As mentioned in previous posts, I am the daughter of pentecostal Christians, one of whom (my father) was a preacher. The stigmas surrounding preacher’s kids (or “PKs,” as those in certain circles refer to us) are bountiful and varied, ranging from the iconic perfect angel to the rebelious jail-bound streetwalker. Earlier today, I googled “preacher’s kids,” and the results were surprising. I expected a lot more anger, a lot more s**t talking and church bashing, and it simply was not there. Where is the rage, folks?! I know it exists. I know I’m not the only one. Maybe the others are so burnt out that they just don’t want to talk about it anymore. Whatever the case, I thought all the non-PKs might like a peek into the world that someone like me grew up in.
First though, I need to give you some context. Pentecostal churches are different from other churches. A Methodist PK is likely to have a different outlook than I do. Pentecostals are in a bizarre and baffling world all their own. So keep that in mind as you read.
My father became a minister when I was two years old, and he was 25 years old. The same age that I am now. He had his own church in California for 10 years, and then we moved to Texas so he could attend Bible school.
[Allow me to deviate for a moment and just state that Bible school is probably one of the biggest scams in modern religious history. A greater, more unforgivable waste of money I cannot think of.]
My parents told me that our reason for moving to Texas was simple: that’s what God had told them to do. I was 12 at the time, and just starting seventh grade (a horrible year to make your child start a new school, I have to say). As you can imagine, middle schoolers are not the kindest of human beings, so when asked why I had moved to Texas, I quickly learned to answer that “my Dad moved for his job,” and then asked them in kind why there were cows outside the math classroom window.
There were always two worlds for me: the world at church, and the world at school and with my friends, and the two mixed together somewhat at home, with religion tending to take the lead in everything. If we were going out to eat, my dad would pray and ask God where we were supposed to go. I don’t really remember doing anything active or fun with him, but he loved to make us sit at the table after dinner and read the Bible. We stopped taking family vacations after we moved to Texas, I assume because our financial status was somewhat diminished; the only trip I remember was the summer when I was 15 – we spent four days in Houston so my dad could go to Lakewood Church (now home to the famous Joel Osteen), and my sister and I spent the entire time in the hotel room by ourselves. If I did something wrong, my father gave me a sermon, not a lecture. Everything I did was supposed to glorify God, so my music (which, looking back, was pretty innocent stuff) was scrutinized, and I wasn’t allowed to watch certain TV shows or movies. He would commit me to church engagements without telling me. I recall one incident – I was supposed to go to a slumber party at my friend’s house for her birthday, but he had promised someone I would go to their church function. So he dropped me off at the party, picked me up and made me go to the event, and then drove me back to the party. I cried and cried but he wouldn’t relent, and I sat in the back of the church with my arms folded the entire time. He didn’t even stay there with me, he just dropped me off.
As you can tell, I guess I’m a little scarred from ordeals like these. Everything in our home life was refracted through the prism of religion. Don’t even get me started on Halloween or Santa Claus.
Sunday after Sunday, my little sister and I would feign illness in an effort to stay home from church; I can recall only two, maybe three times when this actually worked. Being pentecostal, my father delivered fiery sermons with speaking in tongues and people falling down and wailing and screaming. And on the extra fun Sundays, he wouldn’t preach at all – he would just lull the entire congregation into this strange, silent, meditative trance, with everyone lifting their hands, eyes closed, deeply in tune with the Holy Spirit. Personally, I got nothing out of those services, which of course lasted for hours on end. One time my mom and I left the church during one of these spells, went to the mall, came back, and found it hadn’t ended, not even close.
I could always tell that my parents were disappointed by and wary of the fact that I didn’t speak in tongues. Frankly, it always – always, even when I was very young – made me feel very uncomfortable. They said the purpose was to communicate with God when you didn’t know what to say. But I always knew what I wanted to say! Dear God, please help me get an A. Dear God, I really need $10. And the whole falling down thing didn’t sit well with me either. I remember once, when my sister and I were little, we were standing on our parents’ bed and my dad was praying for us (I don’t know why), and we started falling down on the bed like we saw the people in church do. And we thought it was so fun and funny that we kept doing it over and over and giggling to each other. But I clearly remember the look on my parents’ faces, and I think they genuinely believed we were experiencing some kind of holy awakening. Of course, these are the same people who claim to have seen angels and demons.
They never understood why I hated church so much, never truly realizing that I wasn’t getting anything out of it. All I longed for was a straight-up sermon with some simple concept that might help me in a practical way. But all the quiet singing and raising of hands and flailing on the ground did nothing. It just made me resent the fact that I had to be there.
Growing up in this culture also exposed me to a great deal of the hypocrisy and greed of the modern Christian church. For a time, my parents claimed allegiance to the Word of Faith doctrine, which is infamous for its prosperity teachings (not surprisingly, several of the group’s most famous ministers are currently under investigation by the IRS). Essentially, this concept fosters the idea that “if you believe, you will receive” – after, of course, you throw a little dough in the church’s direction. In case you couldn’t deduce this on your own, prosperity teachings are BALONEY. Have you ever tuned in to TBN? If not, I suggest you do sometime. It’s entertaining. There they are, these televangelists decked out in Armani suits on gilt sets next to their plastic-surgery-addicted wives. And they’re begging you for money for their Lear Jet, or they want you buy whatever ridiculous fluff-crammed book they’ve just written. I’m sorry, but they are laughing all the way to the bank.
My family has always, still to this day, had money problems. They’ve always given their 10% to the church, and to be completely honest, they are worse off for it. There is no return on an investment in the church. It’s easy to get up at the pulpit and say “Give and you will be greatly blessed!” when you’re on the receiving end of all that giving. Give me a break. We had way too many crappy Christmases for me to buy into any of that.
Don’t get me started on faith healing, either.
How did I turn out? Well, I wasn’t a “bad” kid, necessarily. Everyone hears those horror stories about how wild preacher’s kids can be. I didn’t use drugs. I wasn’t promiscuous. I did start drinking in high school, but really, who doesn’t? I moved in with my boyfriend when I was 21, and after five years, we are now married, so I don’t consider that a poor decision. I went to college and grad school and earned pretty respectable grades. I have a decent job and will probably be buying a house in the next year or two, maybe starting a family a few years after that. Things are great, really. But I don’t go to church, I don’t read the Bible, I pray on occasion but I don’t ask for or expect anything, and my religious beliefs could be best characterized as “undecided and seeking” at the moment. So in my parents’ eyes, they failed. Or I guess, I failed.
Do I wish my dad had chosen a different profession? Absolutely. I can say with confidence that my family would be far better off if he’d been a banker, or a plumber, or anything else at all. And it ends with me. I guess my marrying a lawyer could be attributed to a kind of rebelion in some way, the ultimate backlash against the sort of life I grew up in but despised. I don’t know exactly what they could have done differently. I do know that my pentecostal upbringing is the very reason why I refuse to go to church now. I have a physical allergic reaction to church. I don’t even like to think about it, and my own children certainly won’t have to go, unless they want to. I suppose it’s just a case of too much of anything being a bad thing. I got way too much, and now I don’t want any.
As you may have deciphered from previous posts, I am at somewhat of a crossroads when it comes to religion/spirituality/morality, etc. So in honor of Bill Maher’s upcoming “Religulous,” which I am anxiously awaiting with the eagerness of a kid on Christmas Eve, I thought I’d flesh out my beliefs on creationism vs. science.
Question: On what day did God create Spinal Tap, and couldn’t he have rested on that day too?
After watching the first season, waiting with bated breath for each week’s new episode, I was enamored. I am confident that TV has never been so intelligent, so artful, so sinfully entertaining. I watched the entire telecast of last night’s intensely boring Emmys just to see if “Mad Men” would win for Best Drama. I am glad to say it did.
