Growing Up Evangelical*: Sin Happens
Growing Up Catholic, written in the 1980's by men and women my age, considers a host of religious categories, sin primary among them. While sin for Evangelicals doesn't seem to be quite the preoccupation Growing Up Catholic authors indicate it is or was for them in the 60's, sin nevertheless was and is important to our evangelical understanding of faith and salvation.
In my Growing Up Evangelical* experience we we were taught from nursery days (and proved it) that we are born with sin so attached to our little hearts that if we don't do what it takes to get rid of it we'll eventually find ourselves in hell. Everyone is required to deal with her own sin because no
one, we were taught, is grandmothered into the faith and no one gets carried
along with the faithful. We come into this world with a very personal debt for which we must personally answer. Anyone who calls herself Evangelical knows she can't free herself of this indelible stain--this bent towards doing and saying and thinking amiss; she must, as Jesus famously explains to Nicodemus in John 3, be born again.
The evangelical community in which I was planted believed (and still does) that in order to be born again, a step of faith is required. We must confesses our helpless, sinful situation and offer ourselves to God's mercy by believing that Jesus, God's only Son, was sent into the world to rescue, redeem, and restore all human beings, including me.
My first step of faith was a short prayer addressed to God, asking him to forgive my sin, fix the damage my four-year participation with sin had done to my soul, and direct me towards heaven. My prayer, as I understood it, opened the door of my heart to Jesus who, I was told and have come to know for myself, doesn't barge into our lives but knocks first (Revelation 3:20). From the moment I open the door, I was assured, my salvation would take hold like a good vaccination.
Growing Up Catholic authors share that winding up in hell might always a possibility and list sins for which the faithful can expect forgiveness (maybe after some homework). The authors as well include a short list that might have more serious consequences. These are the sins my Catholic friends try never to do. In contrast, my evangelical community was encouraged not to worry about hell after coming to faith. Once saved, always saved was the rule of my community, though we were expected to sin less and our sins were expected to be less serious following our step of faith. Should an evangelical eventually become a drug dealer or murderer, their initial faith might come into question. There's always loopholes I guess. Whatever the case may or may not be, I did my part to secure my spiritual future by praying the sinner's prayer many, many times from childhood to young adulthood. Once and done prayers seemed too slender a rope as I thought about hell.
The evangelical community in which I was planted believed (and still does) that in order to be born again, a step of faith is required. We must confesses our helpless, sinful situation and offer ourselves to God's mercy by believing that Jesus, God's only Son, was sent into the world to rescue, redeem, and restore all human beings, including me.
My first step of faith was a short prayer addressed to God, asking him to forgive my sin, fix the damage my four-year participation with sin had done to my soul, and direct me towards heaven. My prayer, as I understood it, opened the door of my heart to Jesus who, I was told and have come to know for myself, doesn't barge into our lives but knocks first (Revelation 3:20). From the moment I open the door, I was assured, my salvation would take hold like a good vaccination.
Growing Up Catholic authors share that winding up in hell might always a possibility and list sins for which the faithful can expect forgiveness (maybe after some homework). The authors as well include a short list that might have more serious consequences. These are the sins my Catholic friends try never to do. In contrast, my evangelical community was encouraged not to worry about hell after coming to faith. Once saved, always saved was the rule of my community, though we were expected to sin less and our sins were expected to be less serious following our step of faith. Should an evangelical eventually become a drug dealer or murderer, their initial faith might come into question. There's always loopholes I guess. Whatever the case may or may not be, I did my part to secure my spiritual future by praying the sinner's prayer many, many times from childhood to young adulthood. Once and done prayers seemed too slender a rope as I thought about hell.
Fear of hell for both children and adults was, and in some communities continues to be, a big reason why many have prayed the sinners' prayer. Some of my friends who also grew up Evangelical say they were scared into heaven by zealous people willing to describe what it might feel like to burn forever, no doubt believing that the hoped-for end (salvation) would justify the means (scaring the hell out of a person).** "Fire insurance" is how some of us describe our evangelical beginnings; we basically filled out the form, signed it and filed it under "H." Thankfully many of us have had our beginnings redeemed by experiencing salvation not only as a ticket to heaven and escape from hell, but the gift of relationship with God who loves the world enough to save it, us included. Fire insurance faith does little for anyone else this side of heaven.
Nevertheless, evangelical children are taught early that they'd better get saved or face the consequences. When I was very little, my parents, I am told, regularly stood me up before family and friends to hear me sing about the "years I spent in vanity and pride" (the first line of an old hymn by William Newell). While I'm not sure how much I could have known about vanity or pride at an age when most children are being potty trained, I nevertheless happily confessed, albeit in song, to have lived in both for years.
Perhaps vanity and pride lay behind my solo ballet performance one Sunday morning when I was supposed to be standing with other tiny children on the platform of our church sanctuary to recite a verse and sing a song. While the incident does not remain in my memory, I’m led to believe (and lament) that when the group recitation began, either because I had undiagnosed ADD or was simply bored, I traipsed to another part of the platform to debut various ballet positions, dancing my way through whatever the other little kids were doing, bending over often to show the ruffles on my underpants. Dance was a quasi-evangelical sin for us, as was showing underpants to the congregation, and shameful enough to cause my mother to consider leaving church that day without me. She told me so. Thankfully, she felt herself absolved when one of the church "elders" (and president of the seminary where my dad was attending) made a joke about it.
By the way, you might be wondering how, if dancing was so prohibited, I knew how to spin and pirouette. It's my guess that the art of ballet was first patterned after apriori movements of children. Dance, for goodness sake, is a gene small children happily display if they get a half a minute and space to move--as native to them as crying and sleeping. If mature human beings are prone to sin, most small children are simply prone to dance. Nevertheless, my evangelical training did not encourage that gene.
Perhaps vanity and pride lay behind my solo ballet performance one Sunday morning when I was supposed to be standing with other tiny children on the platform of our church sanctuary to recite a verse and sing a song. While the incident does not remain in my memory, I’m led to believe (and lament) that when the group recitation began, either because I had undiagnosed ADD or was simply bored, I traipsed to another part of the platform to debut various ballet positions, dancing my way through whatever the other little kids were doing, bending over often to show the ruffles on my underpants. Dance was a quasi-evangelical sin for us, as was showing underpants to the congregation, and shameful enough to cause my mother to consider leaving church that day without me. She told me so. Thankfully, she felt herself absolved when one of the church "elders" (and president of the seminary where my dad was attending) made a joke about it.
By the way, you might be wondering how, if dancing was so prohibited, I knew how to spin and pirouette. It's my guess that the art of ballet was first patterned after apriori movements of children. Dance, for goodness sake, is a gene small children happily display if they get a half a minute and space to move--as native to them as crying and sleeping. If mature human beings are prone to sin, most small children are simply prone to dance. Nevertheless, my evangelical training did not encourage that gene.
Smoking was a very serious sin, equal to swearing, and often responsible for significant reduction in the"spiritual" reputation of the one who practiced either. This teaching was so indelible that a woman I know who grew up like I did still doubts that C. S. Lewis was a Christian because in some of his books he is pictured smoking. So imagine, if you will, my parents' reaction when they learned that their elementary-aged daughter (me) had voluntarily confessed to a woman who attended the church my father pastored that my mother was a smoker. Of course my mother most certainly was not and most
likely had never held a cigarette in her whole life (she grew up Evangelical, too). While I didn't then and don't now know why I made that confession on her behalf, I am pretty sure it’s proof that I, like everyone else--at least in the evangelical mind--was/am predisposed to sin. And maybe proof I was, after all, filled with vanity and pride.
While sin lies at the root of most of our suffering, I've come to believe that some of what we label as sin can be
arbitrary, personal or even tribal rather than universal. For our family, running
through a sprinkler all day on newly laid sod was a sin as was failing to use soap during bath time, forgetting
homework and using provocative language like "pee,"
"poop" and the correct name for any private part of the body. Every
family has their list.
Most evangelical children are introduced to the 10 Commandments early; "Thou shalt not lie" had to be the first commandment I was taught and most likely the first commandment I broke as soon as I learned to talk. My very first conscious memory of telling an untruth was when I was three and following Peter Daniel, my great grandfather, to his boat for a ride. Just as I stepped onto the dock, his tiny wife, my great grandmother Helena Frieda Marta Schneider Wurth, appeared, swooped me up from the ground and held me tight against her chest. As I squirmed to get free, Great Grandma asked, "Don't you like me?" I told her, no, I didn't. That was the truth. And here's some more truth: my response was not a rejection of my great grandmother, but rather a plea for her to put me down. During our ride, however, I concluded from something my great grandfather said that telling my Great Grandma I didn't like her was inappropriate and that I had hurt her. When the boat ride was over and we were once again on land, I repented and told her that I did like her after all. That was a lie for the moment, but had she and Great Grandpa left me alone I probably would have liked her all by myself the next day. But telling someone else's truth is a practice I unfortunately continued throughout my life. It wasn't until many years later that I began to understand how lying to please others had wounded my soul.
Although I've learned how soul-destructive lying is, I sometimes used it as an alternative to humiliation. For example, as my fifth grade self sat one day in a restroom stall at school, two older girls, seeing only my black winter boots dangling on the other side of the stall door, left the bathroom screaming, "There's a man in the girls' bathroom!" I told my dad the story, begging him not to make me wear the boots. He still made me wear them the next time it snowed. Halfway to school I took the boots off and wore my school shoes instead and did the same on my way home from school and told Dad when he asked that I had worn the boots the whole time.
Guilt and shame, my ready companions, showed up often when I was a child; they walked with me to school, sat next to me during lessons and slept beside me in the bed with the pink canopy my parents bought for me. Yet the threat of potential humiliation seemed weightier at the time. It would be awhile before I learned how lying diminishes courage.
Most evangelical children are introduced to the 10 Commandments early; "Thou shalt not lie" had to be the first commandment I was taught and most likely the first commandment I broke as soon as I learned to talk. My very first conscious memory of telling an untruth was when I was three and following Peter Daniel, my great grandfather, to his boat for a ride. Just as I stepped onto the dock, his tiny wife, my great grandmother Helena Frieda Marta Schneider Wurth, appeared, swooped me up from the ground and held me tight against her chest. As I squirmed to get free, Great Grandma asked, "Don't you like me?" I told her, no, I didn't. That was the truth. And here's some more truth: my response was not a rejection of my great grandmother, but rather a plea for her to put me down. During our ride, however, I concluded from something my great grandfather said that telling my Great Grandma I didn't like her was inappropriate and that I had hurt her. When the boat ride was over and we were once again on land, I repented and told her that I did like her after all. That was a lie for the moment, but had she and Great Grandpa left me alone I probably would have liked her all by myself the next day. But telling someone else's truth is a practice I unfortunately continued throughout my life. It wasn't until many years later that I began to understand how lying to please others had wounded my soul.
Although I've learned how soul-destructive lying is, I sometimes used it as an alternative to humiliation. For example, as my fifth grade self sat one day in a restroom stall at school, two older girls, seeing only my black winter boots dangling on the other side of the stall door, left the bathroom screaming, "There's a man in the girls' bathroom!" I told my dad the story, begging him not to make me wear the boots. He still made me wear them the next time it snowed. Halfway to school I took the boots off and wore my school shoes instead and did the same on my way home from school and told Dad when he asked that I had worn the boots the whole time.
Guilt and shame, my ready companions, showed up often when I was a child; they walked with me to school, sat next to me during lessons and slept beside me in the bed with the pink canopy my parents bought for me. Yet the threat of potential humiliation seemed weightier at the time. It would be awhile before I learned how lying diminishes courage.
There were many other childhood sins; pilfering coins from the ice cream man's money box to pay for the cone I had ordered, picking up my baby brother by the head, shaving all the fur from one of our dogs, and cementing a huge vinyl flower sticker to the hood of my dad's car. As I went through each day I tried to remember to add each offense to a mental list to take to my nighttime recitation. "Here's what I did. I am sorry," was the gist of most of my prayers, as if God's sole job was to listen to my sins and then delete them. Besides giving thanks at meal times and begging Jesus not to return today,*** my sins (which were many) occupied most of my spiritual concerns.
Needless to say (but I will say anyway) I sinned as a child and have also sinned as an adult. While childish sins are fairly easy for me to confess now, adult sins are much more difficult and can, when remembered, summon shame powerful enough to nail my soul to the ground. Many songs Evangelicals sing celebrate freedom from guilt and shame, yet many of us still actually live in life-leaching shame from past lapses. And the truth is, however bad we've been, shame widens whatever separation sin introduced: read Genesis 3. And we simply do not hold up well when we are in shame. Ask Brene Brown.****
Then one day, thanks be to God, I was able to hear the gospel as relayed in Romans 8:1: There is therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ. The verse follows St. Paul's confession concerning the good he wants to do and the sin he actually does. Rather than having a judgmental finger pointing in my direction or hearing the command to pray harder or do more homework, I understood that no one was keeping track. No condemnation proclaims a redemption that was powerfully at work before I ever made a stab at prayer. I had to think about that for awhile and finally asked, "Really? No condemnation? None?" None, came an inner echo.
Reviewing some of the sins I couldn't forget, the disgrace of which I had carried in my cells, I asked again, "Are you sure?" Yes, I'm sure, you poor little evangelical child, said the One who has lived in my heart, opening arms for a hug.
Of course no condemnation doesn't happen because we suddenly stop sinning: No condemnation is grace that's able to outstrip guilt and turn its power towards making amends, strengthening conviction and identifying the dark force that drives us towards the low road. While it's true that as much as we love this grace and as hard as we try not to be professional sinners, we err and slip, behave cowardly and forget important lessons. But ever since Martin Luther quit walking around Germany on his knees, men and women in Christ have been trading their shame for no condemnation. If we can swallow that truth, we will begin to stop trying to pay our own way and let grace do it's work.
As far as the eastern horizon is from the west, so he removes the guilt of our rebellious actions from us (Psalm 103:12, NET) and There is therefore no condemnation are good follow-up declarations to 10 Commandment lessons, even--and especially--when necessary consequences following offenses are being meted out. Maybe even to the child singing and sometimes demonstrating her vanity and pride.
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By the way...
*I feel it necessary to define Evangelical because the term is so broadly being thrown around, especially in today's politics. The term, long before the so-called became a political power block, has always had to do with teaching and proclaiming the gospel or good news of the Kingdom Jesus proclaims. While there might be more to say about that, I'll refrain because saying more will give me one more thing to confess tonight as I wait for sleep that comes very sluggishly these days. By the way, it's appropriate sometimes to capitalize the term and sometimes not. Since I'm not always sure which to do when, I do both and hope I do it right sometimes. And I've decided not to check in with some of my stayed Evangelical friends who would likely disagree with my definition or decisions.
**Though hell was mentioned often in church and Sunday school when I was growing up Evangelical, I don't remember anyone making undue efforts to describe hell's torments--at least not until I read "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by Jonathan Edwards. One friend shared recently, however, that when he was 7, a Sunday school teacher took his class out to the church parking lot and set a stuffed bunny on fire to demonstrate what will happen to the little children who neglect to care for their souls. I wonder what Jesus would think of that lesson. Actually, the image of a millstone necklace comes to mind. Eternity is at stake for sure, but so is mental health.
***See Fellowship of the Journey post http://fellowshipofthejourney.blogspot.com/2016/01/growing-up-evangelical-preparing-for.html
****Brene Brown has done brilliant research on what it means to live wholeheartedly which requires us to look at what it means to live vulnerably and shamelessly. I usually point people to her TEDS talk. Warning to Evangelicals: there are a few swears.
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