Conservative Upbringing

I think every single human being pushes against their upbringing in someway. That’s part of growing up. No one says, “My teachers and parents were exactly right about everything, and I wouldn’t criticize a thing.” If they did, they would still have a child’s mentality.

Those of us who are raised conservative, and turn out liberal, tend to develop a certain smugness about it sometimes. “Sure, it’s easy to be open minded and progressive if you grew up in California or New York, but I was brought up in Grand Rapids, Michigan surrounded by reactionary Bible thumpers. Were it not for my superior intellect, I would probably be burning science text books at this very minute.”

And yet thousands, millions of people, were brought up conservative and turned out liberal or radical. Memoirs of this kind have even developed into their own sort of genre.

There’s a famous Michael Moore clip (I think it’s from “The Big One”) when he talks about his conservative Catholic upbringing. I’m quoting from memory, but it goes something like this: “The nuns told me that impure thoughts under 7 seconds were only a small sin, but over 7 seconds became a damnable sin. So I spent my entire adolescence timing my sexual fantasies. ‘One two three four five six…okay let that thought go.’”

Although my teachers and youth group leaders never attempted to numerically quantify the exact amount of seconds that made the difference, I remember being repeatedly told a similar thing: “If a lustful thought happens to pop into your brain, the devil put it there to tempt you, and it’s not a sin. If you linger on the thought, it becomes sinful.”

And I emphasize “repeatedly”. Throughout my middle and high school days I heard that refrain over and over again from teachers and youth group leaders. The emphasis on “sex” as the ultimate sin is ridiculous enough in itself, but that this extends to trying to stamp out even sexual thoughts is something that strikes me now, at 28, as the height of idiocy. At the time though, I went along with it, just like I went along with most of the crap I was taught.

I could probably right a book about all the ridiculous stuff I was taught growing up (I’m sure many of you could as well), but just for the hell of it I thought I would list a few brief examples. I’m not sure if these are the most outrageous examples or not, but they’re just the moments that happen to stick out in my memory.

* In eighth grade, one of my classmates was reprimanded by the art teacher for painting, “Party On,” on her art project. “This is a Christian school. We don’t say Party On.”

* In eighth grade, when we had to pick names for our intramural teams. Most people just copied names from college or professional sports. One team selected “The Rebels”, but this was vetoed by the teachers, who said, “It’s wrong to rebel.

* I was in seventh grade playing an intramural Soccer game. Someone accidentally kicks the ball too high in the air, and one of the eighth grade students yells out, “holy cow.”
The teacher yellow carded him. “God is holy. Cows aren’t.”

* On an eighth grade field trip about 8 of us boys were in a van driven by a parent volunteer. We were a bit rambunctious. After we arrived at the school, the mother marched into the principle’s office and told him she was never driving a group of eighth grade students again. The principle had a long talk with us, and then our homeroom teacher had a long discussion with the whole class.
The primary issues were that we were wrestling in the backseat, and that some of the boys were singing a limerick, “My name is Chuck. I like to…” humorous pause “…Sing!”
Look, lady, you don’t take a group of 8th grade boys in a van and expect them to act like angels. I don’t care what Christian school they’re from. If they get a little rambunctious, you just yell at them to settle down. What you don’t do is just keep driving quietly the whole time, and then give the principal an earful after everything is over.
Okay, okay, so you’re not a professional educator, and not accustomed to discipline. I can dig that. But the song? Come on, if that’s one of the worst things we were doing, I’d say you had a pretty easy ride. You need to get out of Grand Rapids.

* When I was in first and second grade, in my old neighborhood before my family moved to the house we have now, there was a Chinese Buddhist family on my block, and a Jewish family.

Since all my friends were either from church or my Christian school, I was in awe when I discovered they weren’t Christians.

Non-believers! I thought these were people you only read about in books. I didn’t think I would actually meet any of them.

Naturally I set to work on the task of converting them. I invited “Han Chen” to attend Church with my family several times. When he didn’t immediately convert, I took to shouting, “Love Jesus!” or “Love God” whenever he went by. In a similar way I shouted “Jesus!” at the Jewish boy when he rode by on his bike. My mother eventually put a stop to this.

When I was slightly older, in 5th grade, I tried to continue my missionary work by converting some of the younger kids at my bus stop. I figured they were young enough that I could mold their minds easily. I told them the gospel stories, but most of them didn’t look like they understood.

For years afterwards I used to be mortified when I thought back on this. Then one day in high school I was at a Cross Country team bible study, and everyone began telling stories about their youthful attempts at evangelicalism. As we went around the circle, I realized everyone had these kind of stories. “I wouldn’t give any cookies to my friend until she converted” or “I locked my friend out of the house and wouldn’t give her the key back until she accepted Jesus.”

When I think back on the heavy indoctrination we got in Sunday school, it is inevitable that this kind of thing happens. I remember in second grade my Sunday School teaching telling us how important it was that we share Jesus with our friends, because otherwise our friends would be doomed to a life of damnation.

The church even had a skit about it that I remember seeing. Two friends are on the bus together. One asks the other, “why are you always busy on Sunday,” the other one says, “I’ll tell you later.”

Later in the week, the bus is in a traffic accident, and all the kids are killed. One is allowed into heaven, but the other one runs off stage crying because her name isn’t in the book of life.

Is that laying it on thick or what? Convert your friends now, or they’ll die next week and be doomed for all eternity.

I also remember once being shown a video on “how to convert your friends to Christ” in Sunday school.

So with all this indoctrination going on, what is your average 1st or 2nd grader going to do? Are they going to carefully and tactfully share the gospel of Christ, well at the same time respecting the different religion and cultures of their friends? Of course not. How much tact does your favorite 2nd grade student have?

As I’ve grown up, I longer believe that God would damn people to all eternity because of their intellectual beliefs. But I hesitate to speak with certainty about the mind of God. Who knows? Maybe when I’m dead, I’ll find out that those people in my church were right after all.

But it is a bad, bad, bad idea to put so much pressure on elementary students to convert their friends. They just don’t have the social skills to do it. If anyone reading this is teaching Sunday School, please, please stop it. You’re not helping anything, and you’re just creating bad memories for the children when they get older.