The Kind of Faith Predators Love

Can I tell you something ridiculous that I believed for forty years? I used to think the word “faith” was the safest word in the English language. It couldn’t possibly hurt you. Like oatmeal or seatbelts. We quoted Alma’s definition of faith until it became wallpaper in my head: faith is “hoping for things which are not seen, but which are true.” I used to visualize this as gravity, or wind. I saw it as trust that gets so deep into you that it doesn’t feel like a decision. You just move through the world open handed.

And I had so much faith and I trusted so often that I handed my kids over to adults without hesitation because they belonged to my same church. I entered marriage agreements assuming they’d be honored because we shared what I can only describe as the same morals and values. And every time something in me went hmm…...that internal flinch, like a tiny tightening in my chest...I treated that internal alarm like a character flaw, or spiritual immaturity rather than useful information. I saw the hmm as a personality defect, and felt guilty for feeling it. Like it was something I needed to pray through. To become less suspicious and more forgiving.

Looking back I realize there was a sort of invisible equation that made most of my decisions for me. Same faith = same kind of person. Turns out this is an alarmingly efficient screening process if your goal is to be taken advantage of. It’s not a security system I would recommend. The first time that equation broke it honestly short circuited my brain a little.

Years ago, one of my first online transactions, when the internet was newish, happened when I needed to sell a textbook. The buyer turned out to be Mormon. Which at the time, felt safer than a receipt. Mormon meant trustworthy, because we had shared values. So in my naivety, I mailed the book, and the money never came. Instead I received a sort of explanation with the confidence of someone asking to borrow your baking dish forever, because all baking dishes belong to God. Her reasoning came in the language of community, and sharing our blessings. My first instinct was not, “this is wrong.” My first instinct was, “am I allowed to think this is wrong?” Which is such a tragic little sentence. I’m still a little embarrassed about not immediately reaching for anger. At the time I wondered if I was misreading it. Whether being upset was a failure of my own generosity.

I’d been practicing this reflex for years, and it kind of felt like virtue. It came from overriding myself, and distrusting my own perception in order to be “nice.” Goodness and belief were so tangled together in my mind that I couldn’t tell the difference. Just questioning her confidence that I “owed her,” a woman I’d never met, felt sinful. My body would raise a tiny flare gun into the sky and my mind would immediately come running in with a fire extinguisher yelling, “They would never.”

Years later I watched the same reflex play out in my marriage. We had separated to work on our relationship, and I told him there was one condition for reconciliation: complete honesty. If we were going to rebuild anything, it had to be built on truth. He looked me in the eyes and told me there was nothing else to confess. So I believed him. I let him come home. I let him back into my life. I let him back into my bed. Two weeks later, he admitted he’d cheated on me. It was presented as one of those housekeeping items that simply had been overlooked. The pain was immediate, made sharper by the realization that my intuition had been trying to tell me there was more all along. My body had known first. But I had trusted his version of reality over my own. What has stayed with me even longer than the confession is what happened next. Somehow the conversation shifted until my reaction became the problem. His feelings became the thing requiring care. And before it was over, I apologized. I apologized for how I reacted to him cheating on me. I apologized for crying and screaming in the middle of having my whole world turned upside down. He never apologized for cheating. Somehow I’d learned that my pain was more suspect than his betrayal.

We spend a lot of time asking how predators operate. I’ve started wondering what kinds of habits make their work easier before they ever arrive? And honestly, I think this is part of why predators thrive inside highly trusting communities. They barely have to pick the lock. We’ve spent years apologizing for having locks in the first place. And that conditioning doesn’t stop with who we trust. It also shapes how we interpret ourselves.

This conditioning doesn’t just shape who we trust, it also shapes the language we have for our own experience. Purity culture is one place where I see this conditioning most clearly. From the outside it sounds organized, responsible, self-controlled, and clean with standards, virtue, and modesty. But if you ask around you often find people who were taught what not to do before they were taught to understand what they were feeling. So when somone crosses a line, the body knows first. Bodies almost always know first. But if you’ve spent years being taught what not to do before learning how to understand what you’re feeling, the signal comes without a translator. And a nameless experience is impossible to report. You can’t point to it without pointing to yourself. Especially if you’ve been taught that someone else’s certainty is more trustworthy than your own. So things get minimized and reframed…or spiritualized. And when an experience happens enough times, eventually it becomes wallpaper, which might be the saddest things humans do.

A structure can produce harm repeatedly without anyone conciously intending to become a villain. People want to locate a monster and remove him like mold behind drywall. It’s comforting to imagine that harm begins and ends with bad people. I’m realizing that it’s less about the monsters than the conditions that let them breathe. Culture shapes what people are permitted to notice, name, and say. And I think that’s the deeper issue. What happens when faith gets fused to automatic trust? When goodness requires people to override themelves? There is another version of faith that doesn’t require abandoning your instincts in the church foyer next to the bulletin board. One mature enough to ask hard questions about itself. One that understands discernment isn’t cynicism.

A faith that allows women and girls ownership over their own internal reality instead of teaching them to wait for external permission before believing what they already know. Innocence has a certain glow to it. I understand the appeal. I lived there for years. It feels soft, and untouched. Like everybody means well and the world is fundamentally safe. But I know now that discernment is sturdier than innocence. It is trust that was earned rather than assumed. Trust that can actually hold weight without requiring you to abandon yourself in order to belong. And any belief system should be able to survive that.

Predators are not especially drawn to communities where girls are taught discernment. They do much better in environments where politeness outranks “hmm,” and women call their instincts “being judgmental.” Predators don’t create our reflex to doubt ourselves. They simply discover it waiting for them. It saves them an unbelievable amount of time. Because a predator’s natural habitat is unquestioned trust. My definition of Faith has changed. I think real faith includes believing what I can see and feel. A faith that is strong enough to tell the truth.

With Love (and a healthy respect for the hmm),

Sarah Steed xx