those church-hall breakfasts weren’t just social hour. They were the neighborhood watch, and every woman there was both the watcher and the watched. Including me, in training, learning to keep my mouth shut.

I learned the lessons. God help me, I learned them well… most times, the hard way. Be agreeable. Be modest. Be of service. Submit to your husband. Keep the family together no matter what it costs you, because the family is the covenant and the woman is the glue and if it comes apart, everybody knows whose fault it is. Women are taught we are born to suffer in this life and how much suffering we can handle determines our strength and worth. I spent years trying to be a good, god-fearing woman. I held up my end of the contract the best I could and God fucked me over.

The fine print of the contract says to comply, and you’ll be safe and loved. The con is that the payment never comes. Compliance doesn’t buy safety. It buys more demands for compliance. The goalposts aren’t just moved, there were never any goalposts. There was just a field you were never allowed to leave. Women get ping-ponged back and forth however a man sees fit. The problem with God’s contract and me is that I’m neurodivergent, and my brain came factory-installed with a justice setting that doesn’t turn off. God’s contract required me to watch unfairness and then convince myself it was somehow holy. I couldn’t.

I found out what happens when you leave and begin to put distance between yourself and the patriarchy.

I finally mustered the courage to walk away from my abusive husband, so my children and I could have a happier, better life. I did the thing every counselor, every pamphlet, every well-meaning voice says a woman in that situation should do. And the machine responded the way the machine always responds — with a horrific, coordinated, and relentless smear campaign. And the worst part is that nobody had to write the script, because the script already existed. The woman who leaves is the problem. The home-wrecker. The covenant-breaker. Everyone around my children already knew their lines. I was accused of doing horrible things. You name it, I was accused of it. Anything to defame my character and make me the villain in my small town. And it was always from people who felt threatened by the secrets I knew about them. Discrediting me was imperative to maintaining their false narratives they worked so hard to protect. Malignant narcissists will always do the worst to protect the story.

My kids were young. Impressionable. They were handed a script about their mother, the same way I was handed original sin before I could talk — before they were old enough to question it, by adults they trusted, with God’s name attached for authority. They believed it. They jumped on the hate train for their own safety. They didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. It was never my children’s fault. I’ve never blamed my children for feeling the way they felt. They were lied to and gaslit and in some instances threatened. They were innocent in all of this — victims just as much as I was in the smear campaign.

I’ve been working on trying to forgive my ex husband and family for what they did to my children and I for ten years now, but so far, no luck. I’ll keep trying though. I keep reminding myself that forgiveness is for me, not for them.

I lost my children in 2016 when they were 15, 13 and 9.

And in losing my children, I lost God. Not gradually. Not after careful theological reflection. What kind of all-loving, all-powerful God takes away the only things you love, as punishment for protecting them? Theologians have a fancy name for that question. They call it the problem of evil, and they’ve spent two thousand years writing answers to it, and not one of those answers has ever satisfied a mother. God is dead to me.

People assume the decade of study came first — that I read my way out of religion. No. The loss came first. God died, and then I spent ten years performing the autopsy.

I studied scripture like a detective, not a disciple. I compared notes across religions — Christianity, Judaism, Islam, the older traditions they all borrowed from and then pretended they didn’t. And the same skeleton kept showing up under every different costume. A flood story, recycled. A virgin birth, recycled. A dying-and-rising god, recycled. And always, always, the same operating instructions to obey the men who speak for God. Control the women. Frighten the children. Punish the ones who leave.

Religion was engineered as a control system with a fear-of-death engine and a hell-shaped whip, and it works because it’s installed in childhood, before the customer can read the terms. That terror I felt as a little girl, lying awake, sick over unbaptized babies burning in a lake of fire, that wasn’t faith. That was a lie, told to a child, on purpose, by an institution that needed her scared. It took me over thirty years to walk that little girl out of there. But I did. The fear of hell was the last thing to go, and when it went, I want to tell you, the silence it left behind was the most peaceful sound I have ever not heard.

I didn’t replace one daddy in the sky with another. I’m not religious. I’m not even sure I’d take the word “faith” if you offered it to me. But I’ll tell you what I believe, because I earned every inch of it and frankly, I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks about what I believe anymore.

I believe in something bigger than me. But it is not a man in the sky. It does not watch me shower. It keeps no ledger, takes no attendance, employs no middlemen, and has never once asked me for ten percent. I believe in energy — that what we put out into the world comes back to us. Call it karma if you want, but understand that I don’t mean a cosmic punishment system. That would just be hell again, and I already canceled that subscription. I mean something simpler. Cruelty compounds. So does love. You are, every day, building the world you’re going to live in. Be a garbage person, throwing trash out into the world, and you will wake up one morning living in a landfill. Put out love and kindness, and that comes back too — usually from directions you never saw coming.

I have spiritual practices. They’re mine. I chose them as a grown woman, with my eyes open, and I can quit them tomorrow and nothing will burn. That’s the whole difference, right there. Religion was handed to me before I could consent. This, I consented to. It turns out that’s the entire fucking point.

Today, I have a meaningful and beautiful relationship with my oldest. The same machine that handed my children a story about me couldn’t hold all of them. One of them grew up, looked at the script, and put it down. I am still estranged from my younger two.

I will never give up hope that someday we’ll reconnect. I always have hope. It’s difficult to explain why. Hope that argues for itself isn’t really hope.

Their God said, love me, or burn. I say, I love you, and the door is open. Those are not the same thing. So, keep your God out of my fucking life.

Sometimes I think about that little girl in the cry-room. Behind the thick glass, whispering too loud, full of questions nobody wanted to answer. They built a whole room to contain her. They told her babies were sinners and questions were disobedience and God was watching.

She’s still here. The questions turned out to be the right ones. And there’s no more glass holding her voice back.

If a paid subscription isn’t in the cards right now, I completely get it — truly. But if you’ve ever read something here and thought “damn, she needs to keep doing this,” you can throw a few bucks in the tip jar over at Buy Me a Coffee.

No pressure. No guilt. Just me, asking nicely, with my hand out like a very earnest raccoon who writes controversial essays.

☕ buymeacoffee.com/eeviebateman

Thank you for being here. Seriously. You make this worth doing.