Rapture
It's likely that most of you have seen the documentary Jesus Camp (if not you can watch it
here). I would imagine that most of you were horrified by the zealous, "brainwashed"
children.
I was one of those children.
My parents found Jesus in the late 1970s, just before I was born. They had been raised as
church-goers, but more in the traditional 1950s American sense...they said a rhyme at dinner
and at bed time that was aimed at god, went to Christmas mass and Easter Sunday service and
also the occasional Sunday morning service to give dad some alone time. But sometime in the
1970s, they found JESUS..you know, the evangelical guy. My mom went from a college-bound
woman to a house-bound mom within a few years. I was born and baptized as were all my
siblings (oh and there are 5 of us).
I never felt oppressed or overwhelmed by all the church. We went 4 times a week (Sunday
morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday night, and Bible Study or Choir) and it was my social
life. All my friends lived the same life. Nearly all of us were either home schooled or
went to a rotation of small evangelical Christian private schools (non-accredited, always
closing down). I had no idea of any other style of living, plus I really liked my friends.
My father, a geologist, eschewed his college's idea of science for Creationism, which my
siblings and I were taught well, religiously. Our bedtime story was the book of Revelation,
which always tended to bring weird dreams and fevered prayers before falling asleep.
I remember adults speaking in low voices about current events and how they were part of
Satan's realm. I never really knew about what was happening in pop culture. I was allowed
to watch 1 hour of PBS every day, but we knew that cartoons like the Smurfs, He-man, Rainbow
Bright were filled with witchcraft or were "the devil's work". I recall visiting a friend
when I was little and being horrified by her rainbow bright doll she had in her bed...I just
knew she was going to go to hell for having such an awful thing.
We had fun playing Bible Drills (a book, chapter and verse were said aloud and whomever
found it first won), participating in vacation bible school, going to church camp, etc. We
believed that Catholics weren't Christians because they performed pagan rituals and studied
a heathen Bible. I remember practicing converting the unsaved with my parents. I remember
singing songs like Jesus will come again, and though we don't know when, the countdown is
getting lower every day.
The church I went to focused on the whole bible. The pastor was obsessed with Jewish tradition, so we did things like Passover. I remember one summer where my father and a friend of his recreated the 40-years of wandering through the desert...in which we spent 40 days recreating each year the Jews experienced wandering around. We thought it was awesome at the time. Role-playing for Christian kids.
The thing that horrified me most about church was communion. The pastor always told us we had to confess all our sins before we took communion or we would be punished by god. Communion thankfully only happened once a month or so, but it ended up turning into this thing where everyone stood around, held hands, swayed singing "Halleluiah, he is coming" and then people would get all in a frenzy and just start confessing all their most horrible sins to the entire congregation. I remember finding out that a friend of mine was molested by her dad, there were unexpected pregnancies, stealing, adultery -- all these things confessed in front of the entire church before communion. It was horrible. But usually for me, church was just a place for me to draw pictures and giggle with my sisters.
I was incredibly afraid of not being saved and losing my family in the Rapture. Since my dad filled our heads with so much talk of the apocalypse, I was in constant fear that there was the small chance that I did not actually accept Jesus into my heart (which I did once every other month or so from age 5-10) and that I would be LEFT BEHIND. Of course it didn't help that of the few movies we were allowed to watch, most of them focused on being left behind by the rapture or there was the occasional movie about a missionary who was persecuted by whatever group they were trying to save. Once my sister literally shit her pants when we got locked out of our house when we were younger -- she was convinced that our parents had been ruptured and we would never be able to get inside to try to save ourselves.
Of course, not my whole life was filled with church, I did go to the library and play with friends and siblings. I didn't know anything else and I was really a happy child.
I guess the thing that really inspired me to write was the fact that I think that many people have talked about Jesus Camp as if these kids really are brainwashed and unhappy. And I have to say that while I had a lot of Jesus and weird experiences as a kid, I am pretty sane and well-rounded now. And out of all the people I know now that went to my church, they seem pretty okay too. Some are Christians (though not evangelicals), some are anti-religion, some are agnostics, some are pagan -- the upbringing didn't exactly seem to make us all Jesus-drones. And I can assure you that I had the same "brainwashing" techniques performed on me as in Jesus Camp. There was wailing, there was praying, there was glossilalia, there were multiple baptisms, there was converting, there was anti-abortion rhetoric. But I think really that people get over it.
Eventually I figured out that something just wasn't ringing true for me. My parents told us that if Silence of the Lambs won an Oscar, that the world was coming to an end. Now looking back on it, I am sure they didn't mean it the way I interpreted it, but I was convinced that the rapture would happen if Silence of the Lambs won and Oscar. I spent all evening praying that it wouldn't win the Oscar (because I didn't want the rapture to happen, I wanted to spend more time alive on the earth). When I woke up the next morning, I saw on the front cover that Silence of the Lambs won an Oscar and my face just fell. As the day wore on, I realized that no rapture was happening and that the world wasn't ending. It was about that time that I stopped believing in god. Over the next few years my ideas about philosophy started to come into play and by the time I was 13/14 I had found rock and roll (oh and so many Christian parents are horrified of rock and roll -- see the christian movie: Hells Bells) and it was over. My parents had people come "lay hands" on me, pray for me, and they sent me to boarding school to be "cured" -- the funny thing is, I really found myself more away from them and by the time I came back, they had stopped regularly going to church (having found themselves ostracized from our church for having a daughter that "strayed"), and now never go to church. I would have never guessed it having grown up in the house I did, but (thankfully) people change.
For a while I experimented with other religions, not really knowing where I wanted to go. I thought that going to what I thought was the "opposite" would somehow work for me -- so I tried out various forms of paganism (wicca, OTO, etc). What I was looking for was to get away from what I experienced as a child and what I found was that it was the same candy in a different wrapper. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I really want nothing to do with Religion (capital R on purpose there)...I guess part of me is a touch spiritual, but I generally stay away from big organized groups.
Oh and I have to say that watching Ted Haggarty on the Jesus Camp documentary made me really happy -- because we all know how he has fallen from grace.