Owning My Journey from Christian Fundamentalism Pt.2
I was always a straight A student (which I now know was related to my life-long issues with anxiety). I wasn’t hyper intelligent, but I was a great listener and developed critical thinking skills that served me well. At least until AP Calculus, where my brain desperately wanted to make sense of the nonsense, but I was told the calculator understood so I did not need to.
As the oldest child, I was very much a people pleaser and quickly learned that earning good grades was an easy way to get affirmation from family members and teachers. It was also a way in which I learned to define myself in the early years of elementary school. I didn’t want to be the “girl that always wore skirts,” but I found that I could be the “girl to beat on the next math or reading test.” I was the same with politics and learned the language of my conservative political surroundings very early in life. Rather than discovering my own thoughts and ideas, I was listening to the conversations around me from people that I loved and admired and then finding ways to defend those ideologies. In high school I was an avid Sean Hannity and conservative talk radio fan and fell hard in my economics class for Reaganomics (the economic principles promoted by US President Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s) as that was the only option I was given.
My parents encouraged me to go to college. However, with limited time spent on extracurricular activities, despite my grades, I did not have much to set myself apart in college applications or scholarship programs. When it came time to apply for college, I was fairly limited in the college options despite graduating Valedictorian of my high school class. But it didn’t matter, as from a young age, I believed that I would follow in my father’s footsteps and pursue a future in expanding the mission of the church.
My dad is a devoted Pentecostal minister with a charismatic personality and captive public speaking skills, and my mother is a talented self-taught Gospel musician who can play circles around most professional musicians with one hand and her eyes closed. From a very young age, they held leadership roles in the church and were very engaged in the communities in which we lived. My father was elected to be the Pastor of multiple congregations through the years in rural Mississippi which meant that we moved around the state quite a bit, but it also meant that I grew up with an appreciation for shelling peas with neighbors on their front porches, Sunday lunches with strangers, and visiting the elderly in nursing homes.
I was deeply committed to the ideals of the church, and this determined how I looked at my future. However, because of what was modeled for me as a woman, I could only aspire to be a missionary (someone who promotes a religious doctrine in a foreign country), a music leader, a teacher, or the wife of a minister. But I had witnessed my father counsel countless church members through the years, and not wanting to follow the traditional path, I planned to carve out a space for myself in Christian counseling. With that in mind, I decided to attend a small private (UPC church affiliated) school in Stockton, CA to pursue a degree in Biblical Theology and Counseling.
I arrived in California an arrogant 18 year old who thought I knew everything. One of the consequences of growing up in a bubble is that you are surrounded by people with similar life experiences who hold similar political and religious beliefs. This inevitably leads to the flawed assumption that the latter are interchangeable.
Additionally, in my Mississippi circle everyone looked like me, as churches and communities in the south are still predominantly segregated. While I did not grow up in the Jim Crow era, I did witness the systemic consequences of slavery and segregation, the impact of racial biases in public policy decisions, and the refusal of white people to admit to the generations of wrongdoing towards communities of color. The impact of racially zoned neighborhoods, gerrymandering, mass incarceration of black men, housing — education — and employment discrimination are still very visible in my home state today (Systemic Racism Built Mississippi by Ashton Pittman). However, these consequences have been justified by correlating these things with an individuals moral failure to live up to their potential, or even more deadly, with one’s lack of relationship with the church. As I get older, I cannot reconcile the teachings of a church that simultaneously believes in generational curses (a habit or behavior that has been passed from one generation to the next) but refuses to admit the generational impacts of racism in the South. More thoughts on the political and racial dynamics of the South to come in the near future.
(Book recommendations: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, The Power of Proximity by Michelle Ferrigno Warren, and Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson.)
Thus, I went from Mississippi into California armed with my conservative religious and political values. Fortunately, even though I was at a religious college, I was confronted with students from around the world with life experiences very different from my own. I was questioned about why my state flag still touted the racist Confederate emblem, I was introduced to the idea of work authorizations for my fellow immigrant students including my now husband (whose immigration story has forever impacted my life), and for the first time I was asked about my views on interracial marriage. The latter is one that I often reference as a turning point for me.
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Experience:
I was casually dating a Filipino guy from New York. He often pushed me on my beliefs, mostly I think, because I was an anomaly from other classmates. We were raised with similar religious experiences, but he was a bit ahead of me in school and in life. One day, he questioned me about my thoughts on interracial marriage. And I quickly responded with the answer that I had indirectly picked up through the years, “My faith doesn’t support it, because it causes problems for the kids who are born having to choose between two races.”
He pressed me, “Why?”
“Because the cultures are just so different,” I said.
He pushed again, “What if they share the same cultural experiences?”
Because of the semi- segregated lifestyle in which I was raised, it had not occurred to me that this was possible. It was here that I realized, “culture” was code.
He then asked me if I would ever consider introducing him to my parents. I answered aggressively, “Of course, why do you ask?”
He responded, “Because I am not white.”
To understand my questioning here, you must first understand there is not a lot of cultural diversity in Mississippi. And at some point or another you choose to identify with one of the two larger populations, white or black. Ironically, my own late grandmother, a Native Hawaiian, visited the South once as a young woman, and the story is told that she had to ask if she should enter the door labeled “black” or “white” because there was no door labeled brown for her.
In the course of this short conversation I was confronted with multiple realizations that my tailored upbringing had led me to a very narrow worldview. Once again, I found myself on the outside looking in at how the political and religious aspects of my life were so intertwined. What other aspects of my life had been influenced in this way?
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My purpose for putting pen to paper is not to imply that my journey is one that is so incredibly unique, but rather just the opposite. I want to spark a sense of communion with others who also remember the smallest moments that shifted their life trajectory. And I hope to also do so with the acknowledgement that I led a very privileged childhood. I have hesitated for years to publicly share these stories, as I understand there are so many stories of religious trauma that I can’t begin to understand.
But as I mentioned in Part 1, it is my goal to portray the importance of journey, education and experience no matter how it may compare to others.
We all begin this life in very different places, and we must navigate as best we can with the tools that we are given. This has been extremely helpful for me to make sense of the crazy space in which America has found herself in the last several years, and it has enabled me to live a life free of anger and hatred for those who do not think or believe the same as me.
I am also hopeful that there are things that can be taken from my experience that can be used on a larger scale to assist society in this era we find ourselves in.
I hope you will keep reading.
