Us Four S’more: How has your experience with Easter changed over the years?
Sticky questions, personal answers:
The Religious Trauma Network’s team mashup.
How has your experience with Easter changed over the years?
Luke A. Renner
For as jubilant as Easter tries to be, it has always caused me anxiety.
Raised from birth in a non-denominational, fundamentalist, evangelical, charismatic Christian home, I was taught to see Easter as the pinnacle of everything we believed. On my most zealous days, I’d get righteously angry about how commercialized it had become. I mean—chocolate bunnies? Painted eggs? What did any of that have to do with the “good news” of the gospel? It felt like one more way the world was mocking us—persecuting us, even—for holding on to the truth. So even when I was a believer, Easter left a bad taste in my mouth.
Ironically, those same Easter Sundays also served as some of the most powerful, group-sanctioned reinforcements of the deepest cognitive dissonance I carried: that everything in life could be utterly amazing—but only if I was on the right side of the salvation message. And if I wasn’t? Then the price was eternal conscious torment in the fires of hell. Forever.
So while someone was inevitably singing Don Francisco’s He’s Alive!, and “He is Risen!” banners and palm fronds were waving, I was quietly being crushed under the psychological weight of a story that offered no space for doubt, no room for error. Easter didn’t lift me—it buried me. It became an annual reminder of the fear that I might already be damned. And that fear drove me to deny my own personhood, to reject myself entirely, and to disappear into systems of coercion and control—all in the name of being “right with God.”
That’s the shadow side of Easter for me. Not bunnies or eggs or fake grass in a basket, but the deep, unspoken torment of a theology that taught me to smile while quietly unraveling.
Rebekah Drumsta
achoo Bless you!
Easter always brings back memories: the sweet smell of Easter lilies making everyone’s eyes water, sneezes interrupting the service, flannelgraph lessons, vocalists tackling once-a-year songs (sometimes out of their range), and the parade of new clothes in the auditorium. Sunday morning Easter services were full of pomp and circumstance—because Easter, even more than Christmas, was the cornerstone of our faith. Jesus is alive. No other religious leader claimed to rise from the dead. Our God was alive; everyone else worshiped a dead god.
Now, as an adult in a very different place in life, I look back on my thirty-some Evangelical Easters with mixed feelings. I remember the colors, music, food, stories, egg hunts, and excitement. But I wonder: did the show—the performances and hype—overshadow the message? Wasn’t Easter supposed to be about Jesus defeating sin and death? Then why did the churches I was part of ignore the evil happening within their own walls and congregation? Was Jesus’ resurrection and the good news of the Gospel meant to excuse, or cover up, a system that covered up abuse? If Jesus came to save the world by dying a gruesome death and rising three days later, why did I, as a child, pray the 'prayer of salvation' dozens of times—paralyzed by the fear that I might get it wrong or not mean it enough? I was terrified that Jesus wouldn’t let me into Heaven if I died young, especially since I didn’t believe I’d live long enough to grow old. Easter didn’t mean much to a kid who was terrified they'd gotten something wrong and wasn’t going to Heaven anyway.
For survivors of religious trauma like me, Easter is complicated. It may bring up lots of memories, unanswered questions or conflicting beliefs. Now, it’s neither painful nor joyful for me, but for others, it can be deeply triggering. I’ve chosen to reclaim the day for my family. We celebrate being alive and together, honor Easter’s historical significance, and respect the diverse beliefs of loved ones.
While I still identify as Christian, I’ve come to question what it means to "live out one’s faith." If modern Christians celebrate the story of Jesus’ resurrection only on Easter Sunday—while ignoring its implications every other day—what does that say about those who claim belief in that resurrection? For me now, Easter isn’t about believing and publicly celebrating “the right stuff;” it’s about living a life that reflects hope, goodness, and love every day. It’s about bringing life-giving hope and healing to a world that desperately needs it.
Janyne McConnaughey
Easter can be hard. This year, I find myself moving in and out of the hospital, supporting my husband through a very serious illness. As we face this together, old and new hurts resurface—triggers, fears, memories, and beliefs about life that gnaw at us both. While the world around us is eager to celebrate life and joy this Easter weekend, we’re sitting with the very real presence of loss.
Maybe, for me, Easter in 2025 is about something different: freedom from jumping through the hoops others set for us. I am tired. We are tired. The pressure to appear capable, to follow the rules, to live the “right” way, and even to function as senior adults—it’s exhausting. This freedom from human-made expectations isn’t just about this season; it echoes back to our childhoods and church experiences, too.
Maybe this Easter isn’t about celebrating as much as appreciating the life we’ve had together and how together, as husband and wife, we have learned to survive and through sheer determination find ways to thrive.
David Ruybalid
Growing up, the continual gospel pitch at Easter was that the cross was about God’s anger being appeased—that we had sinned, and because God had to punish sin with death, Jesus stepped in to take the beating meant for us so that, if we prayed the right prayer, we could avoid hell. This was presented as the gospel, but it didn’t feel like good news. It made Easter a season of fear rather than joy, painting God as a violent being who demanded blood. As I deconstructed my faith in my twenties, I realized that this version of atonement wasn’t the only way Christians had understood the cross. I couldn’t follow a God who needed to kill His Son to appease His anger, so I started exploring other perspectives—particularly how the Eastern Church has understood Jesus’ death, as well as angles and overtones of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) that are often missed. What I discovered in these details reshaped everything, giving me a broader and deeper understanding of the cross.
Here is one of the key elements I discovered that connected with me: If Jesus is God in human form, then the cross isn’t focused on God punishing His Son—it’s about God, in Jesus, being killed by an unjust society and its systems of abusive power. Throughout history, oppressive systems have tried to silence those who stand for justice, and Jesus (whom I still believe was God)—who proclaimed freedom for the oppressed—was no exception. The cross was the collision of divine love with human injustice, and Easter is the declaration that injustice doesn’t get the final say. Jesus wasn’t crushed under God’s anger; He was crushed by the powers of the world—and then He overcame them and death. That means Easter isn’t about guilt or shame. It’s about freedom. It’s about a God who knows what it’s like to suffer under religious and political oppression, who stands with the marginalized, and who ultimately triumphs over the very forces that tried to destroy Him. And that is actually good news. I am not alone in my work, and there is a God out there who finds Himself in my work and is even more powerful than I. There is more to this, but this is a simple snapshot of how Easter has changed for me.
C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity:
"Now before I became a Christian I was under the impression that the first thing Christians had to believe was one particular theory as to what the point of this dying was. According to that theory God wanted to punish men for having deserted and joined the Great Rebel, but Christ volunteered to be punished instead, and so God let us off. Now I admit that even this theory does not seem quite so immoral and silly as it used to; but that is not the point I want to make. What I came to see later on was that neither this theory nor another is Christianity. The central belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter: A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians agree on is that it does work.” (57-58 [pagination varies by edition.)
Many of us have been handed a single explanation and theory of the cross, as if it’s the only way to understand it. That was my experience too. But when I started exploring other historical and biblical perspectives, I began to see God’s character and His work in a much healthier, more life-giving way that I find intriguing. Easter and the messages preached no longer keep me trapped in fear of God’s anger.