My childhood is thick with religion, and a quite… unusual… variety of it, too.
From what I have been able to piece together by overhearing the previous generation of my Family discuss it, as well as suppositions on my part, it began in the 70’s. My Dad was drafted to go to Vietnam, and he got all the way out to California ready to ship off on one of the planes when his Grandfather died. His Enlistment was canceled due to the fact that he was the only surviving adult male (Head of the Household), and my Dad was free to go home.
Only he didn’t go home immediately, he stayed out West for awhile and got involved with the Hippies, partook of all the vices of that Counter-Culture, and eventually “bottomed out” and joined the Jesus Freak movement. The movement entailed a lot of strange beliefs, such as “Faith Healing,” being “Slain in the Spirit” and “Speaking in Tongues.”
“Faith Healing” is the belief that God still literally heals people miraculously, everything from a stuffy nose to full-on Stage IV Lung Cancer, just instantly disappeared. All it requires is the Laying on of Hands, perhaps an Anointing of Oil, and a lot of Faith. That is, you’re supposed to “Claim” that you’re Healed, like Announce to God what you want and, if you do it right, He has to give it to you. If He doesn’t, there must be some flaw in your asking, like perhaps you don’t have enough Faith or something.
“Speaking in Tongues” is mentioned in the Bible in Acts and a couple of the letters of Paul where he says that men shall speak with “unknown tongues.” The Jesus movement took this to mean “ranting absolute repetitive gibberish as loudly as possible as a form of prayer.” Scientists have done brain scans on those performing glossalalia and found that the language centers of the brain aren’t even active. They’ve been short circuited. It’s an automatic, conditioned response. However, practitioners of glossalalia enter mental states that are strikingly similar to those achieving Meditation. Maybe that’s why so many Evangelicals do it. (I must admit, I’ve gained peace from Speaking in Tongues many times in my life.)
Finally, being “Slain in the Spirit” is when somebody prays over you so effectively that you connect directly with the Spirit of God, and the power hits you so hard that you fall down. Sort of like an “involuntary trust fall,” people are behind you to catch you and gently lay you on the floor. Sometimes people get a little crazy with this and they writhe around after they’re down there. I guess they’re “writhing in the spirit.” (This is where those Crash Test Dummies lyrics come from.) I’ve been in Church Services before where the Minister got a little exuberant about his prayer and tried to insinuate that you should just go ahead and fall… by pressing more and more insistently on the center of your forehead. My Brother always resisted falling and resented it when the Ministers would try to make him go down.
I’m a little fuzzy on the history of it all, but apparently the Jesus Movement established the Foundation for the Charismatic and Pentecostal denominations, with their eventual children being the Evangelicals and the MegaChurches. In any case, my Dad brought it back with him when he finally hitch-hiked his way back to Kentucky, and he infected the rest of my family with it. Family, though, I should say my Uncle and Aunt. My Grandfather was dead and my Grandmother wouldn’t truck with any of that “silly nonsense.”
At the same time, my Mother experienced the Great Revival of 197X at Asbury College, which featured many of the same elements. She became as freakishly hyper-religious as my Dad did, and when they met, they both felt that God was “leading” them to get married. Me and my Brother were the result.
Dad spent some time Pastoring, but my Uncle developed a true talent for it. Eventually he founded a Church of his own; sometimes we had an actual church building, but for most of my youth the Church met in people’s houses, garages, upstairs rooms, that sort of thing. My Dad and Mom attended, as well as a bunch of extended friends they had met in rural Kentucky. (A few of them still attend my Uncle’s church to this day, and now they have an actual building again.)
I rarely paid attention during Church. Usually I took a big stack of paper, pencils, pens, markers and crayons, and I would draw and color and generally amuse myself as best I could while services were going on. Sometimes they would have a guest minister, like a Physician who cracked his skull open one night and supposedly visited the Afterlife. He predicted the world would end sometime in the 90’s. Or the dreaded Mabel B., who held four hour Prayer and Intercession Services. When she came around, the parents would just give up on controlling their kids and let them out early to run around the yard or play Nintendo.
There were two subjects that really left an impression on me from my religious upbringing. One was that the world was going to end horribly in fire, and it could happen any day. I read special descriptive books about the End Times and became absolutely fascinated with it. I dream about the Apocalypse happening even now, quite regularly in fact. The other subject that really affected me was sex. Somehow I got it into my head that it was one of the worst Sins you could commit, but I don’t remember anyone actually telling me this. I must have picked it up from one of the “Teen Books” my Dad gave me in lieu of having the actual conversation with me himself. It’s a large part of the reason I’m so repressed now.
I was completely faithful in my beliefs until I came to Saint Academy. There, I witnessed another denomination, one that I was always taught was “dead” and incapable of experiencing the true Power of God, enjoying “spiritual” Revival Services that were just as effective as my own. That threw me for a loop. My Dad had lost his Faith as a result of his Wife’s death, and took on a couple of crippling Vices. In turn, I lost my Faith in him, and since he was a proxy for God, I lost my faith in God. Exposure to the alt.atheism Newsgroup sealed my fate. I could no longer take the Bible literally, it just made too little sense for me to be able to accept.
Of course I went through the “Angry Atheist” phase, where I took inordinate pride in my superiority over all these “stupid sheep” and tried to ardently disprove any article of faith that was brought up before me, but I eventually calmed down and got over that. Now I would probably describe myself as a rather limp-wristed Agnostic. After all, it’s literally impossible to know anything about the time before your birth or after your death, and it’s impossible to know for certain anything you can’t personally observe, so why try to make authoritative proclamations about it? I’m not totally turned off by the idea of there being a God or a Higher Power, but I would be quite surprised if It exists. Same thing for the Afterlife. If I wake up after Death burning in Hell… my words will probably be… “Well, I’ll be damned.”