Erica Bailey
speaker
177 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Erica Bailey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And if you just stick with us, we'll tell you them. We'll help inform your path. We'll help show you, you know, your ideal path. And even better than just your ideal path, this is the path that God has ordained for you. And that's a really appealing message that can help reduce some of these concerns about what does it all mean.
On the one hand, it was incredibly challenging to feel that I had differing beliefs to the people around me and that voicing those beliefs could get me in trouble or get me sanctioned or at least have a stern talking to. At the same time, I really desperately wanted them to approve me and to accept me and to value me in the group.
And so I was willing to sort of not say what I was really thinking or hide those beliefs in exchange for maintaining these relationships that I valued so much.
There were lots of ways that you would be sort of disciplined, quote unquote, and usually it would be, you know, you're discussed and the church leader would mention something that happened in a sermon. So you're sort of, you know that he's talking about you. You feel that shame that everyone must know that you made the wrong choice.
Or you had really intense one-on-one conversations where you were reprimanded and told that what you had done was out of alignment. It wasn't the right path. It wasn't the godly path. And frustratingly, those individual conversations could happen at any time. And sort of one thing that you did one day could be right. And that could be the spiritual choice.
And then another day, it would be the wrong choice. And so you're always kind of questioning which decisions were right and which decisions were supported. And those who were sort of in the know would just know the right answers. And what I know now is that was a way to sort of control our behaviors. You never felt like you really were settled or secure. You always were looking for guidance.
And that was an incredibly confusing experience.
Yeah, I felt very adrift in terms of what the right thing to do is. Because I had sort of disconnected from school, from my peers who maybe were going to colleges or applying to college at the same time, I almost didn't know the right steps to take.
And ultimately felt this pressure to follow along with the path that the church had outlined for us, which was to take a year to invest heavily in my faith and to try and bring new people into the group and do that instead of going to college, which was sort of the worldly choice.
So even though I always was very bookish, I was very nerdy, I was very inquisitive, I always really wanted to go to college, it was sort of implicitly discouraged that that was sort of the lesser path that was the earthly, worldly path.
I moved to a small town with a group of people from the church, and we sort of set up a satellite group in that town. And we went around talking to people about the message of the group and trying to recruit people into our group.
What really shook my whole sort of belief system is we had a death in my family. My niece passed away. And it was one of those experiences that sort of jolts you awake. It's really nice to have these ideas that the church gave us about how special we are, how powerful we were, how logically our life path would unfold.
And then when this happened, it felt like one of those moments where I looked around to realize, you know, I'd been holding on to sand and I had nothing. And these stories that I had been told about myself, about the world, about the way my life would unfold were not accurate or they were empty.
And that moment is really when I started to feel like I had to really voice those questions and concerns. And I had to start saying, actually, I don't think I agree with what they just told my sister after her daughter passed. I don't actually agree with maybe these other stances that are more about how we treat other people. Maybe it's okay to have friends who are not part of the group.
Maybe it's okay to think differently about the world and the purpose of life and how people outside the group should be valued and appreciated. That moment was fairly dramatic and things kind of happened quickly after that. I started to voice my unhappiness with the way the situation was handled, with the way we were treated.
And that also kind of brought up all these feelings I'd been holding in about things I disagreed with policy-wise, things I disagreed with, the way we even talked about other people of similar religious faiths. It was sort of a cascading experience that just really snowballed really quickly from that point.
Yeah, it was, you know, these rules about church attendance and things like that, they're never formalized. They weren't written down anywhere. But of course, we had really deeply believed them. I had internalized them. And one morning, I just decided I don't want to go to Sunday service. I want to hang out with a non-religious person. I want to just go to a movie and have a bowl of popcorn.
You know, I'm 20 years old. And... That felt like very small. I'm sure, you know, no one in the movie theater would have thought I was doing anything brave. But to me, it was a first step towards reclaiming my autonomy and realizing that, you know, maybe it's okay to have the desire to go see a movie and to just follow that desire.
Yeah. So they were not a fan of what I was doing. They were not a fan of the things I was saying. The way that that was communicated was in a couple of one-on-one meetings and then the people really closest to me trying to implore me to sort of step back, to change my behavior, to sort of come back into the fold.
At that point, I felt that that had been so severed that it almost felt like I couldn't come back. It felt like I was living in a totally different reality now from these people. And I couldn't sit in the same rooms that I was in before. So
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