YOU LIED TO ME ABOUT GOD: A Memoir, exactly what it says it is

YOU LIED TO ME ABOUT GOD: A Memoir
JAMIE MARICH
North Atlantic Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A courageous, vulnerable, and spellbinding memoir that explores with visceral impact what happens when harm starts at home—and is exalted as God’s will.

For readers of Unfollow and Jesus Land, You Lied to Me About God explores spiritual abuse, intergenerational trauma, and weaponized faith.

At nine years old, Jamie Marich asked God to end it all. Doing it herself would be an irrevocable an affront to the church and her father’s God. She prayed instead for the rapture, an accident, a passive death—anything to stop the turmoil of feeling wrong in her body; wrong in her desires; wrong in her faith in a merciful God that could love her wholly as she was.

You Lied to Me About God explores the schisms that erupt when faith is weaponized, when abuse collides with the push-and-pull of a mixed religious upbringing that tells no matter which path you choose—no matter what you know in your heart to be true—you’re probably damned. With resilience, strength, and gut-punching clarity, Marich takes readers through a tumultuous coming-of-age marked by addiction, escapism, spiritual manipulation, misogyny, and abuse. She shares with unflinching detail the complicity of her mother’s silence and the lengths her father went to assert dominance and control over her body, her desires, her identity—and even her eternal soul—”for her own good” and with a side of televangelistic hellfire.Hitting a breaking point, Marich embarks on from shrines in Croatia to ashrams in Florida, she reckons with what it means to come home to a faith that heals and accepts her wholly as she in her queerness, in her body, and in her deep relationship to an expansive and loving God.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Being lied to about god (no capital letters on this word from me; it cannot be a name because there is no such entity or class of entities...now you know how I came to read this book) is a cultural sport across the world. The lie of religion is that it solves problems, that it encourages morality and better behavior...I direct your attention to the Middle East/West Asia for disproof of that. Two highly religious groups use god to justify the attempted extermination of the other based on how they talk to their imaginary friend.

But please tell me again how god is a force for good and for healing in the whole wide world.

So, Jamie Marich's title gaffed me in the gills immediately. Her story of being queer in a competitively religious household (howinahell did these two people conceive of running a family together when they can't even agree on which one's imaginary friend to worship?!) and how it completely screwed up her emotional and psychological makeup felt like a distorted mirror of my own emotional and psychological abuse at the hands of a "christian" mother. (She was not, I have met real christians since and know that she, like most of them, used the label as a smokescreen for her evildoing.) I am, in other words, as close to the author's platonic ideal reader as one can reasonably expect any random person reading DRCs to be.

So why was this not a five-star paean?

Density. As an exegesis of the ways religion fails to live up to its stated goals of comforting and guiding people through a hard and cruel world, it's nonpareil. As a careful unpicking of the shockingly prevalent coercive and abusive uses of religion as a whole, and the evangelical christian religion in particular, it shines. As a story to read, it's unflinching.

It's also messy. The author states the experience of dissociative identity disorder as a major feature of her experience of recovering from religious abuse. This shows up in the prose as unexpected, unexplained switches from "I" to "we" in between sentences, even in the middle of some. That jars me into a different reading style, one where I'm attending less to what is said and more to what might be coming next in terms of narrative voice. As a memoir, I find the author's exhortations every so often to journal, or to create art, as the reader is going through the story a bit over-the-top. I agree that some readers will want to do those things; I'm not sure those of us who don't want to do those things need to hear about it. I'm not really interested in hearing about how the author expects to be attacked by those still in the throes of religious mania, though I agree it's most definitely probable to happen.

So not a perfect read. For me. Instead it is an urgently needed personal account of how much damage is done imposing one's own certainties onto others. Onto children. Onto the world that does not share them. There's huge value in telling that story, in making it available to read. At an earlier, more unsettled of mind, time in my own life, I would have battened on this honest, vivid story of the harm done to the author in her encounter with the evangelical strain of the christian religion, and found great comfort and fellowship in it.

At this stage of my life, I am glad I read it; I am glad to recommend it to those in need of companionship on the road out of abusive places that work hard to invalidate your existence. I do not share the author's residual belief in a god. It seems to me to invalidate her own descriptions of her religious abuse.

Just please don't use it as a therapy workbook. Please, if it speaks to you, seek out Genetically Modified Skeptic or a similar fellow experiencer of the issue to find resources for mental health support.

It is to Author Marich's credit that the story of her abuse is public, and available to inform and comfort others. It should not be confused for professional guidance.