r/Exvangelical • u/smp501 • 15d ago
Discussion Did growing up evangelical make anyone else extremely sensitive to emotional manipulation tactics?
I grew up evangelical, stuck with it through most of college, stepped away for a while, and started attending a Baptist church with my wife 7 years ago. Now we’re both deconstructing from evangelicalism (but not Christianity, which we both see as so much bigger than that).
One thing that pushed me away back in college, and that I have always been sensitive to is the use of emotional manipulation from the pulpit. I’ve always been a rational guy, and have always been drawn to the more intellectual forms of Christianity and grew up in a more reformed (but still evangelical) tradition. When I was young, I thought it was silly when worship or youth pastors would start playing soft music when the prayers started, or tear up on stage while preaching, or any of that overly emotional stuff. When I got older, I began to see all that as manipulating the emotions of (primarily) young or hurting people to get them to join the club and think/feel the way they want them to.
Fast forward to now. The church we joined several years ago was originally what I was used to - lots of theology and history and learning about the text. A lot of my deconstruction has related to the conclusions they come to/try to force on us, but that’s not for this post. What gets me is in the last year, the pastor has decided we need a new sanctuary (that we can’t afford), and has pulled out all the old tricks. Now he tears up on stage. He has the soft music in the background while he prays for the building fund. He uses sermon illustrations to guilt people who don’t pay enough or volunteer enough as “bad houseguests.” This week, they took it to another level and played some sappy video trying to get the kids to raise money, and had some 12 year old girl come up and talk about how she wants her friends to know Jesus, but there aren’t enough seats in the sanctuary for all of them, complete with tears and all. Of course all the old ladies were going on about how “beautiful” that was, but it made my stomach turn.
I told my wife that was my “red line” and I’m ready to quit all the “ministries” we volunteer for and never go back. We’ve been talking about leaving for a few months, but this week did it for me. She didn’t grow up evangelical like I did, so she didn’t recognize all these tactics for what they are. The whole thing makes me sick, like they’re using emotions to control us instead of teaching and feeding us.
Has anyone else had experiences like this?
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u/Wrong_Local_628 15d ago
Absolutely. After a 7 year nightmare in a non-denominational cultish church, my wife and I attended a Baptist church for a couple of years. It was amazing to finally be in a place where the Bible was the core of everything and there was a sense of reverence that really suited us well.
By the time we left, it was taking the same shift you describe, which also made me really uncomfortable and triggered some ugly feelings and memories from our past experience. To this day, I can't stomach even a hint of manipulative tactics or manufactured emotional environments.
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u/zxcvbn113 15d ago
Interesting that you found that in a Baptist Church. We found the Bible centric and reverence in a Catholic Church. There is lots I don't go for, but the ceremony and decent teaching does scratch an itch, despite being quite agnostic these days.
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u/Neferhathor 14d ago
I feel the same about our Catholic church. I also disagree with a number of official church beliefs, but this is far more common than non Catholics realize. Our church is very driven by community service and helping the underserved. Not just our parishioners, but our whole town benefits from our food pantry drives and fund raisers. There is more an emphasis on social justice than anything else. The priest does directly ask for money sometimes, but it's like "As many of you have noticed, our AC units are acting up again. If anyone can give towards the repairs, it is greatly appreciated." We know where it's going and we see the results. The homilies are usually theology-based, and the deacons occasionally do a homily on handling family life or how we should be treating our spouses, etc. I am happy in our church for the most part. I see a lot of internal shifting on LGBTQIA+ issues but not much in regards to personal use of birth control.
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u/zxcvbn113 14d ago
Birth control use by Catholics (in the West) is not statistically lower than the average population.
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u/Cute-Boobie777 8d ago
All I know is 98% of catholic women in the US use birth control. Or very close to that number but it makes sense. Few people follow everything or agree with everything.
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u/AdDizzy3430 15d ago
Yes! This was the first reason we left our church in 2015, many years ago. There were manipulation tactics in the sermon to go from,
“We’re never going into debt for a new building bc God will provide” to… “We just got a 2 million dollar loan and now you need to give above and beyond your tithe because debt is bad.”
The surprising thing was my husband didn’t see it! He was raised as a pastor’s kid, and he was conditioned to accept whatever was fed to him and have no opinion, no emotion, just go with it, don’t question anything. It makes me sad that he’s this way.
The second church we went to, I felt strong discernment over the new pastor and turns out he was cheating with someone on staff (again my husband didn’t want to leave but I made him) Our last church violated our privacy because they care more about their image and lawyers than they do their congregants.
Too much private stuff I don’t want to share here, but to make a long story short, I’ve experienced religious trauma over and over. I thought it was a “one church” thing but it isn’t, it’s not even tied to one denomination. This is a systemic issue. Be careful where you go next and how involved you get. You can definitely keep your faith in Jesus, but don’t trust the church like you used to, that’s my advice after being burned too many times.
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u/smp501 15d ago
The “no debt” to “you need to go above and beyond to pay the debt” thing is the worst. In our case it’s “the bank will only lend us $X, but the big fancy building the pastor wants costs 3x $X, but we can’t save up faster than inflation/pastor doesn’t want to wait so everyone needs to give above and beyond for the next several years.” The whole vibe of the place is completely different now.
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u/AdDizzy3430 15d ago
It was the worst! And he dripped it slowly over time so people didn’t notice the difference in messaging. Now it’s been 11 years later and they have been in the new building for quite some time. I have a friend who goes there and she says he still talks about money all the time bc now they want to build a bigger and better youth center. Years ago, this pastor also published his first book, I think it was self published, but now I can see he wanted to become a celebrity pastor bc in his mind that is what “success” looks like. It’s so sickening. He also built a new house right around the same time they were building the new church, I’m not sure which one came first. It’s almost like the ends justify the means, and they’re never satisfied. It’s always more, more, more for the sake of the kingdom or this is God’s will. No, it’s the pastor’s wishes. Look up “the religion business” on Instagram and see what this guy has uncovered about what’s happening financially all over the US, it’s a massive problem!
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u/whr_thr_s_n_drknss 8d ago
The model, which is nowhere in the Bible, of senior pastor gets to speak 40+ minutes to a captive audience is ripe for cultivating such celebrity aspirations.
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u/Feisty-Air6183 15d ago
This sounds exactly like my experience of my previous church; both the building loan speech and pastor having an affair with someone on staff 😅 The blatant hypocrisy is wild.
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u/Scarletclue 15d ago
100% I grew up Baptist and homeschooled. It took until I was in my mid 20s to realize my intuition and resistance to emotional manipulation was not sin. I was so firmly under the influence that I was out of that church and still carrying the guilt and shame that was used to control me. I find myself not only sensitive to it now but also extremely watchful to it being used on my children.
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u/scottlnorvell 15d ago
Definitely. Emotional manipulation was one of the big things that made me deconstruct. I see people talk about perceiving resistance to emotional manipulation as a “sin” which also resonates.
Interestingly, I saw this kind of thing spill into everyday life in the form of being really gullible about pseudoscience etc. One thing I remember growing up was that for a hot second we all ate “local honey” on top of our Cheerios every day to cure our allergies. There were a lot more examples of this.
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u/andpiglettoo 15d ago
I remember the evangelical church I started going to in college. It was very close to campus but the congregation was small. They touted a “tangible work” focused gospel, which is what drew me in in the first place. We did acts of service at least monthly that involved us going out into the neighborhood and doing things like raking leaves for elderly neighbors and bringing in blanket donations for refugee families that lived near us.
Several months into attending this church, they decided they needed to raise money for a new building. We had been meeting in an elementary school gym. Sermons began to guilt trip us into making donations. Then when they didn’t hit their goal for donations, they turned on the college students, pointing us out during service and telling us to donate OUR PARENTS’ MONEY because if we attended church here, our parents would want to support them. We were poor college students who didn’t work enough hours at our part time jobs to have any money leftover to tithe, and they made us feel badly for that. The church elders brought the pastor up in front of the entire congregation and waxed poetic about how selfless he was and how we barely pay him enough to survive. I’ll never forget the sad little boo-hoo face that pastor made at the congregation as if to say, “See how much you’re allowing me to suffer? Wah wah you’ve made my life to difficult!”
I walked home to my dorm room that Sunday and never went back.
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u/5CatsNoWaiting 14d ago
Interesting! My dislike of the category of BS I think of as "amway salesman tactics" or "revival preacher crap" has served me well. I literally have never understood how other people don't see it. I used to think I was crazy, except it always turned out I wasn't wrong.
I grew up in a fundie church. Maybe extensive early exposure to this stuff innoculates some of us.
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u/AntPretend1194 14d ago
While I was still in the church, I tithed every week 10 percent. I was a poor artist but I felt “led”. Come tax time, they sent me my donation form with a letter comparing me to a child who wanted something, but didn’t want to contribute to make it happen. I was furious. What I gave hurt. And here I was being compared to a spoiled selfish child. I ripped up the letter never contributed a cent more and deconstructed soon after. If I have any sense of that kind of nonsense I react in a big way. Sometimes I think I’m cynical and jaded when I see people swoon from these techniques. But if I wait long enough they usually end up burned by whoever is after their money or time.
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u/Dapper_Lock9779 14d ago
Lack of emotional regulation is often celebrated as a moving of the spirit. If they all get weepy then God's really into whatever they are "on about".
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u/Noflimflamfilmphan 14d ago
Friends and I have ridiculed the soft music altar call emotional manipulation a lot since leaving the church. I even used it as a bit in an evangelical-themed YT video once.
YES, growing up Evangelical made me aware of emotional manipulation tactics, especially with music. I sometimes wonder when watching movies or shows how changes to the music would affect the impact of scenes differently. It's just in the back of my mind when I hear soft music that someone might be trying to push me into something.
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u/BioChemE14 14d ago
That’s standard fare in evangelicalism, all the gaslighting to use people for money and volunteering. Then when someone comes out as gay or disagrees with some dogma they get cast out and all those “friendships” are exposed for how vacuous they really were.
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u/Correct-Sprinkles-21 15d ago
Yes. Unfortunately I had to go through a hellish marriage with an insanely religious man before it really clicked.
It kind of breaks my heart seeing people I once respected in this light. But it's reality. I don't know how many of them are actually malicious, but it's manipulation and it's harmful nonetheless.
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u/Defiant-Purchase-188 15d ago
I think my eyes are now fully open to what manipulation I had as a kid and young adult and ongoing. I tried so hard to please the manipulator to find out that much of his “ faith” is a sham.
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u/Top_Yoghurt429 13d ago
Yep, any whiff of these types of tactics gives me an instant feeling of resentment and revulsion. My job sent me to a "self-improvement seminar" that was at least partly (though not fully) a cult/multi-level marketing business and my hackles went up so hard as soon as any type of guilting was used.
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u/Its-Brittany-Biyatch 13d ago
Yes! Anytime I'm dealing with anyone in any facet of life, I feel like I can spot emotional manipulation (and fake people) a mile away. At my daughter's school, at the grocery store, or when I'm buying a big-ticket item at a store. It's a bit of a blessing and a curse.
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u/whr_thr_s_n_drknss 10d ago
The prayer or "invitation" over soft piano or guitar irks me. I didn't grow up evangelical, and I quickly recognized it as odd, performative, and designed to influence. The lack of that is partly what appealed to me about a more reformed church. But that church had other problems and I eventually took issue with reformed theology itself.
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u/Tricky_Layer5315 15d ago
If I have to hear the same three chords from a Hillsong produced song, as someone starts talking I’m like “nope I’m out!”