The Agony and Blessing of a Religious Upbringing
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
Philip Larkin — This Be The Verse
I was brought up in a Christian home. When I was young I felt as if there were essentially two worldviews to choose between: the worldview of my family and the church I was taken to, that of fairly “fundamentalist” Christianity in which the Garden of Eden and Noah’s ark literally happened, in which there was a heaven and a hell and everyone is headed to one or the other, and the worldview that I saw on television, encountered in my friends outside of the church, in teachers and in the public world, a worldview in which nothing has actual meaning, evolution tells you how we came to be, there is the big bang, the heat death of the universe and when you’re dead you’re dead.
Everyone brought up in the modern world in a religious home has this dichotomy to some extent. To those brought up in a relatively unpleasant religious background full of hypocrisy or repression this may be a slightly easier choice, unfortunately for me I wasn’t. The Christianity of my upbringing was full of goodness, family, community, hymns I loved, people who showed me inexplicable kindness because of what I believed, and many other things I have nostalgic fondness for.
