I grew up in the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and I’ve not yet found a way to accurately sum up everything that that means in a way that makes sense for a secular lay person.
It was strict. It was cult-like. It made me terrified of my own thoughts. It insisted that we were all wretched, disgusting sinners who deserved to burn in hellfire. It taught me that to be who I wanted to be, to act in a way that felt authentic to me, was Sinful and would eventually damn my soul. It said that my actions, my thoughts, and my wants were all wrong. Worse than wrong – utterly, totally, inescapably Evil.
Which is kind of a lot to lay on a six-year-old anyway, and I was undiagnosed at the time, so I guess no one realised that an autistic child might take all of this extremely literally.
I was in the Free Presbyterian church from the ages of five to sixteen (it’s fine, it was only the most formative years of my life, no big deal) and then my family moved to a Free Evangelical church, which was a little less heavy on the brimstone, but still totally unbending on the whole Filthy Sinner stuff. I stayed there until my early twenties, and then I had Some Trauma and A Breakdown, the end result of which was that I stopped going to church.
It’s been about ten years now, and although I no longer worry about dying in my sleep and going to hell, that lingering fear that the church planted in me is still there, even though I believe (I hope) it grows weaker with every passing season.
The fear, habits, and thought patterns that the Free Presbyterians cultivated in its congregation are all encompassing in a way that I think it’s hard to understand if you haven’t been in a similar situation.
Trying to unlearn Ineffable Truths is really fucking hard. Try downing a bottle of bleach and trusting that it won’t eat your insides. Try jumping off a building and trusting that gravity won’t turn you into a smear on the pavement. Try picking up a deck of tarot cards and trusting that the action won’t damn your immortal soul to an eternity of infinite suffering.
And then I started going to yoga.
This in itself was a healing act, because my parents were very concerned about Eastern Spiritualism, and it was a struggle to get them to agree for me and my brother to take karate lessons as teenagers in case we were asked to worship at shrines, bow to the sensei, and, I don’t know, barter away our souls to the devil in exchange for a black belt. But I guess my mum liked the idea of yoga better – anything to get me to lose weight, probably – so I went to yoga and actually really enjoyed it, so much so that a few years afterward I did a yoga teacher training course and read The Upanishads, which are a part of the Hindu sacred scriptures. There’s a lot in there about the self and the soul and the universe, and I was kind of shocked that some of the texts weren’t too dissimilar from the Bible.
I know that the Hindu idea of God is very different to the Free Presbyterian idea of God, but even so, to read that another religion believed that the Self held God inside it – like the idea of humans being made in God’s image – and that God was ever present, the essence in everything – like the idea of an omnipresent, omniscient God – was very powerful.
Then, a few years later, I started researching paganism, and I found people talking about their deities in a way that acknowledged their existence alongside the existence of the Free Presbyterian God, which was a whole other epiphany. One day, I saw a post on Reddit where someone was asking if they could worship Jesus alongside Aphrodite, and someone else responded with something like “No, you can’t really do that, because the Abrahamic god is a jealous god, so his worship has to be exclusive.”
And, fuck, maybe that’s not mindblowing for anyone else, but it was for me, because it contextualised worship and the worship of the Free Presbyterian God as something that existed within a larger reality. The church always emphasised that God was the only true god, and while there were many false deities, theirs was, of course, the only right and correct one. Anything else was a lie – see the account in 1 Kings where there’s a dramatic showdown between God’s prophet Elijah and the prophets of the Canaanite god Baal. Predictably, Elijah wins and the prophets of Baal are shown to be not only losers, but dumb losers because they wasted their time serving a god who wasn’t even real.
To hear other people acknowledge the existence of the Free Presbyterian god in the same breath as they did Aphrodite, Hekate, Apollo, Brigid, and Cernunnos made something shift in my brain. The Free Presbyterian god was no longer an inescapable, universal truth that applied to everybody whether they liked it or not. It was one truth in an infinity of other truths. And it didn’t have to be my truth if I didn’t want it to be.
That’s maybe the biggest gift I’ve been able to give myself in the past decade: the idea of choice. In the Free Presbyterian church, there was no escape from God, and there was no option to follow any other path. Sure, you could leave the church, listen to secular music, expose your shoulders and kneecaps, cut your hair short, and allow your thoughts to wander on the Sabbath, but God would find you in the end, regardless of how you tried to avoid Him. It didn’t matter if I was miserable, if sermons triggered terrible anxiety shutdowns and depressive episodes – this was just how things were, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. God was as unwavering a Truth as the stars in the sky and the cling of gravity, as inevitable as the tides and the phases of the moon.
But it doesn’t feel like that anymore. I have a choice. I am free to make my life what I want it to be. The Free Presbyterian god might want me to live my life a specific way, but if I don’t want to do that, I don’t have to.
I don’t owe Him anything.
“Who is better able to know God than I myself, since He resides in my heart and is the very essence of my being?”
― Paramananda, The Upanishads