Terrible Lie

This essay is a reference to the NIN song of the name name.

“Terrible Lie is my fave NIN song. I’m not sure what it Trent’s story behind the lyrics is, but to me the song is about losing your faith system.

I’m still Christian, but I’ve always had struggles with my own beliefs. In my teens, I saw enough youth group personal testimonies that all sounded the same. I respected the teenagers, but the testimonies always had this weird cult tone to them, like “Oh, just keep loving God and listen to what he tells you and you’ll never be depressed ever.”

Meanwhile, I thought I was loving Jesus a lot, but I was really anxious and depressed pretty much all the time? I started taking comfort from the opinions of other kids in my secular school who said that “God wasn’t real”. Like maybe The Big Bang and evolution did happened, and time just happening and EVERYTHING just kind of *happened*. If you died you died. That was it.

Then Columbine happened and I was scared of the God question. “What if she said no? Would he have let her go?”

That shit actually freaked me out for years. Like I remember in my teens being sick of Christianity and how cringe it was getting, and I just wanted to have a “cool” faith, so I read about Wicca and I read about Buddhism, but neither really felt right. Meditating sounded boring as fuck and there wasn’t a good wooded area within walking distance of my house wherein I could perform “rituals”. I would have felt stupid doing it anyway.

In college, I worked full-time at Winners/HomeSense and usually needed up being scheduled on Sundays and I didn’t go to church for a long time. I kind of liked life better because I didn’t have to worry about what people thought about me. I was finally free to be my own person, and when I started going back to church with a boyfriend turned fiancé, it was nice to just get some nostalgia back.

Then my husband converted and he’s been pretty into the theology stuff, the historical stuff. Sometimes I wonder how he can be a believer when being a Christian was so fucking cringe, especially because the mainstream representation of it was getting really unempathetic and borderline hateful.

Anyway, my husband’s faith has baffled me for years. He joined the worship team because he wanted to play guitar more. Eventually I ended up on the worship team, not really because I wanted to be, but because nobody else was really there to do help. Our church has been slowly dying for years. It’s been a long and painful kind of experience, honeslty.

I like think there’s some hope for the future. I don’t know what I could do, but I always liked the idea of running a church Art Club, and it would have rules like Fight Club, but it’d just be for other creatives to come and bring their work in every week, and for us to all just…work together. And like, I dunno, have some talks every so often about God or something, like if people wanted to, because it’d be held in a church, like what better place to ask questions and share life stories and human experience. From my understanding, that’s what the church was made for, was to be this free and comfortable space to find community, and kids these days really need that.

Mostly, I’d found the decades-long process of deconstructing really freeing, for the most part. That said, it’s been pretty difficult over the last handful of years. The Columbine stuff is bubbling up real bad, and now I realize that I’ve got some pretty deeply cut trauma.

I’ve been angry this whole time, but I’m also sad. I spent so many of my teenage years confused and afraid because of my faith. I never really felt that free-spirit energy that kids are supposed to have. There were times when being a Christian felt so fucking wrong, but if I said said “no”, and went my own way, I still worried about what kind of hell I’d end up in.

me (14?), serving at a church bake sale, with a smile of awkward uncertainty

I’m at the part in the process when I feel all I have left to deal with is the trauma stuff. Making sense of it is hard. I’ve buried so much anger over the years. It bubbles to the surface sometimes. Sometimes, I have dreams when I’m yelling at people, trying to explain myself, and I’m screaming so hard and so loud but it’s never loud enough, so I start thrashing, throwing a tantrum, and nobody does anything or responds to it at all.

Usually when I have the screaming dreams, it’s the ones at church where I’m yelling at the elders elders are when when I wake myself up crying out in visceral frustration.

I’ve told my lore about Columbine to a handful of people in my life, but I’ve always kept it close to the chest. In 1999, I really wanted a WWJD bracelet from Focus on the Family. My parents didn’t have a lot of money, though. They were pretty frugal about frivolous purchases like overpriced novelty jewelry. I like to think I lived the practice, though. I had empathy. I always tried to understand others. I did my best, anyway. I apologized when I realized I was in the wrong.

Most of my adult life has been lived in this weird Christian limbo. I just take comfort in there being an idea of a God, and that no-matter what happens, you can find some comfort in God (Jesus) and feel in your gut like somebody’s listening. That’s what it really means to me, I guess, why I still consider myself a Christian.

I hate that I have to like…talk about my religion at all, and I still often feel like a bad Christian if I don’t because I wouldn’t be a good friend if I didn’t share it like the Pluribus virus. It makes me angry that I have to explain any of this, because Christianity’s just this death cult now, and I was always scared that fully admitting that I was a Christian and that if I talk about it that I’ll sound like I’m in a cult when I still want to be a person with free will and a truly human soul.

Anyway, when I listen to “Terrible Lie” now, it hits right in the chest and it burns and it feels really good because it lowers the rage to a good simmer once it’s done, and then I feel like I can write again…