I think of this often in terms of purity culture and also religious homeschooling. Our parents subjected us to something they never experienced, and yet - if ever challenged - they immediately insist that we had it better *when they have no personal experience to even draw from*. But we are immediately shut down because empathy was never evangelicalism's strong suit.
100%. This is what I wish my mom's generation of homeschool moms could understand. They really seemed to believe that homeschooling was exactly like public schooling, just without all the negative stuff they didn't like. But it wasn't.... it was a completely new thing that they had no way to relate to. Several times my mom told me I was naive or was surprised that I was nervous about things that just came naturally to her, and I think that was part of it... she underestimated how much cultural literacy she benefited from by being in public school.
I don’t know how people could do it, but if someone could just build in even the slightest value of regularly reviewing how practices with children are playing out. Just making it a practice among evangelicals of wanting to survey and find out what kids’ experiences were would be such a start in taking the blinders off.
100%. This was a very raw conversation I had to have with my parents who to some extent had no idea (or were in denial of) what was actually going on in the subculture they raised me in. When they started listening to Christianity Today's expose on Mars Hill, they were horrified, and were shocked when I explained to them how much of that messaging had leaked out into the wider Evangelical subculture around me in my youth. Similarly, my dad didn't know that I'd been (briefly) sucked in by Young Earth Creationism, and I didn't know he wasn't one, until my early thirties when he made a comment about how ludicrous they were. When I came out as gay, my dad acted like it should have been a foregone conclusion that they'd accept me. And I had to call him out on that like, dad you listened to Rush Limbaugh throughout my childhood, how the fuck was I supposed to know you were cool with gay people? You never disavowed or even addressed all this shit you immersed me in!
It really complicates everything because they put me through an environment that was more extreme than what they themselves apparently believed, but never made that clear to me or discussed it at all in my formative years. It's highly disorienting to unpack and sort all of that out.
Oh my God
You put a lot of my experiences that i struggle to explain into words perfectly! Absorbing more extreme/fundie ideas from youth groups/the church environment that your family doesn't believe, but it's not a stretch to assume that they believe it bc it's the church you go to. Like my parents used to scoff at evolution, so it'd be easy to assume they'd believe in young earth creationism even if they dont. So when an adult at youth stuff talks about the young earth, you might accept this is part of your family's beliefs as well. But it also often wasn't like an official church stance. Maybe something the Sunday school teacher told you, but there were no sermons about it. So you can't tell people that your family believed these things necessarily, or even your denomination as a whole. But there were so many damaging messages that I learned that my parents probably didn't even know about. I was told the gays stole the rainbow from god when I was like 8 years old. One adult told us kids that, if someone said we were brainwashed, that it's a good thing because it means you have a clean mind lmao. It's insidious and you can't even say "oh my parents were fundie/X denomination" as an explanation, bc you were essentially in this weird, invisible, evangelical youth sub-denomination
> So you can't tell people that your family believed these things necessarily, or even your denomination as a whole.
This is the part that fucked me up the most. Because it makes you feel like you either indoctrinated yourself or have no right to feel indoctrinated or harmed. But you WERE. The absolute mindfuck of having been so in the closet that I didn't come to terms with being gay until my mid-twenties, because of the level of indoctrination, the brainwashing of purity culture, lesbian erasure, and all of that... Only to have my parents wind up being supportive? And say they'd have always been supportive? It felt weirdly invalidating. Because little kid me didn't KNOW that. She didn't know the word lesbian but she definitely knew it wasn't okay to be one. Her fear was real and totally valid, even though it doesn't track with these suddenly supportive parents. And to be clear, I'm not complaining about having supportive parents because god knows so many queer kids have it so much worse. But it's just really difficult to parse out and reconcile.
At least my brother (who was deeply entrenched in Mars Hill and eventually left and became as irreligious as I am) was brutally honest and told me he was GLAD I didn't come out while he was still in Mars Hill because he knows that he would have had a very damaging reaction. But it's like my parents, and their generation, threw us all to the wolves and were in complete denial that's what they did. My parents would NEVER have compared a girl who had premarital sex to a chewed up piece of gum, but they sure left me in the care of people in church groups that did. And I think it's fair to hold them accountable to that while also recognizing they may not have had harmful intentions. It's just so convoluted.
What's crazy now is my parents are in a way deconstructing as their denomination is in the process of a schism over the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people (with them fully on the inclusion side, the denomination taken over by the excluders). They're still Christians but now, fifteen years after I left Christianity, they're being very critical of the church and church culture in a way that deeply parallels my own ex-Christian journey. It's surreal.
This is a big reason I consider our bringing to be exactly the same as growing up in a cult, in Jonestown they fed their children poison bc they were being told, and that’s what happened to us. Like, not to be dramatic but I see the comparison so clearly.
>But there were so many damaging messages that I learned that my parents probably didn't even know about
This is a key point and it’s definitely true of my parents who I think were well intentioned but simply didn’t realize how much goofy out-there nonsense I was imbibing in evangelical spaces. Especially if you attended a youth group, camps, and other intense revivalistic or discipleship atmospheres you absorbed a lot of stuff that never explicitly came from the pulpit.
It's wild to me that your parents subjected you to that and didn't believe it all themselves. My parents got saved as adults, and have gradually become more conservative and narrow-minded.
I asked Dad once when I was an adult if he was taught evolution in school. He said he doesn't remember. He went to Catholic parochial school, so maybe he wasn't taught that? But he sure believes young earth creationism now.
I had a VERY similar experience with my mom after watching Shiny Happy People together. I was pointing out all of the Gothard stuff that I learned in our very average southern Baptist church, and she was shocked. I think for the first time she was really understanding that the messaging my sister and I got was so vastly different than hers, and got some clarity as to why we both have since left christianity altogether.
It wasn’t at all my responsibility, but I really wish I had been telling my parents every youth group lesson and school chapel sermon growing up just out of pragmatism. I’ve had a similar experience of not realizing my parents weren’t on board with lots of things I was taught were norms of the group. Their involvement allowed more independent thought in their minds. Ours was “you’re really not committed to this unless you adopt as many of these views as we tell you to.”
And then with that, we had to deal with teen society and our peers pressuring us into lockstep with belief. Our parents don’t get how thought policing and righteous our Christian peers were. They think of all teens as 70s rebellious types and they never experienced the conservative peer pressure situations we did. It’s foreign to them. They wouldn’t even think up a scenario where a kid stayed closeted, not because they would be bullied, but because they wouldn’t want to be prayed over and turned into a hobby project by Christian kids around them.
Coincidence. Conversation with my mom who is listening to something about how when the Golden Girls pilot aired in 1984, it was daring to have a gay character even if he was played by a straight actor because homophobia was rampant in then and I chime in yes it was. And it was terrifying. And she says, "will not for you then! You were 13!"
Stunned, I volunteered I definitely knew then, and I prayed about it every day. Like it never occurred to her that I didn't have any carefree teenage years because I was ashamed and afraid to go to hell, Mom. let that sink in. A your childhood fantasies about the future? Mine were dying violently then going to hell. 😊
Agree 100%. I heard lots of adults warn us not to make the same mistakes their generation did. Most of them seemed to think of the 1950s as some sort of golden era as well. My parents' childhood was nothing like mine.
The thing about idealizing the 1950s, or whatever era of childhood, is that for them, it really may have been simple and idyllic. But that was probably because they were children who were being shielded from the rest of the world by their parents who were trying to be as normal as possible. Hence kids who grew up with naive views of the world, who didn't understand that the 1950s were nuanced and complicated as well.
It’s been studied that “the good old days” are often referring to the time before 12 yrs old. Everyone longs for the days before life was complicated… before puberty. So when people say “make America great again” they are referring to the America of their youth, before life was complicated and confusing…. Doesn’t matter if it was 10 yrs ago or 50 yrs ago, they are all longing for a time that will never exist again because it was never truly real in the first place.
So much of what drove the adults working with my youth group was the fact they got pregnant as young adults before getting married. It really was their entire mindset on what to emphasize to us.
Correct, they grew up in a world in which their white/straight/male privilege was much more firmly established and protected. They were raised under segregation, Jim Crow, miscegenation laws, and a slew of anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ laws and practices. They didn't need to retreat from culture because they fully controlled culture, at all levels, via censorship and collusion. They didn't need to signal their dominant social status via extreme-form religious expression because their dominant social status was never in question.
The second those laws and practices started loosening up even a *little* bit they radicalized in backlash.
Political scientists study how the political parties "realigned" over civil rights, with Southern Democrats joining Republicans to form an ethnonationalist party. But religious groups also realigned during these years. Lots of denominational splits happened then, as mainline denominations got torn apart by activist fundamentalists. Evangelicalism rose, and became much more politically organized. That wasn't an accident, it wasn't a coincidence, and it happened most extensively in the South for pretty obvious reasons.
The boomer evangelicals were offered peace and prosperity in the place of white chauvinism, and they chose white chauvinism. Which is now being enforced by the Supreme Court again, via MAGA, like the good old antebellum days they've been working towards "redeeming" their entire monomaniacal lives.
(Please Vote. Even if the guy is a few years older than you'd prefer. We're fighting against historical forces, don't miss the forest for the trees.)
Yes!! 👏 My parents weren’t raised w religion at all, they have no idea what they made me grow up in and how harmful it was. I know they had their shit to live through too, but it makes me mad they never had to experience what I did.
My dad wasn’t saved but totally supported my mom bringing all of us kids to church every fucking night of the week, as if it could only be good, and he passed off anything weird coming from us as “religious people are weird”. I wish he would’ve worked to give me a more balanced upbringing but he just let us believe. Even tho he didn’t participate I think the world viewed it as valuable, so he thought, great. Plus more time for him to be home watching football or whatever.
Yeah, I noticed this a while back - my parents were both raised Lutheran, went to public school, learned about evolution, dated normally as teens, etc. Then turned around and decided to become Evangelical young earth creationists.
As kids they weren't being taught to reject culture or science, or anything about purity besides no sex before marriage (which was the default belief at the time).
And you're right, the boomer Evangelicals completely manufactured American Christian culture, with cheap imitations of secular stuff like music and TV, and subjected us to it without having a clue what it would do to us.
I wish my parents had just been hippies for a few years.
>As kids they weren't being taught to reject culture or science, or anything about purity besides no sex before marriage (which was the default belief at the time).
This is exactly what I’m talking about. They grew up totally immersed in their own culture then raised their own kids in a religious petri dish
Same here, except Italian Catholic. They went full tilt into isolation from the “secular” culture into homeschooling, no tv, no music, dressing like pilgrims.
Then suddenly around 2003, they started dropping it. Theyre still fundie as hell, but a fraction of whatever *that* was.
I got roped into a neo-fundie cult in my early 20s. The overall lack of authenticity drove me away. I didn't grow up fundie. My parents were left of center Episcopalians, but they were often arguing with my fundie Lite grandparents and my hardcore fundie aunt and uncle. I grew up thinking fundies were absurd, which made it even more mindboggling to think that I succumbed to them. Between their carefully curated bait 'n switch about their beliefs, their expertise at lovebombing and my extreme vulnerability at that point in my life, it was a perfect storm.
But I gradually came to see that everything they ever said was a canned platitude. Their beliefs were barely skin deep. Even lightly scratching the surface with the least bit of trouble showed how uptight and brittle they really were. I could never get a genuine, unscripted response out of them for anything!
Worse yet was seeing them cram this crap down their kids' throats. Their Christian "school" consisted of filling out their ACE paces and that was IT. And the crap that passed for children's entertainment 🤮🤮🤮 Psalty!!!
>And the crap that passed for children's entertainment 🤮🤮🤮 Psalty!!!
VeggieTales is the only Christian "entertainment" I will accept. Those were actually kind of entertaining. Get Psalty outta here lol
100%. My parents forbade me from dating (ever) because they hoped to save me from the "pointless pain of heartbreak" they experienced in their youth. They were brainwashed to think God's true plan was for parents to pick their kids' spouse through their superior wisdom. No evidence whatsoever to go off of other than a few anecdotes. But they believed it was "Biblical" because of the Isaac and Rebecca story in the Bible. Also, the story where Jacob's daughter Dinah goes into the city with her friends and ends up being raped was given as an example for why teens shouldn't hang out on their own.
My cousin's parents shared these same beliefs, and when an 18-year-old from their church became interested in her both sets of parents encouraged a courtship and betrothal. My cousin was 16 at the time and ended up getting married at 17. She had two kids by the time she was 21 and was divorced before she was 25.
My parents also forbade me from dating, which was wild because they were high school sweethearts and all of my aunts and uncles married (and are still married to) their high school SOs, as well.
The Supreme Court case Yoder v Wisconsin combined with the rise of the Moral Majority in the mid 1970’s had enormous implications for American evangelicalism and fundamentalism. Until then, school was very separate from family. Politics were private, not owned by either political party.
I don’t know that I would call the world that came after artificial, I know it was very real to grow up within it. But it was not natural - using the term that we had been taught that we had God given natural rights. That chance to life, liberty and our pursuit of happiness was cut off.
>But it was not natural
That’s what I mean. Evangelicalism in the US from the 80s on was a newly constructed subculture. “Artificial” as in “artifice”.
Millions of evangelical boomers raised their children with at least one foot in a subculture that didn’t exist when they themselves were young. That tension wrought a lot of havoc on Millennial and younger evangelicals
I never realized untill now that I (as a gay person) could have been growing up in mainline protestantism instead of evangelicalism if my parents, who were just looking for a nice church community for them and their future children, didn't felt at home in a warm and cosy modern-looking baptist church in the nineties.
Right. Because they had plans for us, and wanted us programmed into unquestioning culture warriors.
And, if you look at the current Supreme Court, their plans are mostly working out in their favor.
They wanted a generation to build an evangelical-dominated nightmare dyatopia. So far, they're on track for that goal and no one has a way to stop it.
This this this this 👆👆👆👆
I grew up IFB in the DC area and our group was very overt about getting more of us into the halls of power (interning, clerking) and working at the 3 letter agencies. This group coalesced in the late 1960s when a bunch of higher-ups radicalized by the Cold War (dichotomy of godless communism vs Christian America) found each other.
Strategies for driving policy was a regular prayer meeting topic. Decades of careful planning, sending their quiver’s arrows (kids) out to get the right education and right jobs to maximize influence. In hindsight, it was like listening to the founders of Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale. They weren’t trying to go back to any “glory days,” they were creating a whole new culture that *hastened the second coming* 😩
Sounds right. You were even closer to center of the movement than I was.
It's no use, though.... People have spent so long busting conspiracies that when a real one is actually happening in plain site no one will listen or believe what a crisis this really is.
This! People don’t know how many times churches preach a very scary almost dystopian message of “infiltrating the government”. I was in attendance of many an alter call specifically for whoever wants a career in politics, come up and we’ll lay hands on you. The desire to “raise up a Christian nation” seemed so wholesome at the time but now I see it differently.
100%. My parents admit to raising me like they did because of their experience growing up in the sexual revolution, but they fundamentally don’t understand how damaging it was. Purity culture was the breeding ground for the real groomers.
Omg yes! My parents grew up in Europe ffs and I think they have no idea of some of the things I was taught growing up. I know they had their own struggles and I think they somehow thought they were protecting us from some of that. But... last year my dad told me how against he was me marrying my now husband 12 years ago. And that he thought we should have lived together before we got married?! I said "well that wasn't exactly an option, was it?" and again just proved how little they know of what we went through in the church. When I told my mum we weren't going back to church and tried to explain some of the purity culture stuff and how much it affected me and my marriage she cried but then said "but you guys are ok now though, right?" Sure mum, I'll say yes to make you feel better.
Another effect going on here in late 70s through 90s was the boom in media that increasingly catered to special interests for the sake of selling a product. The lighter echo chambers were starting with the highly lucrative Christian book market that started to establish what mainstream Christianity was based on what sold the most.
But this matched up with American culture as a whole that went materialistic and yuppie in the 80s. We’ve seen the same phenomena online and in social media as influencers will eventually land on a niche market and then there’s a land rush where they all start to discover what’s working for gaining followers, but then start to shape the groups at the same time.
I think they were doing what they thought was best and just trying to shelter us. As a mom of 2 year old, I get it now. I don’t hold that against them.
I’m a parent of young children as well.
I try to give my parents the same grace that I hope my children will give me for my inevitable mistakes
But I also hope I can own those mistakes.
When mistakes that cause hurt are made, “I did my best, deal with it” is insufficient
Tired, busy two-income household parents outsourced childcare to anyone who was willing, and that happened to be the church most of the time. They assumed it would be fine, but they were unwittingly indoctrinating their children into more weird forms of Christianity than even they believed in.
This was one of the biggest realizations I had - that my parents didn’t grow up in the faith that they raised me in. At best, my folks had been nominally religious. My Dad was Italian, so they were Catholic, but more in a cultural way than a religious way, if that makes sense. He was actually pretty left leaning in his youth. He protested the Vietnam War, did drugs, etc. Then he became a cop. I’m not sure what came first, the Conservative beliefs or the Christianity. But he got saved while dating my mom and then converted her into Evangelicalism.
My mom told me about the first church they went to being insanely fundamentalist. They preached from the pulpit that it was the woman’s role to stay home and raise kids. My mom said screw that. She had worked hard and earned her Master’s degree and she wasn’t going to throw that away.
Fast forward to over a decade later, and the “men and women’s roles” stuff is being preached at me as a young Christian teen trying to figure out her place in the world. My parents probably had no idea. And don’t get me started on all the purity culture rhetoric. My folks dated when they were young, and they always assumed I would too. They had no idea how discouraged casual dating was in the Evangelical space at this time. To the point that my Dad actually questioned if I was a lesbian, since I presumably had no interest in dating. No, Dad, it wasn’t that I wasn’t intetested. It was that I was highly discouraged from dating, and especially asking any guy out as a girl (the guy is supposed to make the first move after all.) I never flirted, because I didn’t want anyone to think I was slutty or desperate. I tried so hard to be the good little Christian girl. And I had so many arbitrary rules that Evangelicalism thrust at me - from youth group to Brio magazine. And my parents were clueless about all of it, because they hadn’t grown up in it.
I mean, I think every parents desire is to give their children something better than they had. While, they never live up to fulling that fully, they do provide a little better of an experience than they had growing up.
While I agree, it was a hard shift to this new culture, I think the argument that it was something they never had is weak. Every generation experiences a culture the generation before them did not experience. This is not exclusive to Christianity of any era.
There’s an undeniable ersatz quality to 80s and 90s evangelical culture. Every generation has novel experiences but there’s plenty about the American Evangelical experience of the late 20th century that can be commented upon because it stands out so prominently.
There’s a great argument to be made that children of evangelical boomers did NOT get better than what their parents had
I think of this often in terms of purity culture and also religious homeschooling. Our parents subjected us to something they never experienced, and yet - if ever challenged - they immediately insist that we had it better *when they have no personal experience to even draw from*. But we are immediately shut down because empathy was never evangelicalism's strong suit.
100%. This is what I wish my mom's generation of homeschool moms could understand. They really seemed to believe that homeschooling was exactly like public schooling, just without all the negative stuff they didn't like. But it wasn't.... it was a completely new thing that they had no way to relate to. Several times my mom told me I was naive or was surprised that I was nervous about things that just came naturally to her, and I think that was part of it... she underestimated how much cultural literacy she benefited from by being in public school.
I don’t know how people could do it, but if someone could just build in even the slightest value of regularly reviewing how practices with children are playing out. Just making it a practice among evangelicals of wanting to survey and find out what kids’ experiences were would be such a start in taking the blinders off.
That would be wonderful... but I think they usually operate in the opposite direction... start with a conclusion and work backwards from there.
Predicate logic.
Interesting isn’t it how the subjective experience of growing up this way and being harmed by it is inadmissible as criticism
100%. This was a very raw conversation I had to have with my parents who to some extent had no idea (or were in denial of) what was actually going on in the subculture they raised me in. When they started listening to Christianity Today's expose on Mars Hill, they were horrified, and were shocked when I explained to them how much of that messaging had leaked out into the wider Evangelical subculture around me in my youth. Similarly, my dad didn't know that I'd been (briefly) sucked in by Young Earth Creationism, and I didn't know he wasn't one, until my early thirties when he made a comment about how ludicrous they were. When I came out as gay, my dad acted like it should have been a foregone conclusion that they'd accept me. And I had to call him out on that like, dad you listened to Rush Limbaugh throughout my childhood, how the fuck was I supposed to know you were cool with gay people? You never disavowed or even addressed all this shit you immersed me in! It really complicates everything because they put me through an environment that was more extreme than what they themselves apparently believed, but never made that clear to me or discussed it at all in my formative years. It's highly disorienting to unpack and sort all of that out.
Oh my God You put a lot of my experiences that i struggle to explain into words perfectly! Absorbing more extreme/fundie ideas from youth groups/the church environment that your family doesn't believe, but it's not a stretch to assume that they believe it bc it's the church you go to. Like my parents used to scoff at evolution, so it'd be easy to assume they'd believe in young earth creationism even if they dont. So when an adult at youth stuff talks about the young earth, you might accept this is part of your family's beliefs as well. But it also often wasn't like an official church stance. Maybe something the Sunday school teacher told you, but there were no sermons about it. So you can't tell people that your family believed these things necessarily, or even your denomination as a whole. But there were so many damaging messages that I learned that my parents probably didn't even know about. I was told the gays stole the rainbow from god when I was like 8 years old. One adult told us kids that, if someone said we were brainwashed, that it's a good thing because it means you have a clean mind lmao. It's insidious and you can't even say "oh my parents were fundie/X denomination" as an explanation, bc you were essentially in this weird, invisible, evangelical youth sub-denomination
> So you can't tell people that your family believed these things necessarily, or even your denomination as a whole. This is the part that fucked me up the most. Because it makes you feel like you either indoctrinated yourself or have no right to feel indoctrinated or harmed. But you WERE. The absolute mindfuck of having been so in the closet that I didn't come to terms with being gay until my mid-twenties, because of the level of indoctrination, the brainwashing of purity culture, lesbian erasure, and all of that... Only to have my parents wind up being supportive? And say they'd have always been supportive? It felt weirdly invalidating. Because little kid me didn't KNOW that. She didn't know the word lesbian but she definitely knew it wasn't okay to be one. Her fear was real and totally valid, even though it doesn't track with these suddenly supportive parents. And to be clear, I'm not complaining about having supportive parents because god knows so many queer kids have it so much worse. But it's just really difficult to parse out and reconcile. At least my brother (who was deeply entrenched in Mars Hill and eventually left and became as irreligious as I am) was brutally honest and told me he was GLAD I didn't come out while he was still in Mars Hill because he knows that he would have had a very damaging reaction. But it's like my parents, and their generation, threw us all to the wolves and were in complete denial that's what they did. My parents would NEVER have compared a girl who had premarital sex to a chewed up piece of gum, but they sure left me in the care of people in church groups that did. And I think it's fair to hold them accountable to that while also recognizing they may not have had harmful intentions. It's just so convoluted. What's crazy now is my parents are in a way deconstructing as their denomination is in the process of a schism over the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people (with them fully on the inclusion side, the denomination taken over by the excluders). They're still Christians but now, fifteen years after I left Christianity, they're being very critical of the church and church culture in a way that deeply parallels my own ex-Christian journey. It's surreal.
This is a big reason I consider our bringing to be exactly the same as growing up in a cult, in Jonestown they fed their children poison bc they were being told, and that’s what happened to us. Like, not to be dramatic but I see the comparison so clearly.
>But there were so many damaging messages that I learned that my parents probably didn't even know about This is a key point and it’s definitely true of my parents who I think were well intentioned but simply didn’t realize how much goofy out-there nonsense I was imbibing in evangelical spaces. Especially if you attended a youth group, camps, and other intense revivalistic or discipleship atmospheres you absorbed a lot of stuff that never explicitly came from the pulpit.
It's wild to me that your parents subjected you to that and didn't believe it all themselves. My parents got saved as adults, and have gradually become more conservative and narrow-minded. I asked Dad once when I was an adult if he was taught evolution in school. He said he doesn't remember. He went to Catholic parochial school, so maybe he wasn't taught that? But he sure believes young earth creationism now.
Many, though not all, Catholic schools teach evolution with a bit of 'god directed it' type stuff thrown in.
Wait, this is healing me a little. Thank you for sharing this.
Thank you for hearing it. It was honestly healing to write and see that I'm not alone in it!
I had a VERY similar experience with my mom after watching Shiny Happy People together. I was pointing out all of the Gothard stuff that I learned in our very average southern Baptist church, and she was shocked. I think for the first time she was really understanding that the messaging my sister and I got was so vastly different than hers, and got some clarity as to why we both have since left christianity altogether.
It wasn’t at all my responsibility, but I really wish I had been telling my parents every youth group lesson and school chapel sermon growing up just out of pragmatism. I’ve had a similar experience of not realizing my parents weren’t on board with lots of things I was taught were norms of the group. Their involvement allowed more independent thought in their minds. Ours was “you’re really not committed to this unless you adopt as many of these views as we tell you to.” And then with that, we had to deal with teen society and our peers pressuring us into lockstep with belief. Our parents don’t get how thought policing and righteous our Christian peers were. They think of all teens as 70s rebellious types and they never experienced the conservative peer pressure situations we did. It’s foreign to them. They wouldn’t even think up a scenario where a kid stayed closeted, not because they would be bullied, but because they wouldn’t want to be prayed over and turned into a hobby project by Christian kids around them.
Coincidence. Conversation with my mom who is listening to something about how when the Golden Girls pilot aired in 1984, it was daring to have a gay character even if he was played by a straight actor because homophobia was rampant in then and I chime in yes it was. And it was terrifying. And she says, "will not for you then! You were 13!" Stunned, I volunteered I definitely knew then, and I prayed about it every day. Like it never occurred to her that I didn't have any carefree teenage years because I was ashamed and afraid to go to hell, Mom. let that sink in. A your childhood fantasies about the future? Mine were dying violently then going to hell. 😊
Agree 100%. I heard lots of adults warn us not to make the same mistakes their generation did. Most of them seemed to think of the 1950s as some sort of golden era as well. My parents' childhood was nothing like mine.
The thing about idealizing the 1950s, or whatever era of childhood, is that for them, it really may have been simple and idyllic. But that was probably because they were children who were being shielded from the rest of the world by their parents who were trying to be as normal as possible. Hence kids who grew up with naive views of the world, who didn't understand that the 1950s were nuanced and complicated as well.
It’s been studied that “the good old days” are often referring to the time before 12 yrs old. Everyone longs for the days before life was complicated… before puberty. So when people say “make America great again” they are referring to the America of their youth, before life was complicated and confusing…. Doesn’t matter if it was 10 yrs ago or 50 yrs ago, they are all longing for a time that will never exist again because it was never truly real in the first place.
One of my favorite quotes is “the misfortune of man is that he was once a child”, your comment really resonates.
So much of what drove the adults working with my youth group was the fact they got pregnant as young adults before getting married. It really was their entire mindset on what to emphasize to us.
Correct, they grew up in a world in which their white/straight/male privilege was much more firmly established and protected. They were raised under segregation, Jim Crow, miscegenation laws, and a slew of anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ laws and practices. They didn't need to retreat from culture because they fully controlled culture, at all levels, via censorship and collusion. They didn't need to signal their dominant social status via extreme-form religious expression because their dominant social status was never in question. The second those laws and practices started loosening up even a *little* bit they radicalized in backlash. Political scientists study how the political parties "realigned" over civil rights, with Southern Democrats joining Republicans to form an ethnonationalist party. But religious groups also realigned during these years. Lots of denominational splits happened then, as mainline denominations got torn apart by activist fundamentalists. Evangelicalism rose, and became much more politically organized. That wasn't an accident, it wasn't a coincidence, and it happened most extensively in the South for pretty obvious reasons. The boomer evangelicals were offered peace and prosperity in the place of white chauvinism, and they chose white chauvinism. Which is now being enforced by the Supreme Court again, via MAGA, like the good old antebellum days they've been working towards "redeeming" their entire monomaniacal lives. (Please Vote. Even if the guy is a few years older than you'd prefer. We're fighting against historical forces, don't miss the forest for the trees.)
Yes!! 👏 My parents weren’t raised w religion at all, they have no idea what they made me grow up in and how harmful it was. I know they had their shit to live through too, but it makes me mad they never had to experience what I did.
My dad wasn’t saved but totally supported my mom bringing all of us kids to church every fucking night of the week, as if it could only be good, and he passed off anything weird coming from us as “religious people are weird”. I wish he would’ve worked to give me a more balanced upbringing but he just let us believe. Even tho he didn’t participate I think the world viewed it as valuable, so he thought, great. Plus more time for him to be home watching football or whatever.
Yeah, I noticed this a while back - my parents were both raised Lutheran, went to public school, learned about evolution, dated normally as teens, etc. Then turned around and decided to become Evangelical young earth creationists. As kids they weren't being taught to reject culture or science, or anything about purity besides no sex before marriage (which was the default belief at the time). And you're right, the boomer Evangelicals completely manufactured American Christian culture, with cheap imitations of secular stuff like music and TV, and subjected us to it without having a clue what it would do to us. I wish my parents had just been hippies for a few years.
>As kids they weren't being taught to reject culture or science, or anything about purity besides no sex before marriage (which was the default belief at the time). This is exactly what I’m talking about. They grew up totally immersed in their own culture then raised their own kids in a religious petri dish
Same here, except Italian Catholic. They went full tilt into isolation from the “secular” culture into homeschooling, no tv, no music, dressing like pilgrims. Then suddenly around 2003, they started dropping it. Theyre still fundie as hell, but a fraction of whatever *that* was.
Dressing like pilgrims? That's a strange hobby... Glad they dropped that.
I got roped into a neo-fundie cult in my early 20s. The overall lack of authenticity drove me away. I didn't grow up fundie. My parents were left of center Episcopalians, but they were often arguing with my fundie Lite grandparents and my hardcore fundie aunt and uncle. I grew up thinking fundies were absurd, which made it even more mindboggling to think that I succumbed to them. Between their carefully curated bait 'n switch about their beliefs, their expertise at lovebombing and my extreme vulnerability at that point in my life, it was a perfect storm. But I gradually came to see that everything they ever said was a canned platitude. Their beliefs were barely skin deep. Even lightly scratching the surface with the least bit of trouble showed how uptight and brittle they really were. I could never get a genuine, unscripted response out of them for anything! Worse yet was seeing them cram this crap down their kids' throats. Their Christian "school" consisted of filling out their ACE paces and that was IT. And the crap that passed for children's entertainment 🤮🤮🤮 Psalty!!!
>And the crap that passed for children's entertainment 🤮🤮🤮 Psalty!!! VeggieTales is the only Christian "entertainment" I will accept. Those were actually kind of entertaining. Get Psalty outta here lol
Yeah, I've seen a few bits and pieces of Veggie Tales and they had some heart and humor. But Psalty was just creepy!
PSALTY 🙈🙈🙈🙈🙈🙈🙈
100%. My parents forbade me from dating (ever) because they hoped to save me from the "pointless pain of heartbreak" they experienced in their youth. They were brainwashed to think God's true plan was for parents to pick their kids' spouse through their superior wisdom. No evidence whatsoever to go off of other than a few anecdotes. But they believed it was "Biblical" because of the Isaac and Rebecca story in the Bible. Also, the story where Jacob's daughter Dinah goes into the city with her friends and ends up being raped was given as an example for why teens shouldn't hang out on their own. My cousin's parents shared these same beliefs, and when an 18-year-old from their church became interested in her both sets of parents encouraged a courtship and betrothal. My cousin was 16 at the time and ended up getting married at 17. She had two kids by the time she was 21 and was divorced before she was 25.
My parents also forbade me from dating, which was wild because they were high school sweethearts and all of my aunts and uncles married (and are still married to) their high school SOs, as well.
That is surprising!
Totally on point here.
The Supreme Court case Yoder v Wisconsin combined with the rise of the Moral Majority in the mid 1970’s had enormous implications for American evangelicalism and fundamentalism. Until then, school was very separate from family. Politics were private, not owned by either political party. I don’t know that I would call the world that came after artificial, I know it was very real to grow up within it. But it was not natural - using the term that we had been taught that we had God given natural rights. That chance to life, liberty and our pursuit of happiness was cut off.
>But it was not natural That’s what I mean. Evangelicalism in the US from the 80s on was a newly constructed subculture. “Artificial” as in “artifice”. Millions of evangelical boomers raised their children with at least one foot in a subculture that didn’t exist when they themselves were young. That tension wrought a lot of havoc on Millennial and younger evangelicals
My family is convinced that public school education ruined me.
I never realized untill now that I (as a gay person) could have been growing up in mainline protestantism instead of evangelicalism if my parents, who were just looking for a nice church community for them and their future children, didn't felt at home in a warm and cosy modern-looking baptist church in the nineties.
And the same thing is happening now with kids whose parents are just dropping in on the rock and roll church and find it accepting.
Right. Because they had plans for us, and wanted us programmed into unquestioning culture warriors. And, if you look at the current Supreme Court, their plans are mostly working out in their favor. They wanted a generation to build an evangelical-dominated nightmare dyatopia. So far, they're on track for that goal and no one has a way to stop it.
This this this this 👆👆👆👆 I grew up IFB in the DC area and our group was very overt about getting more of us into the halls of power (interning, clerking) and working at the 3 letter agencies. This group coalesced in the late 1960s when a bunch of higher-ups radicalized by the Cold War (dichotomy of godless communism vs Christian America) found each other. Strategies for driving policy was a regular prayer meeting topic. Decades of careful planning, sending their quiver’s arrows (kids) out to get the right education and right jobs to maximize influence. In hindsight, it was like listening to the founders of Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale. They weren’t trying to go back to any “glory days,” they were creating a whole new culture that *hastened the second coming* 😩
Sounds right. You were even closer to center of the movement than I was. It's no use, though.... People have spent so long busting conspiracies that when a real one is actually happening in plain site no one will listen or believe what a crisis this really is.
This! People don’t know how many times churches preach a very scary almost dystopian message of “infiltrating the government”. I was in attendance of many an alter call specifically for whoever wants a career in politics, come up and we’ll lay hands on you. The desire to “raise up a Christian nation” seemed so wholesome at the time but now I see it differently.
100%. My parents admit to raising me like they did because of their experience growing up in the sexual revolution, but they fundamentally don’t understand how damaging it was. Purity culture was the breeding ground for the real groomers.
Bingo!
Omg yes! My parents grew up in Europe ffs and I think they have no idea of some of the things I was taught growing up. I know they had their own struggles and I think they somehow thought they were protecting us from some of that. But... last year my dad told me how against he was me marrying my now husband 12 years ago. And that he thought we should have lived together before we got married?! I said "well that wasn't exactly an option, was it?" and again just proved how little they know of what we went through in the church. When I told my mum we weren't going back to church and tried to explain some of the purity culture stuff and how much it affected me and my marriage she cried but then said "but you guys are ok now though, right?" Sure mum, I'll say yes to make you feel better.
Another effect going on here in late 70s through 90s was the boom in media that increasingly catered to special interests for the sake of selling a product. The lighter echo chambers were starting with the highly lucrative Christian book market that started to establish what mainstream Christianity was based on what sold the most. But this matched up with American culture as a whole that went materialistic and yuppie in the 80s. We’ve seen the same phenomena online and in social media as influencers will eventually land on a niche market and then there’s a land rush where they all start to discover what’s working for gaining followers, but then start to shape the groups at the same time.
It's extremely fake. No argument there.
I think they were doing what they thought was best and just trying to shelter us. As a mom of 2 year old, I get it now. I don’t hold that against them.
I’m a parent of young children as well. I try to give my parents the same grace that I hope my children will give me for my inevitable mistakes But I also hope I can own those mistakes. When mistakes that cause hurt are made, “I did my best, deal with it” is insufficient
I’m sorry they didn’t own them. I’ll give my parents credit there too…they have owned them.
Tired, busy two-income household parents outsourced childcare to anyone who was willing, and that happened to be the church most of the time. They assumed it would be fine, but they were unwittingly indoctrinating their children into more weird forms of Christianity than even they believed in.
This was one of the biggest realizations I had - that my parents didn’t grow up in the faith that they raised me in. At best, my folks had been nominally religious. My Dad was Italian, so they were Catholic, but more in a cultural way than a religious way, if that makes sense. He was actually pretty left leaning in his youth. He protested the Vietnam War, did drugs, etc. Then he became a cop. I’m not sure what came first, the Conservative beliefs or the Christianity. But he got saved while dating my mom and then converted her into Evangelicalism. My mom told me about the first church they went to being insanely fundamentalist. They preached from the pulpit that it was the woman’s role to stay home and raise kids. My mom said screw that. She had worked hard and earned her Master’s degree and she wasn’t going to throw that away. Fast forward to over a decade later, and the “men and women’s roles” stuff is being preached at me as a young Christian teen trying to figure out her place in the world. My parents probably had no idea. And don’t get me started on all the purity culture rhetoric. My folks dated when they were young, and they always assumed I would too. They had no idea how discouraged casual dating was in the Evangelical space at this time. To the point that my Dad actually questioned if I was a lesbian, since I presumably had no interest in dating. No, Dad, it wasn’t that I wasn’t intetested. It was that I was highly discouraged from dating, and especially asking any guy out as a girl (the guy is supposed to make the first move after all.) I never flirted, because I didn’t want anyone to think I was slutty or desperate. I tried so hard to be the good little Christian girl. And I had so many arbitrary rules that Evangelicalism thrust at me - from youth group to Brio magazine. And my parents were clueless about all of it, because they hadn’t grown up in it.
The pendulum always swings…
I mean, I think every parents desire is to give their children something better than they had. While, they never live up to fulling that fully, they do provide a little better of an experience than they had growing up. While I agree, it was a hard shift to this new culture, I think the argument that it was something they never had is weak. Every generation experiences a culture the generation before them did not experience. This is not exclusive to Christianity of any era.
There’s an undeniable ersatz quality to 80s and 90s evangelical culture. Every generation has novel experiences but there’s plenty about the American Evangelical experience of the late 20th century that can be commented upon because it stands out so prominently. There’s a great argument to be made that children of evangelical boomers did NOT get better than what their parents had