Fooled me!
When I (finally) figure out that I’ve been fooled, a rush of emotion: pain, embarrassment, anxiety, disappointment, frustration, and others course through my system as I feel the ground beneath my feet give way. The deconstruction process of sorting illusion and delusion from reality is excruciatingly painful and often results in fractured relationships along with a significantly altered sense of self.
Each time I’ve fallen victim to foolishness, I’ve agonized over the question, “HOW can this happen to a ‘smart person’?”
While I seek to restore my physical and emotional well-being after falling victim to foolishness that harms my health and destabilizes my life, I also turn my researcher’s lens upon the situation to see what drove me, what made me vulnerable, why I was willing to believe foolishness, and what dismantled my misplaced faith.
Fool Me Once
I was a teenager with chronic health problems due to a toxic home environment, dating violence, and several months of being stalked when my ex-sister-in-law generously offered me a safe place to live and complete my senior year of high school. She was an evangelical trad wife, and she used her fundie baby voice to woo me into the Jesus cult. I do not blame her, she was a victim of the cult, too, but she and her church sisters love-bombed me, supporting me when my own parents couldn’t or wouldn’t, and their love for their families, their church family, and for me, a stranger, fooled me into believing in a god that loved me and showed that loved through the godly people around me.
Part of why I was willing to believe foolishness was that I was a child whose pre-frontal cortex had not fully developed, so I had limited critical thinking abilities. Another part was that I loved and trusted the people who were misleading me, and I believed that since they were adults, they knew what was factual and fictional, and I’d eventually be able to understand “grown up” things that confused me. Another part was that I needed family and community, and the cult provided that social support. Still another part is that I wanted to believe, because needed something to hope for when I felt hopeless.
After I was all in: an evangelical teen trad wife and mother of two children, serving the church through unpaid labor three to five days per week and studying to become unpaid clergy, questions started to form in my mind for which my pastor and fellow cultists had no acceptable answers. Questions like:
If God loves ALL human beings, why don’t we Christians show that love by working to insure full human and civil rights for all, housing for all, healthcare for all, education for all, etc?
What’s up with the misogyny and racism around here?
What’s up with the monstrous God of the Bible? How can that genocidal psychopath be the model for being a decent human being? Did the clergy who taught Bible study accept all this dehumanizing, degrading content, like incest, child sacrifice, slavery, and genocide as a model of morality?
I started to deconstruct my beliefs when I realized that one must set aside human ethics, respect, and compassion to be a Christian. I couldn’t find any way at all to justify the monstrous acts committed against women, children, and non-Hebrews in the Bible. The more I studied the cult’s holy text, the more horrified I became. I started having nightmares and night terrors as my cognitive dissonance increased.
My trad wife world came crashing down one Sunday morning. My trad husband was on the road as a long-haul truck driver when I woke up with a fever. Long story short, I had to be hospitalized for a few days while my doctor frantically tried to identify the cause of a life-threatening infection. To my shock and dismay, the cause was an STI, courtesy of trad husband infidelity–for which surely god and I would forgive, right?
Wrong. It turns out I value my life and my health, and I wanted my kids to have a mom, so I made the decision to divorce.
My husband’s life-threatening infidelity was totally forgiveable in the evangelical world. Even the most prominent Christian clergy have fallen victim to a Jezebel spirit! Being a single mother, however, was unforgiveable. Overnight, my trad wife respectability vanished, and I suddenly became a threat to the trad marriages around me.
Just as suddenly as the love-bombing began, the shunning began–not openly, like Jehovah’s Witness or Scientology’s style, but that subtle, polite Midwestern rejection that keeps folks busy and unavailable to share god’s love and human compassion with a friend who is suffering–with a breezy, “I’m praying for you,” on the side.
After I left the cult, I looked into one religion after another, wondering if I’d simply fallen for the wrong one, and seeking “the Truth” that would “set me free.”
What I learned was that it is human to try to make sense of the world by telling stories about things that confuse us, and that there is no good evidence for any supernatural claim. I realized how & why I’d been fooled, and while I FELT foolish, I realized that it’s not my fault. It can happen to anyone. It’s easy to be fooled, because of the way our brains work, because we are at a vulnerable place in life, and because people we love and trust convince us of things they sincerely believe–but are foolishness.
It’s important to resist shame. It’s human to get fooled, and although it can be incredibly costly and painful, we can recover and rebuild our lives. We can create community with people who share our values, interests, and concerns.
By strengthening our thinking powers, we can more ably resist falling for foolishness in the future.
By sharing our stories of how we fell for–and sharing resources to resist foolishness–we can warn others of the dangers that exist and help them avoid becoming victim of foolishness.
Foolishness free, may we all ever be.
Related Content
Source for the Meme Above: Four Ways Your Personal Experiences Can Lead You Astray
Our brains prefer stories over data and statistics. And it’s hard to admit, but we are easily fooled. We can perceive things that didn’t happen, miss things that did, and misinterpret others. “Your truth” may not be “the truth.” The subjective “reality” inside of your skull might be different from objective reality.
If your goal is to align your beliefs with reality, be skeptical about the conclusions you can draw from your lived experiences, question your perceptions, and be humble enough to admit that you might be wrong. Learn to recognize your brain’s short-cuts and seek out reliable data instead.
How Conservative Christianity “Groomed” Us
People seem more concerned about “grooming” than ever, but only in relation to LGBT groups. The reality is, the Christian church engages in more systematic manipulation of children than any other institution in the western world. Conservative Christianity intentionally shapes children’s views of sex, gender, and authority, using unethical means to do so. Here we explain how this is done.
Why do miracles work sometimes? When a faith healer causes your pain to go away, what’s really going on? Explore the science of faith healing and the psychological tricks that preachers use to convince you that you’ve been miraculously healed. Today former-evangelical actress and author Alice Greczyn joins me to uncover the secret tricks of faith healers and how they use your brain against you. What is the neuroscience behind faith healings? Are you really being healed, or is there a psychological explanation?
Why I fell for Wim Hof and Andrew Huberman
Journalist, Scott Carney says, “I needed to do a lot of soul searching to record this video.”
What’s Wrong with Huberman’s Science? | ft Dr. Andrea Love
So maybe you don’t care about what happens in Andrew Huberman’s personal life. So long as his science checks out, what’s the harm? Well, I hate to break it to you but his science doesn’t really check out either. From cherry-picked results to quack “protocols” Huberman frequently overextends his knowledge and starts shilling pseudoscience. This week on the show I talk to the immunologist Dr. Andrea Love to set the record straight.
Andrew Huberman’s cheating (and being a huge weirdo)
After enjoying much of Huberman’s content, Tanner and Sam realize in real time that a respected scientist has been peddling plenty of foolishness.
The Who – Won’t Get Fooled Again (Shepperton Studios / 1978)
This song has been playing in my head the entire time I’ve been writing this.
lisa eddy (she/her) is a writer, outdoor educator, and musician.
Email: lisagay.eddy1@gmail.com
Link to lisa’s FREE online book: Write Outside: Investigations of the Living Land
Citizen Teacher 
Posted on April 3, 2024
0