The Knowledge of Good and Evil
A guest post on leaving Christian fundamentalism by Betsy Cornelius.
Hello and welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. Today I am so pleased to share this guest essay which is a personal exploration of leaving fundamentalism and slowly having your world expanded. I know many of us can relate to this journey, and I think it is SO important to share how people can and do leave oppressive high-control religions. Thank you Betsy for this post, and thank you to everyone who supports this newsletter and makes it possible for me to publish these essays.
The Knowledge of Good and Evil
The spiritual and political journey that gives me hope for our future
by Betsy Cornelius
Summer 2004
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney campaigned for a second term against Democratic nominee John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards. Conservative email chains spread doubts about Kerry’s military valor and compared his facial features to Lumiere.
And I returned to college to finish my bachelor’s degree.
On a Midwest campus, I parked beneath the shade of towering oaks. At best, my SUV logged 16 mpg, and across the bumper flashed a white sticker with block print: BUSH CHENEY. My T-shirt displayed an identical logo.
My shirt was armor. I was raised in a fringe offshoot of the Church of God (Anderson), a descendant of the U.S. holiness movement, where attending college was unusual, since even the appearance of worldly influences was avoided. After all, we were called to be “in the world, not of it.”
I wasn’t part of the Church of God anymore, but I expected to clash with professors at my new liberal arts college—emphasis on liberal.
***
“Dr. Paul is your advisor! You’ll love him!”
The clerk in the admissions office was delighted and added covertly, “He’s a pacifist. He spent time in prison during Vietnam.”
Crap. I squared my shoulders and walked deeper into the campus. My adrenaline was spiked, ready for a fight.
It’s hard to fight a pacifist.
Non-reactive, Dr. Paul listened to my introduction, blue eyes serene beneath a shock of white hair. He shuffled around the stuffy room, searching, then slid a biography of Mohandas Gandhi across the desk.
“You might find this interesting,” he said.
I accepted the book, unaware that pacifism was part of my church history. Pacifism in the Church of God (Anderson) declined steadily throughout the 20th century as leadership conceded that salvation was between a soldier and their God. The drive to fight “godless” communists further eroded pacifist teachings1. By the time I was a young adult, in a later branch of the church tree, militant verbiage was staunchly embedded in our lexicon.
***
At eleven, a brief airplane ride at a local air show sparked the special interest that altered my life path. For seven years, I became obsessed with airplanes. I wanted to fly them. Through self-advocacy and rebellion against holiness dress codes and gender roles, tedious control of my stutter, and learning to fake eye contact, I landed at a secular university 2,000 miles away. For a country girl raised in fundamentalist Christianity, college was instant culture shock. I was a married dropout 16 months after stepping onto campus.
To my annoyance, my mother joked that all I’d earned in a single year at college was my M.R.S. degree.
By 2004, my husband and I rented a small house outside his U.S. Air Force base where I watched my children laugh, bright-eyed and uninhibited, as I baked cookies, changed diapers, and felt my brain shrivel.
At 25, I felt restless and bored. I needed to finish my education.
When classes began, Dr. Paul was patient. In spidery script, his comments and pointed questions encouraged deeper diving. He often included articles for my review with packets of graded essays, and I read the gifted biography of Gandhi.
Slowly, my U.S.-centric perspective shifted.
Since motherhood was my life, full of Bob the Builder and Sesame Street and chasing kids between chapters, I imperfectly imagined world events through the eyes of other mothers. How terrifying to flee West with children, escaping the United States Cavalry as we devoured the land! To flee American atrocities performed in the name of fighting communism!
God couldn’t bless this, could He?
***
The college was once a convent. Stone buildings, polished interiors, and the hushed chapel all spoke of cherished tradition. That tradition meant theology classes were sprinkled through general ed.
I looked forward to exploring and strengthening my faith since, studying on his own, my husband had asked, “What if the Bible isn’t true?” My imagination plunged him into hellfire in the style of Chick tracts, the terrifying black and white comics full of gleeful demons with pitchforks that were my Sunday afternoon reading as a kid.
First, my studies led me through Lawrence Boadt’s Reading the Old Testament alongside large portions of the Catholic canon.
I had read the KJV and NIV Bibles, some portions repeatedly. In childhood, I entertained myself in church by reading Ruth and Esther on the whisper-thin pages of my mother’s palm sized Bible.
From a historical perspective, the Bible resembled literature. Developed and edited by men. Oral traditions, told around fires, evolved over centuries, and finally written, like the results of a very long, violent, telephone game.
It’s okay if the Old Testament isn’t the literal word of God. The New Testament will be better, I thought.
***
Watching Hurricane Katrina unfold on my television in 2005 was horrifying. The inadequate government response, heart-wrenching video and images, and online victim blaming revealed a dark character in my fellow citizens. While convoys of supplies and volunteers rallied to support those impacted, some white Christians criticized instead. Why didn’t they evacuate? Why couldn’t they be civilized?
I had never witnessed that level of devastation, and the cruelty towards fellow humans in life-or-death situations built a knot of rage and helplessness in my chest.
The following spring, freshly moved to the Southwest, I read Bart D. Ehrman’s The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings alongside my own Women’s Devotional Bible, New International Version (NIV).
That’s okay, I thought as the class ended. I’ll be a Red-Letter Christian.
I discovered Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.
My conservatism softened, God’s Politics confirmed what I already felt. Jesus would want everyone fed, clothed, sheltered, peaceful, loved, and thriving.
My voting record was not aligned with Jesus, and wasn’t Jesus the point?
***
In 2007, I added the actress and comedian Julia Sweeney’s monologue about leaving Christianity, “Letting Go of God,” to my playlist2. I wandered my New Mexico neighborhood at dusk and listened as the sun’s reflection faded from the mountains. My voice interrupted the desert silence with my own version of “Amen!”
Sweeney recalled,
Eventually I was able to say good-by to God… And I said to him, “I’m sorry God; it’s not you. It’s me. It’s just, I don’t think you exist. I mean, God, look at it this way: it’s really because I take you so seriously that I can’t bring myself to believe in you.”
As Sweeney’s words faded, and I headed home, I accepted that, brick by brick, my faith had been dismantled. I had kept it around, a sentimental connection to family, but it no longer felt authentic.
***
With faith gone, curiosity ran wild. Freedom of thought was an unexpected and precious gift.
I tackled basic biology. As a teen who listened to Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis, a Christian radio show that taught a literal 7-day creation and a 6,000-year-old Earth, I struggled through science classes. I even argued against my teachers, teachers I didn’t believe counted as real Christians because they were Methodists or Presbyterians.
As an adult, videos and books revealed the severity of AiG’s twisting of science, especially the theory of evolution. I was riveted.
“It’s still just a theory,” I said to my husband, an engineer.
“So is gravity,” he scoffed.
***
I discovered LiveJournal.
I shared family news, photos of the kids splashing in monsoon puddles, and my thoughts on history, politics, and religion.
My sisters emailed within hours of each other, coordinated cease-and-desist orders. I almost heard Julie’s voice lecturing across the prairies and deserts that separated us3.
…I have been… sifting through the atheistic riff-raff (sic) trying to read something of substance that tells me what is going on in your life.
Julie wondered why I still read the Bible. Wasn’t it a waste of my time? She implied that my religious education stopped at eight-years-old and addressed my declining patriotism:
The United States is… the best country to live in the world. We need to be thankful every day we get to… take a breath on this soil. I refuse to stand still and hear my country bashed in this manner, especially since [your spouse] is in the service.
Julie didn’t truly care that my husband was “in the service.” Maybe it was his rank and assignment; while our family’s noncommissioned veterans were respected, my husband was only a “desk jockey.” Our experiences in a 9/11-era military didn’t count.
I dare say, some people need to live a little longer, Julie finished.
After reprimanding my lack of patriotism and, like Julie, questioning my religious education, Kate wanted to compare our childhoods.
I left my response in Drafts. Fighting was exhausting.
***
I snapped a picture with a smiling Dr. Paul at my 2010 graduation. To my surprise, since they knew that my classes played a significant part in my desconstruction, my parents attended the ceremony.
Dad claimed that he left college the moment he realized Mom was smarter. Four or five years into marriage, they found Jesus. Their preachers warned that secular education allowed “The World” to influence good, Christian youth. Religious universities were no better; only the Church of God had the truth. Instead, young men often worked in their family business, and girls lived with their parents until marriage.
Secular education did influence me, and fifteen additional years have only widened the distance to my family. Two years ago, Mom blocked me for advocating for my LGBTQ+ daughter. It’s been nearly four years since I’ve heard from Dad.
Do they carry a sense of betrayal, of more fragile faith, due to God’s broken promise? They trained me up in the way they believed I should go, and I departed from it.
***
I still yearn for deep conversations about belief—not confrontations. I dream of finding the right words to open hearts and minds and to find commonalities.
Despair haunts that dream. I possessed curiosity and an unquenchable desire for a different life that opened me to this journey. How do we reach someone who truly believes that the price of curiosity is their eternal soul?
Yet, I return to hope. In 2004, I could not have predicted my shift. From arrogant militance, confident that I was “on the Lord’s side, just because it’s right,” to humanism, a word preachers spat out like poison. The aversion I once carried for people my government calls enemies, that Christianity calls sinners, is gone. For that, I am grateful.
I still have a lot to learn. Sometimes, the old prejudices flare, and I need to dismantle them with information and compassion. I’ve caused harm that can never be repaired, but I can further align my remaining life with values like empathy and self-determination as I continue to evolve.
Additional Resources
Many universities now offer free classes online, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and MIT. Online educators like Lindsay Nikole, Casual Geographic, and Philosophy Tube share expertise across social media channels. Knowledge is more accessible than ever4!
Betsy Cornelius (she/her) lives in the western U.S. with her husband and one of two young adult children. When she is not having an existential crisis, she enjoys the openness of the high desert sky, the wag of her dog's tail, and learning how her neurodivergence impacts her world. Betsy's memoir-in-progress, Things We Don't Talk About, explores mental health, marriage, nonmonogamy, and Christian fundamentalism through the lens of her 2013 psychiatric hold in California. She can be found on Substack at An Open Book, Redacted.
Thank you so much Betsy for this personal reflection on your evolution and growth — including highlighting the family and social pressure you experienced to not expand your worldview. If you came from a high control religion or family, what experiences helped you expand your perception of the world?
Church of God (Anderson): I was raised in the branch of the Church of God that broke from the Anderson movement over issues like mixed swimming, modesty, television, jewelry, etc (under 7th Seal in this Wikipedia entry). In other words, the Anderson movement became “too worldly.”
Full transcript of “Letting Go of God.”
Names have been changed.
Lindsay Nikole holds a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology from Oregon State University.
Mamadou Ndiaye, creator of Casual Geographic, holds a Bachelor of Science degree in environmental science from Rutgers University.
Abigail Thorn, actress and creator of Philosophy Tube, holds a Master of Arts degree in philosophy.
 | A guest post by
|
How do we reach someone who truly believes that the price of curiosity is their eternal soul?
So relatable. Thank you for sharing. 🙏🏽 I join you on the church to humanist slippery slope! lol. It’s a wild ride.
Hurricane Katrina was also part of the beginning of my faith/conservatism "undoing".....along with a required Native American Studies course I needed for a teaching licensure in a new state. Talk about eye-opening to my young adult sheltered self. Once I finally allowed myself to start asking real questions they wouldn't stop coming....I'm actually really grateful for that now. This was great, thanks for sharing!