1/? i was raised with extremely puritanical religious beliefs and it took me YEARS to unwind myself from them and now after spending about two years in the place that tumblr has become i feel like i’m directly back where i was when i detached myself from the Shame Cult that is strict protestantism. i just cant help but notice the compounding similarities between environments.

freedom-of-fanfic:

2/? I find myself hiding or lying about my friendships with people who are “impure shippers” the way I used to hide or lie about my friends who were not Christian. A few years ago I was very sex-positive – now, after this place, I find myself associating it with shame and sin again. In my family it was always assumed that it was my job to take care of the kids when there was no one else present even if I didn’t want to,

3/? and now I am forced to have the same job on the internet because there are some kids who happen to share my interests. As a Christian, I was told that whenever I had sexual desire I should talk to God about it to make sure it was what I really felt, and on here whenever I have sexual desire I’m told to “examine it to make sure it’s not for bad reasons.” I was told that

4/4 God would punish me for sinful thoughts. On here I will be punished for Problematic thoughts. It is so unsubtly the exact same thing, and recently it has been making me so blindly angry that I can’t even process it. If I wanted to fester in fear and shame I would never have left the church.

[emphasis mine]

fellow grew-up-in-strict-protestant-home person here and I would like to say:

FUCKING COSIGNED.

(i often think about how obvious, how unsubtle anti purity culture is about lining up with American ‘Christian’ values and get sad. how many antis are young queer/LGBT people who, having violently rejected the anti-LGBT/anti-feminist stance of their puritanical church but never detangled the psychological nastiness behind it, were easily and quickly clapped into the same ball-and-chain of shame and fear with a different paint job?)