How I Misspent my Youth by Going to Church

Well, I'm about to hit the road to go to Gig Harbor, Washington, where my band, the Bedlam Bards, will be playing at the Washington Renaissance Fantasy Faire. It's been a little less than a week since my first "weekly" posting, but I thought I'd post for this week now, as I'm going to be traveling and busy for a few days. So here's a little more information about my spiritual background:

My teen rebellion involved becoming a fundamentalist Christian and joining the Assembly of God church. (That’s how you rebel when your parents are agnostics.) Even during that period, I had a keen interest in mythology, which I often hid from my fellow Christians or explained away as an “examination of the enemy.”

My parents did their best to remain tolerant of my religious choices, as good Unitarian-Universalists should, but they finally lost their objectivity in the matter. Going against even their own principles, they forbade me to attend the AoG church.

Saying that they had neglected my spiritual education, they embarked on a program of making up for it. Every Sunday morning, we attended a different church, so that I could see the variety of worship that people engaged in. (We even went to a synagogue on High Holy Days. I guess that happened on a Saturday.) On Sunday nights, we read from books about other religious traditions, including one called This Believing World.

I hated the experience. I struggled and fought and resisted in my heart. My faith was strong and pure, and my parents could not destroy it. But something else did.

Hypocrisy.

Specifically, hypocrisy at the church my parents had forbidden me to attend. It took two forms, both of which I found profoundly disturbing.

First, a traveling preacher came to my home town under the auspices of my old church. His “ministry” involved preaching against “Satanic music.”

Now, I had heard all about Satanic music when I attended the church. I’d heard the stories—urban myths essentially—about how rock music was literally the Devil’s tool, about how Satanic priests actually chanted evil spells while the records were pressed. (Back then, we called compact discs “records,” and we played them on these things called “turntables.”) I’d even heard about how if you listened to the records backwards, you could hear the Devil’s compelling marketing slogans, like “Decide to smoke marijuana.” If you ask me, the Devil needs better slogan writers.

Anyway, even as a fundamentalist Christian, I had regarded such stories with considerable skepticism. After all, the backwards messages were scratchy and incomprehensible unless someone told you what to listen for. More importantly, they were backwards, for God’s sake. Who the heck listens to records backwards?

Finally, the most compelling issue for me was that if you just listened to, say, “Shout at the Devil” forwards, you’d hear plenty of much more explicit (and catchy) Satanic slogans. I mean, the Devil must be sneaky enough to know that hiding subliminal messages under a Black Sabbath or Motley Crue song is a less-than-clever ploy.

So my attitude toward the whole matter was that you listen to a song and decide on its own merits whether it supported your faith. Even back then, I believed that common sense had to temper faith.

Now, back to that wandering preacher. He attracted a lot of attention in the local media by hosting record-burnings. I found even the concept of that disturbing; I just had a gut-revulsion to anything similar to a book-burning.

But the final straw was a quotation I read in the newspaper: When asked if only rock music is Satanic, the preacher said, “Any music that does not expressly glorify God is Satanic. I burn rock music because there aren’t many kids out there endangering their souls by listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.”

This may seem silly, but I knew then and there that the preacher was no man of God. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is the closest thing to Divine music we will ever have on Earth, in my humble opinion.

The other matter of hypocrisy that hit the news from that church was even more troubling.

See, the people of that church thought of themselves as one big family of the virtuous, and we helped each other out. We all had the illusion (common in many subcultures) that fellow members of the church were utterly trustworthy and above reproach. For that reason, one of the couples at the church trusted me to babysit their young sons.

I took the responsibility seriously and did my best to safeguard them from all harm; and I’m proud to say that nothing bad befell them on my watch.

Then, during that period when my parents were keeping me from that church, I read in the papers the truth about that family: The dad had been raping his sons, and his teen-aged neice, for years—all while attending the church several times a week and professing his love of God.

These two events opened my eyes—and I was able to actually see the wide variety of religious experiences my parents were showing me. Though I resented them at the time, I am now deeply grateful that I had such an excellent education in comparative religion, to complement my first-hand understanding of the people that now form the Religious Right.

That experience left me faithless, and for a longtime I was a die-hard rationalist. How I overcame that is a subject for a different post.