Episode #54: Kicking Off the New Year with Spiritual Abuse: How Romantic Comedies Can Reinforce the Worst Parts of Evangelical Culture, with Katherine Spearing

“Romantic comedies and chick lit reflect messages that are prevalent in both secular culture and religious spaces. Although Christian spaces give lots of lip service to being counter cultural, they usually repackage the same message from popular culture with a different wrapping paper.”

We continue our mini-series Let’s Kick Off the New Year with Spiritual Abuse, with Katherine Spearing, co-founder of Tears of Eden and author of Hartfords, a historical romantic comedy. Katherine talks with us about how literature can often reinforce some of the rigid, unhelpful ideas about gender and relationships, and how writing Hartfords positively impacted her own healing process. Join us as we explore:

Jane Austen and Subtle Messaging (6:00): Jeremiah muses, “The way that Katherine sets her story within the 1840s culture and subtly challenges the gender norms of the day reminds me of what makes Jane Austen so successful.  Her writing doesn't incite social revolution, but the critiques about gender and family in Victorian England that she makes are noticeable enough that her female audience can explore a world in which they can push back against the boundaries in meaningful, subtle ways. Katherine [also] finds that sweet spot.”

The Fear of Art Within the Church (16:00): Katherine notes, “Art in general tends to be like a decade ahead of just like culture in general. One of the reasons why like fundamentalist cultures are terrified of the arts and seek to control the arts is because what the arts will make us aware of.”

Art as a Means of Survival (21:00): In a context with no control, Katherine offers how art was a vehicle for self-expression, “Art, and specifically theater and writing, were a big reason why I never fully lost access to my intuition within the context of a world that suppressed your internal voice and made you fear your internal voice. I do believe that I remain somewhat connected. And then when I started to understand the dynamics of abuse and trauma, that intuition came online pretty fast. It was always kind of there and I was always somewhat connected to it because of art.”

Psychology, Art, and the Church (26:00): Jeremiah discusses how psychotherapy, art, and the Church intersect: “The practice of psychotherapy is an intersection of science and art, and there's a lot of research and conversation that gets put into science and quantitative research, things like that. It's a lot harder to get funding for research around the art of therapy, around the ways that connect, from dialogue to more experiential types of activities.” 

Rom Coms and the Church (31:00): Julia reflects on how romcoms reinforce Church narratives: “I am actually scared to watch a lot of movies from the 2000s in particular, especially movies that have the romantic element, because it does remind me of what I learned growing up and the ways that I learned about my body, the ways that I learned about the bodies of other people. And although the churches in my life pretended to be so counter cultural,Anything that I could watch or consume outside the church just reflected exactly what I was learning within the church walls.”

Friendship within Hartfords (35:00): Katherine discusses the central themes to her novel Hartfords, “Male female friendship throughout the whole story is the central relationship in the story. And that was very important to me because of expanding our view of what intimacy can look like, and we don't have to just have that in the context of a committed relationship.”

The Power of the Pen (40:00): Katherine shares, “Writing helps me in the family that I grew up in of just having agency. I can decide what happens here I can decide what happens with these characters. I am God here. I have the pen. I can decide and no one else can tell me how this world is supposed to be in a very different way than what was happening in real life.”

Deconstruction and Hartfords (45:00): Katherine talks about the novel and how it reflects the deconstruction journey, both joy and sadness: “Everyone who was in the deconstruction world can have that experience of, ‘I have changed and these people that I love have not. And so we now have this natural separation that occurs because we're not in the same place anymore. And that is a good thing, yet it is so very sad. To some extent this book, as bright and happy as it is, does have that thread of grief. And I see it more now. I think of Hartfords being this lighthearted tale, yet having that sadness a little bit interwoven within the story.“

Healing (59:00): Julia brings the two-part episodes to together, and the movement from spiritual abuse to the healing process: “The important, dark reckoning with spiritual abuse, and as heavy and awful as it is, that is a necessary part of the healing process individually, relationally, and hopefully systemically. And today, we got to experience healing through the creative arts and through the rebelliousness of what it means to use fiction to challenge social norms in and outside of religious contexts.”

You can learn more about Hartfords and Tears of Eden at www.katherinespearing.com.

Let’s heal together!