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Doug Frank Quotes

Total quotes: 7
“There’s so much pressure to be good and holy that we get scared of all the parts of us that aren’t.”
— Doug Frank, Escaping the Bully-God of American Evangelicalism: An Interview with Doug Frank - The Other Journal
Tagged: Religion, Evangelicalism
“The way to acknowledge that you've just spoken to another human being, about just about anything, in Australia, is to say "No worries, mate." I'm trying to take it to heart. I wonder whether it means Australia has fewer clinical psychologists than the US, or more...”
— Doug Frank
Tagged: Australia, Psychology, Radical Apathy, Seems Chill
“When I talked with students who were trying to get as far as they could from their childhood religion, they often confessed to feeling guilty or ashamed about their rebellion. I would say thank God—thank some better God—for your rebelliousness. It’s a cry of truth from inside you. It’s a kind of protection against the damage being done to your soul by a false God.”
— Doug Frank, Escaping the Bully-God of American Evangelicalism: An Interview with Doug Frank - The Other Journal
Tagged: Religion, Evangelicalism, Doubt, Faith
“Very often God seems to come in moments of failure or shame. For example, Father Zossima tells how in his youth, for no good reason, he savagely beat his orderly. The next morning he sees with utter clarity that he has beaten a helpless, innocent man. He’s overwhelmed with sorrow and shame, and he begs forgiveness—from the orderly and from the birds.”
— Doug Frank, Escaping the Bully-God of American Evangelicalism: An Interview with Doug Frank - The Other Journal
Tagged: The Brothers Karamosov, Why people are such dicks
“For me, and for a lot of the Christian college students I’ve gotten to know over the years, the constant pressure to love God and to be a certain way for God leads you to judge yourself a spiritual failure. It’s never God’s fault that you don’t feel close. Preachers will say ‘God is always reaching out to you. If God seems distant, it’s you, not God, who moved away.’ You feel like it’s your fault.”
— Doug Frank, Escaping the Bully-God of American Evangelicalism: An Interview with Doug Frank - The Other Journal
Tagged: Religion, Spirituality, God, Spiritual abuse, Evangelicalism
“It was horrifying. As a little kid, you’re absolutely vulnerable to what these powerful preachers and other adults are telling you. They control your life, and as far as you know, the world. You don’t understand that it’s a little group of mostly uneducated people huddling in a little church that people on the outside ignore. To you, it’s the whole world. This mortal threat is coming from your dad, or a visiting minister who’s a friend of your dad and who comes to your house for dinner. It gets reinforced at home, in prayers at every meal, in Bible readings after every evening meal, in prayers before bedtime. So these sermons scare the shit out of you. Then you see adults coming forward, kneeling right in front of you, weeping for their sins. The pressure builds up inside you—I can still remember the heavy dread in my chest. As a little kid who was especially shy, my fear of going to hell would battle with my terror of exposing myself by standing up in front of the church.”
— Doug Frank, Escaping the Bully-God of American Evangelicalism
Tagged: Religion, Why we believe what we believe, Epistemology
“But I see myself on the cross too. Beneath all of my posturing and image-tending, I’m a body, finite and frail, suffering life’s wounds and indignities. How many times in a single day do I feel abandoned, insufficient, or ridiculous in the eyes of others? This is a condition the spirit of God shares. Once you have eyes for it, you can see that the cross is where God and humans come together. It’s the truest picture of who God is. It’s also the truest picture of who we are.”
— Doug Frank, Escaping the Bully-God of American Evangelicalism: An Interview with Doug Frank - The Other Journal
Tagged: Religion, jesus, Shame
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