I’m currently visiting my home town, which is very christian and conservative and while that brings its own annoyances, I’m currently sitting in a coffee shop that plays only christian music.
Besides the fact that the music is just kinda bad, slow, etc, a string of worship songs has gotten an almost ptsd reaction out of me. It’s not that big of a deal since I have my own headphones and whatnot, but I didn’t realize how much aggravation I’d feel when listening to it for extended periods. I’m not very good at describing it, but I figured I’d share this since I haven’t been in the situation since I left town.
Depends on what it is for me. I strongly dislike praise team / evangelical pop-rock Christian stuff. But I miss some of the older more traditional and liturgical music. Some of it is quite beautiful. Bach, etc.
The only Christian pop-rock song I can think of that I actually enjoyed is that Pure Flow song from idk… around 2009. Back in the day my wife used to sing it as “let the beer flow! Drink so deep…”
I’ve been walking away from Christianity for more than 10 years. I’m at the point where I just cannot stand anything Christian - I don’t want to see, hear or think about it. I definitely get your reaction.
Try watching Righteous Gemstones on HBO.
I avoided it forever because I thought it’d be “about” Christianity, but it’s just an excellent absurdist comedy that takes place in a fictional megachurch.
They have a mix of real and fictionalized Christian music and it was honestly really fun to see levity brought to that world without it being some over-cooked anti-religion angle.
We’re watching it right now (mid season 2) and what a great show it is. It’s less about the Christian stuff and more about how bad these people are, despite being a rich megachurch family. You find their humanity endearing, but then they go and do absolutely awful things that tracks with what you think that kind of self-absorbed person would be like.
While a lot of Christian music really sucks, there’s some incredible gospel music out there.
Some gospel goes so hard that it will grab you and make you start dancing.
I’d recommend talking to someone at recovering from religion. (www.recoveringfromreligion.org
They aren’t therapists but they do have a library of resources for dealing with PTSD stuff like this. They also have a community if you’re interested
Thank you for the resource! I’ll check them out :)