The Backlash I Get for Calling Religion Indoctrination (Why I’m Not Stopping)
Every time I post something about religion being a form of indoctrination, I know what’s coming.
Within minutes, the comments start. Some are thoughtful disagreements, the kind I genuinely welcome but most follow a familiar pattern that consist of accusations that I’m attacking faith, attacking culture, and ultimately attacking the very thing that held our families together through generations of survival. Comments telling me I’ve lost my way, that I’m being used by dark forces and I’m leading women astray. Sometimes the responses are angry. Sometimes they’re worried, in a way that’s almost more uncomfortable than anger, the tone of someone trying to save me from myself, which is really sad if you think about it…
I’ve sat with this reaction enough times now to understand something important about it and I wanna talk about it openly today, because I think the pattern itself, the constant backlash is part of the conversation needed.
What I Actually Mean When I Say Indoctrination
Let me be precise, because precision matters here.
When I talk about religion as indoctrination, I am not saying that faith is meaningless, that religious tradition has no value, or that the people who practice within religious structures are wrong or deceived. Many of the women in this community have deep, living relationships with religious traditions, and I’m not interested in dismantling that.
What I am naming is something more specific in the way that religious structures, like many structures of authority, can be used to install beliefs before a person has the capacity to examine them. The way certain teachings function less as invitations to seek truth and more as instructions to stop seeking. The way questioning itself gets coded as betrayal, as sin, as evidence of spiritual failure rather than spiritual maturity.
This is not unique to religion. Educational systems, family systems, cultural systems, all of them can function this way but religion carries a particular weight because it operates with the authority of the sacred, which makes its instructions feel less like instructions and more like truth itself.
Naming that dynamic is not the same as attacking faith, but I understand why for many folks the two feel impossible to separate.
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We Are All at Our Current Level of Understanding
Here is something I have to remind myself of, repeatedly, especially in the moments right after a wave of pushback arrives.
Everyone is at their current level of understanding. Including the people responding with anger and the folks who genuinely feel threatened by what I’m naming. I
This is not a condescending statement. It’s simply true, and it’s true for all of us, all the time, about everything. There was a version of me, not that long ago who would have had the exact same reaction to some of what I now teach. Who would have read a post like this one and felt something tighten, something defensive, something that said this is dangerous that this person has lost something important.
What changed wasn’t that I became smarter or more enlightened than the person I used to be. What changed was that my understanding expanded to include more than it did before and that expansion happened on its own timeline, shaped by my own experiences, my own grief, my own questions that finally got loud enough to need answers.
I cannot give someone else that expansion before they are ready for it. No one can and trying to force it, through argument, through being right louder, through winning an exchange in the comments, has never once worked, not for me and not for anyone I’ve watched try it.
My Content Isn’t for Everyone
This is the part that took me the longest to actually believe, not just say.
My content isn’t for everyone and that’s not a failure. That’s not me being too much, too controversial, or too out there. That’s just the nature of speaking from where I actually am, rather than from some flattened, inoffensive middle ground designed to avoid ever unsettling anyone.
If I tried to write in a way that never challenged anyone’s current framework, I would have nothing left to say. The work I do exists specifically at the edge of frameworks, the place where grief meets Spirit, where clinical meets ancestral, and where the structures people were given start to show their limits. That edge is, by definition, going to be uncomfortable for folks who are not yet near it. Just like the newly released movie, Disclosure Day. I haven’t spoken too much on the existence of non-human life but how could there NOT be within an infinite Universe. If you’ve seen the movie, what did you think about it? I felt like a documentary overall for me and it also felt validating to my experiences and decades of experiences that have been reported. There’s some folks that posted on social media that they walked out of the theater because it wasn’t good… well, they’re not at a level to understand, just like this post, but I digress….
The women who find real resonance in what I teach are often the ones who were already feeling that discomfort before they found this space. They were already questioning and already sensing the gap between what they were taught and what they were experiencing. My content didn’t create that gap. It gave language to a gap that was already there.
For someone who isn’t at that edge yet, my content will land as foreign, threatening, or simply not for them. That’s accurate. It not an insult to them and it isn’t a failure on my part. It’s just where they currently are, and where I currently am, and the distance between those two places.
Most recent YouTube interaction on recent YouTube short
The Consciousness Shift Happening Right Now
I believe we’re living through a genuine shift in collective consciousness, and I don’t say that lightly or as a marketing phrase.
Across generations, across cultures, more and more folks are waking up to questions that previous generations either didn’t ask or weren’t safe to ask out loud. Questions about the systems they were raised inside and about what was inherited versus what was actually theirs, and questions about the relationship between spirituality and institution, between faith and fear, between what was taught as truth and what was actually a mechanism of control.
This shift isn’t comfortable because growth is never comfortable. Shifts in consciousness rarely are, for the individual or for the collective. When something this foundational starts to move, the systems built on top of it respond. I mean, look at America right now… right conversation, perhaps wrong time…. Sometimes that response looks like backlash or sometimes it looks like people you love feeling destabilized by your questions, even when your questions were never about them.
The backlash I receive isn’t really about me. It’s a small, local instance of a much larger friction. The friction of a worldview meeting something that doesn’t fit inside of it anymore. That doesn’t make the friction feel great to be on the receiving end of but it does change how I hold it.
Discernment as Spiritual Practice
Here is where I want to land here because I think this is the most useful thing I can offer on this topic.
Discernment, the capacity to sit with conflicting information, conflicting reactions, conflicting truths, and learn how to choose what is actually yours without needing everyone else to agree because it’s not a side skill. It’s one of the most important spiritual practices there is.
Discernment is what allows you to hear criticism and ask, honestly, is there something here for me, without collapsing into either total rejection or total absorption. It’s what allows you to know the difference between someone disagreeing with you and someone being a genuine messenger of something you need to hear, even when both arrive sounding similar.
Discernment is also what allows you to release content, relationships, or frameworks that aren’t for you without needing to convince anyone else that your choice is correct. You don’t owe an explanation for the edge you’re standing on. You don’t have to win the argument to know what’s true for you.
This is a spiritual intervention in its most practical form. Not a dramatic vision or a thunderclap of certainty, but the quiet, ongoing practice of checking in with your own knowing and trusting it, even when, especially when, the folks around you are telling you that you shouldn’t.
If You’re Ready to Go Deeper
If reading this landed somewhere real for you, if you’ve been feeling the friction of your own expanding understanding, of relationships and frameworks that no longer fit the way they used to, you don’t have to navigate that alone.
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary: Consider joining the reading space for women in exactly this kind of expansion. Monthly practices, ritual support, and a space where questioning is not a problem to be managed. Upgrade Subscription
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Remember that your understanding is allowed to expand and not everyone has to come with you at the same pace.
With care and intention,
Amber Choisella
