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Confessions of a Bougie, Ex-Christian, Black Woman

It’s time to confess. I think bad religion was getting in the way of me living my best life…

HealedandHealing
7 min readSep 26, 2023
AI image of a luxurious and happy black woman

As I have deconstructed Christianity (as this is the primary focus of my page), there has been a trickle of additional aspects of my life I have learned to not only deconstruct, but reconstruct.

There’s several opportunities for an identity crisis when deconstructing a faith you held for over 20 years. What I did not know would come with the journey, is the additional identity evolutions that would result in embracing some of the very things I feared, due to a refreshed perspective of myself, outside of the box of religion.

For me, that was to reconstruct my view of the word — bougie: marked by a concern for wealth, possessions, and respectability.

Recently I was watching some YouTube videos discussing the significant lack of representation of the bougie black woman. The woman, who, regardless of where she grew up, found herself being called “bougie” for being well dressed, well spoken, and overall, generally well put together.

She typically was raised with money, or a little more than her peers, maybe she was a product of a single parent home, or had both parents in a community of peers that were raised…

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