Throughout human existence, the search for a connection with God and the supernatural has existed.
However, religion and spirituality has often been criticised as one that is anti women. This has made some women leave religious spaces like the church and the mosque.
Urban Woman Magazine recently spoke to some women to ask them why they left the church and how they have navigated being unchurched.
Read their responses below.
Cynthia
I used to be a dedicated church girl in my teens. The praying in tongues, attending weekly church programs, prayer vigils type. I was even prophesied to that I’d marry a pastor in the future.
But somewhere in my late teens/early twenties, I got tired of everything. I particularly hated the double standards, the policing and demonisation of my gender. I hated how single older ladies in church were always prayed for as if they had a problem— I didn’t want to get older in church and start “praying for a husband”.
So I when I stopped, I never looked back.
It’s been like 7 years and I haven’t been to church more than 20 times.
As per navigating life as a woman who got unchurched, it’s been freeing. I don’t feel guilty for living my life. Although it hasn’t also been easy because most people I meet even friends are churchy and don’t seem to be able to wrap their heads around the fact that I don’t go to church every Sunday.
They still make efforts to want to ‘lead to me Christ again’ because they feel I have gone astray.
Even men I have dated are men who are looking to marry a ‘praying wife’ and this has made me comfortable with the idea of not getting married at all.
I need to also mention that the church thing affected my sex life too because I always used to feel guilty about it (I left the church before my first sex btw). This guilt is something I still struggle with.
Leaving church made me decenter men and marriage, made me live more freely, made me not see sex as something that takes value away from me. It has made me see things for what they are not the work of the devil—especially as it concerns the actions or inactions of men.
It hurts me to see women getting manipulated by these churches and I wish their eyes will be open to see them.
N
I’m exhausted. First of all, the church does not value young single women. Or single women who are older than their married counterparts. The church also harbours abusers. And this abuse is not just sexual. Psychological, physical and verbally abusive parents love church. LOVE I tell you.
Dara
I was telling my mum recently that I left a church because the pastor(a woman) was always supporting men. The last time I was in the church, she told me to stop misleading the teenagers. She said something was wrong with me because I was 24 (at the time) and I did not have a man. She sha found a way to ridicule herself (not me) that day and I just left.
PR
I left the church because the Baptist denomination disappointed me. I grew up Baptist and for that reason I’ve always been unattached to pastors and leaders and I’m grateful to them for that. However they continue to disappoint me.
The first instance was when a girl I was close to was pretty sick in my church. Her parents couldn’t afford the treatments. So fundraising right? It was so freaking difficult to get the people at conference level and convention level to pay this thing any attention. The whole process of writing letters, passing it back and forth through people. It just offended me. She died and I still blame the denomination. At least the Lagos one.
But that’s not all. So one of the churches I love and attend in the Baptist denomination, one of their elders was sleeping with his daughter. They ostracized his wife and they freaking accepted him back into the church. Like they isolated the poor woman but they let this man attend the church. I don’t even understand how this makes sense.
Then the one in Ilorin that wouldn’t stop hammering on my body, on scarfs and all. The policing was just too much.
I hate that this is a denomination I love and they’ve constantly shown me that they’re at the end of the day, “crazed religious people”.
I barely go to church. The last 3 times I’ve done it’s been one Baptist church and then CCI. I don’t have any feelings towards church pastors because growing up mine was a womanizer that the Baptist denomination refused to send away. And everyone in church felt it was better to warn their children and not him. So that’s why the two CCI attendance have not been a problem for me. I like the young people and was hoping that in one of those times, I’ll make new friends. However the last time I went, the one person I talked to I saw their status and I remembered why I’m not religious enough. She was basically reiterating the whole men as the head of the home rhetorics. So I’m not going anymore to any church. I won’t like the pastors and I won’t be able to form community because I won’t like the people.
I tell people that me and God are working on our relationship because that’s the best way to describe it. It’s like a toxic relationship that we’re both working on. I tell him that the only thing that keeps me to him is my family and if he takes them from me, he would have to work on the relationship on his own.
Jo
I’ve revisited this decision many many times. At first it had no feminist reasons. I simply couldn’t believe in it anymore; it hardly made sense to me and it just wasn’t adding up.
But looking at it constructively from the basis of the female experiences alone, there is a huge gap in interpretation of everything life is.
The way I feel now is that the Bible was structured and made it very clear I wasn’t a person.
Dinma
Well, first of all, my mother doesn’t know o (at least not that she’ll admit).
But I’ve never actually felt anything. From as far back as I can remember, I just remember looking at everyone weird and wondering what they were feeling as they danced and sang in church with joy.
I think I started to actively oppose one random day when I realized that people’s miracles were just random things that others could get. New job? Promotion? Irreligious people were getting it.
And yes, sometimes you get favours from others. I think I also understood better when I stopped seeing things from a “spiritual “ perspective. Because some people are actually charismatic and people love to help them and they just attract others to themselves.
But yeah, most important thing is that I just never got it. I always felt like a stranger when people expressed how much joy they felt from “worshipping God.”
Angel Nduka-Nwosu is a writer, journalist and editor. She moonlights occasionally as a podcaster on As Angel Was Sayin’. Catch her on all socials @asangelwassayin.