Member-only story
That Time I Didn’t Become a Missionary
A meandering story about Protestant guilt
I grew up with a mom who hated religion but sent my siblings and me to a Christian school. I grew up in the Bible Belt where there are more churches than Starbucks per capita. I grew up confused about moral codes and the afterlife. At home, we watched horror movies and listened to the radio and mama cussed.
At school, we studied the Bible and wore long skirts and swore off the secular world. I felt a deep sense of guilt and worry about this dual life. Would I go to hell for watching MTV and wearing pants after school and not being allowed to go to church on Sunday? Could I do enough good deeds to outweigh the sins I committed?
Would my mom go to hell because she didn’t go to church?
One of the main tenets of our Bible lessons was that as Christians, it was our personal responsibility to spread the Word of God and make sure we saved as many people as possible. We were shepherds leading sheep to the Lord, to safety from eternal damnation. But when I tried to shepherd my mom, I was met with a barrage of resistance and rage.
How dare I, a child, tell an adult how to live her life? See, my mom sent us to Christian school to spare us from the brutal public school experience she’d gone through. Not because she…
