EmMA

raised Southern Baptist

"It was hard…my entire life was through the lens of Christianity.”

I was born in Ohio and then moved to Iowa and then California, but spent most of my childhood in North Carolina; Central-North Carolina outside of Chapel Hill.

I don’t think I’ll go back to North Carolina. That’s where my parents are, and I feel like I wouldn’t be able to live there without living in their shadow, or being within their realm of influence. It’s a nice place! It’s a good part of the world. It’s just theirs now. And my place is not there, because of that.

I grew up in such a tight-knit, small community, where everybody knew everyone else’s business. Once when we were at church and having lunch afterwards, I remember [my mom] saying “Gossip is good! Everyone should be gossiping.”

The idea would be that everyone’s good enough anyway so their dirty laundry isn’t that bad. And everyone’s Jesus-revering people and just gossiping about cherry pie and peach pie and “Oh my goodness!” No one’s supposed to have any deep, dark secrets and if you do then the community has to find out about it so they can, I don’t know, try to fix you or whatever in that way.

I never felt like there was anything that I had to hide from my family but did feel like I wanted to have my own space. It never occurred to me that it was different than what other people’s lives were like.

The church community I grew up in was very progressive and liberal and not crazy-southern-Baptist-with-snakes or speaking-in-tongues. It was very much a hippie-dippy “peace-and-love” kind of thing. And so I guess I didn’t realize how church-ified my whole life was because I saw myself in an opposition with people who were southern-Baptist in that way, or nuts and filled with hate.

When I left high school I went to live at a summer camp retreat center, a secret kind of commune thing. It was for super Earthy, Jesus hippie people, and I’d go as a camp counselor teaching kids about Jesus. And like, a camp director being like, “I know what you guys are doing but if a camper asks you to have sex, you have to say no! You have to say you’re waiting until you get married, OK? Do what you want in your own time but you have to tell them that you don’t drink, smoke, or have sex and all those things that are “immoral.” And that was the acknowledgment of the façade and the beginning of the end for me, like everyone’s faking this but I went on doing it, for years and years.

I remember there were sort of different levels of rationalization. I remember really feeling like “Ok, I believe this story about the New Testament about Jesus.” I believe that’s real but in the same way that I think Harry Potter is real, or something I want to believe in. Because it makes the world a better place to entertain these ideas. Because it’s written down. And if we all take that information and absorb it then of course it’s real because it affects our life.

[When I was in middle school], my family moved to Lithuania. There was a concentration camp that had been outside of the city commons that we lived in. And I remember, I wrote a ton in my diary, like how was this allowed to happen? And then I sort of ended up, from that point on, slowly distancing myself from the faith doctrine of Christianity, [while] holding the morality rules like that you should be kind to each other and do good works and love one another. I got into anti-Israel pro-Palestine stuff for a while during my early teen years, like, this is what Jesus would be doing if he were here. But without it being a religious kind of activity on my part.

Around that time, my mom decided to go to divinity school in Lithuania. And when that happened I feel like she sort of stopped being our mom at that point and became wholly “God’s being,” and I resented that. As everything became about Jesus for her, I wanted nothing to be about that for me. Even though I still, for 10 more years, considered myself as a Christian and someone who believed in that.

So I moved to New York in 2005 to go to NYU, and when I left camp where I’d been living in Virginia, they were like, “Oh, you’re gonna change. You’re gonna become one of those slick New York girls and be a totally different person.” I was like “No! I won’t! I’ll be the same, I just really wanna do this.” [But] on some level that’s what I wanted, to physically get away from all of that and finally remove myself from it entirely.

It was hard…my entire life was through the lens of Christianity and it was the only way I knew how to meet and interact with people, and comprehend or rationalize things that were happening in my life. But I definitely threw off my messages of Christianity. But like, admitting that was really hard. The first time I said out loud that I don’t believe in God anymore, that was a huge thing and I really scared myself. What does life…do now? And a little part of me thought God was mad at me for saying that. Do I care? Is that a meaningful anxiety to have in this situation?

I don’t think I was ever an angry anti-theist kind of atheist. I definitely was very upset and continue to be kind of upset with a lot of hypocrisies that the church perpetuates.

I started graduate school last year, in the library and information program. I really found that the community of librarians and information professionals reflected some of those things that I felt really strongly about, and as a younger person were only ever framed as Christian to me. And I’m very excited about that. I said to myself, “Goodness, there’s still that kind of stuff happening in the world.”

Power structures – as they relate to access to information – in a human rights kind of way and especially as a library information science person, is something that I think and talk about a lot. That not everyone has equal access or the same tools, or even the same goals when they go to interact with a library or museum, or any other kind of institution. And I think all of that seems to grow really organically out of the radical Christian political beliefs that I came upon in my early teens…this idea of being in the world but not of the world.

I feel like I’m trying, figuring out how better to sort out the good from my Christian life and fit it into the pieces of my life I have now. Which I think is probably healthy.

I came out as a queer person not long ago. I think my mom really struggled with what that meant and what that meant for her as my mother. And she e-mailed me these Bible verses that were like “In God, there is no man or woman, no Jew or Gentile, no Greek or Roman. Is it something like this? Is it how this Bible verse is saying, you’re in the eyes of God, and when you get into heaven you transcend those labels and they don’t represent you anymore?” And yes in some ways.

I don’t think that there’s a higher power, but I do genuinely and whole-heartedly believe that the universe is a beautiful place. It’s stunning and amazing to be alive and at the end of the day, it’s astounding to exist, and the universe is unfathomably beautiful and exciting and large. And all of our shit, as meaningful as it can be to us as individuals or us as a species or the world as an entity, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really mean anything. And I don’t mean that in a nihilistic, upsetting way, I mean that in a really exciting and good way.

August 2015, Astoria, Queens

Names have been changed

This narrative has been edited and condensed.