Amy Green Smith Loses Her Religion, Finds Her Voice

For more information about Amy Green Smith’s work visit her website and to hear the rest of her podcast episode about boundaries go here.

When Amy Green Smith turned 16 she got to pick out a ring for her birthday… a purity ring. Her mom loved to shop on QVC, the shopping channel.

AMY: And so QVC had these knockoff diamonds called diamonique and then they would have these weeks called like diamonique week where all their diamonique would be on sale. And so I saw this one that was a teardrop shape. It was probably about one carrot. It was just a solitaire. It looked like an engagement ring and it, but it was diamonique and it was about a hundred bucks, but that was so much at the time. 

Amy loved clothes and accessories so to her it was fun. But she also understood and bought into the significance of it.

AMY: I'm not gonna have sex with anybody until I get married. And then once I get engaged, I will move it over to my left hand to symbolize that that man has the power to move the ring.

People would notice the ring on her hand at the restaurant she worked at…they’d say, oh, are you engaged? 

AMY: Don't you usually wear that on the left hand, cuz it looks like a total engagement ring. And, and I said, no, actually this is a purity ring. Or we called it a promise ring. 

This is a story about questioning such promises and finding the courage to break free from indoctrination.

This is 2 Lives. I'm Laurel Morales.

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Amy’s dad caught polio soon after he was born in 1950. His case led to extreme scoliosis, his spine in the shape of a giant “C” curve. Her grandmother was told the only way for him to walk unassisted was to do rigorous stretching routines with him everyday.

AMY: My grandmother bless her heart was determined that my dad was gonna walk unassisted. So she had to do a series of if, I think, like 36 different exercises, something like that each day in two different increments. And she had to really start discerning audibly. When is he crying out of extreme pain?

But his illness didn’t stop him from speaking his mind, especially when it came to God. Amy’s parents were both missionaries. The family attended an evangelical christian church every Sunday, Bible study, as well as youth group meetings at least once a week. 

AMY: I was very much in a very born again bubble… My whole life, you know, we were always involved in church.

While there were a lot of strict rules and expectations in their home, there was also a lot of love. Amy was especially close with her dad. He’d blow dry her pajamas for her so when she got out of the bath they’d be warm.

AMY: He would also take me on dates where he wanted to show me how I should be treated. So he would, we would go on these lovely little father-daughter dinner dates, where he would take me to a fancy restaurant and he would open my door.

In middle school she recalls her mom driving her to her first co-ed birthday party. 

AMY: Just make sure that you're not one of those ones hiding off in the bushes or something like that. And I dismissed it somehow. And they, they really stopped and said, no, you make sure you are not one of those ones making out in the bushes or in those dark places. 

The message was: if you have sex, you will get a disease or get pregnant. And all of the pressure seemed to be on the young women…

AMY: It really started to teach that all negative repercussions or things that you might experience from boys or in turn men are because you did something, there's this quote from the Bible that you are your brothers keeper. And so the idea was you are responsible for how you're dressing, all of that stuff, the onus was on the women. And it was this idea that the boys just simply could not be controlled. They cannot control themselves. It's just how things are. So ladies, it's on you.

The church used fear and guilt to educate against other potential vices.

AMY:  So it was, if you ever gamble, if you play the slot machine, you will eventually become addicted to gambling and you will squander all your family's money. If you smoke weed, it's a gateway drug. All of a sudden you're gonna be on heroin and you're gonna be on the streets. It was everything, you know, drinking you'll become an alcoholic. It was so extreme. 

She was asked to have blind faith in all of these beliefs. But Amy’s not one to keep her opinion to herself. 

AMY: My mom would say, you never have to wonder what Amy's feeling because I would just say exactly how I felt. 

In high school she began to ask questions. She asked her mom if masturbation was wrong. And she said yes, because it leads to sex, which is a sin out of wedlock. She challenged some of the biblical teachings at school too.

AMY: So they would be teaching us stuff like Abraham sacrificing his son, Isaac, because God told him to. And I was like, mm, raising my hand. Like, so you're telling me if God told you right now to sacrifice your son, you would be on board with that simply because God said. And so, because of that, in my little circle of friends, they, I got branded as like the sassy bad girl who was like a bad influence. And they would all go to bat for me, with their parents. Like, she's, she's amazing. She doesn't do any of the stuff you think she does. She just pushes back on some of the that we're being taught. And there was no room for that. 

Amy remembers talking to her dad about an issue that she couldn’t wrap her head around – the church’s stance on legalizing abortion.

AMY: I remember very specifically him saying I certainly can’t get on board with the act of abortion but I don’t know if I think that it is the government’s place to make that decision which is quite a liberal perspective for someone so conservative. I remember hearing that and thinking oh wow I didn’t realize that was a piece of the argument. All of the messages I had received was it’s wrong, nothing about the overreach of government over women's bodies.

While her parents rarely discouraged Amy from expressing herself, her church and school did.  Amy never smoked or drank but she began to rebel in small ways. The school had a dress code. They weren’t allowed to wear jeans with holes in them so Amy would patch her jeans with duct tape so you couldn’t see the holes. 

AMY: Be such a good, good girl. And there was a part of me that was really rebellious and I contested a lot of the stuff that I was learning, a lot of the biblical passages and things like that. So I was quite outspoken. 

Word got out that Amy was rebellious, so when it came time for the class trip many parents questioned whether Amy should be allowed to go.

AMY: One of my friend's fathers, it was laid on his heart that I was not to go. And if I was gonna go, he did not want his daughter to go.

Even though Amy was a straight A student, one teacher said she shouldn’t be allowed in the National Honor Society. All because she was outspoken, questioned rules and things that didn’t make sense to her, and essentially acted like a teenager. 

AMY: I have so much anger around the lack of education and the lack of freedom to just genuinely be who I, I was and to not have any of that demonized, like then it was, you're a sinner you're living in sin. 

She was attracted to both boys and girls but knew the church did not accept same sex relationships. So she dated boys. They were what she considered Christian light. Just Christian enough for her parents to approve. None of the relationships lasted. 

Amy says she was eager to settle down, to trade in her promise ring for an engagement ring.

AMY: I just scared everybody away because I was like, do you like me, do you wanna get married? Do you wanna like, and they were like, slow your roll man. We're 15. 

The summer after Amy graduated from high school she got a job working as a hostess at Guadalaharry’s, an Irish-Mexican restaurant. That’s when she met Ken Smith. It was his job to train Amy. Frequently they’d eat dinner together at the end of their shift. 

AMY: He had a crush on one of the other hostesses. I had a crush on one of the bus boys. So we would sit in the back and booth 38 and we would talk about how am I gonna get him? How am I gonna get her? And, you know, so we were fast friends. And then I just kind of gradually saw myself checking his schedule a little bit more to see if I was working with him and he's extroverted and gregarious. 

KEN: So we would talk about how we were going to approach these other people. And, um, we gave good and bad advice to each other about how to do that. And, uh, you know, those obviously didn't pan out. And, um, I think one day I just said, you know, why don't we go out? And she's like, well, why don't you ask me? I'm like, I kind of just did.

Ken was 26. Amy was 18. 

Her heart skipped a beat when on their first date Ken came to the door with a bouquet of flowers. 

AMY: I had gone on dates … their ideas of dating were like, let's go to this kickback, let's go to this kegger you know, and, and then here was this guy who really wanted to court me. So our very first date, he brought me three roses and three carnations, like super 1950s style met my parents, you know, picked me up, had reliable a reliable vehicle.

Ken took her to a Japanese restaurant for dinner then a movie. She remembers him trying to make her laugh. They had been friends first so they were both very honest with each other. At the end of the date Amy looked down at her promise ring and asked Ken…

AMY: So what do you think, how do you feel like that went? Like I wanted to let's debrief. I, I never, I, I never bought into the idea of games and like, oh, I don't call too quickly. I was just like, let's call a spade. How'd you feel that went? And I remember he said, I feel like it's a good we're in a, in a good pace. Like let's just kind of go at a nice pace. And I was like, okay, cool. That sounds good with me. You know? And, and that, it was really kind of, we became kind of inseparable after that.

So they took things slow. At this point Amy still didn’t drink, smoke, do drugs... She still abided by the church and her parents' rules. 

AMY: I had this like super conservative limited upbringing and he had been, he fought in desert storm. Oh, wow. And had survived a volcano eruption in the Philippines and had delivered babies and elevators and had lived with women, you know, in relationship. And I was like, Jesus rules, you know, like, so we, I was like, I went to a really cool summer camp once.

One day during her restaurant shift Amy was in the bathroom washing her hands. She took her promise ring off and put it on the edge of the sink like she always did.

AMY: I lost it. I would take my rings off to wash my hands. And I think I just left it there. It looked like a diamond so I’m sure someone thought they fucking scored.

Her parents never asked what happened to it.

AMY: They were pretty good at evading those sorts of topics and not digging into things they didn’t want to know the answer to.

Amy’s still not sure whether she lost the ring on purpose, or not. But it certainly was symbolic of an internal shift.

PAUSE

Ken had opened Amy’s eyes to another more worldly perspective.

KEN: I grew up in a very open family. We, we, my mom was very, for a lot to put a label on it, agnostic … So, um, I grew up and traveled world and got to see tons of different religions and ways of life and ways of faith and belief. So …it was to me more just curious of whether that was really how she felt or if it was something that was indoctrinated. So that's the question I brought to her was, is this, is this truly your belief or is it just something that is the norm around the people that you're around? 

One by one Amy began to try things that she had been told all her life were “sinful.” 

AMY: I started experiencing things with him, like sex, like marijuana, like drinking, like going to Vegas. And I kind of went, wait, there's this huge gray area. There's this huge gray area. And I went, okay, he's that was a really incredible experience. That sexual connection like, oh, or, oh, turns out I really like weed and it's quite helpful with my anxiety or I like, I enjoy wine. I like to have a glass of whiskey or, or, you know, a nice glass went and I wasn't, it wasn't having this catapulting into despair effect that I was always told. So at that point, and that was right around 18, 19, I started getting really angry because I felt lied to, I felt like you didn't tell me that there's this whole other swath of outcomes. What the hell!

So Amy felt justified in hiding the truth from her parents. She was still living at home at this point.  She’d tell her mom and dad she was spending the night at a friend’s house but would actually spend the night at Ken’s. 

AMY: So there was a way in which I think they just kind of LA LA LA LA LA. I, we're not, we're just gonna assume that she still loves Jesus and is still, we're just not, we're not gonna look at it… and they knew I was at his house and I didn't come home and my dad was not happy about it. And we had a conversation on the phone, but he was never like a yelling, screaming, shaming. It was a never like that. But I said, this should not have been an issue when I was 18. It sure as hell should not be an issue. Now that I'm 19, just the bravado that I had. I said, I need you to trust that you instilled me with all of the values that you did and now it's my turn to just live my life. I handle all my car payments. I handle my insurance. I've been working since I was 14. I'm a full blown adult now and that after that I would just say I'm going to Ken’s. And that was probably the biggest thing they at at that point they would say we're going to church and I would say, I'm not gonna go. And they would continue to invite me and stuff, but there wasn't, it wasn't like a big fight around it. 

But there were still things she didn’t do or say in front of them. 

AMY: Okay, don't talk about Howard Stern or liberal agenda or gay rights, or don't cus it's kind of this shapeshifting and this twisting and contorting.

KEN: Like having a glass of wine or like that she was, oh, no, don't tell my parents or, um, be really careful not to cuss around them or, you know, there was all these, these, um, little jagged corners that we had to be careful to turn.

Still Ken and Amy’s dad got along. Ken is 6 foot 5. Her dad was barely 5 feet tall with his polio. So when Ken came over her dad would step into Ken’s giant shoes…

AMY: …and then walk around and go, wait a minute. These feel weird. Are these my shoes? and he would joke about it. So, and they would laugh and they, they were really, really so connected.

It wasn’t just Ken who exposed Amy to other ways of life. Around this time she joined a dance company and started working as a makeup artist for a company that embraced the LGBTQ community.  PAUSE

After dating for two years Amy and Ken got married in an apple orchard. Her parents didn’t mind that it wasn’t a church wedding. They just wanted it to be Christian. So it was. Amy’s dad officiated the service.

AMY: My dad was so cute. He walked me down the aisle and went up and gave sort of the invitation and the welcome and said, who gives this woman away? And he came, he walked back down and said her mother and I, and then walked right back up. 

Amy and her dad shared a father daughter dance. 

AMY: So it was this beautiful song that was talking about just, um, the support that one person had shown another and the love and, um, sort of sacrifice… it really was just, it is so embodied how he had really been there for throughout my entire life…

Her feelings for her dad were complex. Even though she felt she had been programmed by his strict evangelical christian beliefs, she still adored and admired him in many ways.

AMY: Even though I didn't really subscribe to the same doctrine any longer, I subscribed to him.

Years later she choreographed a dance to their song and performed it for him as a surprise.

AMY: And he didn't know when he came to my show, um, he brought me a big bouquet of flowers and he didn't know until he saw the program that I was doing a solo and that it was to that song and that it was dedicated to him. And I wailed my whole way through, uh, just sobbing and dancing and like leaving it on the stage. And so I've got some really lovely pictures of us after that event of, of me holding the flowers and both of us being pretty verklempt.

Around this time Amy had let go of her faith entirely but she kept this to herself. She had had a couple of arguments with her mom over judgments she expressed but remained in the closet about leaving the evangelical christian religion. 

AMY: My parents both of them were really good at being in denial and not really wanting to hear or look or see things that were really difficult. 

It was at this time that her dad’s scoliosis worsened. 

AMY: The curve was becoming so extreme that the spine was actually meeting the rib cage and crushing pulmonary function crush crushing his lungs. So he was essentially folding in half, both, both this way and this way, both, you know, horizontally and vertically. So when you would see his, his x-rays it was like alarming. That that was what was happening inside of this tiny little chest.

He already needed the help of an oxygen tank to breathe. His doctors told him that if they didn’t at least try to correct his spinal curvature, he would suffocate.

So her dad scheduled the surgery. It lasted for 14 hours.

AMY: In the next hour. He will either miraculously respond to the medication that we've given him, or he will gradually flatline. And he did the latter. 

Amy’s dad died on May 19, 2007. As her family made funeral arrangements, Amy volunteered to speak and to do her father’s makeup for the showing, something that’s frequently done by the funeral home to mask the body’s decomposition.

AMY: The family friend of ours, who was kind of helping us plan the service and everything was very wary and did not think it was a good idea for me to do it. And I, I had to put my foot down. I was like, I'm doing his makeup, like back the off, I'm doing it… I had a very specific skillset in makeup artistry, and I felt like it would be a really kind of a dick move to be like, oh, dad, get yourself your a artist. You know, I felt like I, he was this, or he, if he didn't speak at my passing, I would be really bummed out. I consulted with a friend of mine who had done that for the other friend of ours who had passed on and just talked product. And what do I need to be aware of as far as skin texture and embalming and, and things like that…

So on the day of the funeral, Amy arrived at the mortuary with her bag of makeup.

AMY: I asked my husband to please go with me. Cause I said, I don't know. I feel okay, but I don't know how I'm gonna be when I'm actually in the room with him. 

But when she got in the room, she asked everyone to leave her alone with her dad. And she went into business mode.

AMY: It really didn't look like him. You know? I mean it looked like a doll of him. And so I think because of that, I was able to separate myself and kind of go into a different place. I would do it again in a heartbeat and I executed it flawlessly. 

Hundreds of people turned out for the funeral. 

AMY:  I felt very much like I was winning at daughter. I had done this extreme feat of performing makeup on my father's dead body. I'd spoken to this crowd of hundreds.

She shared her favorite memories of her dad making sure she had warm pajamas, their father-daughter dates. She also shared her last memory of him.

AMY: Prior to him going in for that surgery, I had asked him, are you, are you scared? And he said, I, if my, if the only purpose of my life was to live this experience here on earth, then yeah, I would be scared. And I kind of was like, wow, talk about faith that can move mountains.

After the funeral Amy went to her mother’s home.

AMY: And she finds it the most opportune time to say that she feels as though my father and her had failed as parents because the three of us, my two siblings and myself were not walking with the Lord…The only real thing that I could kind of muster in that moment was to say, you probably shouldn't say that to a child. And she said, well, that's just how I feel. And I can remember trying to explain to her, like, how would it feel if you grew up in a Jewish family and all you wanted to do was be born again and be evangelical and your family kept telling you were, you were wrong. And I remember trying to put in some sort of see if you can understand where I'm coming from type of thing. But that really became the pivotal moment for me. When I recognized that it isn't always an ultimatum to stand up for yourself or to speak up for yourself. But if it is, and I have to decide between either making you happy or making me happy, I'm gonna choose me. 

KEN: I think part of it was, was her mother's own grief at play and feeling maybe the, the failures that she had as a mother, um, not realizing the impact of those words.  It was devastating to her because she felt like she wasn't accepted for who she was.

Amy decided then and there she would no longer placate her mother. She was going to be herself and that meant speaking her truth.

AMY: I think I got extremely adversarial and combative, and I wanted to bring up all the polarizing topics and I wanted to fight. I would have to go back to her and say, I still feel very strongly about what I said, my opinion hasn't changed, but how I expressed that was not fair, and you didn't deserve that.

Over the following months she told her mom she was liberal, that she no longer subscribed to their faith. It was around this time Amy ran into an old friend.

AMY: Our parents worked for the same Christian organization for a while. And we kind of reconnected later on like in our later twenties… She said, how on earth did you make peace with your parents? … And I said, I really had to come to a place where I was okay being a disappointment to them because I wasn't a disappointment to myself. And that was so freeing. And that's also…It's like on one hand, I'm so proud of myself. And on the other hand, I'm super saddened, right? I can carry both of those two things like, but we think that it's about just gaining that favor. Once I gain that favor, then I'll be happy. But at what cost, right? Like at what cost. And I decided that, that, that pain of hiding and not honoring who I was was far too great. And I was willing to sustain the feeling of being a disappointment. And, and I I've actually said things to her like, you know, she's, I don't approve of that. And I'll say, you know, quite frankly, I don't need you to approve of me because I approve of me.

Amy went to therapy and signed up to learn how to be a life coach and hypnotherapist. And she discovered she could still keep a loving relationship with her mom without feeling like she was losing a part of herself every time they spoke. 

AMY: And It wasn't until many, many years of explosions and then cleaning up the explosion that I realized, oh, I think I can actually speak up for myself without being an asshole. I think I can actually give voice to the things that matter the most to me without being blamey or vindictive or being a Dick about it.

Sometimes she’d have to rehearse it before talking with her on the phone.

AMY: I can say extremely kindly and lovingly, ‘I don't share that opinion, but I appreciate that that's yours.’ Or, ‘I'd like to kindly request that you, you don't invite me to church or you don't buy me these books. I don't buy you books on astrology. I don't invite you to summer solstice. And I would appreciate the same respect in return.’

Amy has accepted that her relationship with her mother will never be ideal.

AMY: Our relationship is nice. I wouldn't say it's super intimate. There's a lot of denial. She would much rather have a daughter who's like doing missions work or spreading the good word, but I'm not. I work in a field that feels very new agey and of the devil to my mom. And she works in an organization that will go to other faith establishments, like a group of, uh, like an Islamic faith center and stand outside with her folks and try to convert people to Christianity. And I find that morally reprehensible and unbelievably disrespectful. Um, so it gets very difficult because the things that we feel so passionate about are incredibly painful to the other person. What that distills our relationship down to is mostly talking about superfluous things like recipes or decorating the house... if we weren't related, there is no reason why I would foster a relationship with somebody like her. B ut she's also incredibly loving and so considerate and so kind, and, and genuinely wants to be with us, myself, my husband, my brothers, and, and there's ways in which I feel like she's way more accepting than I am.

Amy and Ken have moved across the country to Charlotte, North Carolina where she coaches others to help them find their voice.

AMY: ​​And that really just changed my entire way of being, and it was, was the religion I always needed. It really was, it was the spirituality, it was the autonomy and the agency that I always needed. It was the understanding of how I operate the ownership of how I operate and acceptance and not making myself wrong, working with shame, resilience.

EXCERPT FROM AMY’S PODCAST

She learned that anger is valid but when we react from a place of anger that usually makes the other person shut down or act defensively.

AMY: Communicating from that place, very seldomly yields you the results that you're looking for.

LAUREL: Are you able to do that with your mom?

Yes. Now after years and years of practice … Actually around that the 2016 election said something to me about how heartbreaking it was that I believed the way that I believed. And she was a little there, a little venom in, there was a little spite. So if I hadn't done so much of this work and then subsequently started teaching it, I think I would've lashed right back. I mean, that was me being so adversarial in the past. So instead I said, I understand that that must be really painful for you. And I need you to know that that actually goes both ways. It's equally as painful for me that you see things the way you do, but I respect that that's yours… It was the first time that sort of cadence and kindness and assertiveness rolled off my tongue. Every other time I had to prepare and I had to write stuff out and I had to do some breathing. And I had to think about who do I wanna be in this situation? And, and that was the first time sort of the conditioning had taken hold.

Today Amy’s still untangling her religious trauma. She considers herself an agnostic atheist.

AMY: I don't believe in the Christian God, the Abraham at God. Absolutely not. Uh, but I do believe in a God essence. I do think we're universally connected… if we're talking about God as a universal energy, or we're talking about God as nature theistic all day, you know, but if we're talking about the God of the Bible atheist all day.

Amy realizes today even though they don’t share the same beliefs, that she and her dad have something important in common. They both feel they have a message to share. And speaking in front of people and sharing that message is where they feel the most lit up.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.