Episode #38
Growing Up on the Sex Offender Registry: A Pastor's Daughter's Story (Kate Johnson)
Kate Johnson (she/her) is a writer, poet, and former pastor's daughter who joins us this week to talk about growing up in the PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) during the family values movement, and how a childhood built on obedience, arbitrary rules, and hierarchy shaped her relationship to safety, faith, and her own body. Kate opens up about her father's arrest for child sexual abuse material when she was nine years old, an event the church minimized as a "pornography addiction", and what it was like to live for fifteen years with her family's address on the sex offender registry. She talks candidly about the parentification, isolation, and financial instability that followed, and why she believes the conditions surrounding cases like this one deserve more attention than they get. We also dig into purity culture's failure to teach consent, Kate's experience of a non-consensual first kiss, and how discovering her bisexuality in college became one of the most confusing (and eventually healing) parts of her deconstruction. Kate shares how she found language for her queerness despite growing up homeschooled through a Doug Wilson-influenced curriculum called Classical Conversations, and how genuine friendships with queer people outside her sheltered upbringing shifted everything. From there, we talk grief, estrangement, and reconciliation which includes the personal ritual Kate created on a lakeshore to let go of who her father used to be, her work with Reiki and somatic therapy, and why she firmly believes "forgiveness isn't for the person who harmed you." This is a conversation about surviving a pressure-cooker environment built for abuse, reclaiming a body and identity that evangelicalism tried to own, and slowly learning that you were inherently good the whole time. In this episode: Growing up Presbyterian during the "family values" era Her father's arrest for CSAM and 15 years on the sex offender registry How the church reframed abuse as "addiction" Purity culture and her first non-consensual kiss Discovering bisexuality in college Homeschooling with Doug Wilson-adjacent curriculum (Classical Conversations) Estrangement, grief rituals, and choosing herself over reconciliation Advice for anyone deconstructing their faith and identity Find Kate on Substack ( Quips and Confessionals ) and across all platforms @KateJohnsonWrites . New episodes every Wednesday.
