I subscribe to Rolling Stone magazine. I love reading the feature articles, interviews, and movie reviews. In the April 21, 2016 issue there as a short interview of Father John Misty (Joshua Tillman) — an American singer and songwriter. Tillman was raised in a strict Evangelical home. When asked, Was there anything valuable about your Evangelical upbringing?, Tillman replied:
I was promised redemption and forgiveness and salvation over and over, but it never manifested in any meaningful way. It was like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football.
As I read Tillman’s answer, I thought, what a great analogy, one that describes the experiences many of us had with Evangelicalism. For those of us who are now atheists and agnostics, Lucy pulled the football away from us one too many times.
In a 2015 The Guardian story, Tillman had this to say about his religious upbringing:
“I went to a Pentecostal messianic Jewish cult school where I was taught to exorcise demons from my classmates and speak in tongues, and had these insane engineered psychedelic experiences,” he elaborates. “People were lifting my arms up to worship while kids lay convulsing on the floor, talking about seeing their dead grandparents. It was flat-out insanity, and I should have been writing about that.” Why wasn’t he? “I didn’t want anyone to know about my upbringing. It’s still a major source of pain and confusion. I didn’t get to choose my childhood, and I felt doomed. The further I get from those experiences, the more of a sense of humour about it I have. In a broad sense, I mean. I don’t think it’s hilarious or anything.”
In a February 2015 Rolling Stone feature article, Jonah Weiner had this to say about Tillman and his Evangelical upbringing:
It’s pretty intense conversation for midafternoon, but Tillman has always been, by his own account, an intense guy. He grew up in Maryland the eldest son of devout evangelical Christians. “It was the most suburban, bleached-flour kind of scenario you can imagine — aside from the Messianic-Judaism, Pentecostal, speaking-in-tongues, getting-slain-in-the-spirit, having-demons-cast-out-of-you stuff,” he says. “For my parents, heaven and hell were real. It’s bizarre to contemplate eternal damnation as an eight-year-old.” A born skeptic, he never fully bought into his parents’ religion. Instead, he got heavily into comics with skewed perspectives, like The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes, and for a time he wanted to be a cartoonist. That dream gave way, when he got wind of Bob Dylan, to a musical fantasy, and at 19 he dropped out of New York’s Nyack College — a Christian school he’d enrolled in mostly to appease his parents — and moved upstate, where a buddy was building a recording studio in a farmhouse. (Tillman’s relationship with his parents, long turbulent, has lately improved — “They’ve recently begun acknowledging that I’m an artist” — but it’s not a subject he enjoys discussing.)
Tillman’s story is yet another illustration of the damage that Fundamentalism — with its strict social codes and rules — can do to impressionable young minds. (See Are Evangelicals Fundamentalists?) While Tillman’s music is certainly influenced by his Evangelical upbringing, I suspect he would advise people to avoid Evangelicalism as they would when coming in contact with a Walking Dead-style, brain-eating zombie. .
Father John Misty cover of Arcade Fire’s song, The Suburbs.
Father John Misty cover of Taylor Swift’s song, Blank Spaces
It does leave scars. I’ve recently found a therapist and my upbringing features quite a bit. Just talking about it all out loud makes me realize even more how big of an impact it all does have. Chidhood shapes so much of your world and it takes effort to undo all that stuff.
Thanks for this Melody, For me, the feelings that came out of the talking out loud offered me so much new air to breathe…. Talk is the entrance to it all but the feelings that come in talk are the real portal, for me at least.
Yes, I’m sort of finding my anger more and more at the moment. Just at all the crazy stuff we believed and that increased my fear so much, demons, anti-Christ, you name it. I’m still learning that although the world can be a scary place, it can be a great one too! That I can in fact enjoy it, rather than focus so much on my guilt and being a bad sinner etc. etc. only focussing on God and pie in the sky.
It’s hard to see good things in the world if everything is doomed and tainted by original sin but it never was. So rather that beauty and good being somehow magically ‘spared’ by God, it’s just part of the world as it is. It does make me more hopeful but angry that it took so long for me to become free of it and to not let it influence my life so much anymore.
Bruce has said it many times on this blog, but it’s worth repeating, I think. The most serious people are often both harmed by religion the most because they take it so seriously but may also eventually get out of it because they take it all so seriously. Perhaps it’s both a blessing and a curse…
I really appreciate your comments Melody. I have noticed more anger in my views of Christianity than I experienced after my initial deconversion. I know in my case a lingering fear of Hell that continued past my loss of faith caused me to suppress the anger, but as I get past that fear the anger increases. It also increases because of the patronising responses I have received from christians who fail to address the reasons I left the faith.
I also endorse your comment
Thanks! Initially when I heard say Hitchens use pretty strong words or Bruce on here, I would sometimes cringe a little at the anger and fierceness. But other times, I totally agreed and felt the same.
I agree that a lingering fear of hell and punishment can still have a tempering effect and, for me, it hasn’t completely gone yet and sneaks up on me sometimes. However, most of the time it isn’t there and an increasing realization of the magnitude of it all is: how these beliefs have shaped my whole world view and habits and thoughts and the damage they have done to it.