What's the Difference Between a Heretic and an Infidel?
How Laestadianism Turns Families Into Strangers
Growing up as the youngest of 9 in a Laestadian family meant walking a tightrope of conditional love. One wrong step, one deviation from the approved path, and you plummet from beloved to invisible.
I had the privilege of being the baby. Mom doted on me. My sisters argued about who would braid my hair and with whom I would sit at church. When I wanted to play dress-up, they preened me with all the fanciness in their closets. I also became deeply involved in their growing families - changing diapers, babysitting regularly, helping with household tasks. I treasured being so needed and included in raising the next generation, even if it meant I was constantly busy during my teen years.
But the minute I decided that their god wasn't mine, all of that changed.
Suddenly, I was a pariah. Over the course of time, I was shunned quietly and completely. The same people who had cherished me as their baby sister now treated me like I had never existed.
This is what Laestadianism does. It's a faith built on the idea that walking away means you've chosen darkness over light, death over life. There's no middle ground, no room for different paths. You're either in or you're out, saved or damned, family or stranger.
This pattern of exclusion didn't start with me. It's been going on for decades.
The word "heretic" originally came from the Greek word hairesis, which simply meant "choice" - the ability to choose for yourself what to believe. But once Christianity appropriated the term, making your own choices about faith became dangerous. Throughout history, from the Spanish Inquisition to the burning of Joan of Arc in 1431, heretics were literally killed for daring to think differently. When you call someone a heretic, you're invoking centuries of violence against people who disagreed with religious authority.
I remember when my dad told me that Muslims believe non-Muslims are "infidels" and that they supposedly want to kill infidels. I reminded him that his faith taught me to call people "heretics," and so who's better in the end? He just looked at me like I had turned on floodlights. The parallel was too obvious to ignore.
In the early 1970s, Laestadianism went through a split they called "the heresy." Families were torn apart for the rest of their lives, turning siblings into complete strangers. I have first cousins that I have never met because they became heretics.
When our family moved from the farm in Maple Lake to Cokato, I arrived with a pre-conceived reputation as a "south finn" because I went to the Laestadian church south of town. The heretics went to the church north of town.
I got to know the children of those heretics. I'm friends with many of them today. Turns out, they were just regular kids whose parents had asked the wrong questions or disagreed with the wrong leader at the wrong time.
An entire generation of children who will never know their own blood relatives because of a religious disagreement their parents had before they were even born.
And it's happening again.
The Wolf Lake and Minneapolis congregations were kicked out in 2022. According to someone who left, it started with conflict and bad leadership, leading to years of meetings and concerns. Those who wouldn't go along were eventually isolated, labeled as opposition to God's Kingdom, and voted out.
What kills me is that families are being torn apart again, and for what? Some nuanced interpretation of doctrine that probably boils down to whether you can wear perfume or how outwardly you should pray or which gender gets to interpret a particular Bible verse.
Children who grew up together, played together, shared holidays together, will now cross the street to avoid each other. Cousins will become strangers. Siblings will act like their brothers and sisters never existed.
The pattern never changes. Disagree with leadership, get labeled as opposition, get voted out, lose your entire community overnight.
This is what happens when any faith teaches that it holds the exclusive key to salvation. Laestadianism's leadership rigidly teaches that all other Christian groups, including other Laestadian branches, are heretical and have no place in the Kingdom of Heaven.
When you believe you're the only ones with the truth, everyone else becomes expendable. Including your own family.
The cruelest part is how quickly it happens. One day you're beloved, integral, part of the fabric of the community. The next day you're a cautionary tale, someone whose name gets whispered as an example of what happens when you stray from the path.
I watch this pattern repeat itself and I understand why so many people in this faith live in constant anxiety. You're always one question, one doubt, one moment of independent thinking away from losing everything. Your family, your friends, your entire social structure, your identity as one of the chosen few.
This is what growing up Laestadian was like for me. A lot of fear. The fear of being found out. The fear of thinking the wrong thoughts. The fear of asking the wrong questions. The fear of being labeled and cast out from everyone you've ever loved.
It's a system designed to keep people compliant through terror. Not the terror of hellfire, but the terror of losing your entire world if you step out of line.
The saddest part is watching people get caught in this system. People who can be gracious and generous with strangers, coworkers, and neighbors. People who hand out Christmas cards to their UPS driver and remember the birthdays of their secretaries at work, but can't pick up the phone to check on a family member who's struggling.
Why? Because strangers can't challenge their worldview. Strangers don't remind them of the complexity of faith and family and choosing your own path. Strangers are safe because they don't know enough to ask dangerous questions.
But family members who've walked away? We're dangerous because we remember what it was like on the inside, and we're willing to talk about it.
This is the cost of a faith built on fear and maintained by silence. Eventually, some people get tired of walking on eggshells. Eventually, they realize that the thing they're protecting by staying quiet isn't worth protecting.
A faith that turns families into strangers over doctrinal differences isn't sacred. A system that teaches people to fear their own thoughts isn't holy. A community that can only exist by excluding everyone who asks uncomfortable questions isn't actually a community at all.
It's a house of cards held together by fear and maintained by silence.
I choose to stop being silent. The faith I was raised in teaches that this makes me an "unbeliever." Apparently, that's different from being a "heretic," though the practical result is exactly the same.
I want the children growing up in this system to have a different choice than the one I faced. Maybe they won't have to choose between their family and their freedom to think.
But that can only happen if some of us speak up. Join me.
Speaking of systems that teach people to disappear—this week's episode of The Silence Between Hello: Uncovering Dad: "The Sediment of Rejection," explores how the world taught my father to make himself smaller. From military rejection due to his cleft palate to church men who mocked his speech, Dad learned that survival meant being useful without being noticeable. Episode 3 excavates the layers of rejection that accumulate like sediment, shaping someone into believing their voice is a liability.
The same faith that taught me to fear being labeled an unbeliever or a heretic also taught Dad that his difference made him defective. Different systems, same lesson: conform or disappear.
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