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Growing up fundamentalist Protestant in the South
The Christmas I was six years old, I was given a stuffed catapillar--striped in various shades of purple with an orange nose--that also functioned as a purse. I named her Cattie for the obvious six-year-old reasons and slept with her every night for longer than I care to admit. She was soft and huggable, and she smelled like what I now realize as a parent was essentially my own saliva and sweat, comforting and familiar and mine in that way that all children crave.
Even then, my parents were highly religious. They would become more so as the years passed, but even then they were hitting the upper threshold of most people's definition of devout.
So we were at church, me and Mama and Daddy and my little brother Russell and Cattie.
"God wants us to love Him," the preacher said from the pulpit.
I don't remember what the church looked like anymore. I remember accidentally dumping a whole glass of tea on my head during dinner on the grounds and being mortified. I remember my brother rolling around in the grass with Rachel Smith and trying to kiss her with his fat, toddler lips. I remember a little bridge that connected the sanctuary to the fellowship hall. But I don't remember what the inside of the church looked like anymore. I can guess, though.
I'm sure the preacher stood in front of a baptistery, possibly adorned with a handpainted mural of dubious quality of Jesus being baptized. The windows were probably that fake stained glass that Protestants seem to adore in the South--nearly opaque and strangely plastic-looking monstrosities, crayons haphazardly melted in a pan and smeared on glass.
"God wants us to love Him," the preacher said, and I clutched Cattie more tightly in my arms.
I don't remember this part either, not well, not clearly. The invitational began; the guilt trip began; the fear-mongering began. I would not realize until I was much older, until I'd read Bakhtin on Rabelais and Salvation on Sand Mountain, exactly how pivotal this moment is to the fundamentalist Protestant worship my parents engage in. Everything any theater major needs to know ze could learn in this moment. The pageantry, the crocodile tears, the empathy mixed with the need to control the audience, the sheer spectacle of the whole damn thing concentrated into a handful of minutes.
I left my seat. I was small but full of purpose. I understood perfectly well what the preacher wanted of me, what his God required of me. I had to love God, or I would die and go to that hell he always threatened.
"If you died right now, where would you go?" I had no idea. I would continue to have no idea for years. I still have no idea. I no longer obsessively compulsively pray for God to save me as I did almost every night of my childhood, but it's hard to shake off what you learn as a kid. If I died right now, where would I go? That question still curls up hot and sick in my stomach, in the base of my throat.
"I don't love God," I said to the preacher. "I love Cattie, and I love my family, but I don't love God. How do you love God? You can't even see Him."
The preacher smiled at me indulgently, the way you smile at precocious children who don't know what they're saying. "Of course, you love God, sweetie. I know you do. Don't you worry." He patted me on the head, and I went back to my seat.
Mama and Daddy wanted to know why I'd felt compelled to go forward, but they didn't get it either. I amused them, this little girl so worried about my affection for God. This little girl.
I wish I'd had the words then that I have now. How do you love an intangible? How do you feel something for a vasty nothingness? How do you create and maintain a relationship with no feedback from the other partner? And how in the heck is loving God supposed to serve as a model for all your other relationships when God's an unknown Quantity?
I've often wondered how in such an insular community in the pre-internet days I managed to question pretty much from the get-go my parents' religious, social, and political beliefs. I don't know. I don't. It's a mystery. But I did, tiny and uneducated and so firmly under the grip of my parents and their convictions. I did.
I didn't know it that day, crying down into Cattie's fur, salt mingling with the stale scent of spit and sweat, but this was the beginning.
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How do you create and maintain a relationship with no feedback from the other partner?
yes, this.
The physicality of your sense memory juxtaposed to the vagaries of memory is really stunning.
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This is something I've wanted to write about for a long time, and I've been struggling with how to write it since parts of my childhood and teenage experiences I remember very clearly and others I only remember for what they meant to me, not what actually happened if that makes any sense.
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Oh wow, this could be me, exactly. I am not a Christian. I don't believe in God. Even as a kid and teenager and young adult, when I was going to church every Sunday because my mom made me, and not questioning what I was taught, I still didn't have whatever it was everyone else had. I was a Christian because I was scared I would go to hell if I wasn't (even though heaven didn't sound like any fun, either, but at least it wasn't being tortured for eternity), but there was no joy in it, ever. Only fear. And even now I can't get rid of this feeling of "what if they're right?" I envy people who can easily shake off those questions, but I can't. I want to, but I can't.
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Yes! This has been my experience as well. I don't *not* believe in God, but I'm not sure that I do, and while Josh and I do attend a Catholic church, I don't think of myself as being religious, spiritual or Christian.
I was/am so scared of going to hell, and I feel so dumb for being afraid of dying because I am an educated grown up type person who can rationally dissect where all this fear comes from but not get rid of it.
Heaven also never really sounded like much fun to me either. LOL It was always described to me in my Baptist childhood as a place where there are no sorrows and where your corporeal relationships do not continue (you're not still married, for example). Which I read as a total loss of self. If you have no sorrow that means you have to have forgotten huge chunks of your life and the human existence at large. So you're like this brainwashed entity. LOL It sounds like a very stagnant place to me, where nothing changes or grows or really even matters. IDK
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The main thing I remember about heaven is that you're going to be sitting around with God and singing his praises and basically just worshipping him all day and night for eternity, which really sounded boring to me.
I am so scared of dying, because there's always this "what if they're right?" fear in the back of my mind. I hope that when we die there is just nothing. Or I suppose reincarnation would be okay, too, but the idea of any sort of eternal after life is just not appealing at all, and of course eternal torture is even less appealing!
I know some people have found a way to be Christian without being like the sort of Christians I grew up with, but I don't seem to have the religion gene. Like, I understand the point of being a Christian and believing in God if the alternative is hell. It's a fear-based thing. But I don't know what is appealing about it (or any other religion) otherwise. I don't mind if people are religious (in a way that doesn't oppress others), but it baffles me.
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I also have this horror of "what if they're right?" that plagues me. What if all the racist, sexist, homophobic, classist bullshit I grew up with is really what God wants from us. And I KNOW that it isn't, that it can't be, that Nothing Good could want those things, but always niggling in the back of my mind, "What if they're right?"
I don't talk about it a lot, but I had an abortion when I was a teenager, and a whole lot of the time, I have a hard time convincing myself I'm not going to the hell I mostly don't believe in for that.
Pretty much all of the Protestant Christianity I've witnessed first-hand has been based on fear. I think the Catholics do better with the not discounting science and understanding that the Bible shouldn't be interpreted literally and the social justice issues, but even that branch of Christianity is still largely predicated on fear.
I wish I was a spiritual person, not necessarily a Christian one, but a spiritual one. I feel bereft in some ways, like there is a dimension to me which is not being acknowledged in some way, but my utter inability to have faith in anything that is not empirically evident prevents it.
It's funny how similar our backgrounds are. :) (and sad, obviously)
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