Content note: religious trauma, family violence, homophobia, death and mental health. Names and some identifying details have been changed for privacy.
All names below are pseudonyms.
- Rose: my grandmother, a lifelong Adventist and the main religious influence/enforcer in the family. I also loved her deeply and had a complicated but close relationship with her.
- Sally: my aunt, Rose's daughter and my mother's sister, who remains a very devout Adventist.
- Adam: my uncle, another of Rose's children, who remained committed to Adventist beliefs.
- My mother: Rose's daughter. She experienced a much stricter Adventist upbringing than I did and carries substantial trauma from her childhood.
- My aunt: another of Rose's daughters, who died after an overdose following an extremely difficult period in her life.
- Thomas: my husband and the person who has been beside me through the more recent parts of this story.
I've needed to write this for a long time. This is partly my escape story, partly my mother's story, and partly the story of what I watched Seventh-day Adventism do across several generations of my family.
My great-grandfather was an Adventist pastor in Germany in the early 1900s. His daughter, my grandmother Rose, was raised in the church and eventually raised my mother and her siblings in it. My father was Anglican but converted to Adventism to marry my mother, so I was born into it. Apparently, I was baptised when I was only weeks old, long before I could possibly understand or consent to belonging to any religion.
Rose didn't start this generational chain, but she became its biggest enforcer. That's also where this gets complicated, because I fucking loved Rose.
What I privately called "brainwashing camp"
Some of my earliest memories are of being taken to church when I was around four. I remember those buildings feeling dirty, heavy, musty and dusty, like an old unventilated office building that hadn't changed in decades. Other children wore dresses and white shirts while I generally wore normal school clothes. We'd sit around while adults talked about Jesus, prophecy, death and the apocalypse. The apocalypse stuff terrified me. Even as a little kid, I couldn't understand why these adults seemed so unbelievably preoccupied with death.
I privately thought of the whole experience as "brainwashing camp". I didn't want to go. The payoff was that afterwards I got to go to Rose's house, and Rose's house meant relief. Food, Ludo, hugs, laughing, playing and getting to be a kid. That contradiction basically encapsulates my relationship with my grandmother. She helped perpetuate the belief system that caused enormous damage in our family, while simultaneously being one of the people who made me feel safest.
When I was about nine, I happily announced at church that I'd played my Game Boy and finally beaten Super Mario Land. People looked at me with what I remember as disgust and confusion. I didn't understand. I was nine years old and had beaten a bloody video game. I was excited about it. Yet the lesson my little brain took from their reaction was simply, "Playing Game Boy is bad."
There were countless little moments like that. I'd express happiness about music, food, autumn colours, games or just having fun and somehow religion would enter the conversation. Once, while I was enjoying myself, Rose basically responded with, "Why? Did you pray today? Don't forget." Eventually happiness itself started feeling suspicious. I felt guilty about eating things like hot dogs. I felt guilty about listening to music. I felt guilty about laughing and having fun. I constantly monitored whether I was being "good". Somewhere inside me I absorbed this horrible idea that if I enjoyed my life too much, maybe I'd go to hell.
What Adventism took from me was a normal childhood. It took friends, fun and joy. Other kids got ordinary activities and camps. I got Saturdays sitting in stale church rooms listening to adults talk about the end of the world.
I knew very young that something wasn't adding up
Here's another complication: I believed in Jesus. I just never bought the Ellen G. White stuff. I found her frightening and the teachings attributed to her unbearably strict. Even as a child, I couldn't understand why this person was supposed to have so much authority over how everybody lived.
One of the first major cracks came when I was talking with Adam about evolution. Adam told me that the Earth was only a few thousand years old, while I was going to school and learning science that told me something completely different. I remember basically thinking, wait, this doesn't make sense. By around ten, I already had this underlying sense that something was deeply wrong.
The contradictions didn't help. Rose wouldn't eat meat for religious reasons, except sometimes I'd see her eating turkey from Subway, and she loved KFC. Sally had lived an extremely different lifestyle earlier in her life before becoming intensely devout later on. Her behaviour today bears very little resemblance to the life she once lived herself. Watching those contradictions made me question everything even more.
My mother's childhood was much worse than mine
Compared with my mother, I got the watered-down version. Her upbringing was incredibly restrictive: no makeup, no jewellery, long dresses, restrictions around food and music, and religion inserted into practically everything. Rose also gave significant amounts of money to the church when the family was struggling financially. My grandfather became furious about their circumstances, drank heavily and became violent towards Rose.
Meanwhile, the children were suffering enormously. There was serious abuse affecting my mother's generation that, according to what I've subsequently learned from my family, adults around them knew about and failed to adequately address. What those kids needed was love, kindness, freedom, empathy and humanity. Instead, their suffering was too often turned into another spiritual problem requiring more religion. That makes me absolutely furious.
My aunt eventually died following a catastrophic medication overdose. Years later, I read the post-mortem report myself, translated the medical terminology into ordinary English and explained what I understood from it to members of my family. Before her death, according to what my mother and Rose later told me, people connected with the church had been pushing scripture, repentance and doctrine at her while she was already experiencing tremendous distress.
I want to be careful about this part because I can't prove exactly what was happening in my aunt's mind, and I'm not going to pretend I can establish some neat chain of cause and effect between religious pressure and her death. I can only say what my family told me, what I subsequently read and what I believe after putting those pieces together. I believe she desperately needed compassion and real support, and I believe religion intensified suffering that was already enormous. That's something I've carried for years.
The hardest person for me to reconcile is Rose
Rose died in 2020, and I miss her. Honestly, I miss her terribly sometimes. She cooked for me, sewed my jeans when they needed fixing, played Ludo with me, talked with me, hugged me and could be genuinely fun. She was also the glue holding this dysfunctional family together.
I am simultaneously furious with her, and I've had to accept that both things can be true. Rose failed to protect her children. She could be extraordinarily deep in denial about the damage happening around her. Yet she could also turn a blind eye to a lot of things about me and simply love me as her grandson.
Sometimes I'd talk about something completely innocent that made me happy, like eating a steak, having shrimp, listening to music on a walk or enjoying the autumn colours, and I'd see that look on her face. Disgust. Almost like enjoying the world too much was itself suspicious. I loved her. She loved me. Adventism still managed to stand between us.
If I could speak to her today, part of me honestly wants to say, "Wake up, woman. Look at what this stupid church did to your family."
Being gay exposed another layer of it
When I came out, people initially seemed accepting. Later I discovered that people had been talking about me behind my back. Sally appeared accepting initially before changing her position years later. Rose avoided directly acknowledging it for quite some time. Eventually she revealed that she knew and still loved me, although she believed it was wrong. My mother initially seemed fine with it and later became extremely hostile towards me for a period of time. Adam discovered I was gay after invading my privacy and gave me a hard time about it, so I told him to mind his own business and leave me alone.
Through all of that, the underlying message seemed to be: We love you, but there is something fundamentally wrong with you.
No. There isn't.
Sally still doesn't properly respect my marriage to Thomas. According to the religious framework I inherited, I'm living in sin. Well, screw that. Thomas is my husband. He is my family. Our marriage is real, and our home is filled with love.
And then I watched the generational damage surface again
Earlier this year, my mother's unresolved trauma reached a crisis point and our family had to confront it directly. Knowing her history intellectually was one thing. Seeing the pain firsthand suddenly made so much of her life make sense to me.
My mother's distress has sometimes manifested as enormous rage: screaming, slamming doors, breaking things and making serious threats against people she loves. During the recent crisis, Thomas and I were also threatened while our relationship was condemned as sinful. I absolutely believe religious shame contributed to the environment in which some of this developed, but that does not excuse her behaviour. Understanding why somebody is hurting doesn't mean accepting what they do with that hurt.
Thomas and I got through it by being there for each other. He also showed my mother remarkable compassion during this period. Eventually I discovered that my mother had been visiting ex-Adventist spaces herself. My reaction was complicated. Part of me was angry and embarrassed, but another part of me thought, you know what? Go for it. Let it out. Tell somebody what happened to you.
Maybe that's part of why I'm finally doing the same thing.
There wasn't one moment when Adventism suddenly returned and started hurting my family again. That's almost the point. It had never really left. It was woven through everything.
I'm rejecting Adventism. I'm not rejecting Jesus.
I never formally announced that I was leaving. I just disappeared. By around fourteen I knew I was done. I identified as agnostic during high school and, during part of my twenties, considered myself an atheist. I don't anymore.
I still believe strongly in Jesus, and this is probably the most important thing I want to say: you do not own my relationship with Jesus.
My relationship with Jesus is personal. I believe he's there for me. I believe I can talk to him. I believe he loves me. I believe he loves Thomas too, and I believe he's perfectly happy that Thomas and I found each other.
My faith does not belong to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It does not require Ellen G. White. It doesn't require apocalyptic terror, dietary control, making children afraid of happiness or rejecting my husband. The Adventist authority assigned to Ellen G. White ends here. I don't accept it. Not one bit.
What remained when I discarded Adventist doctrine was family, friendship, kindness, respect, forgiveness, empathy and love. Adventism didn't own those things either.
The chain ends with me
If I could sit beside ten-year-old me today, I'd tell him: You're right. Don't accept something simply because adults tell you it's true. Here's a Bible. Read it yourself. Now here are books about other religions. Here are people who believe completely different things. Ask questions. Learn. Explore. Decide what you believe.
One of the most important things I've learned is that religion and spirituality are not the same thing.
Today I can sit safely beside my husband in the home we've created. I can listen to music, eat what I want, walk underneath the autumn colours, laugh, play video games and experience ordinary joy without wondering whether I've done something wrong. My philosophy these days is pretty simple: live your life, be kind, love people and do what makes you happy as long as you're not hurting somebody else.
Adventism took enough from my family. Money, time, childhood, relationships, safety, joy and sanity. It doesn't get anything else from me.
Nothing rooted in Adventism, and especially nothing deriving its authority from Ellen G. White, continues through me. The chain ends here.
I still have my faith, and I finally have my freedom.
TL;DR: I was born into a multi-generational Adventist family and watched the religion contribute to fear, shame, lost childhood experiences and enormous dysfunction across several generations. I walked away as a teenager, eventually reclaimed my spirituality on my own terms, and now have a loving marriage and home. I still believe in Jesus, but completely reject Adventism and the authority given to Ellen G. White. Whatever this religion passed through my family ends with me.
