tales of an ordinary girl

I was raised in an evangelical Christian household. My grandfather was a Southern Baptist preacher. I went to Christian schools. I wasn't allowed to wear shorts. I went to church 3 times a week at a minimum. When I grew up I wanted to be a missionary.

Christianity was something I fully embraced. I didn't know anything else. I was fascinated by other religions, but mostly as mythological stories. From an early age I was taught to believe I was special because I embraced God so whole-heartedly.

When I was 5 I was "saved" by asking Jesus into my heart. At 7 I was baptized in the Holy Spirit and baptized in water. Our church met at a local Day's Inn and I was baptized in the hotel pool. I spoke in tongues and I fell under the power of the Holy Spirit. I remember thinking that these things were real, but feeling like I had to pretend because I didn't know what else to do. It had to be something wrong with me not to experience it for real.

I remember once falling under the power of the Holy Spirit. I was too afraid to get up. I was terrified that someone would know I was faking it. I was too afraid to get up. One of my parents came in and started speaking to the children's pastor after a while and still I couldn't get up. I took that paralyzing fear as being under the influence of God. Eventually I just stood up, but I was down there a long time. That's the last time I did that. I was too afraid.

I went with our youth group to preach on the streets of our city. I was always polite and I felt weird being pushy, even though I wanted to be a missionary. My idea of being a missionary was like Ingrid Bergman in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. I would show by example.

But I never became a missionary. Even though I had a full scholarship to a Christian college, my parents didn't like the idea of me leaving home for college at 17. The plan was that I'd attend a local university for a year and then I would transfer. Except that it didn't happen. It was probably my parent's worst nightmare. I fell in love and got engaged to an atheist.

I remember our discussions about religion. I told him he just needed to have faith. He told me he wished he had faith, but he couldn't fake it. He couldn't have faith in something that he couldn't see. My friends all thought he was an evil influence on me. My youth pastor, who I saw at a revival, told me that I should not be seeing an unbeliever. Eventually the pressure mounted and I started to doubt him and us. We parted ways, not very well, but eventually became good friends.

By the beliefs of my church anyone who didn't accept Christ explicitly by asking him to come into their hearts was going to hell. Jews, Catholics, Mormons, and many other denominations of Christians were going to hell because they didn't explicitly give their life to Jesus and profess him the son of God. It always troubled me that people that had never heard of Jesus were condemned to hell, but I was assured that God let them know about Him through nature (with a lower-case 'N', of course).

Despite the break-up and subsequently dating a nice, Christian guy, I had too many doubts to return to my church. The chinks were there: the history of the compilation of the New Testament and the books destroyed in the process; the Sumerian and Babylonian myths that were so close to the early Old Testament myths, yet were written down long before; the fact that I had to be subservient because I was a woman; and many more.

But the fact that I had faked much of my spirituality lay locked up inside me. I didn't think about it until much, much later.

Other posts in this series:
How I became an atheist part II
How I became an atheist part III