Sep 13, 2026 · 1 hr 1 min · 11 segments
In this episode, Katherine shares her journey from a strict, fundamentalist evangelical upbringing to a life of pagan spirituality and witchcraft. She unpacks the realities of purity culture…
Katherine EadieHost
This is the kind of town where you know your neighbors by name, you probably know their parents and grandparents, and you may be related to them somewhere down the line.
It's the kind of town where everybody pulls over to the side of the road to pay their respects when a funeral procession goes by, and virtually everybody in town is a Christian.
You might be Methodist or Baptist, Church of Christ, Pentecostal, maybe Seventh-day Adventist or Catholic.
If you're one of those last two groups, though, it's a little iffy on whether the community would accept you as a true Christian or not.
My mom had a salvation experience when she was a young child, and my dad had a salvation experience when he was a young adult.
And as a young conservative Christian couple, I think they were doing the best they could with what they had been taught to believe, the culture and community they grew up in, and what they believed to be true.
There was more than a decade age gap between me and my next older sibling, so I was born when my parents were a little bit older.
By the time I came along, my older siblings were preteens or teenagers, and my parents were dealing with what they described as rebellious spirits among my older siblings.
Looking back at it now with the knowledge that I have of the situation, I would probably describe it as typical teenage development and behavior.
But that's not how my parents viewed it, and that really led to them becoming a lot more conservative and protective with me.
My siblings had a mix of Christian school, public school, and homeschool for their educational career.
But my parents ended up feeling like the worldly, godless influence of the government school system and the people there had negatively impacted my siblings, and even the government school kids that we went to church with, they really felt like they were bad influences on my older siblings and led to a lot of this rebellion.
I did attend a Christian school for first grade, but I was homeschooled from second grade all the way through high school graduation.
Around this time, my parents also started looking for a new church with stricter conservative values.
So even though we lived in this very stereotypically conservative Christian town, my parents didn't think that it was quite conservative or Christian enough.
So when I was about seven years old, around the time I started homeschooling, my parents found a church that was about an hour away from our house.
And they decided we should start attending there because there were a lot of homeschool families.
This is the kind of town where you know your neighbors by name, you probably know their parents and grandparents, and you may be related to them somewhere down the line.
It's the kind of town where everybody pulls over to the side of the road to pay their respects when a funeral procession goes by, and virtually everybody in town is a Christian.
You might be Methodist or Baptist, Church of Christ, Pentecostal, maybe Seventh-day Adventist or Catholic.
If you're one of those last two groups, though, it's a little iffy on whether the community would accept you as a true Christian or not.
My mom had a salvation experience when she was a young child, and my dad had a salvation experience when he was a young adult.
And as a young conservative Christian couple, I think they were doing the best they could with what they had been taught to believe, the culture and community they grew up in, and what they believed to be true.
There was more than a decade age gap between me and my next older sibling, so I was born when my parents were a little bit older.
By the time I came along, my older siblings were preteens or teenagers, and my parents were dealing with what they described as rebellious spirits among my older siblings.
Looking back at it now with the knowledge that I have of the situation, I would probably describe it as typical teenage development and behavior.
But that's not how my parents viewed it, and that really led to them becoming a lot more conservative and protective with me.
My siblings had a mix of Christian school, public school, and homeschool for their educational career.
But my parents ended up feeling like the worldly, godless influence of the government school system and the people there had negatively impacted my siblings, and even the government school kids that we went to church with, they really felt like they were bad influences on my older siblings and led to a lot of this rebellion.
I did attend a Christian school for first grade, but I was homeschooled from second grade all the way through high school graduation.
Around this time, my parents also started looking for a new church with stricter conservative values.
So even though we lived in this very stereotypically conservative Christian town, my parents didn't think that it was quite conservative or Christian enough.
So when I was about seven years old, around the time I started homeschooling, my parents found a church that was about an hour away from our house.
And they decided we should start attending there because there were a lot of homeschool families.
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