A Natural Immunity to Evangelicalism?
How to inoculate your kids against proselytizing peers
By all logical measures, I was an unlikely candidate for conversion to Evangelical Christianity. First and foremost, I wasn’t raised in it. We were never a religious family, having attended church only after moving to the rural South, where it was socially mandatory. Neither was I afflicted by the trauma and vice that hobble many other kids as they break into adulthood.
Nevertheless, during my very first semester away at college, I was sucked into a white evangelical campus club. And by the end of my freshman year, I was a soldier for God.
It is sometimes assumed that the better-adjusted among us are less-likely candidates for recruitment to cults or fundamentalist religion. The truth is that there’s a lot more to it than that. We may not like to admit it, but circumstances play just as big a role in our vulnerability.
In my case, I was 17, away in college, and looking for a social group that was not focused on partying.
Bingo.
Fortunately, my involvement was brief, and after my junior year I was basically done with it. In retrospect, I can see how this break up was inevitable. I was just not cut out to be an Evangelical, or in any other mind- controlled group.
It’s easy to see why church abuse survivors, kids raised in strict religious families, and LGBTQ people flee from the Evangelical fold. But among those without these issues, the difference between lifetime followers and the de-converted can be harder to spot.
I have had little follow up with the other kids from that club, but over the years I have encountered not a few adults who “used to be Christians.” Like me, they were never going to stay in Evangelicalism. We are square pegs that can’t fit in its little round holes, with two major distinguishing traits.
Curiosity saves the child
An uncurious believer will confidently pronounce that the Bible is the instruction book God gave us for living well and getting into heaven.
A curious believer will ask “but what about all the people who lived before the Bible was written?” And if they have an analytical mind, they may conclude that a fifth grader could have executed this particular instruction plan better than that.
Out of innocent curiosity, I once asked a fellow believer who was considering joining the Army how he would deal with the possibility that he may one day have to kill a fellow Christian brother in battle. It turned out he had never thought of that.
This kind of thinking, or rather — non-thinking — was the norm in my college Evangelical club. I had always been curious about the world and people outside my immediate bubble and was shocked to find that these kids were not.
Those of us who have de-converted, or never converted, may be baffled at how believers can just ignore all the contradictions, factual errors, and outright falsehoods in their faith. It turns out they aren’t ignoring them at all. They have just never thought about them. The desire to understand and explore is simply not there.
Inclusion breeds understanding
My fellow club members believed we had the ultimate truth of the universe, and the unique responsibility to share it with the rest of the world — i.e., “the lost.” Basically, there were two camps of people — us and them.
I shared that belief. But I eventually realized that we didn’t share the same criteria for membership in the camps. To my mind, us included devoted believers in all Christian churches. To their mind, most of these “others,” because of some different doctrines and practices, were definitely them.
Some of them even delighted in imagining the surprise these other Christians would feel upon their assignment to hell.
After studying Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in a literature class, I once brought up the selfless sacrifice of one of its Christian characters. This believer, like many other Russian women of her time, practiced prostitution to support her mother and sister, risking the fate of her own eternal soul so that they could remain virtuous and secure in their own salvation.
In the view of my fellow Evangelicals, both she and her sisters were all destined for hell anyway, because they weren’t Evangelicals. And why worry about some 19th century prostitutes anyway? Why did they even matter?
Resistance training for kids
- Model and encourage curiosity. Instill a joy in figuring out how things work and why. From car engines to the night sky, ant farms, and governments, kids who pry into the how’s and why’s of the world will develop curious, analytical minds and instinctively apply these skills to a religion.
- Practice inclusion. Kids who grow up in exclusionary groups can feel at home in an exclusionary religion. Exclusive country clubs, gated neighborhoods, and homogenous rural communities that resent and denigrate others can set kids up to feel entitled to specialness and the status of chosen.
- As much as possible, travel. If it’s not possible, read novels and watch series set in other lands, times, and cultures. Kids who feel a connection to people whose worlds don’t reflect their own will be more inclined to feel that others matter.
- Model empathy. Practice charity and gratitude. Emphasize we over me. Children who don’t absorb these attitudes may be perfectly comfortable believing that the vast majority of humankind deserves eternal torment.
None of these resistance strategies will guarantee that kids do not fall victim to proselytizing or fall in with Evangelical peers. What they will do is increase the odds that their experience with Evangelicalism, or any other mind-controlling cult, will be brief. They will have corners that push against and outgrow the tiny holes that imprison their minds and souls.
The right background can make the difference between a life lesson and a lifetime trap.
