That’s a direct quote. From my mother.
Yep, she’s at it again. The sanctimonious, melodramatic, wounded-heart, flagellant martyr act, again. It gets SO fucking old and annoying!
I’ve posted in other threads about how my parents* are capital-d Devout Christians, and how I have been an atheist for several years now. I knew even before “coming out” to them, that my mother in particular, having been raised as a Southern Baptist Convention missionary kid in deepest darkest Africa in the 40’s and 50’s, would not take kindly or happily to my departure from Xtianity. But I figured, “Ah, she’ll be sad/angry for a while, and then get over it.”
Uh-uh. At first she tried to brush off my unbelief as “just a phase” or something (“God still has big plans for you, Cy!”) But for a couple years now she has been nursing the deepest, heaviest, most soap-opera-worthy maternal self-pity fest that you’ve ever seen. And Good Og, is it ever cloying and infuriating!
Some of the more um, “interesting” things she’s said to me, about my unbelief (these quotes might not be literally word-for-word, but they’re definitely accurate and faithful to what she did say!):
“I would rather have been physically beaten, than endure the pain of seeing my children spit in God’s face.” (This one is very close to word-for-word.)
So what constitutes “spitting in God’s face”? Two things, apparently:
- Supporting gay rights, and refusing to believe that homosexuality is a “sin”; and
- Denying the Bible’s divine authorship and/or denying Jesus’ divinity.
I would really, REALLY like to see her say this face-to-face to someone who has suffered through ACTUAL abuse or domestic violence! She has NO. FUCKING. CLUE. what it’s like to be beaten! (Nor do I, but I don’t use foolish, breathless superlative metaphors like this.)
“[Seeing your unbelief] is like a raw, gaping, bleeding wound in my soul.”
“Your father and I love you, and we are devastated by your inability to hear us or hear the Voice of God anymore.”
…and other such sophomoric, hyperbolic, nonsensical, eye-roll-inducing, dramatic posturing that reflects a purely self-inflicted malaise at best, and an insidious attempt at emotional manipulation, at worst.
I have tried to explain to my mother (sometimes gently, sometimes less than patiently) that no one–NO ONE–not me, not God, not any other being, anywhere, ever, can MAKE her feel this way. She is CHOOSING to wallow in misery and self-pity, all because…her son doesn’t share her metaphysical beliefs?? Christ almighty, what did she expect, as a parent? That I’d be her or my dad’s ideological CLONE??
Further, I have pointed out to her that this morose, overblown, pious humility is in fact arrogance in disguise. In using such extreme language to convey her disappointment with my atheism, what she is in effect actually saying is, “You have fallen SOOOO far, and now I am SOOOO much higher above you, that I’ve lost you.” The message is clear, even if unintentional or subconscious: “I remain pure and holy; you are lost.”
(A year or two ago I read about a study conducted by a cognitive psychologist and a neuroscientist into the cerebral “seats” of various emotions associated with virtue and vice. Know what they found? That when religious types express this sort of “suffering servant” rhetoric about themselves, that the same areas of the brain that are active during prideful bragging, become activated. In other words, there is reason to suspect that sanctimony, no matter how piously it’s phrased, is actually–literally–conceit in disguise. This would certainly fit well within my mother’s modus operandi.)
I love my parents. I really, really do. And in general, I get along very well with them. I’ve been very lucky; they cared well for me, educated me, supported me during many difficult periods, and have always loved me unconditionally. Things could be a LOT worse.
But this childish insistence on emotional self-flagellation that my mother displays, is one of the most despicable, puerile, nauseating rhetorical forms that I have ever seen.
I don’t know which would be worse: If she were deliberately putting on these affected airs to try to manipulate me emotionally, or if her religious pathology really is so deep that she just can’t accept that her son might not actually NEED to be a Christian! I’ll go with the latter, for now, because at least it’s relatively innocent.
*Both are graduates of William Jennings Bryan College in Dayton, TN, a fundamentalist/creationist institution. That should tell you something, right there.
