How Christian Misogyny Unintentionally Drove Me Towards Secularism

In a previous article that I wrote about feminism, I explained how Anita Sarkeesian’s talking points changed how I perceived feminism but failed to explain why I chose to reject misogyny when it was popular for Christians to embrace it. This International Women’s Day article aims to tell what happened with me during the Gamergate Era. It all began with the forums of a conservative website called Free Republic. Free Republic was a well-known Christian nationalist haven where stories from antifeminist figures like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and other similar actors on the Religious Right were regularly shared by the users who made up the site’s base. While I was there, I would regularly be exposed to outrage stories about how the Left would regularly make trouble for people in the name of social justice activism.

Needless to say, I totally bought into the propaganda. But even though I was a Christian teenager back in 2014 who didn’t know any better, I had one quality within me that would ultimately be my saving grace. I loved women. I loved women so much that certain verses in the Bible like Matthew 5:27-30 and 2 Timothy 5:2 had a high level of importance to me. Little did I know that my life was about to change forever.

One day when I read news articles from pro-Gamergate posters that were deliberately designed to bash Anita Sarkeesian, I noticed that the articles were essentially advocating for women in video games to be sexually objectified. At first I didn’t have any reason to leave my faith, but then I was subjected to a challenge that was bigger than anything that I could ever imagine. The posters argued on the forums that it was okay for men to sexually objectify women because the Bible treats women as property in verses like Deuteronomy 21:10-14. At first I thought that their narratives were nothing but blasphemy, but then I looked up some of the Bible verses for myself and found that I was being forced to ask a question that I never thought I would ever have to ask: Are we the baddies? I couldn’t commit myself to being a misogynist and I couldn’t continue to be a loyal Christian upon realizing that the God of the Bible was not only evil but two-faced, so I left Christianity and ultimately became a person with a more secular perspective on life.