What I Learned in Church

Eighteen years in evangelical churches, to the best of my recollection

Dec 04, 2024

Hello, dear reader! This is part of a forming series detailing my upbringing in fundamentalist churches. You can read the first essay here. If you have a background similar to mine, parts of this might be hard to read. I hope you will check in with your body and step away if needed. Or comment, if you need to process the past. If you don’t have this background and any of this is confusing to you, I would love to hear your questions!

I grew up believing we were the real Christians. We were the good people. Everyone who didn’t come to our church was wrong and bad. We were the ones getting it right.

I was seventeen before it ever occurred to me to ask what kind of Christians we were, if there was a name for us. I was told we were Pentecostal. That was all the detail I got. Now I know the churches my family attended were Pentecostal and Charismatic evangelical churches. And I would now say those churches were white, fundamentalist Christian nationalist churches. These were the churches that would go on to help elect Trump in 2016 and 2024.

My immediate and extended family attended three different churches from the time I was born until I left the evangelical church at eighteen. They were all continuations of the same church in a sense, as we were part of a group of people (including several elders) that moved from church to church after folks got mad at each pastor.

This is what these churches and this religion looked like to me as a child. This is what I learned there.

꩜The Vibe

Our church appeared to be an island in a sea of heathens and heretics. We were unmatched in our correctness. The church where I spent the majority of my childhood was an Assemblies of God and I now understand there are other Assemblies of God churches. At the time I thought we must be the only one. We didn’t do things with other churches in the area or seem to have any creed or governing body to refer to. It was just us, on our own, with our Bibles, being right.

Churches with denominations attached to there names were not pure enough, it seemed, for us to fraternize with or visit. Not the Lutherans, not the Catholics, nobody. Growing up, I got the impression that these were Very Bad Churches, the denominations. We were “non-denominational,” I knew that much and that was much better. Why? I didn’t know. Maybe something like the denominations added a bunch of stuff to the religion. We were “Bible believing” Christians. We were just following the gospel and word of God! We didn’t add anything at all! We took God at His Word, as it was printed on the page! In English! Just like God intended!

Only what was written in the Bible was acceptable, so I learned nothing about church history. It seemed our faith had very little backstory.

What I knew is that we had to go to church every Sunday no matter what. Bonus points for going to other, mid-week events.1 We had to dress nicely to go to church…because. Every Sunday was the same, unless there was a visiting pastor or a prophet-like dude (I can’t remember what we called them). The order of events was thus: there was worship, which might seem to go on for a very long time and included powerpoint slides with the words for the songs. There was offering, then a sermon, then a worship song and a prayer to close us out. Some Sundays people would cry, call out, go to the altar and grovel, wave their hands, wave flags, “laying on” hands, and maybe even fall down.

More on the falling down soon. As for waving hands: many adults waved or raised their hands, either all the way up or like a little half-raise. I didn’t know why people were doing these things and I was dreading the day I became an adult and was expected to do stuff with my hands too. But I also felt bad about not wanting to raise my hands. I thought God would be mad and less inclined to let me into heaven if I didn’t raise my hands, at least one of them. I think I did it once in Sunday school when people’s eyes were closed because I hoped that that would count for something.

Our pastor was of course a man. It never crossed my mind that it wouldn’t be a man. I suppose if I ever thought I about it I just believed it had to be a man. He would preach about whatever he wanted to—I mean, whatever the Lord put on his heart. He would use various pieces of scripture, often pieces from different parts of the Bible in one sermon. Sometimes he would shout at us. Sometimes he would say things that were terrifying, like that God could read our thoughts and would judge us for all of them. Mostly I found the pastor boring though. He wasn’t ever a good speaker and his stories were dull. But the pastor could do and say whatever he wanted and I felt compelled to listen. He was “God’s mouthpiece” for little ‘ole us: the congregation, the sheep.

In our church, women led music, did snacks, and ran the nursery and Sunday school. That was all. When I think of these women I think of goldfish crackers, dirty diapers and construction paper.

All through the service there were a lot of long, meandering, stream of consciousness prayers from the pastor, worship leader and other men. You never knew how long anything was going to take and they were so boring. But prayer was essential of course. We needed to be doing it all the time and as far as I could tell it was like listing out what we wanted and needed, interspersed with praises to God. Prayer was like the real Magic 8 ball too—we could get answers from God that way if only we listened well enough. For years I was tortured that I hadn’t heard God’s voice. Maybe I hadn’t “invited Jesus into my heart” well enough to hear God. So I tried doing that again and again since the first time I had felt nothing.

All in all the church service was both rote and you never knew how the “Holy spirit” was going to “lead” people. There was no liturgy, a term that I didn’t learn until I was over the age of twenty-five. There were no recited prayers, time honored rituals, ceremonies, or structured hymns. I had the sense as a kid that those things were bad and what the bad people (like Catholics) did. Ritual in particular was evil. So for us everything needed to be modern, extemporaneous. It came from the Holy Spirit. We might sing the chorus of a song six times back to back, each time building. But even as a kid I was wondering what exactly the Holy Spirit was up to because it looked a bit chaotic.

In this church I learned a lot about dark forces at work in the world. There was a lot of talk about the power of sin, the Devil, Hell, spiritual forces, spiritual warfare, getting or being saved, and the end of the world/When Jesus Comes Back. There were a lot of altar calls—times when you could go to the front of the church and be saved. It seemed like there was an altar call three weeks out of the month and there was immense pressure to join in.

I learned that everyone needed to get baptized ASAP. Our one church had a pool built under the stage for in-church baptisms, which occurred every so often. They could take the cover off the pool, fill it up and be ready to baptize folks for the whole congregation to watch. The people getting baptized would dress in a long, oversized t shirt and loose gym shorts. The pastor would pray, the person would declare their faith in God, then they would pinch their nose shut and the pastor would CHUCK THEM BACKWARDS UNDER THE WATER. WHAT?! I’m still baffled. I could never understand why people were tipped backwards under the water and why God required this. Like a child anthropologist I watched this scene with a level of removal. What strange behavior these people engage in. Why do they do this? What do they believe this accomplishes?

Another thing that confused me: speaking in tongues. Well actually, speaking in tongues terrified me.

If you don’t know what speaking in tongues is, first of all: congrats. Second: it’s when God causes people to speak in languages that are not their own for purposes which are still not clear to me. Except that it’s not a language at all, it’s gibberish and it generally sounded the same no matter who was doing it. There was a clear style of speaking in tongues that sounded like someone pretending, poorly, to speak Arabic. “Ah shum du la, hab du la, uhndula.” Like that, phonetically. This was muttered or proclaimed over and over with some variation as the person likely had their eyes closed, maybe there hands in the air, swaying. It was like watching someone be possessed or cast a spell or both at the same time. Which was confusing because being possessed and casting spells were things were supposed to be against. (More on that later.) This could all be done quietly on your own or loudly for the whole church to hear.

I’m still amazed that speaking in tongues freaked me out even as it was all I knew. I was raised to believe it was normal and good—turns out, Pentecostals believe speaking in tongues is a necessary piece of evidence to show that someone has been “born again.” (Another thing I didn’t know until recently.) And yet it was never normal to me. It was alarming but I thought I had to believe it and love it. It was a message from God. Cryptic, but from God.

In our church, there was also—on special Sundays, for special people—getting knocked over by the Holy Spirit. Yes, knocked over. That really scared me.

For those who don’t know (again, I’m happy for you) it’s what it says on the tin. People just randomly fell over due to “the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit just made people’s knees not work, just because! Except it wasn’t usually random. The person in question might be getting prayed over and the expectation was that they would fall down. That was the expectation of everyone in the room, and I know that because there was a set up for it. Someone would be standing behind them ready to catch them. They might be getting prayed over by a pastor or a visiting prophet-like-guy, and then BOOM, they were down and we were supposed to be happy for them. What a sign of God’s grace and favor!

I suppose people sometimes just fell down on their own with no one to catch them, but I don’t really remember that happening. You would figure if that did happen evangelical churches would be well known as locations where a lot of head injuries take place, yet that doesn’t seem to be part of their reputation.

I learned in church that we should do a little something for the poor and needy but that we didn’t need to go out too much out of our way to do that. What we did mostly consisted of “sponsoring” children in places like Africa and India2, making shoeboxes of small items at Christmas that would also be sent to places like Africa and India for “Operation Christmas Child,”3 and give out sad bagged lunches to homeless people in inner city Baltimore on Thanksgiving morning. That was it. I took part in all three activities as a child and teenager. That seemed to be the entirety of our options for caring for those who had less than us. Well, and donating to missionaries in the Mission Field. We did these things and patted ourselves on the pack. What good people we were!

But if people asked for money or if we saw a homeless person on the street with a sign asking for help, we were to reject and/or ignore them. Those people were not deserving and it was our right to make that judgement. Clearly those people were drug addicts and if we gave them money we would just be enabling their drug use. As a child, I learned they were sinners. Well, we were too but they were bigger sinners. Not as bad as homosexuals, but close.

And that perhaps reveals one of the ultimate messages I learned in the church: love is conditional. Love is very, very conditional.

All in all, I got the sense that we had to earn our place with God. He didn’t seem to like us very much, our God. We called him father, lord, occasionally “Abba” or “Abba Father” if somebody wanted to spice it up that day. It seemed though this father could hardly stand to be in the same house as us, his children. He “loved” us but only because he had to as our father. We needed to follow his rules, keep our voices down, fawn over him, dress pretty, and only think good thoughts otherwise he’d lose his temper. He was always on the verge of hating us, it seemed, so we had to be very careful.

Why did he hate us? Well the Fall had made us wicked, broken, ugly creatures—particularly the girls because Eve had been a girl and she caused the fall. I grew up believing I was a wicked, horrible thing at my very core. But if I just tried hard enough maybe God would love me a tiny bit. Or, at least, he wouldn’t send me to Hell.

꩜ The Baby JC

I find I haven’t said much about Jesus.

Isn’t that interesting? I wrote this whole article and then realized I hadn’t really mentioned Jesus. So I’ve come back and written this section.

I suppose he doesn’t feature prominently in my memories. If my religious upbringing was a novel, Jesus was a character who had been written very two dimensionally. Like how Charles Dickens wrote all of his female characters. He was technically important to the plot but not fleshed out on the page.

Now I think: how ironic.

Now I see the path evangelical churches have taken this year, in this election, and I think: Ah that’s why! You had to reduce Jesus to a blue eyed man with a lamb slung over his shoulder and a dreamy look on his face. You had to water him down. Otherwise you’d have a very different religion.

But I’m getting ahead of myself I suppose.

꩜ The List

Here is a list of things I grew up believing were wrong and bad. (To be clear, I no longer believe these things.)

This is a non-exhaustive, unofficial, occasionally annotated list of what I personally, as a child, perceived to not be ok from what the adults in my religion were saying and doing—and also from what they were not saying or doing. These are not official theological positions. It’s one child’s perception of what was unacceptable in our religion.

Here goes.

Things that were bad and wrong included:

Catholics, United Church of Christ, Unitarian Universalists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Anglicans, Episcopalians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists…all of these were equally NOT CHRISTIAN. Especially Catholics. I don’t know why Mennonites, Brethren, and Amish were ok but they were. I didn’t know Orthodox Christianity existed so I had no official position for that.
Also heathens, Wiccans and pagans, obviously. Bad guys.
Caring about Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in any way because that would be “Mary worship,” which is what Catholics did. She got Jesus here. That was all. Mary was a means to an end.
Jews, but we were nice to them.
Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims. They were lumped into one category.
The Dali Lama.
Barack and Michelle Obama.
Hillary Clinton (Not much was said about Bill).
Oprah. (Notice a theme?)
Harry Potter. (I wasn’t allowed to read it or watch the movies.)
Scary movies or books written by non-Christian authors. (So, I couldn’t read Goosebumps but I could read Frank Peretti.4)
The Da Vinci Code.
Halloween. (We didn’t give out candy or dress up.)
Hippies/nature lovers/tree huggers.
Environmentalism or believing in climate change. (Although personally my family did.)
The natural world, unless you were using it however you saw fit because “God gave us dominion over it.”
Sex outside of marriage.
Living together before marriage.
Children born outside of marriage.
Strong willed children, free range children, children doing what they wanted, children speaking back to their parents.
Divorce. Ever, always, under any conditions except maybe if he beat her and she got a black eye.
Single women who were not old/widows.
Drugs and people who did them.
Alcohol.
Homosexuality. (The biggest, baddest sin.)
Abortion. (Although I only found out what this was later).
Poor people.
Smoking. (Cigarettes, that is—I didn’t know about weed until I was in college.)
Swearing to any degree. (Including “crap,” “oh my God,” or “oh snap”).
Tarot cards, astrology, crystals, and shops that sold all three.
Fairies, witches, wizards, etc. (But Lord of the Rings and CS Lewis were ok.)
Saying “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”
Celtic stuff.
Meditation.
Tattoos.
Yoga that was anything aside from just stretching (no saying “namaste” at the end).
Having questions about God and religion.
Critiquing the pastor.
Women’s bodies.
Women being pastors or elders in the church.
Women working outside the home if they had kids.
Women wearing clothing that was “revealing.” Things that were too short, too tight, or someone’s definition of “immodest.” Potentially leggings.
Women in general. Major issue. Reason for why we got here, to a fallen world.
Being fat. (Yes, there was a religious argument against this.)
Bodies/“the flesh.”
Not going to church every single Sunday.
Not tithing 10% of what you owned/as much as you could possibly give.
Traditional hymns, except an updated version of Amazing Grace with less verses and a modern chorus (“unending love…amazing grace…” IYKYK!).
Wanting the world to continue and not end ASAP. Wanting to have a future.
Disobeying your parents and not “honoring” your elders, i.e. doing anything that displease them.
Not closing your eyes during prayer.
“The World,” as in everything that was not the Church, our church.
Myself.
Humans in general.

꩜ The After

I’m sure there are things I’m forgetting.

It was a very narrow path to walk, that religion. And to what purpose? What was the point? I find myself thinking: To look blameless in the eyes of God. (What?! Where did that wording come from? When was that buried in my brain?)

It was a real Catch-22. Do these things to look blameless in the eyes of God. But actually you are totally depraved from birth and aside from God can do nothing good, not even things you think you’re doing to be kind. But God’s watching you and you need to sin less! But you can’t sin less! Hahaha! You can’t add to your salvation by you works! But the church needs you to do stuff!

In church, I learned that humans are very horrible and broken, I am very horrible and broken, the world is very horrible and broken and also full of threats, and so everything must be beaten into submission because it is evil. I also learned that there is an incredible scarcity of everything (especially love) and the only redeeming factor to this whole rodeo is God, who likes making it complicated for some reason.

Ultimately the biggest lessons from the church were about judgement and hyper-vigilance. Namely, I should be doing both all the time—judging myself, judging others, and keeping a look out because everything was out to get me.

And I think now: What a bananas way to live! What bonkers beliefs and antics!

Now that isn’t a very robust criticism, I know. I don’t mean it to be. When I write or think about the world I grew up in I so often find myself shocked at the things that were treated as normal. Just shocked. People falling down randomly. People “speaking in tongues.” A man at the front of the room speaking uninterrupted for what felt like hours, saying whatever he wanted, always telling us how horrible we all were. And we sat there and took it. I just sat there as a child and was present for all of that. That was my normal.

It took a toll. Sometimes I’m so sad I can’t get that time and innocence back. But that is another story for another day.

I started to write that there is not much this upbringing gave me. It took and took. I have had to claw my way to peace and safety—I am still not done doing this.

But if it gave me something perhaps it is contrast. It’s like being in Plato’s cave but it turns out the sun is gloriously warm and welcoming. After believing for so long that there is only scarcity, seeing glimmers of abundance is joyfully dizzying. After buying into the idea that everything is disconnected and broken, choosing to leave that behind makes connection so incredibly visceral and un-ignorable. And after a lifetime of thinking the creator of the universe hates you for who you are, tasting unconditional love can’t help but send tears down your face.

And that is why leaving these lessons behind tastes, ultimately, incredibly sweet.