r/ReligiousTrauma

I’ve had the sneaking suspicion since I was a child that my grandfather (a pastor) has led a double life. My suspicion is that he possibly cheated on my grandmother or at the minimum, had a pornography addiction. Any pastors or pastors kids willing to share their stories in relation to this topic? My grandfather is actually the best man I’ve ever known, so it’s ironic to be asking this question. I could go into the reasons why I’m suspicious but I’m more interested in real stories of people who have discovered duplicity in their own lives or in the lives of their close relatives. Thanks!!

Hello and welcome to HistoryFlights, and from LGBTQ Baha'i Experience and History Flights Productions IT'S THE HIDDEN FAITH, the UNDEFEATED and TRULY Independent Investigation of the Baha'i Faith.

I’ll summarize why you should care about queer freedom inside this tiny, little-known religion called the Baha’i Faith that is a microcosm of everything wrong with Abrahamic faiths when applied literally towards this one “problem.” I hope you can also watch the rest of The Hidden Faith: The Undefeated and TRULY Independent Investigation of the Baha’i Faith to get more background on the Baha’i Faith, but the blog entries I include from Internet Archive backups of Baha’i Rants, Just a Baha’i and Gay/Lesbian Baha’i Story Project should provide enough context. I’ll also include embeds from the portions of past Hidden Faith episodes where I discussed queer issues on my Substack, so please subscribe there and to my YouTube to help support a solo creator in my fight for truth, justice and historical accuracy!

When you emerge from a high-control religious environment, the first instinct is almost always demolition. You want the institution to answer for the harm. You want the holy men who act holier-than-thou to sit down, look at the evidence, and acknowledge their failures. You want the doctrine that suffocated you to be dismantled in the public square until the whole thing either reforms or vanishes. I know that instinct intimately because I lived in it for eleven fucking years. Even if I never signed a declaration card, by virtue of being in a relationship with one who love-bombed me to get me to visit her friend’s fireside, six of them in a marriage I put disproportionate effort towards, I got about as close as anyone could to being Baha’i while still outside of it.

For years, many thousands of people have internalized shame, believing that all humanity is one but that some are more united than others, that they struggle with a spiritual handicap, that their voices must be silenced from Dialogue to Talisman. The final breaking point always comes down to realizing that any system that requires you to destroy yourself to maintain its harmony is not a sanctuary, but a prison. The real schism happening in the Baha’i Faith is not a loud fight over succession as in every single prior transfer of power, but a quiet quitting by the thousands buried under fake numbers. Over the past several years, spaces like r/exbahai and independent channels like The LGBTQ Baha’i Experience (who I had the absolute pleasure to interview!) and Trash TV (looking forward to interviewing her later) emerged as safe spaces for, say, a nineteen-year-old queer believer in a small town, terrified of losing their family and community, to put on headphones and hear someone say: You are not crazy. You are not broken. Most importantly, you are not alone.

I’m hoping to put the full script on Substack AFTER Wahid’s tortious attempt to have it destroyed by criminally abusing the DMCA process as a heckler’s veto is reversed when they see that the clips I embedded there are obvious fair use. Otherwise, there’s a million different blogging platforms, and I’ll let you know where it lands. Please also note that the AI image in the thumbnail was NOT made by me, and my apologies regarding occasional editing issues in the interview.

ALL THE TRIGGER WARNINGS as well!