Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know.
—Plato, Apology
The sixth-grader on the stage with the microphone told the first-graders in the orange folding chairs to rise:
“First graders, please rise.”
I looked down the row to my teacher, who was looking back at us, commanding us to move with her eyes—to presume the posture of one who knows.
It was Friday Morning Chapel in the gym of my private Christian elementary school on the northeast side of Portland, Oregon. It was 1998, maybe 1999.
All I know is that I loved this moment that I lived over and over again throughout childhood: rising for the recitations.
I got to recite words I had memorized perfectly, words that had Big Meaning, words that I Knew, words that were the Word.
Our tiny voices began out of sync:
“1 Thessalonians 5:18—
Be thankful in all circumstances,
for this is God’s will
for those of you who belong
to Christ Jesus.”
In all circumstances. In all circumstances. What does the word “circumstance” mean?
An event, a situation, a fact of life.
We’d been told to emphasize the “all.” And to try to sound persuasive.
Then the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth graders rose and recited the Bible verses they’d memorized. I can hear their vocal registers getting distinctively deeper and the verses measurably longer with each passing class.
Then it was the sixth grader’s turn to stand.
The sound of their feet hit the gym floor and seemed to shake the room. They knew they were like giants to the rest of us. But it was their voices, resounding from their towering five-foot frames, that was key to doing any of this properly: that is, vocalizing scriptural authority.
I can still hear them. They’re nearly shouting a section of Ephesians 2 with phrases of theological and metaphorical complexity that I am sure they did not comprehend at that time: cravings of the flesh…the circumcision…citizenship in Israel…foreigners to the covenant of promise.
When the sixth graders said their recitations, chapel recitations became a drama competition, and they always won.
Then just a few years later, I became a loud, epistle-reciting sixth-grader and learned why: the sixth-grade teacher, a lovely man who still sends my family greetings from time to time, was a stage actor on the side.
He made class into an opportunity to do his vocal exercises and comical character switches, which, looking back, made sixth grade the most fun year ever.
This love for performance translated not only into his teaching style but also into his grading style.
We’d get especially high marks if we not only memorized our Bible verse that week but if we could say it sort of “in character,” as one who truly believes it. And I ate this up.
Say it like you mean it. It was not just about the repetition of language, but about the embodied expression of meaning and belief.
Say it like you mean it. I was not to just assume the posture of one who knows, but that of one who thinks they know.
That transition from knowing to thinking one knows is everything. That transition might as well be called salvation.
With all my might, I began to think I knew.
Think I know, think I know, I know, I know, I know.
What greater gift can you give a child, especially a little girl—whose voice will inevitably be met with a contempt that’s sometimes outright violent, and other times so subtle and convincing, she begins to doubt her own voice, too—than that kind of confidence?
A confidence not only in her words, but in her sense of knowledge about what those words mean, of the metaphysical and spiritual weight that they hold? Isn’t this the ultimate gift you can give someone?
I was given words that, I was told, needed to be heard.
Say it like you mean it. The whole world needs to hear these words.
I look back on that girl who was given that great gift of secret knowledge.
I had the Word for the world.
Looking back requires me to see through two decades of life in the evangelical Church—a sometimes-hazy memory and other times all-too-clear vision.
It was fraught with panic attacks, poorly medicated depression, an under-diagnosed eating disorder, leaders (including the man who baptized me) disappearing due to one scandal or another, the emotional and verbal abuse of role models—
With becoming more and more “radical” about God because Christianity’s teachings about love and forgiveness were the only frameworks I had available for healing at that age—
Until college, when I gained a sense of intellectualism and awoke to history, philosophy, progressive theology, and the clarity of scientific thinking—
All to arrive at disenchantment with religion, anger at God, a sense of betrayal, unbelief in God, grief in the loss of a God who I thought was Good, guilt over the unbelief—
To finally crash-land in a forest of uncertainty and begin life again in a kind of spiritual homelessness.
I look back on that girl who eagerly memorized scripture because it was The Word, who jumped out of my seat during Friday morning Chapel recitations, who loved the comfort of prayer, and I have to remind myself: it was so genuine.
There is some small, ashamed part of me that wishes that it hadn’t been. That wishes I could tell this story of this struggle to make my faith work for me in such a way that I was “smarter than that”— that all that “love for Jesus” had not been genuine, but rather just performative and survival-oriented.
What if I had been cognizant enough of the circumstances to notice that my whole environment was a kind of stage, and on it, a play was being played called American Evangelical Christianity and that this was my audition for the part—the empty, stringent, chorus-line part—of the believer?
But why would you wish this kind of revision upon your heart, your mind?
What is so bad about it having been genuine?
It’s a good question!
I look back on many of the practices, readings, and rituals that I went through by the time I was ten years old, from Bible recitations to morning devotionals with my mother, to evening readings of the Bible with my father, and even to some of the weirder things like reading the entire Left Behind book series (a fictional series about the rapture and rule of the antichrist as predicted in Revelations that many Christians in the early 2000s took seriously).
Honestly, none of this stuff was “all that bad.” On the bright side, I read an entire adult book series by age nine!
And some of it was genuinely good. The devotions each morning and evening provided an enviable level of family stability, discipline, and moral guidance that shaped me into the person I am today. And I hold a deep appreciation for it.
But what I have come to recognize is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
These things—indoctrination coming from all sides—when you add them up and round them out, was a way of auditioning me for a particular script, a script that I wanted to memorize, but for a part that I couldn’t eventually play, a part that would turn out to be deeply unsuitable for me.
It was the part of the white Christian evangelical, whose particular vein of Kingdom-come theology, combination of ultra-conservative values, and righteous minority thinking, makeup what I now recognize to be at the root of American Christian Nationalism.1
Yeah. It’s tough to even say.
And I think: lots of kids grew up in this same kind of Christian environment, some of whom, by the time they were 8 or 10 or 15 years old, had read something somewhere and decided to never take Christianity too seriously.
When I think about those early-rejecters, I admit that I can feel very intellectually inadequate.
What would life have been like if I had had even a bit of skepticism at an earlier age?
I wonder: what if I had seen through the fourth wall?
This is the cruel mind-game my older self plays with my younger self…
How much sooner should you have known better?
But I didn’t want skepticism. I wanted belief. Pure belief.
Belief in a loving God who knew me—who knit me together in my mother’s womb. How beautiful and desirable is that?
Skepticism was a downgrade. Belief was an upgrade. Belief-oriented things were success-oriented things, good-oriented things—and I wanted to be good! The system of reward worked for me.
I liked reading the Bible. I mean, it’s filled with every kind of story: near-death experiences, social contrarians being used for the big picture, activists who defied governments committing human atrocities with (also human atrocity) plagues, people who made mistakes but were forgiven, intricate descriptions of God’s first temple, socialist communities, and poetic songs of hope. I didn’t know how much the Bible meant to my imagination until I visited the Sea of Galilee in 2017 with my family. Even though it was after I had left the faith, I still found myself weeping on that shoreline as my father read aloud to us the Sermon on the Mount.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
I also liked writing, so I regurgitated everything I learned in journals, in songs, in stories. And regarding prayer: I was introspective, so it was only natural. And then, as I explored at the beginning, there was memorization. By the time I graduated from elementary school, I could recite at least one verse from every book of the Bible.
So, going back to my sixth-grade classroom.
That transition from memorization to expression, from recitation to belief-building, created a sense of identity from which I began to construct my values, my judgments, and my entire understanding of what constituted reality.
When I became a teenager the next year and entered junior high, my parents gave me a purity ring: real sapphire outlined by four real, small diamonds, with a band of real white gold. It was valuable—like what it was supposed to represent. I wore it with gratitude and pride.
But a gift even more precious to me was what I asked for next for my birthday: a $100 leather-bound New King James Version Bible, with annotations and footnotes on the Hebrew and Greek translations.
It was so heavy, I had to carry it with both of my hands.
Candy funded my early Christian education.
I think about these things.
By now, it might sound like I’m ungrateful for this early education. But the truth is, the farther away I grow from this period of my life, the more I can see clearly how much I have to be grateful for. While my dad was working more than full time to pay the bills, my mom ran this candy vending machine business all over town, one day a week, to bring in enough money for us to attend that small private Christian elementary school.
On that one day a week, she’d drive all over town to service sometimes up to 100 machines, refilling them with candy and emptying out the quarters into these big cloth bags. Around 5:30 (always home in time for dinner), I’d be sitting at the kitchen table when mom would barge through the garage door with two of those big bags full of quarters in her hands, and many more to come from the van.
We’d dump the quarters out onto the kitchen table to count them. She had marked out a PVC pipe with lines in the measurement of quarters to make the counting go faster. My job was to put them into the pipe, one by one, until it was full.
One full PVC pipe of quarters was about $10.
The pipe of quarters was heavy—as heavy as the Bible, the Bible that was the real value of the education she was paying for.
I knew that this work, all of these quarters, our garage filled wall-to-wall with bags of gumballs, Hot Tamales, M&Ms, and Skittles—it was all there because of her desire for me and my siblings to grow up into people who truly loved and knew God.
And for this circumstance, I was so thankful.2
There’s something inherently challenging about telling a story like this.
In some ways, it is just as much an existential catastrophe for me as an ex-believer as it is for those people who shaped me into that believer.
Yet for anyone who has known me for any period of time within the past five years, you’ll know that this is something I almost can’t help but mention that I am dealing with, and not with a kind of indifference about what it all means and who it affects, but with a kind of responsibility about what it all means and who it affects.
Growing up as a Christian and truly believing in God for the first part of my young adult life is something I continue to feel shame about for a lot of different complex reasons. This shame has been exacerbated by the last four years of Trump’s presidency.
Even though my crisis of faith had already occurred by the time he was elected, seeing white evangelicals that I knew hold onto him like he was their policy savior caused massive guilt by association.
I didn’t know what to do—so I disassociated.
That is why telling this story makes me feel vulnerable: open to judgment from people who didn’t grow up in the Church. I feel open to getting shamed by people who are still in the Church. And most importantly, I feel open to the risk of hurting people who I love and who have loved me deeply.
The idea that writing can be a double-edged sword—hurting others while healing me—is something I haven’t figured out yet. Undoubtedly, I’ll use the power of writing imperfectly at times, but I will always try to move through this topic delicately and truthfully.
It’s tricky.
Writing about a crisis of faith without writing about the environment and influences that established that faith would kind of be impossible.
So before concluding, I want to reiterate what I said in my last post:
The purpose of writing about all this is not to create a public record of the past, but rather to lead into a story about an intellectual journey that is present and ongoing.
I want this to be a new kind of witness.
What exactly this is bearing witness to, is a question I am asking myself right now, and I invite you to ask, as well. I believe the process of writing and sharing will help me better understand it.
Part Two is in the early draft stages—I think it could be a little while before it’s ready.
So, in the meantime and as I said in my last post, I’d love to hear what you think.
Thank you for letting me tell this story, and as always, for listening.
-L
And what a day, what a day, to be talking about American Christian Nationalism, as pro-Trump, white nationalist terrorists invaded the US Capitol and attacked our democracy.
I asked my mom if I could tell this part of the story, about the vending business and how hard she and my dad worked to send us all to Christian school, and she kindly said yes.
The Beginning of Literacy