Choosing Compassion Over Coercion in the New Year

Christmas is over, and the new year is just around the corner. In this final week of December, the volume of hustle-culture rhetoric gets turned all the way up. Television and social media ads promise endless ways to reinvent yourself, most of them focused on losing weight and looking better. It’s so easy to get swept up in messages that make us feel like we’re already behind before the year has even begun.

When Hustle Culture Puts on a Halo

If you’ve spent much time in Evangelical culture, you know this rhetoric carries over into Sunday sermons, where pastors use spiritual language and coercive control to force people into a mold God didn’t create.

Of course, they use the right words. They claim that it’s about health, holiness, and honoring God with your body. I remember how every new year in my former church started with a call to the congregation to join in a “Daniel Fast.” It sounded so spiritual. Dedicate yourself to prayer and breakthrough, let go of what distracts you from God.

But many of us recognized how our pastors prioritized appearance. The Daniel Fast was just a convenient way to get everyone to go on a collective diet. It wasn’t uncommon to hear body-shaming comments from the pulpit or see them in social media posts. We all knew what the real message was, even if we couldn’t articulate it yet: make yourself smaller, look the part, and stay “healthy” enough to serve without complaint. These kinds of messages decimated my self-worth, and I know I’m not alone.

I never participated in the Daniel Fast because it felt like sacrilege to me. Using a spiritual practice to lose weight seemed to defeat the purpose. But, I also never felt free to say so because I worried that people would think it was because I lacked self-control, hadn’t fully surrendered to Jesus, or wasn’t serious about my faith.

Whenever I was at church, I would overhear conversations about food and weight loss, even while they continued to claim the fast was a spiritual discipline. We even had “life groups” where the only goal was to exercise and get fit.

The Bible I read says the purpose of faith is to seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.

The Bible I read says the purpose of faith is to seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. But in our church, the focus seemed to be more about looking good and enduring mistreatment in the name of holiness.

When Self-Abandonment is Called “Holy”

When church leaders use the last sermon of the year to speak about health and discipleship but treat congregants like projects to be managed and critiqued, New Year’s resolutions can feel threatening. My nervous system still remembers what being part of that culture cost me, and I’ve been slowly learning how to be gentle with myself about what I endured, rather than shaming myself for it.

I’m not sure whether American culture influences Evangelical culture, or vice versa, but both are obsessed with crafting the perfect image. In church, families are expected to look perfect, and volunteers, who go from full-time work, school, or parenting straight into hours of unpaid labor, are expected to smile and look fresh and energetic.

This kind of system rewards people who are driven, perfectionistic, and outgoing, while punishing those whose bodies, lives, or experiences don’t fit the mold.

This kind of system rewards people who are driven, perfectionistic, and outgoing, while punishing those whose bodies, lives, or experiences don’t fit the mold.

They talk about health, but they rarely care about your actual well-being. It’s about being able to overextend yourself, work until you’re exhausted, and still appear put-together and joyful. When I was an 18-year-old newlywed, a relative chastised my then-husband and me for taking a Sunday off after an especially tiring week. He told us we could sleep when we were dead, and this is a message I continued to hear, in different ways, throughout the next 22 years of church involvement. In environments like this, any hint of weakness (chronic illness, depression, trauma responses, or simply needing rest) is treated as a spiritual problem to solve rather than a human reality to honor.

A church culture that prioritizes your image over your humanity can feel cold and narcissistic. You are nothing more than a tool, used to build the church and make the pastor more money. They’ll tolerate your pain, but only if you mask it and turn it into a testimony that makes you the cautionary tale and the church the savior.

My deconstruction journey has shown me that much of what they taught me about God and faithfulness centered around abandoning myself. If anyone from my old church read this, they would probably respond with something like, “Of course it is. After all, the Bible says, ‘He must increase, and I must decrease.’” (I lived in that world long enough to know the lingo.)

When Faith Interprets Survival as Failure

Maybe you’ve heard similar messages, but if you look more closely, you’ll start to realize how often pastors use proof-texting and spiritual manipulation to guilt us into ignoring our body’s danger signals, glossing over our trauma, and keeping ourselves acceptable and productive regardless of the cost to our mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being.

I have lived with PTSD and C‑PTSD for a long time, but it took several years of deconstruction to finally recognize it for what it was. In the meantime, I joined others in shaming myself for “failing.” I beat myself up for not accomplishing as much as other women. I was overwhelmed, traumatized, and hurting, and no one seemed to care. So I kept going, kept trying, kept smiling, all while feeling like a fraud.

Even after I finally broke and began deconstructing (though I didn’t have a name for it then), I still approached the new year with a spiritualized hope that everything would shift: that a breakthrough would come, that God would intervene, that I would get organized, get healthy, and finally lose the weight that made me feel physically and emotionally worthless.

But eventually, I started to lay it all down.

The expectations. The need to prove myself. The defensiveness.

Now, I allow myself to feel the feelings – fatigue, sadness, grief, fear, anger – and all the emotions I once labeled as a lack of faith or discipline. I look at the new year with relief now, knowing I no longer have to pretend. I can be who I am, feel what I feel, and not punish myself for it.

Choosing Wholeness Over Coercion in the New Year

If you can relate to my story, it’s okay to stop pretending. You don’t have to drum up excitement for the new year if you’re struggling. You don’t have to punish yourself and call it sacrifice. You don’t have to hate your body and soul and call it conviction. And you don’t have to be coerced into a diet plan just because someone tells you it’s holy.

If you’ve left church culture behind, but still struggle to name what harmed you, it’s okay to say, “What they did to me caused real pain,” and you are allowed to begin healing from it.

If you’ve left church culture behind, but still struggle to name what harmed you, it’s okay to say, “What they did to me caused real pain,” and you are allowed to begin healing from it.

I truly believe that God is love. Real love doesn’t expect you to ignore your needs. It doesn’t equate starvation with holiness. It doesn’t throw you away the second you stop being useful. And love sits with you while you’re falling apart, without expecting you to hurry up and get over it.

That’s what I love about deconstruction. My deconstruction journey has made my faith more real. It has allowed me to ask questions and reject spiritual practices that demand self-abandonment.

Goals are important, and working toward something meaningful can be a healing, affirming practice. But New Year’s resolutions become harmful when religious leaders use them to coerce people in their care to conform to an accepted standard.

You do not owe anyone a New Year’s resolution.
You do not owe your former church proof that you still love Jesus.
You do not owe God a thinner body, a stricter schedule, or an impossibly cheerful attitude.

For some of us, the healthiest choice we can make this year is to say no. We are allowed to reject coercive control disguised as discipleship, to throw away the scale or block “wellness” content that keeps us wrapped up in shame, and to say no to commitments that require us to give more than we have.

This year, I intend to honor my body and my boundaries and stay true to myself. I will never again knowingly bind myself to any person or system that expects me to do otherwise.

If you have similar experiences, I invite you to move at your own pace, honor the truth of your story, and choose what supports your healing rather than striving to meet someone else’s expectations. No matter how old you are, you are allowed to start over and create a life that does not harm you. You are allowed to be whole on your own terms.