Discourse about trusting the knowledge within our bodies is all the rage right now. The mental health field has been particularly insidious about this development, rebranding wisdom gleaned directly from BIPOC communities, as well as from some of our spiritual traditions, as cutting-edge science. We see this occurring in therapeutic modalities, particularly those focused on somatic treatments or mindfulness. After decades of ignoring the body, conventional mental health has finally caught up to what our communities have known all along—that our body contains vast wisdom and knowledge. This wisdom doesn’t know time, and may at times transcend our ability to convert it into language or more linear, cognitive frames.

All this to say, the wisdom of our bodies isn’t a new concept. In fact, it’s one of our oldest ways of knowing and being. But along the way, we lost our connection to what was already inside us. I don’t begrudge somatic therapy modalities. In fact, I integrate a lot of these approaches into the work I do with my clients in my practice. However, I think it’s important to name what is often lost, which is that these practices stem from many of our own ancestral traditions. We are finding our way back.

The reasons we lose our way are myriad. The world is constantly creating paths that lead us away from ourselves, because entire industries would fall if we fully embraced ourselves without judgment. Embracing ourselves includes welcoming our contexts and histories, including intergenerational trauma, as well as the ways we may have participated in systems and dynamics that keep us trapped. When we religious history into the mixture, disorientation can become even more heightened. Invalidation from and within conservative evangelical communities is vast. Christian theology itself can at times create a foundation rife with concepts that make it impossible for us to trust ourselves, including but not limited to the belief that we are inherently sinful, broken, and unworthy, and that our own bodies do not belong to us. If we are inherently wicked, this can make us hold natural desires and feelings suspect. Wherever there are obstacles to trusting ourselves, as exacerbated by Christian doctrines like “total depravity,” we frequently conclude that the core of who we are must be fundamentally wrong at some level. If there is an internalized belief that we are fundamentally wrong, then there can be no foundation of trust infused into our lived experiences. This can make us distrust our own senses—the very senses that reside in our bodies. On a day-to-day level, this can become internalized as self-doubt:

“I was sinful, therefore what happened to me was justified.”

“I’m being too sensitive or dramatic.”

“I don’t have it as bad, so I’m not justified in my own emotions.”

This becomes compounded by the internalized message that we, as Asians or Asian Americans, do not get to take up space. Guilt and shame easily grow within this intersection if we make choices that go against the wishes of our community. And, the tricky thing about these beliefs is that they are subtle, we frequently don’t even realize we’ve breathed them in until we experience a space with different air. I am constantly telling my clients to take a breath, and then to exhale fully. If you have read until this point, perhaps you could do that too at this point. And as you exhale, consider:

What if our hearts and desires are not wicked or wrong by default, but could be good or even neutral?

What if we gave ourselves permission to restore our own agency?

What if we never needed to be saved at all?

As you breathe out, what is your body telling you about these questions? Remember, coming back to ourselves, learning to pay attention to the information coming from inside our bodies, is always a journey and never a destination. And always in everything, you are worth the chance you give yourself to recover and divest from systems and practices that might lead you away from what is already within you.

Take care.

When I was in the throes of my own religious deconstruction—the pulling apart and reexamining of my Christian beliefs, there were so few places to turn where I felt seen. I made do with some resources that felt a bit like a bridge, but nothing felt like an arrival. As a queer, agender, 1.5 generation Asian immigrant, the intersectionality of my identities was instrumental in both the pain and loneliness of my deconstruction process, and also in the beauty and freedom that came with uncovering parts of myself I had considered long lost. For people who have multiple intersections of identity, especially identities that have been historically and systemically excluded, navigating religious trauma can become exponentially more complicated. If you are a queer or trans person who is also Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Color (BIPOC) and you attend a culturally specific church, your church might is the only place where you regularly hear your mother tongue spoken. If you are a BIPOC person living in a largely white area, your Christian family may be one of the only places you get to encounter faces that reflect your own. If your non-queer affirming Christian community brings comfort in many ways, while also inflicting harm in equal measure, this can be a fundamentally destabilizing experience. This is a familiar dance for so many folks who hold intersecting identities, and navigating deconstruction while holding and honoring multiple identities brings an additional layer of nuance and complication.

The ways that I personally navigated this process are by no means the only ways forward. In fact, there are many paths that can guide us through to where we need to go. However, as a queer Asian person going through deconstruction, I remember that the loneliness of not seeing my own experience reflected cut me through to my core during my most wrenching moments. Much of the writing about deconstruction is currently the perspective of white, straight, and cisgender dominant culture. I remember struggling to piece together how to deconstruct my faith in a way that felt navigable, because whenever I unraveled one part of my faith, it would pull on a thread that unraveled seven others. For me, a huge part of this process was navigating the way that purity culture touched every part of my life—my relationships to work, hobbies, social justice, my communities, and ultimately my relationship to myself even in realms that felt far removed from sexuality. Some 18 years on from unraveling the very first thread, some things are clear to me that I could not have named at the time. For instance, the way in which purity culture and Christian colonialism are deeply intertwined in the way that they both seek to control our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to systems. Christian colonialism has extended its arms into the ancestries of virtually all BIPOC people on earth, and uses faith as justification for genocide, slavery, and exploitation of resources. Colonialism seeks to subjugate and control not just physical, but also relational and psychological worlds through multiple generations. For those who are exploited, one way to cope with this is through internalized oppression—adopting the colonizer’s worldview as superior. And in doing this, it is impossible not to leave core parts of yourself behind. Internalized oppression has been a big part of my, and so many others’ journeys of deconstruction.

Yet, it’s only once we name these happenings, and come to terms with how they’re affecting our lives, that we can move through and away from them. Through this frame, it follows that purity culture, which seeks to control the way we are in relationship to our own bodies, has deep roots in patriarchy, white supremacy, and even capitalism—all fruit of the tree of colonialism. Purity culture calls us to be ashamed of having bodies, and of all the normal functions that come with having a body. It tells us to hold our natural yearnings and desires suspect, and to discard them because they are sinful. For queer and trans folks, it calls us to be ashamed of our sexual and gender identities if we do not conform to dominant cisgender and heteronormative standards. For BIPOC folks, it calls us to conform to white, Eurocentric standards as the benchmark. Systems of power have a stake in us continuing to hate ourselves. In this way, the act of loving ourselves is in and of itself an act of resistance.

Ultimately, for those who embody multiple intersections of historically excluded identities, the feelings of grief and loss that accompany this journey cannot be understated. This process has no easy way through, and being on the deconstruction journey can be a conduit for these feelings. Emergence and blooming of parts of ourselves that have been previously unseen is a beautiful and powerful pilgrimage. But the journey of getting there can mean the loss of treasured communities that already feel scarce. Sometimes ashes are a prerequisite for the forging of new life from fire, but the pain inherent in this is vast. If this is you—your experiences are valid, you are valid. Don’t walk through this process alone, if you can help it. And finally, remember that there exists a powerful lineage of many others who have traveled these steps before you, and they see you too.

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This first entry is a letter to say, first and foremost, you are not alone. If you’ve found your way to a page called Asian Exvangelical, I’m guessing you might hold one or both of those identities. Or, perhaps the exvangelical part is in flux or in process. Wherever you may be on your journey, hello!

I’m Val, I’m a psychologist, and most of my practice is geared around creating spaces for Asian Americans. The longer I’ve done this work, the more I started to see a thread. I have spent countless hours in my office listening to people give voice for the first time to hurtful and harmful experiences with faith and religion. And over and over again, I listen to so many people talk about how alone they feel. The experience of being Asian/Asian American, and enduring religious trauma, is such a very specific intersection. In my personal experience with existing religious trauma spaces, I tend to feel partially but never fully seen because of this. So, I’m creating this platform for you: every person who has ever sat across from me, whether in my capacity as a psychologist or a friend, and told me about the time that a cis-male pastor blamed you for something that wasn’t your fault. Or about the blatantly racist comments from other church congregants who couldn’t be bothered to learn the correct pronunciation of your name. Or about every time you had to shed your ancestral selves to be a better Christian. For every time you have been told not to sow seeds of discord, and to pack away your feelings and put a smile on your face for the sake of the kingdom. You are not alone.

I originally started Asian Exvangelical as an Instagram page in 2022: https://www.instagram.com/asianexvangelical. Feel free to check out the whopping five posts that I made there in the span of the first two months before I completely gave into my avoidance of making more posts. I found that every time I sat down to create more “content” for the page, I somehow always found something else I would rather be doing than trying to trick the algorithm. However, I think there are still things to say about religious trauma within the Asian experience. And hence, we are pivoting to this space.

A little about my own experience… My journey in and out of church spaces was circuitous. I didn’t grow up in a Christian family, instead raised inside a religious smorgasbord that included Buddhism, Taoism, with a smattering of Catholicism and agnosticism.  Through a meandering series of events, I ended up in a Chinese church youth group during my junior year of high school. After that, I attended an evangelical Christian college in one of the middle states. I remember that my high school youth group leaders lavished me with praise for choosing this college, which was well-regarded in Christian circles, and for being a young person who chose to attend church devoutly despite being raised in a childhood environment fraught with the more “heathen” religions. I received so much praise, so much positive feedback, and so much love, for my decision. This, along with the fact that I was at a place in my life at 18 where I was seeking love and praise at any cost, cemented my drive to follow Jesus. And so, I entered that Christian college with the noblest intentions, however misguided. I used to look back at that time in my life and cringe, but now I have love for that 18-year-old trying to find their way. I spent over a decade after that trying to be a good Christian. I tried so hard that I started to give parts of my self away, little by little. I gave away so many parts of myself that I eventually became a ghost. By the time I was nearing the end of my graduate training to become a psychologist, there was nearly nothing left of me, and I knew that if I didn’t make the decision to leave the church, I would eventually lose my soul. Through that vine of pain, I chose myself, and in the decade that has followed, I have reclaimed so many parts of myself. They are not exactly the same as they were before, but are instead a new creation. And I have sat with so many other beloveds who have walked along this very journey. Wherever you may be on your own journey of reclamation, know it is possible.

This is going to be a platform about religious wounding within the experience of being Asian. Hence, this will also be a platform about wounding that happens at larger, more systemic levels. I set out to write this because whenever I would teach workshops about religious trauma, there would be scarce literature about religious trauma specifically as it impacts QTBIPOC folks, and virtually nothing about Asian folks specifically. This platform is one attempt to create that space. If this resonates with you, feel free to follow along. I hope we can walk together.