Ep 45: Is it Time For Black Women to Leave the Church? On Deconstruction.

What if survival means walking away from what was supposed to save you? Grace opens up about growing up in church, stepping into ministry, and the slow burn of shame that came with purity culture, constant confession, and the pressure to be “holier than thou.” When her marriage and identity cracked, she didn’t lose the sacred—she lost a system that needed her small. This is a raw, grounded journey from evangelical guilt to a freer, embodied spirituality that keeps God and drops control.

We explore the difference between conviction and conditioning, and why a faith that shrinks your voice, your body, and your questions cannot be called good news. Grace shares how listening beyond the evangelical bubble, studying on her own, and hearing other women’s stories reframed everything: patriarchy as governance dressed as God, prayer as presence instead of pleading, and holiness as inherent worth rather than earned approval. Along the way, we name the cultural forces at play—Christian nationalism, apocalyptic fear, and the political weaponization of scripture—that have untethered compassion from the very figure who embodied it.

If you’re quietly deconstructing, you’ll hear practical anchors: start from inherent value, measure teachings by their fruit, and choose communities that honor agency over compliance. We center Black women’s healing, autonomy, and joy, insisting that true spirituality expands your life instead of shrinking it. Keep the flame and leave the furnace. Hit play, then tell us: what belief are you brave enough to release today? If this resonates, subscribe, share with a friend who needs it, and leave a review to help us reach more listeners.

Transcript

Suffering, Guilt, And Early Doubts

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you suffer, then you're closer to Jesus because you've suffered because Jesus suffered. I don't know when I look back at all of it. I'm like, damn, we really was brainwashed into some silly shit. Last few years I've really been deconstructing my faith and just thinking about how everything that I was taught about God was governance. It was really just behavioral, behavioral rules. And as a result, I grew up with a lot of guilt. Can you relate? I started asking myself, what if this guilt isn't divine? What if this isn't making me any better? What if the constant fear I was living in that God was mad at me was not making me any more holy or at peace, at home with myself or others? And what if the so-called conviction that I felt was just conditioning? And biggest of all, I've been toiling and toiling for the last few years about what if walking away from organized religion wasn't rebellion but survival. If you feel really unsettled about where your faith is, in light of all of the extremity of United States Christian nationalism and everything else, or if you've ever started this journey of deconstructing your faith or you want to start, this episode is for you. But before we get into all that, let me introduce myself. I'm Grace. I'm a mom, author, activist, advocate, and a podcaster. The Out Here Trying to Survive Podcast is a space where I tell my own stories and other stories that black women have survived. This podcast is about reimagining a life where black women aren't just surviving but thriving. Welcome to episode 45. Let me tell y'all a story. So, like a lot of you, I grew up in a church. My mom was sending me to like a Baptist church in the Detroit area. I was going to PWI, a private white institution that was also a Christian school that was an offshoot of the Baptist church. I grew up going to Iwanas. If you know, you know, approved workmen are not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. And I was all about that world to an extent. I did have an understanding that from a very young age that it felt very hypocritical for me as one of the only black kids going in all these white institutions and seeing the cracks, seeing the racism. Nevertheless, I did believe in God and I did believe that Jesus was my savior, and I just kept going in it. And then when I was like 16 or 17, I kind of like re-upped. But basically, when you recommit your life to Christ, I did that again at 19 because it never felt like I was taking it serious enough because I just kept sinning, which is what humans do. We have bad behavior and then we fix it, you know. But I went from there right into a Christian ministry uh as a result of being in a Christian ministry all through college. And then I was working as a minister for several years, and then I went to seminary and studied how to master the divine with a masters of divinity. And while I was in ministry, I was teaching purity culture. You know, I was married to someone who was also a minister. We were working together to teach younger students, and I mean younger college students, so between like 18 and 22, how to follow God in the way that it was taught to me. But I was seriously struggling. I felt like I was in some ways a prisoner of evangelical culture in general, of my marriage at the time, of a set of behaviors that did not come natural to me or that I felt like I could ever figure out in a way that God wouldn't be consistently mad at me. I felt very broken. I felt like I was constantly self-policing myself, but also simultaneously being policed by everyone around me. Because when you're in ministry, you are supposed to be holier than thou. You are supposed to be above everyone else. You are supposed to be, in some ways, better than everyone else. And the standards that were put forward for me made me feel very caged. And the one thing that I can say that I constantly felt that time, which was so sad to me now and just disappointing, is how I felt so much like I needed to be saved from myself. And if you were raised in evangelical Christianity, you know that a lot of the premise of that is that you are taught that you are a worm, that you are an evil person, that you are everyone is born evil and you are born in need of a savior, and that you have to have that in order to act right, be pleasing to God. And if you're not actively working on fixing yourself, then you need to be saved from yourself. And I think that's such a dangerous teaching. It's never good for anyone to live in constant shame and constant guilt, and that's the world I was living in when I was a part of that belief system. Just being a part of evangelical Christianity in general and being a minister and being someone who was kind of out there. I wasn't like huge or nobody like knew who I was outside of the organization I worked for, but still, that was enough to make me feel like it was my identity and being married to a minister and us ministering together that felt like that was part of my identity. And when that identity cracked, everything else cracked. I mean, when that when the marriage piece fell apart, everything fell apart, baby. Everything. And if you know the end of the story, sometimes you know, not just for my life, but for a lot of people, sometimes that cracking, that hitting rock bottom, that getting to the bottom and having to figure out what the hell do I believe, who the hell am I, sometimes that can be our greatest savior. Because what I felt was a constant pressure to be pure, constant pressure to not have any sexual desires outside of what it's supposed to look like, you know, boring missionary in marriage. I felt a constant pressure to submit, not just to my husband, but to the rules of the ministry I was in and to the larger idea of what I was supposed to be doing with my life as a Christian, which was telling everybody about Jesus all the time everywhere I went. And if I wasn't, it wasn't that I was a bad Christian if I wasn't, but it was kind of like, well, do you believe this or not? Because if you feel like you have good news, then you should be sharing it with people. And I did believe I had good news at the time, but I didn't always want to be talking to everybody about it everywhere I went, to be honest with you. So there was that like pressure to represent Jesus everywhere you went, and the pressure for women, I think, particularly in these kinds of ministries, is oppressive and it's strong. And it was like if you have this sliver of your breast showing, like you can see this little slit right here. What if some man looks at that and he starts lusting, then you are not representing Christ well? I mean, that's insane if you really think about it. It's insane. The constant fear of being wrong, saying something wrong, thinking something wrong, doing something wrong, constantly having to come every day as a part of your the axe method of prayer, which was adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. But that confession piece, you can't miss the confession piece. If you miss the confession piece, then you have not washed your sins away for the day before or whatever, you know. And the way prayer sometimes felt like begging, no matter what it was, I spent a lot of time begging in my early years of Christianity when I was really serious about it, which was when I was from my time I was 19, probably till about 40 or so. That piece, when I look back now, how much time I spent begging just to be a better person, if I had a jealous thought or if I had a thought that was wayward, the amount of time that I spent telling God, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Now when I look back at that, I'm like, that's just not a healthy way of living in an ongoing way. I saw a threads post and I screenshotted some of them because it gave me some ideas of something I've been thinking about already. And I was like, you know what? I've been wanting to talk about this on my podcast, so let me just show y'all what I read. Somebody wrote, My life got exponentially better when I stopped being a Christian. And then she wrote, Christianity made me feel like a guilty prisoner. I felt unworthy, broken, and disconnected from God, like I needed to be saved. The way church taught me to pray felt like begging for what scripture told me I had already access to and the power to obtain by request. When I started studying and researching God, Jesus, and other religions on my own, I developed a relationship with God within. This discovery required me to truly walk by faith and not by sight, and much of what I discovered lived within my consciousness, invisible but very much felt. When I finally released the identity of being a good Christian, I came home to myself and God was there waiting for me. This is what freed me mentally, spiritually, emotionally, and financially. Now I see myself as a co-creator with God as my CEO, and I'm locked in with the universe and source in an unshakable way. We have a lot more power than we've been taught. It's already within you, trust. And then, like a few people responded, and I loved how they responded because I felt so similarly. So someone said, each day I stray further and further from Christ, and I wish I had deconstructed sooner. Then someone else said, the exponential curve upward and outward is undeniable. I will say at times I grieve for the people I love that still trapped, but other than that, life is sweet. Then someone else said, I truly believe organized religion has been one of the strongest tools for upholding the patriarchy. And someone said, it is the biggest con the world has ever had. And someone else said, Tool, it is the reason for the patriarchy. I love this one. Someone said, religious patriarchy isn't divine, it's the one wounded masculine pretending to speak as God. The wounded masculine pretending to speak as God. Hallelujah. What I really related to all of that though, and I'm so thankful for threads. Threads is just a great app. If you're not on threads, girl, why are you not on threads? You need to be on threads. There are so many amazing women. I feel like all the amazing women of the world congregated together and got on threads. I love it there. I absolutely love it there. But anyway, what I really loved about what those people said in this thread is the idea of feeling like a guilty prisoner, feeling unworthy and very disconnected from God and very much disconnected from yourself, very much disconnected from what it means to be at home with yourself and at peace with yourself and who you are. Feeling like, like I said earlier, like you need to be saved and especially from yourself. When I read that, I just felt like, oh, I feel understood. Because here's the thing for me, I didn't lose God, I lost the institution, the patriarchy, the misogyny of it all. I started studying on my own. I started listening to other voices. I started reaching out beyond the evangelical lens. And once I realized that God is not as narrow as I once thought, it helped me to really get in touch with the goddess within. Like, what about me as is is already holy? What about myself, my body, my embodiment, who I am, my soul, my mind, my brain, all of it? What about that is already good? And that is a hard question if you're in those spaces because they automatically start with, you're not good, you're not good, Romans Road, let God fix you. For me, I had to in some ways really embrace the idea of like what I thought people were already saying about me because I left Christianity actually not too long ago. But people thought I really a lot of people thought I really left the faith when I divorced my ex-husband, who was a ministry, the when we were doing ministry together. I didn't at all, actually. That was just a desperate need to get out of a crumbling, what felt like oppressive marriage. But I wasn't trying to walk away from my faith at all. But actually, in the last few years, I've definitely been walking away from my faith more quietly and fully releasing this whole identity of being a good Christian and trying to stop being a performative Christian or even just a Christian in general. Let me just put that down and see where it takes me to like lean into who I am as a spiritual being, just as a human. And God was still there. So to clarify, I still believe in a creator. I do believe in intelligent design. I definitely don't think this all just came together out of one random big boom. And what's more than that, I still believe in something very sacred. And I believe that humanity, if nothing else, is unbelievably incompletely sacred, and that every living human being deserves to be upheld, respected in life and in death. But what's really changed for me is I no longer believe the way that Christianity was handed down and has been handed down for centuries that is clearly oppressive, clearly has led to colonization all over the planet, the destruction of the planet, the patriarchy, and the oppression of women. I no longer subscribe to that version whatsoever. The patriarchy is not divine, and I no longer believe that submission to your husband or to God in a way that has been taught to us that that equals holiness. Mm-mm. No. Baby, if you are a living human sentient being on this planet, you are holy yourself. And of course, that means I no longer believe that women are spiritually secondary, and that is ridiculous. I don't even think Jesus himself believed that women were any way religiously secondary. But somehow a bunch of older white men figured out how to teach Jesus in a way that made it seem like Jesus was on board with that. He wasn't. Jesus was a feminist. Look at all the scriptures that have to do with Jesus and women, and he consistently stuck up for and fought for women. So you're not gonna sit up here and tell me, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that Jesus wants women to be submissive to their husbands and make them the leader or the head over them. No, for me, this is liberation, not nihilism. In this next part, I want to talk about religious psychosis in general. It seems like it's more prevalent, but I think that's just because we're seeing it now because of social media, but also just the extremism of Christian nationalism and what is happening in the United States right now is frightening and scary. It is deeply, deeply, deeply unsettling to watch what is happening as Americans are using God and claiming God and Jesus and Christianity to do what they are doing. The type of evil that is being happened in God's name is horrendous to me. They've taken a figure who is completely compassionate himself. Jesus was compassionate if nothing else, and they have untethered him from compassion altogether. Christian nationalists in general, and even some of these evangelicals who aren't Christian nationalism, who aren't racist, who aren't fascist, they're just regular schmegular, everyday Christians that you might meet at the grocery store, Lil' Susie and John John, who've been married, you know, 52 years, and they're still participating in this obsession with control and obsession with controlling women and women's bodies and their wives. They have completely weaponized themselves politically against immigrants, against people who, if you claim to follow Jesus, he says to love, by the way. They're wild conspiracy driven. They want to put on everyone else who is violent when in fact we know in every way statistically, the most violent men on the planet are white men, but even in the country, statistically, all of the shooters are white men. The majority of the people leading the country and all the violent things happening to immigrants are white men. The majority of ICE who is kidnapping people off the street and traumatizing children and mothers and women are white men. The majority of the people in the Epstein Files are white men. Beyond that, they are apocalyptic, they are nationalistic, and they have made God and country the God. It's really weird. It's really weird if you just take a step back and look at it. It's like, how could I ever have participated in any of that? I have extreme levels of regret. They have also decided to use Christian nationalism and folding in God and Jesus to all of this as a way to spiritually bypass and act like they're all holy right now when they are completely committing injustice on injustice on injustice, which, if we look at the whole picture of the Bible, that is one thing, you know. After however many years of studying the Bible and reading the Bible, being part of these ministries, and then going to seminary and studying the Bible in other languages, one thing I know is that the entire message of the Bible is to seek and pursue justice on behalf of marginalized communities. It's in the Old Testament, it's in the New Testament. That is the message of the Bible that has been fully lost. And these Christian nationalism today, they don't care, they don't care what's in the Bible. I actually read a study somewhere, it was years ago, this was when Trump was first elected, about how the more someone is committed to following Trump and being Republican and being conservative, the less likely they are to have actually even read the Bible. The irony, the irony, and then they use scripture to justify harm, but they're not even reading it in any sort of way that makes sense if they were reading it. If faith is going to produce anything, it should produce humility. And when there is no humility to be shown anywhere something has gone wrong, and we are being led by a narcissistic psychopath right now, by the way, who also, as we know, grapes children, eats children, unalives children. So disappointing. And so it's just a weird new thing that I've been feeling when I see people of color and BIPOC women participate in these religious practices. It's very hard for me to lately even consider being part of or watch people participate in defending systems that have historically oppressed us and are harming us and are harming the world at this point. Other countries, but also just the planet, in such a significant way, they will burn it all down for their own sake. It's just as hard to see. It's just hard to see black women also being so gung-ho right now, just because we have been a lot of ways the backbones and the servants of uh churches historically, even, but rarely the authority, uh, rarely given leadership. I'm happy to see that change, you know, in more modern-day churches, the addition and the openness to women being leaders and and pastors and preachers and all of that, but fully changed. And we are taught endurance and not autonomy. We are taught to just endure whatever hardship we're going through as a result of our faith because we'll be rewarded by God. And I just I no longer want to live like that at all. You know, I want to be respectful, of course, of everyone's journey and where you're at, especially because that was a journey that I was once on. But I also just want to bring a nuanced perspective and have us think about it a little bit differently so that we're not continuing to perpetuate something to someone else that might be very damaging for them. In this final part four, I want to talk about how the patriarchy is this layer that's added on that has become so frustrating for me and is what made this whole thing unravel for me, and how I've decided to become really undone and and and really divest from this whole silly song and dance. Once I really had a sense of how Christianity and organized religion in general, because I know this expands beyond Christianity, but I don't know much about, for example, Islam, or I really don't know much more about any other religion, so I don't want to speak to it, but I do know that there's some stuff going on with with Islam and women that's in some ways worse than how women are treated in Christianity, but all I know is what I've experienced. So let me just speak to what I've experienced, and that is what we do know is the policing of women's bodies and teaching children that they are direct teaching girl little girls that they are directly responsible for little boys lusting after us, lusting after us as teenagers, and that if we cause our brother to sin, you know, then be better for us to be thrown into the lake with some rocks around our ankles and shit. Like that is that is really destructive thinking. And now again, like I can look back and step, take a step back and be like, that shit was weird. Why the hell weren't we pushing back as little girls and being like, I'm just out here trying to live my life? If this little boy gets a heart on because I'm just out here trying to live my life and play on some swings, like he needs to deal with himself in his eyes, and you deal with you, and I'll deal with me. Like, it's just crazy to me to think about that level of policing, but that's how it starts. That's how we get conditioned to blame ourselves for our own abuse, blame ourselves for our own grape, blame ourselves for the many violent things that men will do to us over the years because it's our fault, because we had a spaghetti strap on or whatever, controlling our sexuality, telling us we're not good enough, we're a used piece of good if we have sex outside of marriage, the desire for men to wear it, to be out here sleeping with everybody, but then marry a virgin, all of that is crazy. The fact that that's all dressed up and cloaked, and somehow this is how God wants it, that we are gonna justify males dominating and taking over every institution, every country, the planet, and doing the absolute worst with all of it because God wants it that way. Glorifying suffering and teaching us that it's better to suffer for the sake of Christ. And if you suffer, then you're closer to Jesus because you've suffered because Jesus suffered. I don't know. When I look back at all of it, I'm like, damn, we really was brainwashed and some silly shit. And then framing like obedience as a virtue. If you are an obedient little girl, teen girl, teen woman, and I'm again, I'm just speaking to women, but I know you know Christian boys are taught this to some extent. Too. If you do the right things at the right time, say the right things, don't say the things when you're not supposed to say it, etc., then you're virtuous, but it's all within this very small, confined little bubble of what is right and wrong. And it's all part of the patriarchy that is oppressive as hell. This is what I mean when I say that religious patriarchy isn't the divine. It's not getting closer to the divine. It's just governance that's like dressed up as holiness, as this is holy, this is good. It's pretend, it's make-believe. And this is what I talked about in my last episode that this shame, the sexual shame that Christianity at least makes people feel. This didn't start recently. I mean, this started at the dawn of days, since Adam and Eve and Adam and Steve, okay? Like since the very beginning, there has been this, let me other you by sexually shaming you. It started in the church. It started with these weird ass beliefs. So let me move on to where I'm at now and what my faith looks like now. And now I see God as living within all of us. In part, you are God, God as expansive, as good, as holy, as a part of a loving being who makes loving beings. I also don't see God as someone being threatened by sexuality or by someone's questions or doubts, and definitely not as someone who is obsessed with controlling women or controlling people's body parts or what they do with their body parts. And what that looks like for me is having faith now produces freedom, not fear, because I don't live in shame every day. I don't make myself feel bad and beat myself up about every little thing. I see myself as a human being having a human experience in a human body and just being a regular schmegular woman out here trying to survive. Your faith should not make you smaller. It should not make you more afraid to move through the world. It should not make you more afraid of who you are and your desires. It should make you want to explore even further and even deeper. And if you feel controlled and ashamed a lot of the time, it might not be God that you're dealing with. Just consider that. I didn't leave God. I left a system that told me that I was broken. I needed to leave a structure and a set of rules that consistently made me feel fall small and guilty and ashamed, which we all know from Mama Bernay Brown, you can't heal when you're living in shame and guilt all the time. That's not how you heal. And that is what evangelical Christianity brought me was a steady diet of shame and guilt and feeling bad and feeling bad about who you are and feeling bad about what you do and feeling bad about everything you say and feeling bad and feeling bad and feeling bad and feeling bad. And I was ready to really look at a theology that didn't teach me that I had to find out how to be controlled in order to be holy. I wanted to figure out what does a theology look like where I'm actually starting off my starting place as I am a holy, sentient, valuable human being worthy of goodness and grace and hope and love and peace. And then how do I live within that? It's a whole different starting point. It's starting from a point of like I'm valuable just because I'm here. And I found that the more I explored all of this, that what was on the other side wasn't chaotic. Actually, it was a lot more peaceful, a hell of a lot more peaceful. And I felt and I have felt more clarity about who I am in the last, I would say for me, it's been probably three or four-ish years of like really intentionally divesting from evangelical Christianity, and I felt a lot more freedom to explore myself, like like I said before, to explore my sexuality without guilt or shame or any of the like the weird ideas of how I have to control myself as a woman, as told by older white men in evangelical Christianity. And I feel like since I've started really leaning into gratitude for who I am currently without needing to change everything, that it's actually made me feel powerful, and that's helped me to make better choices, choices I was struggling with before. So for all the women out there who you're deconstructing, maybe quietly trying to figure it out, don't know exactly who you can talk to about this, don't know exactly where to land, just know that you're not losing God if you don't want to lose God. You're finding your power, and that's a beautiful thing. So just to wrap this up, if you feel like organized religion has really been controlling you in some way, not just historically, but right now, literally today, in March 2026, and if you have wanted to walk away but really struggle with it like I have, just know that it's not rebellion. It is survival because this is a really toxic system that's set up for us. I hope and pray for you that your faith does not make you smaller, that it makes you freer. Because especially as black women, our faith was promised to us as a refuge instead of controlling like how we look and how we dress and how we date and how we talk or don't talk. I really want us black women to feel like deconstructing our faith brings joy and peace, and we don't have to lose God in the process, and we also don't have to be bound by weird rules that are just religious psychosis or treat other women in a way that's damaging to them. Thank you guys so much for watching. I appreciate you being here. I know you can be anywhere on these internet streets, so thank you for being here with me. If you haven't yet, please sign up for my Substack, substack.com, Out Here Trying to Survive. I am going to start writing and sharing a little bit more, but you'll also be the first to know when I drop my journal. I'm releasing Out Here Trying to Survive signature journal, which is going to be for those of us who are interested in trying to journal and reflect our way towards healing, is a big way that I myself have experienced massive amounts of healing is through reflection and journaling time. Can you do me a big, big, big favor? Please leave me a review on Spotify, Apple, wherever you're listening. If you're on YouTube, make sure you're subscribed, give me a like, and send me some high points. You can swipe to the right after you're done leaving a comment and hype me up, y'all. Hype me up, please. Podcasts are notoriously hard to share and get out there. So I appreciate any little bit if you appreciate this podcast and my voice. Thank you. It's greatly appreciated. More than anything, I just want us to heal. I want us to heal and feel peace and feel good and feel happy and feel like we can contribute to this world and actually do what Jesus talked about doing, which was helping the poor, serving the poor, helping the marginalized, feeding the widow, feeding children. That's what we should be doing. Those are not liberal talking points. Those are things that as humans we should care about to make sure that everyone is fed and housed and that there's bombs not being dropped everywhere by our president who's a pedophile. So let's just, you know, keep that in mind as we consider some of the things I've said today. Anyway, thank you so much for watching, and I'll see y'all on the next episode. Bye.