We were pushed to give a lot of money to the church. My dad ended up losing a lot of his own personal finances. At one point, he was unemployed, and we lost our home. My parents couldn’t afford groceries. My dad spent the last money he had on a donation to a televangelist.
I don’t think my parents were able to realize how much that environment impacted my brother, sister, and me. The youngest memory I have of that church, and my brother and sister would say the same, is of my mind being dominated by fear. The messages of the church were always putting me down, making me feel guilty, making me feel afraid. One of the things that was really hammered into all of us at every age level, right from the time we were little, was the evangelical notion “Why didn’t you tell me about Jesus?” There was this strong idea in the church that we needed to constantly tell our friends about Jesus, trying to get them to more than just believe. Because if they were Catholic, that wasn’t good enough. The Catholics were going to hell. The Baptists were lukewarm. We were trained to be little evangelical missionaries.
I had a dream when I was six years old that friends of mine from grade school were burning in hell. In the dream, they called to me, asking, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I also dreamt about the Apocalypse and worried about the Rapture. At any given point during our childhood, if my brother, sister, or I couldn’t find other members of the family, we would worry that the Rapture had happened and we had been left behind because we weren’t good enough Christians.
Leaders in our church often talked about how, if we were real Christians, not only did we need to be telling everybody about Jesus, but we also needed to be ready to be tortured and killed for our faith. If somebody were to, hypothetically, put a gun to our head, we would need to say that we believed in Christ. That was really traumatizing, particularly as a small child.
Our church put on “Heaven’s Gate and Hell’s Flames” every year. That’s an evangelistic drama, a series of skits where different characters in it are unexpectedly killed. It’s a good example of how fear and guilt permeated the culture within the church. One of the scenes that I remember the most, which fit in perfectly with the dogma of the church, highlighted the evils of abortion. In the skit, there’s a girl who goes to a clinic to get an abortion. She is strapped down while she screams, yelling, “No! I don’t want an abortion anymore!” Doctors would then rip the baby from her womb as she screamed horribly. The character playing the devil would dance around and talk about how he loved killing little babies. The girl dies as a result of a complication with the procedure and is cast into hell. In another scene, there’s an atheist who dies, and when that character is pulled into hell, the whole church would roar with laughter. A hatred of atheism was commonplace in the church. I believe people there really accepted these scenes as truth. The church is still putting on these skits, with children watching.
I assume that my parents didn’t realize just how bad those experiences were for my siblings and me. I fully believed, for example, that demons were real. We frequently talked in church about demonic possession and demons coming into your house and attacking you in the night. My father reinforced this idea. He had what I believe now to be a hypnagogic episode where he felt that a demon was attacking him. I prayed to Jesus to protect me at night, and my brother and sister did the same. I was quite influenced by one particular Bible passage, Revelations 3:16, “So, because you are lukewarm — neither hot nor cold — I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” This drove my evangelism.
I think my church was also damaging to me regarding my sexuality. Their teachings were especially hard on women. We were told that we couldn’t hold hands with men. One of the things that was touched on in church, especially in youth group and Sunday school, is the idea that a girl’s body is a perfectly wrapped package for her future husband. That metaphor was used a lot. If you held hands, you were pulling the ribbon. If you kissed somebody, you were tattering the paper. Even seemingly innocent sexual acts were, in fact, acts that were sullying yourself for your future partner, and who would want that? Who would want a gift with the bow removed and the paper tattered? Nobody.
Human sexuality was never discussed in a positive light. If anyone began to behave sexually, we were taught, their actions would lead them on a downward slope that would lead to wanting more and more and more. Such behavior would lead to pornography, which might lead to murder. Not only did I have to be pure, but I was told that if I was sexual at all, there was a chance that I would end up raping children. That was pretty damaging for us as kids, so much so that my brother has made art about it as a way to try to work through what he had been taught. He has had to try to deconstruct ideas in his head so that he can try to have a normal human sex life. I was 24 before I got over a lot of that, and I think many of my peers in the church had similar experiences. It takes a lot to stop feeling shame and fear for perfectly healthy behavior.
Still, during my youth, I did always feel like I had a relationship with God. I felt like He was listening to my every thought. Did I love it? I probably would have said that I did at the time, but I also didn’t know a different life. There was a degree of love. I think the philosopher Daniel Dennett is right that religions are human systems that are designed to provide love and attachment to sustain membership and group cohesion. I didn’t understand how there could be a world with love or beauty without God. I am, however, a curious person, which is eventually what began my break from the church.
Losing my faith was unique in that it happened suddenly. One of the aspects of being a teenager in my church was attending training sessions to prep for having evolution taught in school. At the time, I believed that the Earth was less than 10,000 years old. I believed that dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark. I had been given pseudoscientific explanations for these beliefs. The literature that I read was always Christian, and I thought it came from authority. I decided not to take biology in high school because I thought biologists were stupid. I did, however, take a class on ancient history. We briefly covered evolution. I argued with my teacher, and every now and then, he said things that I hadn’t heard about. I wanted to have really good arguments to disprove the theory of evolution, so I would go online to see what evolutionists were arguing to defend their position. I wanted to come up with even better arguments. I found some websites written by secular humanists and atheists that debunked creationism; they were persuasive. I didn’t understand all of the specifics right away, but I soon realized that I had a problem because some of what I had taught at church wasn’t true.
I was shocked, and my beliefs changed almost immediately. Many people claim that you choose what you believe, and sometimes that’s true, but that’s not always the case. I had a philosophy professor in university who, as an example, showed us quarter and put it in his pocket and asked, “Does anyone not believe that I have a quarter in my pocket?” It was very hard to believe that he didn’t. I think that’s very similar to how my beliefs about religion and God changed. There was simply no denying that I had been grossly misinformed. I had many cascading problems from the way I had understood God and the authority of my church.
At the same time, I was also reading a lot of Paul in the Bible because I was reading daily devotionals. I was having a difficult time with how hard Paul is on women. For example in 1st Timothy 2:12, he says, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.” A lot of the misogynistic lines in the Bible, in the New Testament, come from Paul. Doubts began as I started to learn about evolution, and Paul only added to that doubt. I was really scared, too scared to tell anyone.