Amazing Grace

I was raised in an ultra-fanatical fundamental Baptist church. This is my explanation when anyone asks why I am an agnostic. It’s a simple statement and the short answer to an infinitely more complicated path that brought me here.

My father was a southern Baptist and my mother was raised as a Methodist. To this day it is a mystery to me how they ever got involved with the fundamental Baptists in the first place. As far as I can tell, it was my Dad’s decision to join the church, and my mom went along with it and then she was unable to extricate herself. I think she also felt it was a safer place to raise my youngest sister, who had special needs due to a congenital hereditary disease. I'll never know for sure.

We went to church on Wednesdays, and twice on Sundays from the time I was in Kindergarten until I was 12 and refused to go anymore. My sisters and I attended a Christian version of girl scouts called Awanas on Thursday nights. Most kids in puberty rebel by doing drugs or having sex.  My mother and I got into screaming matches over my going to church.

Before the prayer meeting on Wednesday nights, we gathered at the church for dinner. After dinner we formed groups. Armed with Bibles and religious tracts, we canvassed the neighborhoods, spreading the Word of God. Sometimes when we were out on these holy missions, we would pass the Jehovah’s Witnesses on foot, or the Mormons on bikes. When I think about the stupidity of sending a group of prepubescent girls out to knock on stranger's doors with no adult supervision, it makes me a little queasy.

I attended a strict Christian school through the ninth grade. Students attended morning chapel for an hour 5 days a week in addition to a Bible class that was part of the curriculum for every grade. I have read the King James Version Bible cover to cover at least twice. In fact I used to be on a Bible Quiz team.  Yep, it’s just what it sounds like. We had trivia competitions except instead of memorizing more useful things like the Periodic Table or the capitals of Eastern European countries, we learned, by rote, verses from the Bible, the books of the old and new testaments and other useless Biblical facts. However, I can still quote all the books of the Bible today, so it wasn't a complete waste.

All total, I spent about 50 hours a week at church, or church school, or doing some church related activity. The term “having religion rammed down your throat” doesn't’t even begin to cover it.

The basic dogma of this particular group is that God is angry at the sins we commit. He’s royally pissed off in fact, such that eventually he is going to come down to earth, from Heaven and take away all the true believers, leaving everyone else behind to fend for themselves in some sort of post apocalyptic society, before eventually going nuclear on the entire planet and sending everyone to a fiery pit of suffering and horror. Oh, and if you’re a Jew, Catholic or Muslim, you’ll be burning in hell with all the other apostates unless you repent and turn to the One True God. Even the Methodists and Presbyterians are suspect because they don’t quite have enough faith and aren't real Christians as far as the fundamentalists are concerned.

There is a way for you to avoid the suffering though. All you have to do is say you believe in Jesus and that he has forgiven you all the sins you ever committed and ever will commit in the future. It’s like having a get out of jail free card. You abuse your wife and kids? No problem, Jesus forgives you. You raped and murdered someone? Come on over to our side; your sins are absolved.  And don’t worry if you slip up and do something in the future. All you have to do is say you’re sorry and the blood of The Lamb covers you for all eternity.

Sins ran the gamut from breaking any of the 10 commandments, to more pedestrian offenses like going to movies, listening to secular music, dancing and for women, wearing pants. The woman’s place was in the home. Women were to be subservient to their husbands. Children were to be subservient to their elders, even when their elders were a bunch of crazy zealots with no compunction whatsoever about destroying a child’s self esteem, or worse abusing them emotionally and physically. 

This group of fanatics ruled by fear. Corporal punishment was not just accepted but expected, at school, and at home. This taught me that it always is better to lie than admit you’d done something wrong, even though admission was supposedly the first step to forgiveness, because you would get punished twice.  When I was  in the third grade, my biggest fear was that I would wake up one day to find the rapture had occurred and I’d been left on earth to die with the criminally insane, the sociopaths and the Seventh Day Adventists.

By the time I was 10 years old, in the fourth grade, I began to have an appreciation for the rampant hypocrisy that I witnessed daily. I began to question whether or not the things I was being taught about my existence, God, and my place in this world were factual, or an interpretation by flawed human beings who might not be right after all.

So I quit believing. It is really as simple as that. I called bullshit on all of it. I kept this to myself for another two years, but then I decided I didn't want to be a part of the church at all anymore. My parents and I duked it out for another two years. I quit going to church. I begged to be allowed to go to public school. My personal mutiny became apparent at school when I was in the seventh grade and the people in charge started disciplining me to keep me on the path to righteousness. It was humiliating and degrading to be punished in that way at 13 and 14 years old, by men, in private.

It was physical abuse and emotional abuse with weird sexual overtones, in the name of God. I know that was the point they were trying to make. "Do what we say or suffer. Saving your soul from Satan justifies the sins we are committing." I wasn't a monster. I was a teenage girl with a mind of her own. All this served to do was strengthen my resolve. I knew without a doubt. I was right.

I finally convinced my parents that the abuse I was suffering at school wouldn't get better because I wasn't going to just fall back in line. I started public school in the tenth grade and I was free.

I spent a lot of time in my teens and early 20s studying other religions, just to make sure there wasn't something out there that might be a better fit for me. In the end, they all seemed too extreme, but I think that’s a side effect of how I was raised. If others find peace in their religious beliefs and they aren't hurting anyone, more power to them. The only thing I ask is that you don’t try to convert me. I consider myself a spiritual person. I just don’t need my spirituality spoon fed to me. My beliefs are my own, as are yours to you.

Today, I have truly come to terms with everything. I have no permanent emotional scars, no lasting impressions at all except for this. I have a very strong negative reaction to fanaticism of any kind. I don’t understand how anyone could blindly follow, without question or reason. This is true for anything from Amway salesmen and Michael Bolton fans to Promise Keepers and snake handlers.

I cannot comprehend the infliction of physical or emotional pain, or the fanatics who stand outside Gay Pride events spewing hatred and abomination or the abortion clinic bombers or the Muslims who are willing to die for what they have been told is a holy cause. Injustice, intolerance, abuse, hatred and war in the name of religion seem needless and senseless to me. 

I have to check myself at times, from not getting on my intellectual high horse when people share their religious beliefs with me. I know there are Christians in the world who are open minded and kind and not complete whack jobs. But it has been my experience that they are few and far between.

A platitude that the fundamentalists always pay lip service to is that their religion is based on free will. I exercised my free will and I never looked back.

I guess you could say I was saved.