A conversation with survivor-advocates and authors Melissa Duge Spiers and Katherine Spearing
Dear Friend of Lake Drive Books,
What a delight it was to sit down with authors Melissa Duge Spiers and Katherine Spearing, along with a hearty group of supporters and readers, to talk about cultural and social systems that can put us in boxes and prevent us from becoming ourselves fully.
Of course, in the video below, we’re talking about more than that. We’re talking about how our religious backgrounds can create just the opposite effect on who we are than it professes to create. Instead of helping us become people of character, people who are fully engaged in life, our religion can just as often create conformity and uniformity, and even stunt our growth as individuals and our ability to engage with the very world we are born into.
Just raising the issue that religion can be toxic is confusing for some of us. We’re talking about love right? We’re talking about Jesus, hope, and togetherness, right?
Sure, religion is those things. But so often, it’s those things only in theory.
Just listen to the experiences that both Melissa and Katherine share in the video and in their books: strict rules about what media they could consume, a hyper-focus on their appearance, being assigned a secondary role solely because of their gender, and not being allowed to go to college. Some of these experiences might seem extreme and isolated, but some of them—you and I both know—are often just part of everyday religion, or everyday evangelicalism in the US. So many life-restricting ideologies or Sunday morning motifs, for example, like the doctrine of original sin, pass simply for everyday “Christianity,” and yet they have an effect that is anything but becoming fully human. My own background in psychology has shown me that the doctrine of original sin, when introduced to young children, has a way of forestalling the development of an engaged, playful human being.
In this “Survivors Speak,” we turn the discussion to an achievement in both panelists’ lives in which they felt they were recovering some of the power they had been denied in a religious system that boxed them in. I think this is a key part of a discussion of restrictive systems, if we can get to it. For Katherine, she remarkably put herself through college via remote learning, starting when she was twenty-six, something she did in secret so her father wouldn’t find out. For Melissa, she made it a point to stop dating men, as her own sense of self was so damaged in relation to men that it has been difficult for her to have healthy relationships. Both women showed great courage in these decisions, efforts that have led to a fuller sense of who they can be. The journey continues.
I strongly encourage you to sit in on this conversation. Grab a snack and a cup of tea, and just soak in the truths these women reveal both in their stories and their own hard-won insights.
Grateful for you,
David Morris, Publisher
Melissa Duge Spiers is an award-winning essayist, screenwriter, and advocate for topics of religious abuse and resilience, utilizing her online platforms (TikTok and Instagram, known as “The Glory Whole”) to raise awareness and help others find healing. She is the author of Holy Disobedience: Sex, Sin, and Secrets in the Biggest Church No One Knows. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from Barnard College and is based in California.
Katherine Spearing, MA, CTRC, is the founder of Tears of Eden, a nonprofit supporting survivors of spiritual abuse and is a Certified Trauma Recovery Practitioner with a Master of Arts in Religion and Cultures. Katherine is the author of A Thousand Tiny Paper Cuts: The Subtle, Insidious Nature of Spiritual Abuse and Life on the Other Side. For five seasons, she hosted the groundbreaking podcast Uncertain, pioneering pivotal conversations around abuse in churches. Katherine is based in Missouri.
