Tl;DR wife became a raging church freak/spiritual abuser out of no where. She must be stopped or it’ll be the end of us.

Now the context.

Rather than being joyful in faith and the love of God, my wife is using faith to portray me and other people in a highly negative light, even using scripture to depict us as hell bound. She actually used the word “damned” tonight.

That’s my life right now. I began dating my wife as a fun, care free woman who was still responsible in handling life’s duties and had an open minded approach to the world and not a peep about religion (if she was the way she is today when we first met, we wouldn’t have even been friends). That’s who I could picture forever with.

My wife and I did not attend church for the first two years of our relationship until she casually brought up going one fateful Sunday. Up until then I truly did not have the slightest clue that religion was even a factor in her life which was fine by me. As a long non practicing catholic I acquiesced. What was the worst that could happen? It’s a Christian mega church with high production values designed for mass appeal so I figured they would keep things light and enjoyable. Oh how wrong I was. The lead pastor is a very traditional brimstone and damnation type that he dresses up with the occasional corny joke but I’d only come to realize how toxic this is until later. So anyway we very casually attended, maybe once or twice a month and it wasn’t a huge deal.

However then we got married after 3 years of dating and she’s pulled the rug out from under me. Now she demands weekly attendance, she chides me for not taking notes during service which is ludicrous, elbows me during service for not singing, or not closing my eyes or bowing my head, not lifting my hands up, and every week this gets worse. It’s like a flashback to being forced to go to church as a kid.

Now here’s where things have been getting real fucking weird and unpleasant in the past couple weeks. (After 1.5 years of marriage) Now her nightly routine is to go into the closet to read the Bible alone for almost 1 hour per night robbing us of time together, she goes to the three, yes fucking THREE, mid week evening services robbing us of time together. Also every single time we go to church she very openly resents me more and more for apparently being some unclean filthy sinner and alluding to how she is saved. Then today she starts sending me really vague but clearly directed at me bible verses about being a sinner.

This church has poisoned our relationship. I just want my wife back. More than anything this is knee capping the marriage. I know this is spiritual abuse on her part, and fortunately I’m already immune due to 11 years of catholic school, but I’m terrified for my children to get dragged into this toxicity of this particular non denominational Christian church. I’ve even devised a plan to move us out of state to hopefully rip my wife out of this bullshit but it might be too late by the time I’m ready to leave.

I just hope that my 2 sons have my common sense to view all religions for what they are which is, generally well intentioned but probably wrong and not to be fully submitted to.