So how on earth do you tell your story and make it sound anything like they expect? How do you make your story into what it’s apparently supposed to be? To tell your story the way you’re expected and taught and subtly required to tell it, you have to change your story. And now you’re expected to get up in front of the congregation and tell them all about the day you risked everything to leave the Old Country, sailing across an ocean. You’re a natural-born citizen who’s been saluting the flag and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every day since kindergarten. You’ve never been anywhere else, never spoken any language other than American English.
And now you’re being asked to tell those stories too, but you were born here. Your grandparents tell those stories about gripping the rail of the ship as they caught their first sight of the Statue of Liberty, about learning a new language and culture and struggling to create a new home in a strange new country. I’ve sometimes described this weird “personal testimony” dilemma as being like the grandchild of immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island. It was the only way to turn our stories of being born into Christianity into stories of being born again. This is where what Adam describes as “the habit of relentless self-examination” comes in. Just a kid who grew up learning about Jesus and praying and going to church who then, one Very Special Day, became a kid who … continued learning about Jesus and praying and going to church. But I had no idea what I was supposed to do when I was asked to present it as a story. And then one day, apparently, one of the prayers that I’d been praying ever since I had learned to speak and to think turned out to be a Very Special Prayer that, I was told, placed me in a wholly new category of being, even if everything else about my life and childhood remained exactly as it had been. I was a very young child who prayed before bed and before meals, read the Bible and Bible story books and Narnia stories, and who went to church three times a week. Practically speaking, though, the pre- and post-conversion me was otherwise no different. And after that moment, all things were made new, I was a new creation, destined for eternity in Heaven rather than for a well-deserved eternity in Hell. Before that moment I was not saved and not a Christian. It was, I was taught, a moment of enormous, transformative importance and eternal consequence. That happened for me at Vacation Bible School when I was, I think, six or seven years old. We weren’t really “converts” at all, given that we hadn’t really been converted from some prior state or converted to anything notably different from the lives, beliefs, or practices we’d had before we’d followed along and prayed our “sinner’s prayer” and gotten saved. “Getting saved” or becoming “born again” was, for people like us, one of our earliest memories. This is his de-conversion story, presented in the same way that he once learned to present his conversion story, which is mainly what we meant by that term “personal testimony.” That was a difficult and confusing exercise for people like Adam and I who were raised within white evangelicalism from childhood.
0 kommentar(er)
