Proudly on Record

Kate Johnson (she/her) is a writer, poet, and former pastor's daughter who joins us this week to talk about growing up in the PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) during the family values movement, and how a childhood built on obedience, arbitrary rules, and hierarchy shaped her relationship to safety, faith, and her own body.

Kate opens up about her father's arrest for child sexual abuse material when she was nine years old, an event the church minimized as a "pornography addiction", and what it was like to live for fifteen years with her family's address on the sex offender registry. She talks candidly about the parentification, isolation, and financial instability that followed, and why she believes the conditions surrounding cases like this one deserve more attention than they get.

We also dig into purity culture's failure to teach consent, Kate's experience of a non-consensual first kiss, and how discovering her bisexuality in college became one of the most confusing (and eventually healing) parts of her deconstruction. Kate shares how she found language for her queerness despite growing up homeschooled through a Doug Wilson-influenced curriculum called Classical Conversations, and how genuine friendships with queer people outside her sheltered upbringing shifted everything.

From there, we talk grief, estrangement, and reconciliation which includes the personal ritual Kate created on a lakeshore to let go of who her father used to be, her work with Reiki and somatic therapy, and why she firmly believes "forgiveness isn't for the person who harmed you."

This is a conversation about surviving a pressure-cooker environment built for abuse, reclaiming a body and identity that evangelicalism tried to own, and slowly learning that you were inherently good the whole time.

In this episode:

• Growing up Presbyterian during the "family values" era
• Her father's arrest for CSAM and 15 years on the sex offender registry
• How the church reframed abuse as "addiction"
• Purity culture and her first non-consensual kiss
• Discovering bisexuality in college
• Homeschooling with Doug Wilson-adjacent curriculum (Classical Conversations)
• Estrangement, grief rituals, and choosing herself over reconciliation
• Advice for anyone deconstructing their faith and identity

Find Kate on Substack (Quips and Confessionals) and across all platforms @KateJohnsonWrites.

New episodes every Wednesday.

Emily Clede (she/her) is an Emmy-winning, VMA-nominated producer, but before any of that, she was a homeschooled kid on an isolated Kansas farm. Her father worked with James Dobson and Focus on the Family, making anti-gay documentary content that used Emily and her siblings as unwitting participants from the time she was three years old.

In this episode, Emily opens up about growing up without the freedom to choose her own clothes, cut her own hair, or express herself creatively, and how she secretly kept drawing and storytelling alive under her bedsheets with a flashlight. She talks about being treated like royalty in church spaces because of her grandfather's status, while having no autonomy behind closed doors. She shares what it took to finally leave, the years of surveillance and stalking that followed her out, and how she rebuilt a life on her own terms.

What We Cover:

• Her father's connection to James Dobson and Focus on the Family
• Life on an isolated Kansas farm turned "pastors' retreat center"
• Being used as a camera crew at Pride parades (in an anti-gay way) as a young child
• Meeting Fred Phelps (Westboro Baptist Church) and other prominent

evangelical figures growing up

• The moment that changed everything: a trip to Old Navy at 16
• Years of surveillance, stalking, and boundary-setting after leaving
• Being the family scapegoat and the cost of staying vs. leaving
• Building a chosen family
  

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Hannah Orsag (she/her) grew up as the eldest daughter of a Methodist preacher in North Georgia, fluent in scripture, leading worship, and doing everything right. But being perfect never actually felt like enough.

In this episode, Hannah walks us through her slow-burn deconstruction, from purity culture and a Christian summer camp that literally burned her shorts in a bonfire for being "immodest," to discovering her bisexuality through an unexpected D&D campaign, to building a life and a literary journal (Heimat Review) centered on telling honest, complicated stories.

We talk about growing up in a charismatic Methodist church, the difference between performative worship and real connection, purity culture's lasting impact on marriage and intimacy, deconstructing faith through the lens of literature, coming out to unsupportive parents, and finding a queer-affirming Episcopal church as an adult. Hannah also shares some genuinely wild stories from working at a Christian wilderness camp, including gendered camp roles, a Revelation reenactment complete with gallows, and yes, the infamous shorts bonfire.

What we cover:

• Growing up as a preacher's kid in a charismatic Methodist church
• Purity culture, modesty rules, and writing letters to a future husband
• The wildest stories from working at a Christian wilderness camp
• Discovering bisexuality through a D&D character
• Deconstructing faith through literature and storytelling
• Coming out to unsupportive parents and dealing with bi-erasure

Follow Hannah:
Heimat Review: heimatreview.com
Instagram: @heimatreview (journal) / @scriptandstarlight (personal)

New episodes every Monday on YouTube, all other platforms Wednesday.

May we never be erased.

Dan Shenk (he/him) grew up the son of Mennonite missionaries in Tanzania, East Africa, spent his teenage years boarding at a mission school, and later found himself ordained as a chaplain working inside Rikers Island and the Virginia State Penitentiary. But it's what happened next that defines his legacy: as a gay man coming into his own identity in 1980s New York City, Dan became one of the co-founders of what is now known as Bailey House, one of the first organizations to offer supportive housing to people living with HIV/AIDS. He also helped establish the Bronx Harlem Needle Exchange Program, now New York Harm Reduction Educators Inc.

In this episode, Dan takes us through it all: a childhood split between Tanzania and the USA, the loss of his mother in a plane crash, discovering his sexuality while isolated in a school infirmary, and the years he spent on the ground during the earliest and most devastating days of the AIDS crisis, organizing candlelight vigils, raising money through fish bowls on Christopher Street, and building community in the middle of unimaginable loss.

Dan is the author of the memoir Search for a Blessing: A Gay Man's Journey from a Mennonite Missionary Childhood to the Streets of AIDS Activism. If his story resonates with you, we highly recommend picking up a copy.

Content warning: this episode includes discussion of sexual assault.

Note: We're on a every-other-week summer schedule and will return to weekly episodes in September. YouTube subscribers get episodes first on Mondays, with wide release on all other platforms Wednesdays.

If this episode moved you, we'd love it if you left a rating or review, it genuinely helps other people in the deconstruction and ex-evangelical community find us.

#religioustrauma #exvangelical #deconstruction #churchtrauma #proudlyonrecord #AIDSactivism #mennonite #queerhistory #chaplain

Proudly On Record sits down with Spencer, who is a non-binary lesbian, YouTuber, and community builder who grew up in a conservative Eastern European country where queerness wasn't visible or discussed.

In this episode, they take us through the slow, nonlinear process of understanding their gender identity after immigrating to Canada as a teenager, encountering queer community for the first time, and eventually discovering trans androgyny as the framework that finally made sense.

This conversation covers a lot of ground: Spencer's theory that sexuality and gender are more deeply linked than we tend to acknowledge, what it means to be a non-binary lesbian, and why androgyny can exist in femme presentations even when nobody tells us it can.

Spencer also shares what it was like to build masculinity-free community spaces and why decentering how others perceive us might be the most important work we can do for our own gender identity.

Topics covered:

Growing up without queer representation
Trans androgyny vs. non-binary identity
The link between sexuality and gender
Being a non-binary lesbian
Androgyny in femme presentations
Gender affirming clothing and binding
Microdosing testosterone
Decentering masculinity and body perception

Religious trauma is real abuse and it's time we stop letting it get minimized.

In this episode, Elise and Kari sit down for a candid conversation about the deep and lasting impact of religious trauma, why it maps almost perfectly onto CPTSD, and how the church runs the same narcissistic abuse cycle that keeps survivors stuck, confused, and doubting themselves for years.

They get into:

• Why religious trauma is still minimized
• Religious Trauma Syndrome and how its symptoms overlap with Complex PTSD
• The four stages of the narcissistic abuse cycle and how churches use every single one of them
• Confession culture used as surveillance and control
• How purity culture and shame disconnects you from your body
• The weaponization of forgiveness against survivors
• How religious gaslighting gets installed before you're old enough to question it
• Why anger is the key to leaving abusive situations (and why the church suppressed it on purpose)
• What actually helps: IFS therapy, somatic work, body-based healing, and learning to trust yourself again

In this episode of Proudly On Record, we sit down with Angela (she,they), a 36-year-old from Houston, Texas, who shares their remarkable journey from charismatic Christian missionary to openly queer woman in recovery.

Angela talks about growing up in a non-denominational church where "God loves you no matter what" was the message, even as subtle signals told her being gay was something to hide. She takes us through her 18+ months living overseas as a missionary intern and the isolation and loneliness she dealt with while there.

We discuss:

• What missionary training is like
• Being outed by a 12-year best friend
• Losing her church community after coming out
• Finding sobriety through AA and rediscovering a "universalist" faith
• Returning to church for the first time in 11 years at an affirming Episcopal congregation

Content Note: Around the 40-minute mark, we discuss culturally insensitive missionary training methods. We do not condone these practices but believe it's important to expose what happens in these institutions.

Schedule Update: We're switching to bi-weekly episodes for the summer! No new episode June 3rd and we'll be back the following week.

Pastor, educator, and queer theologian Stephen Lowe (he/they) joins us for a conversation about reclaiming Christianity from evangelical toxicity and finding liberation as a queer Anabaptist Christian.

Stephen grew up in a tight-knit Mennonite community in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, where his family had been rooted since the 1600s. As a queer, gender non-conforming pastor now serving in Appalachia, they share how falling in love with Jesus' actual teachings (and yes, his six-pack abs on the crucifix) led them deeper into faith rather than away from it, and into the work of building communities that honor the divinity in every person.

We dig into the 500-year history of Anabaptism and how Mennonite theology radically differs from the evangelical Christianity that dominates American culture. Stephen makes a compelling case for how evangelicalism "mistakes the reward for the goal" by fixating on individual salvation and afterlife rewards while missing the entire point of Jesus' message: community, justice, and reconciliation here and now.

In this episode, we cover:

• Growing up Mennonite in a 500-year-old Anabaptist tradition
• The difference between evangelical Christianity and actual Christ followers
• Why individual salvation theology misses the entire point of Jesus' message
• Reconciling queerness with faith and moving beyond apologetics
• Why judgment can sound like justice for those who are marginalized
• The Trinity as an orgy (yes, really) and queer theology as liberation
• Communal discernment vs. evangelical individualism
• Reclaiming "sin" as structural injustice rather than personal failing
• Being too queer for church and too churchy for queer spaces
• Why the Bible was never meant to "say one thing"

Whether you're deconstructing, healing from religious trauma, exploring queer theology, or just trying to understand that not all Christians are evangelicals, this episode is a vital and surprisingly healing listen.

Writer and podcaster DL Mayfield (they/them) joins us to unpack the deep harms of religious authoritarian parenting and the legacy of evangelical culture in America. DL grew up as a homeschooled pastor's kid, deeply immersed in end-times theology and evangelical purity culture. As a late-diagnosed autistic, non-binary parent, they share how reading, parenthood, and listening to their own kids ultimately led them out of the faith and into the work of helping others heal from religious authoritarian upbringings through their project, Strong Willed.

We dig into the legacy of James Dobson and how his bestselling parenting books shaped generations of American families through ritualized corporal punishment disguised as godly love. DL makes a chilling case for how breaking a child's "strong will" doesn't just damage them in the moment, it severs their connection to their own inner knowing, setting them up for a lifetime of exploitation by abusers, employers, toxic relationships, and authoritarian systems.

In this episode, we cover:

• Growing up evangelical, homeschooled, and convinced the world was ending
• How James Dobson's parenting books shaped generations of American families
• Why religious authoritarian parenting is a form of ritualized abuse
• The connection between corporal punishment, fascism, and authoritarianism
• How purity culture created safe havens for predators in the church
• The disturbing overlap between evangelical parenting methods and child sexual abuse
• How disconnecting kids from their "strong will" makes them vulnerable for life
• Reparenting yourself, honoring your inner child, and finding joy after religious trauma
• Coming out as non-binary at 38 and going no-contact with family
• Why protecting children is the foundation of resisting fascism

Whether you're deconstructing, healing from religious trauma, parenting differently than you were parented, or just trying to understand how American evangelicalism got us here, this episode is a vital listen.

Find DL Mayfield:

strongwilledproject.com

Strongwilled Podcast

@dlmayfield on Instagram & Threads

Writer and podcaster DL Mayfield (they/them) joins us to unpack the deep harms of religious authoritarian parenting and the legacy of evangelical culture in America. DL grew up as a homeschooled pastor's kid, deeply immersed in end-times theology and evangelical purity culture. As a late-diagnosed autistic, non-binary parent, they share how reading, parenthood, and listening to their own kids ultimately led them out of the faith and into the work of helping others heal from religious authoritarian upbringings through their project, Strong Willed.

We dig into the legacy of James Dobson and how his bestselling parenting books shaped generations of American families through ritualized corporal punishment disguised as godly love. DL makes a chilling case for how breaking a child's "strong will" doesn't just damage them in the moment, it severs their connection to their own inner knowing, setting them up for a lifetime of exploitation by abusers, employers, toxic relationships, and authoritarian systems.

In this episode, we cover:

• Growing up evangelical, homeschooled, and convinced the world was ending
• How James Dobson's parenting books shaped generations of American families
• Why religious authoritarian parenting is a form of ritualized abuse
• The connection between corporal punishment, fascism, and authoritarianism
• How purity culture created safe havens for predators in the church
• The disturbing overlap between evangelical parenting methods and child sexual abuse
• How disconnecting kids from their "strong will" makes them vulnerable for life
• Reparenting yourself, honoring your inner child, and finding joy after religious trauma
• Coming out as non-binary at 38 and going no-contact with family
• Why protecting children is the foundation of resisting fascism

Whether you're deconstructing, healing from religious trauma, parenting differently than you were parented, or just trying to understand how American evangelicalism got us here, this episode is a vital listen.

Find DL Mayfield:

strongwilledproject.com

Strongwilled Podcast

@dlmayfield on Instagram & Threads