Every Friday I receivein my in-box The Galli Report, a newsletter sent out by retired Christianity Today editor Mark Galli, who converted to Catholicism. In today’s edition, he highlights a couple of pieces by two Anglicans who push back against Evangelicals, or Ex-vangelicals, who trash their religious roots.

Alan Jacobs writes:

One thing that I almost never see in the current Discourse about evangelicalism is an acknowledgement by people who were raised evangelical that their upbringing might have provided something, anything to be grateful for. When I hear people denouncing their evangelical or fundamentalist “family,” I remember something Auden said about Kierkegaard: “The Danish Lutheran Church may have been as worldly as Kierkegaard thought it was, but if it had not existed he would never have heard of the Gospels, in which he found the standards by which he condemned it.”

For decades now I have been puzzled, bemused, and sometimes frustrated by people who speak as though being raised a fundamentalist Christian is a uniquely terrible tribulation. And I have met many such people. I was not raised evangelical myself, and only in a nominal sense was I raised a Christian. We knew we were Baptists, because denomination was a social marker in Alabama sixty years ago, but we very rarely went to church. (Occasionally someone would feel a sense of responsibility and we’d attend for three or four weeks in a row, but then a year or more might pass before we returned.) We didn’t pray; I don’t believe I ever prayed or was prayed for at home. At some point in my childhood — during one of those brief spasms of church attendance, I suppose — I learned John 3:16, for which I’m very grateful! But I didn’t learn the Lord’s Prayer until I became interested in Christianity in college.

Jacobs goes on to talk about how his father, a violent drunk, was in and out of prison, and how his dad physically and emotionally abused him. He says:

So when people whose parents loved them and expressed that love, cared for them and prayed for them, encouraged them in goodness and consoled them when they were hurt, tell me that their upbringing was terrible because those same parents were legalists and fundamentalists, well … let’s just say that I have a somewhat different perspective.

Galli quotes from a great recent TAC piece by Brandon Meeks in which he expresses the same frustration with that kind of ungrateful person. Excerpts:

One can imagine fewer complaints from the South if her critics held everyone over the fiery pit like one of Edwards’s unfortunate spiders, and did so with equal contempt. But there seems to be a bit of socio-theological dissonance at play. On the one hand, cultures that are overtly pagan, unbelieving, or outright anti-god are viewed through the starry eye of Pelagian optimism. While on the other hand, the imperfect religious expressions of the Bible Belt are met with the clenched fist of an Augustinianism gone to seed. The latter is denounced as utterly depraved with all of the fervor of a tent-revivalist, while the former are patted on the head like some tame race of noble savages.

Just so, barring a faulty eschatology or kind of theological schizophrenia, one is left to draw the conclusion that those who dislike “Bible Belt Religion” really just dislike the Bible Belt. But for my part, I thank God for the Bible Belt people who introduced me to Jesus.

More:

Urban Evangelistas love to rail against nominal religion, declaring with no small amount of glee, “Mayberry is not the New Jerusalem.” To which an honest person is bound to say, “sure.” But then again, Mayberry sure as hell ain’t Sodom and Gomorrah either.

Read it all. 

I was raised pretty much like Alan Jacobs was on the religious front (though thanks be to God mine was a loving family). My family were Easter and Christmas Methodists, with my father occasionally deciding that we needed to go to church for a few weeks, and then we would backslide. I can’t complain about the church in which I was raised, because we didn’t give them much of a chance to raise me. I complain about the lack of religion in my upbringing, but let me say something good about the nominal Christianity of my childhood.

My late sister and I were raised with the Christian story, in part because my mom took us to Sunday school. I was a shepherd in the Grace Episcopal Church kindergarten Christmas play. We kids processed into Jackson Hall carrying lanterns we made in kindergarten from milk cartons that had windows cut out of the side, and papered over with wax paper we had colored with Crayolas. I still remember all of us marching into the dimly lit hall, singing the mysterious “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” enveloped by the warm smell of melting crayons coming from our glowing lanterns.

We never read the Bible at home, or prayed together, but the moral structure my parents instilled in me was quite Christian. I only began to realize that there was something wrong with our approach to the faith when I stumbled across a copy of The Late, Great Planet Earth at age 12, devoured it in one sitting, prayed the sinner’s prayer at 2:30 in the morning, accepted Jesus as my personal savior, and then sat back and waited for the Rapture.

I laugh at my adolescent Evangelical fervor, which was fairly short-lived, but I’m grateful that it compelled me to do something I had never done before: read the Bible in earnest. It opened a whole world to me. I fell away from it after a year or two, and then was nothing … until, at age 17, I walked blindly into the Chartres cathedral and met God. You know the rest of that story.

Over the years, I’ve been pretty critical of my folks over their attitude to church. Ruthie and I took different religious paths, but we were both regular churchgoers in our adulthood, unlike our parents. I can recall getting fed up from time to time with their complaining about the church, and telling them in anger that they ought to either change churches or get back in there and try to fix what they don’t like, but staying away from the house of God is not right. They had no idea what I was talking about. Eventually we quit arguing, because there was no point in it, and I realized I was sounding self-righteous. They never hassled me about church. My dad was hurt and offended that I left the Methodist Church to become Catholic, but not because I was becoming Catholic. He was grieved that I was no longer Methodist — this, even though he rarely went to church. It was part of the family’s identity, and to that I was being disloyal. But he got over his hurt, and always supported me, whether Catholic or Orthodox. His and Mama’s idea was, “Well, at least he’s going to church.”

When I first started reading about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism about fifteen years ago, I realized that this scourge had arisen because many Christians related to the faith the way we did in the 1970s: as part of our social identity rather than a living faith. A decade earlier in my Christian life, I would have been mad at my parents for what amounted to neglect. But by then, I was a father, and I realized how hard it is to raise children in the faith. Like so many people of their generation, at least down here in the Bible Belt, they assumed that we would always be Christian, and that nominal Christianity was just fine. They had no real understanding of how fluid our culture was becoming. Even today, I realized, so many Christians of my own generation don’t have a full grasp of what’s really happening. We are driving without lights at night, assuming that the guardrails are still in place on either side of the bridge.

For all I know, my own children will reach age 40, and wonder how on earth their parents were so lackadaisical about their religious upbringing, given the array of forces lined up against the faith in their generation. Or, if they remain Christian, but for whatever reason move to a different confession, I hope that they will remember fondly the Jesus that they were shown in Orthodoxy (the older two were baptized Catholic, but were little when we became Orthodox, so don’t remember Catholicism). When I was a Catholic, I met from time to time people who would introduce themselves to me as “recovering Catholics.” Often they would thank the God they no longer believed in for their Jesuit educations. I remember back then being really amazed, and even offended (as only a convert can be), how ungrateful these people were. Was there really nothing about growing up Catholic that they appreciated?

Anyway, in the spirit of Alan Jacobs and Brendan Meeks, I want to say how much I appreciate the good in my Christian raising. If my folks hadn’t given us what they did — Sunday school as little-bitties, Grace Church kindergarten, church at Christmas and Easter, and the rest. I might never have known or cared enough about God to be receptive to Him in the Chartres cathedral, and beyond. As nominal as the Christianity was in our household, the spirit of the Gospels still glowed there, and there is no telling how much good it all did for Ruthie and me. They say that a Christian’s feelings toward God often have a lot to do with how they related to their own father. As I wrote in How Dante Can Save Your Life, that really complicated matters for me, until by the grace of God things were untangled a few years back. But in the main, if that saying is true, then the fact that I came to believe in a morally rigorous but loving and kind Father in heaven has to do with the fact that Ray Dreher loved me well.

I would love to read a sweet thread here about what we appreciate from our flawed religious upbringings.