Your thoughts on Christianity and gossip?
I don’t know exactly how to word this, but I’m trying to process the role that gossip has to play in church circles. The way I would tell things to one person and suddenly someone else in leadership would know something about me I didn’t intend to tell. The way prayer circles work. The way forgiveness is supposed to work.
The things they choose not to tell everyone– like this young woman in my group who has been lying to us with heavy, emotionally manipulative stories for over a year in our small group. (She said her parents took away her car. They didn't. She said that her cousin was in a horrible motorcycle accident. He wasn't, but she talked about it for weeks.) It wasn't until church leadership decided to kick her out of our small group that they told us they had known about her lying for a while. We knew she lied at this point because she would lie about the people who would discredit her in the group.
This is showing up with my girlfriend and her religious family- the gossip. I experienced it with my religious family. I know it's not necessarily just religion, but I feel much more content to just keep to myself and mind my own business now that I'm out of Christianity.
I didn't really get to process this when I was processing a lot of my religious trauma, but the further away from my last church I am, the more annoyed and frustrated I am with how Christian women (and maybe men, but I wasn't in those circles) act.