FROM THE MANUSCRIPT
In the author’s words
And if you resist, suddenly you are the problem. You are defensive. You are prideful. You are lost. You are bitter. You are rejecting truth. You are hardening your heart. You are refusing God. But maybe you are not refusing God. Maybe you are refusing pressure. Maybe you are refusing arrogance. Maybe you are refusing to let another person place their inherited certainty between you and the Divine. That distinction matters. Because there is a wound that comes from being pressured in the name of God. It is not always visible. It does not always look dramatic from the outside. It does not always come with shouting, cruelty, or obvious abuse. Sometimes it comes through ordinary conversations, repeated comments, quiet judgments, emotional warnings, and the constant suggestion that who you are spiritually is not enough. That kind of pressure gets inside a family. It gets inside the atmosphere. It makes people feel watched by other people’s beliefs. It makes people feel like they are always being measured against someone else’s idea of salvation. It makes people feel like their prayers, their questions, their background, their reverence, their hunger for God, their love, their discipline, their own sacred history, and their own
The God They Inherited, manuscript p. 68. Transcribed from the supplied manuscript; line breaks normalized.
The definition above is an editorial summary of this chapter, not a separately named theory or a claim of scientific proof.