Straight to Hell: Memoir of an Ex-Evangelical Pastor - Hardcover

by John Wesley Wilson (Author)

John was a pastor, a husband, and a father-until the secret he'd spent a lifetime suppressing came crashing to the surface.

Raised in poverty and shaped by abuse, Wilson found refuge in the Pentecostal church, where holiness demanded obedience and salvation required surrender. But when his sexual orientation emerged at age twelve, he was thrust into an impossible war between a faith he couldn't abandon and a truth he couldn't change.

Believing that God would heal him if he stayed faithful, he married young, became a father, and rose to the pulpit-preaching a gospel that condemned the very core of who he was. A decade later, after removing his beloved brother from life support so he could die of AIDS, the foundation of Wilson's carefully constructed life collapsed.

The faith that once anchored him became a prison of shame and self-erasure. Telling his wife the truth shattered everything. He lost his marriage, his ministry, and the identity he'd spent a lifetime constructing. Cast out by the church he once served, he fled-and begged God to let him die.

But death never came. Instead, he began the slow, excruciating work of becoming who he truly was.

Straight to Hell is a memoir of collapse and reconstruction-from religious indoctrination to spiritual authenticity, from shame to self-acceptance, from exile to homecoming. It's a reckoning with American Evangelicalism and the systems that demand silence in exchange for belonging. And it's a love story-of a father reclaiming his daughters, of a man discovering grace outside the church, and of finally being loved without pretense.

Both harrowing and redemptive, Straight to Hell speaks to anyone who's had to lose their world to find themselves. It's a raw, compassionate exploration of what happens when faith and truth collide-and what it means to stop running from yourself and step into the life that's been waiting.