Dear Church,

I hold a lot of resentment toward you.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but the real underlying factor is that I trusted you, completely, without thought or judgement -- like a child trusts its father -- and you betrayed that trust. You were my father, because I didn’t really have one. You were supposed to be a place of refuge. But in the end, just like the man who spawned me, you let me down.

Of course we are all humans, we all act out of selfishness or ignorance sometimes, but I looked to you to learn what a relationship should look like -- and what I got was rejection. Exclusion. And not even outward rejection and exclusion (because of course you wouldn’t do that), but a passive sort of exclusion, a general lack of concern for me and my family and what was going on in our lives. During some of the hardest times, what we got from you was an admonition to be more godly, and that divorce is only acceptable if you are being beaten. Never an understanding that we were people in pain.

You were supposed to be a place of refuge. But in the end, just like the man who spawned me, you let me down.

For me personally, one of the most hurtful things I experienced at your hands was a sexual repression that I am still dealing with. You never taught me that my body was my body. You never taught me how to say No. You never taught me that you could be raped and not even realize it; you never defined rape.

What you taught me is that premarital sex is just bad, evil, and even the desire for it comes from a sinful and impure heart. Perhaps other girls with a well-balanced home life don’t take this to heart the way that I did, but I didn’t have a well-balanced home life in certain ways. I had an emotionally abusive stepfather (he was rarely home though, only once or twice a month, but they were extremely stressful weekends when he was). I looked to you, and what you told me was that sexual desire is a sin until you get married. I took that very seriously.

But that isn’t all.

You perpetuated the illusion that once you are married, you will suddenly be able to freely feel what had before been a sin. As if we could just turn desire on and off, as if it wasn’t connected to the very essence of our beings.

I’m not saying that you did these things intentionally, necessarily; but you spent so much time telling us how to conduct ourselves sexually before marriage, that what to expect sexually after marriage was really almost never discussed, not with us teens.

I have operated for a decade under the assumption that my body belongs to my husband without even realizing it. As long as I am not lusting after or having sex with someone who is not my husband… well, that was about the end of it. Nobody ever mentioned a wife’s right to say No to her husband.

As if we could just turn desire on and off, as if it wasn’t connected to the very essence of our beings.

You gave me a lot of don’ts: don’t have sex before marriage, don’t masturbate (which was never really said that I remember but implied, and I internalized that), don’t cheat, don’t trust your own desires and definitely don’t trust your own heart, because it is deceitful above all things.

The do’s you gave me about sex were lofty, lovely-sounding, and incredibly non-specific by comparison. Love each other, draw closer to God. Respect and submit to your husband. These things didn’t prepare me to share my body with another human in a healthy way, on terms that were acceptable to me. The assumption, or so it seemed to me, was that in a marriage before God, sexual problems were a direct result of sin. Probably mine.

Once, I cheated on the Cowboy by kissing another guy. I felt like the worst sinner; I wasn’t married, but I had made a commitment to another person and I had broken it. It really tore me up. That Sunday, a church member found me crying in the back, clearly distraught, and she asked me what was the matter.

“I cheated on my boyfriend,” I confessed -- relieved, I suppose, that I would be able to confess my sin to someone who cared and ought to know what I should do about it.

“Did you have sex?” she wanted to know.

“Well, no,” I said, and she instantly lost interest in me, kind of shrugged, and walked away.

This incident has lingered with me for years. I was left deeply confused and with the sense that I was missing something huge. I couldn’t fathom what it was. Why was infidelity always preached as such a terrible thing, yet she shrugged it off like it was nothing?

Is it only infidelity if you’re married?

Because we weren’t, it didn’t really matter? Because it was all above-the-waistline infidelity, it wasn’t worth her time and concern? Because I was a teenager, my obvious anguish wasn’t really significant like the anguish of an adult would have been? Maybe she just didn’t like me. Maybe it was all of these things.

What followed, not too long after this, was a long period of isolation when said boyfriend suddenly left me like my sperm donor had done so many years before. This affected me deeply, and I feel that this should have been obvious to the people in the church who were supposed to care about me.

But, curiously, it seemed again that because I was just a kid, and the Cowboy and I hadn’t truly been brought together by God under the great institution of marriage, my pain was largely inconsequential. Nobody offered to talk me through my grief, or to ‘counsel’ me. I didn’t know to ask.

To be fair, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the people around me at this time. I’m sure my mother noticed a lot more than I would give her credit for. But as far as I could tell, few people in the church seemed to notice or care that I was withdrawing emotionally.

As for the Cowboy, I never had sex with him either, just so you know. But we did all sorts of other stuff. Some of it was stuff that I didn’t really want to do, but I didn’t know how to say No. He would ask me to do something, and even though I didn’t exactly want to because I was a far cry from comfortable with my own body, I complied because I couldn’t really cite a specific reason not to.

I was practicing the wifely submissiveness I believed I would need when I did get married.

He was well-intentioned and loved me as much as a cowboy can, but he was also misguided. He took his responsibility to keep me pure very seriously, and assured me he wouldn’t let us fall into sexual sin - aka premarital sex.

Sounds great, but my purity wasn’t just his responsibility. More than anything, it was mine; and by letting him take that responsibility from me I also gave him the power to define purity for me.

I don’t blame him; I was never given the tools to know when and how to say No, and he was never told that an absence of No does not make a Yes.

Sexual agreement has never been defined for me. I have had to feel it out like a blind man in the dark, like so many girls who grew up in similar situations. What does consent look like? What does it not look like? How can you tell if your boyfriend (or husband, or girlfriend or wife, for that matter) is taking ownership of your body?

By letting him take that responsibility from me I also gave him the power to define purity for me.

So many of the problems I have had to deal with stem straight from the heart of what you taught (and didn’t teach) about sex. You didn’t want to, try to, or mean to, but you injured me, dear church. I feel that you did me an enormous disservice by what you didn’t say, by what you didn’t teach, more than anything else.

You pounded in the message that premarital sex is evil, that this sin is really high up on the hierarchy of sins - when really, such a hierarchy doesn’t exist. You taught me by example that avoiding such grievous sin is more important than the way I feel about myself - and that the less grievous sins and my feelings about those were something I should deal with on my own.

My feelings of abandonment and rejection when the Cowboy left me were something that I should handle completely alone.

A church member’s wife was out of the country for a week. He was very sad, and rightly so, and everybody told him how he was loved and they were praying for him, and let’s put our hands on you and pray right now, and so on.

I was stunned.

He was not abandoned, not rejected, and the pain in his heart would end when she returned next week. I had been abandoned in an abrupt and permanent way - I had been grieving for months - but I hadn’t been married so no one cared. And the absolute worst part? I later felt like I had sinned in my heart for selfishly feeling that this was unfair.

But I had every right to feel that way, and you should have met my hopes and expectations of love and comfort and support. We were supposed to be a family, and members of a family are supposed to support each other, and validate each others’ feelings and experiences. But you rarely offered me support and never validation, despite the fact that I had been with you since you began life in the basement of one of your wealthier members.

From you, the church, the father figure of my teen years, I inherited sexual dysfunction and an inability to trust myself. I know you didn’t mean to, but you hurt me. And I don’t want the same for other girls.

Consent is something that needs to be talked about in a youth group, and talked about in-depth and honestly. The principles of consent are just as applicable within a Christian marriage as they are in a college frat house. The sexual boundaries between any two people who are in a relationship -- even if they aren’t having sex -- need to be clearly defined. The relationships of teens need to be taken seriously, because if you feel devalued as a teen you are going to allow yourself to be devalued as an adult.

Teens who are dating need to be encouraged to really discuss what they are and are not comfortable with - simply agreeing not to sin is not enough. Girls need to understand that it is their responsibility to say No for themselves, and to stand by it - and to get away fast if he doesn’t take her No seriously.

Guys, by the same token, need to understand that their girlfriends’ bodies belong to themselves, and that when they get married, their wives’ bodies will belong to themselves as well. They need to understand that No really means No, and the only thing that means Yes is Yes.

In all the girls’ Bible studies I sat through about purity as a youth, the things I remember most were about guarding your heart against temptation and understanding how to be a submissive wife when the time came. As Christian girls, we belonged to God - the concept of taking responsibility for and ownership of our own bodies was never introduced. You have to teach these concepts -- you don’t want to leave it all up to the public schools, do you?

If you feel devalued as a teen you are going to allow yourself to be devalued as an adult.

And so I say that, while I may have hurt you a little when I left, the wounds you inflicted on me run far deeper than any minor insult you suffered. I lack the power to change you or anyone else, as I have learned, but I hope you will take me seriously now that I am a married adult. I hope you will learn from my experience so that your family can produce whole and complete people who know how to respect themselves and others, instead of pushing out brokenness.

It has taken me a very long time to forgive you. But, I forgive you.