E.V. Un-Free

A Series

There are stories we tell because we’re ready. And there are stories we tell because they finally refuse to stay quiet.

For years I’ve written about coming out, marriage, motherhood, caregiving, estrangement, and the long journey of becoming myself. But beneath every one of those stories has been another one I’ve only circled from a distance.

The religion that shaped me.

Or perhaps more accurately, the religion that unshaped me.

I was raised Evangelical Free and Baptist. I learned Bible verses before I learned to trust my own instincts. I memorized Scripture before I knew how to question it. I learned to confess before I understood myself.

Much of what I believed wasn’t presented as belief at all. It was presented as fact. As truth. As the only story worth living.

As a little girl, I didn’t know there were other ways to understand God, women, bodies, love, family, or even myself. I accepted what I was taught because children almost always do. Children don’t have the luxury of skepticism. They survive by trusting the adults who tell them what is true.

Looking back now, I don’t write from a place of bitterness. I write from a place of curiosity.

How did a six-year-old girl come to believe she was fundamentally broken?

Why did I spend decades believing love had to be earned, obedience was the highest virtue, and questioning was dangerous?

What parts of me were buried before I even knew they existed?

And perhaps the hardest question of all:

How much of what I carried did I unknowingly pass on to my own children?

That question has humbled me more than any other.

This series is not an attack on people of faith. Many people find deep comfort, compassion, and genuine freedom in their faith communities. This is simply the story of the faith that formed me—and the slow, often painful work of separating God from fear, love from control, and truth from certainty. My hope isn’t to convince anyone to abandon their faith. It’s to tell the truth about my own.

Tomorrow, I’ll begin where my memory begins.

With a felt-board garden.

With a woman named Eve.

And with the first sin I was taught to believe was mine.