Rejected by church and family, Sonoma County native finally finds peace

When they were children, the lives of Wylder Reinman, Julia Myers and Janie Stapleton were indistinguishable from the mission of Calvary Chapel Petaluma. The friends played horse in the sanctuary, galloping under the pews. They went to services or Bible study most nights of the week and, because they were home-schooled, had few friends outside the church.

None of them could imagine an existence outside of Calvary Chapel.

Today, Stapleton is a graphic artist whose next publication will be about leaving the church and coming to terms with the pain it inflicted. Myers is studying psychology in college; she plans to work as a therapist specializing in religious trauma. And Reinman, more than a decade after being cast from their family and community, is thriving, with a loving partner and a recently purchased home in West Hollywood.

“I was told a lie, that there is only sin and death outside of the church,” said Reinman, who uses the pronouns they, them and their. “My lived experience is that there is a beautiful, loving world waiting for those who are ready to step into it.”

Taking that step was one of the hardest things Reinman has ever done. And now they want other kids who feel oppressed by rigid evangelical environments to know the problem isn’t them.

Reinman reached out to The Press Democrat a few months ago and offered to tell their story of escape and renewal. They know it comes with emotional risk. Their father is Ross Reinman, the pastor of Calvary Chapel The Rock, a flourishing Santa Rosa church that he spun off from the Petaluma site.

Responding to an interview request from The Press Democrat, Ross Reinman emailed a brief comment.

“We love our son Wylder and adore his partner Marco,” Reinman wrote. “For years we have enjoyed loving interactions together with them, as they are a welcomed, integral and precious part of our lives. Nothing will ever change that.”

Wylder Reinman acknowledges much of that. They know their parents love them, and Ross and Barb Reinman have indeed begun to welcome Marco to family events. Wylder hasn’t given up on a full reconciliation. But they feel compelled to recount the damage done by their upbringing.

“There will be a how-could-you, because we’re talking about this,” Wylder Reinman said. “But I’m no longer protecting or honoring people who wouldn’t show up to my wedding, who are actively making it difficult for queer people to exist in the world. That theology is wrong. It hurt me, and it’s continuing to hurt people.”

Though their experiences varied, Reinman, Myers and Stapleton all described an atmosphere of control and isolation, in which girls were chastened to be subservient, boys were held to a strict ideal of masculinity and everyone was taught that outside the church lay a frightening world of decadence and chaos.

“The entire thing is suppressing your own intuition,” Reinman said. “That’s what you’re taught from the age of 5 or 6. You’re inherently evil, and you need the blood of Jesus Christ to get to heaven. Whenever there’s a thought that church is wrong, or heaven and hell don’t exist, that’s the devil working in your life.”

The Pew Research Institute’s Religious Landscape Study, last conducted in 2014, indicated 25.4% of Americans identified as evangelical Christians — more than any other individual religious denomination, and more than all of those who don’t identify with a faith.

Certainly, many American evangelicals are loving and open and tolerant. But many who have abandoned churches like Calvary Chapel or who study fundamentalist religion insist there’s a branch of the movement that is particularly rigid and hurtful.

“If there were a focus on anti-oppression, I would be so supportive of any evangelizing,” said Araya Baker, an educator, journalist and commentator who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in counselor education. “But because that liberatory element is totally absent, I can’t get behind it. I use the term ‘fundamentalism’ specifically because I want to be clear I’m not against religion, or any particular faith. I’m against how it’s weaponized in a way that is inhumane.”

Baker, who is now based in State College, Pennsylvania, was introduced to the concept of religious trauma through his work with LGBTQ+ youth. He visited drop-in shelters, crisis hotlines and organizations providing services for the homeless, and over and over again he heard from kids who had been ostracized by their faith communities.

It was by no means limited to evangelical Christians. The damage looked the same for people from other religions, including traditional Muslim or Orthodox Jewish communities.

“That’s the most ironic part,” Baker said. “Religious fundamentalists see themselves as very separate and distinct. But the emotional and psychological constructs underpinning their belief systems are the same.”

In a recent phone interview, Baker ticked off several threads that, in his experience, course through fundamentalist religions. He cited apocalyptic paranoia, an us-vs.-them worldview and authoritarian leadership. Each point echoed earlier conversations with Wylder Reinman, Stapleton and Myers.

Apocalyptic paranoia?

“I thought about hell every single night,” Stapleton said. “I still think about it. It was a very real place. I thought we should all be panicking. Like at the grocery store, it was like, ‘People we know are going to hell. How can you be shopping for bananas?’ That’s the sort of toxic culture I think about.”

Us against them?

“It’s so insular,” Reinman said. “You are not allowed friends who are not in the church. You’re taught to be extremely wary of the world, which is a euphemism for wickedness.”

Authoritarian leadership?

“When someone presses the authority of the pastor — he’s accountable to no one but God himself,” Stapleton said. “That’s in the church bylaws. Anything they say or do is the final say.”

That sense of hierarchy also has a tendency to enter evangelical homes, in what Araya Baker called “the dehumanization of children.”

Stapleton’s family life was good, she said. In fact, her parents often acted as a shield between the children and church leaders. That was not the case for Reinman.

At their house, Ross practiced what he called “ears-down parenting,” Wylder said, a reference to a dog’s submissive posture, which children should be conditioned to emulate.

“I called my dad not long ago and said, when you hit me so hard that the wooden spoon broke, that was abuse,” Wylder recalled. “My dad’s response was, ‘You’re 30 years old and you’re calling me about something that happened when you were 14? What’s wrong with you? Let it go.’ But this is my first time talking about it, and I won’t let it go. It damaged me.”

It was especially hard for a buoyant, expressive child like Wylder Reinman, who lived to sing and lead worship services at Calvary Chapel.

“(They were) the best,” said Myers, who knew Reinman from the time they were 5 years old. “(They were) this sweet, kind, sensitive soul. And (they) was like a magnet. (They were) drawn to people, and people were drawn to (them). (They) had this personality that was so tender and sweet and goofy. I have a 7-year-old son who reminds me so much of (them).”

Reinman was known as P.J. then. Wylder is their chosen name.

The Reinmans first joined Calvary Chapel Petaluma, where Ross was an associate pastor, then moved to start Calvary Chapel Sebastopol when Wylder was in middle school. The church rented tiny New Thought Hall there, and later expanded and became Calvary Chapel The Rock in Santa Rosa. Services there now often bring in more than 200 people.

Wylder Reinman began singing at The Rock, and once they learned to play the guitar, started leading worship. It was a happy childhood, especially with a light home schooling regimen that largely consisted of reading scripture or books about Christian martyrs.

“Having community, youth group, summer camps, that was the best time in my life,” Reinman said. “And I loved the spiritual practice of Christianity, of being able to deprive myself for Christ. Any darkness was an internal battle, and not to be talked about.”

The shadow deepened when Reinman began to mature into their sexuality.

“I started to realize I was not growing out of my femininity,” Reinman said. “That this is just who I am. I started to notice my dad make fun of someone’s girlie voice in youth group. And I started to stand up to my dad – because of course I was really standing up for myself, even though I wasn’t as feminine-presenting.”

At 19, Wylder Reinman got a job at a Starbucks on Farmers Lane, before being transferred to the location downtown that was then attached to Barnes & Noble. Improbably, it became their portal to a stable life. And their long-delayed source of sex education, courtesy of the gay co-workers who were patient with and accepting of them.

“Every time I experienced attraction to the same sex, I felt bad about it,” Reinman said. “I saw these people who were happy and fulfilled, and something was not adding up. I’d be leading worship, and I would just start bawling. I made the choice eventually to follow my intuition instead of this hellfire doctrine.”

Reinman came out to their parents. Ross responded by kicking them out of the church, and out of the house.

“I really thought they would choose Wylder over anything else,” Myers said. “But it wasn’t true. And to see so many adults I grew up with take the side of the parents, I lost hope for that church.”

Reinman was suddenly homeless. That might not be a huge challenge to some 19-year-olds. But Reinman, cocooned in an insular environment their whole life, had little sense of independence and almost no contacts outside of Calvary Chapel. They received a couple timely offers of a couch, and didn’t let on that they had nowhere else to go.

It has taken them years to find equilibrium. But they have. And they want other closeted evangelical kids to know it’s possible.

That’s the main reason they contacted The Press Democrat, which previously had chronicled Calvary Chapel The Rock’s open defiance of Sonoma County’s COVID-related health restrictions, and how it may have contributed to Ross Reinman’s brush with death after he had been infected with the coronavirus.

Wylder Reinman now teaches chorus at South Pasadena Middle School. It is their “mission,” they said, to let students know they are safe in the world, regardless of the sexual identities they are forming.

On the wall of Reinman’s classroom is a poster that Stapleton illustrated. It’s a ram in high heels, and it’s captioned, “I’m learning to express myself.”

“We call it the gay ram,” Reinman said, smiling broadly on a Zoom call. “I’ll be like, your assignment is underneath the gay ram. I’m surfacing it, because I needed someone to be gay, and normal, and sane, and loving, to let me know there is a pathway forward for me.”

A lot of adolescents seem to need that.

Service providers reported a greater number of LGBTQ+ youth experiencing homelessness than straight youth, according to a 2015 study by UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. The Center for American Progress indicated significantly higher rates of alcohol and intravenous drug use among queer kids, and those youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide, according to a survey that appeared in the Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report in 2020.

Reinman’s relationship with their parents is complicated. They are not estranged. As Ross Reinman noted, he has invited Wylder and Marco to dinners, and Wylder admits their father treats both with more respect these days.

But Wylder Reinman considers that a bare minimum, and they demand more from the beloved pastor of Calvary Chapel The Rock and his wife, Barb, the women’s ministry director there.

“Of course, if they apologize, that would be great,” Wylder said. “But what it would actually take to restore our relationship would be to denounce hatred from the pulpit, and to denounce the way they treat marginalized communities.”

That feels like a monumental prayer for Reinman to utter. Then again, they know their Bible as well as anyone, and they’ve had prayers answered before.

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.