Growing Up Evangelical
A quick primer on the subculture you may have missed
Before I can explain how I’ve changed, you might first want to know what I was coming from.
In some ways, I was a typical Xennial. I came of age as desktop computers did, got my first taste of the Internet through AOL, and thought my parents were awesome for getting a then-state-of-the-art cell phone the approximate shape and weight of a brick.
A Subculture Bubble
But in other ways, I was an extreme outlier. I was a pastor’s kid—though it wasn’t my dad employed as the lead pastor of a church, but my mom as the children’s director —and my upbringing had most of the hallmarks of the Religious Right.
We attended church multiple times a week throughout my childhood and youth, often at a church where my mom was employed. Sunday School for kids and youth group for teens were weekly activities, and I learned through implication that they were the safest place to make friends. I was taught to dress modestly and “guard my heart.” I signed a pledge to wait until I got married before having sex. I got up early for the annual See You at the Pole prayer meeting at school. I don’t swear, and I would have been punished for doing so. I was so Not Cool.
The “evangelical subculture” provided musicians like Amy Grant or dc Talk and radio stations that played them; magazines like Focus on the Family and Christian Leader; and plenty of camps, activities, and retreats focused on evangelical Christian teaching. I knew other kids listened to and read different things, but I had so much that I didn’t miss the secular equivalents.
As one professor described it, evangelicals had “Christianized their everyday life.” Though it might sound unbearable, I never felt like I was being deprived; rather, I bought into my parents’ distrust of popular culture.
Republican by Default
My religious upbringing also came with an understanding that many popular beliefs were bad. Evolution was a bogus theory, liberals had an agenda, “gay rights” threatened to destroy the American family, legal abortion was the worst thing to happen to the US, unions only protected bad workers, and people without jobs were either lazy or too arrogant to take lower-paying jobs. Being Republican was assumed — so much so that I was surprised to meet a Christian who was not just Democrat but proud of it.
Seeds of Change
However, I can see in retrospect that a few seeds of my eventual political shift were planted early.
My family belonged to two or three different evangelical denominations at different times in my childhood and youth. As such, the unwritten rules changed from church to church, and I subconsciously learned that not all the rules are “the gospel truth.”
Unlike in some conservative circles, my household praised immigrants. My mother’s family were German-speaking Mennonites from Ukraine. Her father was born to immigrants from there, and her mother emigrated to the US after being displaced during World War II. Unfortunately, the praise was often spoken in contrast to (hypothetical) Black people on welfare who didn’t want to work, but it was another way that I was prepared to reject the right-wing narrative.
Both my parents have seminary degrees from an evangelical school. That was unusual for women at the time, but my mother was accepted because she was “only” a children’s pastor. Even when we belonged to churches that didn’t ordain women pastors, she often told me at home that she didn’t believe women had to be subordinate. Thus I saw from a young age that we could attend a church with which we didn’t fully agree on every point of doctrine. Since no church was perfect, I subconsciously absorbed that I didn’t have to get it perfectly right, either.
We couldn’t afford a private Christian school, and my personality was not suited to being home-schooled by someone with my mother’s gentle temperament. I don’t know if my parents worried about sending me to public school (would I learn terrible lies??), but if they did, I didn’t see it. Through school, I befriended Christians from other traditions, as well as atheists, agnostics, and Jews.
I was also a huge reader, and my use of the library was strongly encouraged. By the time I graduated high school, I had read historical, contemporary, fantasy, science fiction, and classic novels. So many books got me used to experiencing new perspectives.
Still, the culture around me was very white and broadly both Christian and conservative. While I was primed to question my own beliefs, I had never needed to.
Turning Points
Attending a large public university provided me an education in more ways than one. The student body was still majority white, but boasting much more racial diversity than my high school. (In fact, their admission policy had a stated goal of pursuing racial diversity, a case that went all the way to the US Supreme Court while I was a student there.)
More students and faculty at the university were politically liberal than I had met in my whole life until then. Church was just one of literally hundreds of activities available to me. I had freedom to schedule my own time and no one to make me attend. However, I quickly sought out a church that was familiar, i.e., conservative. Though it was not without flaws, it provided a place to explore my independence and a tight-knit social circle, several of whom remain my closest friends to this day.
After college, I got hired by a big tech company and moved to Seattle. Though I found friends with similar, relatively conservative beliefs, I was surrounded by liberal ideas that seemed to be working and people with stories and statistics that were totally new to me.
In Seattle, I joined a more moderate church, because I was tired of arguing that women could indeed be pastors. As I kept track of what was happening at my old college church, I saw problems I hadn’t noticed before: emotional abuse and sexual harassment of women, an emphasis on hierarchy and authority that led to a lack of accountability, and a willingness to overlook leaders’ bad behavior when the church was growing. Those ills are too common in conservative churches, and I began to question whether that’s really a coincidence. I came to believe that when a church’s dogma treats any group (in this case, women) as lesser members, that in itself primes its members to accept or overlook mistreatment of others.
Most importantly, I accepted that my views could change. Even if the Bible is perfect and unchanging, humans are not, so neither is our theology —that is, how we interpret Scripture and apply it to our lives. As I learned more about the world and grew in my faith, my priorities changed… and so did my politics.
Read on to learn more about what it means to be evangelical — both technically and in practice.
