6. A Vulnerable Psyche

Building a literalist vault to insulate a wounded child from a chaotic world.

It was my freshman year of college, and I can still remember how dysregulated my body felt leaving my English Composition class. Every week, my professor, who was clearly highly intelligent, would present a new worldview that I had never heard before in my life. We covered a massive spectrum of topics in that short semester, ranging from animal rights and gun control to genetically modified crops. I had no idea these issues were being argued about at such a viscous level around the country and the world. I felt incredibly small and ignorant. I had lived in a small town bubble most of my life.

My professor was also quite smug about the Bible. He would bring up biblical passages, but never in a way that outright dismissed them as false. Instead, he dropped just enough hints so you knew he believed they were not literally true. I felt woefully unprepared to defend my faith or my thinking against his intellect.

Yet, I honestly believed he was one of the brightest professors I had during my entire time at Oklahoma State. I learned so much from him about the structure of arguments, specifically how to analyze their strength based on three core metrics Pathos (the emotional appeal), Logos (the logical appeal), and Ethos (the ethical appeal). That class has paid dividends in my life in ways I could not have dreamed of as an eighteen year old.

However, I could not shake the desperate need to impress him and win him over. If I could not prove Christianity was true to him, I resolved to at least be the best student in his class and absorb everything he had to teach. And that is exactly what I did. This theme of seeking affirmation through achievement to prove my internal value would carry forward throughout the rest of my adult life.

The Hope of a Blank Slate

For the previous two years, I had dived headfirst into Christianity, going on mission trips and being deeply involved in Bible studies and my local church. Yet, even within the church community in my hometown, I felt a persistent angst. I was the only child who attended that small Baptist church without a his family to accompany him. I also felt the crushing weight of the weekly altar calls. Every Sunday, I would regularly head down to the front of the sanctuary to confess my sins, while no one else in the building seemed to feel the need to repent. I had started to feel a profound disconnect between the church environment and the Jesus I read about in the scriptures, a person who actively interacted with those society had shunned. Everyone at my church seemed so good at not sinning, and I couldn’t understand why I was so bad at it.

Consequently, I attached a massive amount of hope to college. I was excited to be on my own for the first time in my life, no longer relying on a friend or a relative for a place to sleep. I was excited to study and learn at a level I had not been able to access back home. But most of all, I was excited about the potential for deeper Christian friendships, a community that would allow me to exist without feeling so much shame around my past, my family, and my upbringing. College offered a blank slate, and the opportunities felt endless.

Competing Role Models

That fall, I joined an on campus Christian ministry as well as a new church. This new group of friends was diverse, and the non denominational composition of believers was something I appreciated, even as it challenged my sense of stability.

I also found an older male mentor who agreed to meet with me weekly to talk about life and the Bible. This was the first time in my life I had an older male figure regularly investing time in me, and it felt incredibly life giving. I was the only person in my immediate family to go to college, and during my entire time there, my family never once visited me. Because of that profound isolation, relationships like this were essential to my sense of self.

However, this leader operated under a Calvinist worldview, and that view of God made me uncomfortable. I felt a constant, underlying pressure to adhere to his exact brand of the faith, fearing that if I did not, I would lose his approval. This relationship would soon be challenged and usurped by a new male role model, the pastor of my new church, a vicious pattern that would continue throughout most of my early twenties and into my early thirties.

The Weight of Opposition

By the end of my first year of college, I felt like I had taken a severe intellectual and emotional beating. It felt as though every single class was designed to challenge my worldview and dismantle my faith.

Simultaneously, many of my friends were reading Rob Bell, so I decided to get his book to see what the hype was about. I began with Velvet Elvis. I do not remember much from that text besides a singular section where he contrasted theology as either a brick wall or a trampoline. Bell explained that many people had built their faith like a brick wall. Consequently, if you were to pull out certain theological bricks, such as the virgin birth or a literal interpretation of Jonah, the entire wall would come crumbling down. Instead, he argued that theology should function like a trampoline, where individual doctrines are merely springs. You could remove several springs, and the system would still maintain its integrity without collapsing

I remember feeling incredibly angry, patronized, and simultaneously terrified. If theology was not a brick wall, it could not protect me from the world. I did not want a trampoline. I needed an impenetrable fortress.

When a friend had slowed me down long enough to truly ask me if I was doing okay, I paused and then began crying. I felt I needed to confess how deeply I had begun to doubt the faith. I did not know if I would be able to stay connected to Jesus, someone who I felt had allowed me to feel a form of deeply anchoring emotional stability. Losing that connection, I feared, would deeply unravel my psyche.

Podcasting Before It Was Cool

That summer after my freshman year, I went on a Christian mission trip to Branson, Missouri. Trust me, the irony of that sentence is not lost on me. The trip was a two month leadership camp where about thirty college students stayed in a hotel and got local jobs around town, with the explicit mission of sharing the Gospel with people in our workplaces. The secondary goals were to deepen our faith, make a little money, and connect with other believers.

But I had an ulterior motive for going. The reality was that I no longer had a home to return to and I didn’t want to stay in my hometown any longer. My mother did not have her own place, and my father had recently been arrested for drunk driving and drug possession. There was no physical structure waiting for me in my hometown. So, while I loved the spiritual mission of the trip, what I actually needed was a place to belong.

Overall, the summer was a stabilizing experience. I enjoyed the leaders, one of whom was the campus mentor I mentioned earlier, but the most significant development that summer was my narrowing of my Christian theology.

Ironically, many churches were way ahead of the curve in terms of podcasting. My home church had been recording all of our pastor’s sermons and hosting an extensive digital archive of his older series. Throughout the summer, I began binge listening to his catalog. This was the first time I was able to fully digest a single person’s theological architecture, and I loved every minute of it.

This pastor possessed an absolutely certain view on the correct way to interpret the scriptures, and to me, that understanding equated to emotional safety. His explicit position was that Christianity was literally true, that the Bible was completely inerrant, and that his specific model made perfect sense to me: finding the original author’s intended meaning using the historical, grammatical, and literary (HGL) method. How could you interpret the documents any other way? Thus, this method would produce the most accurate interpretation of reality. He also taught that any other interpretations were false, and even worse, they were actively leading people away from the truth.

As I binged his sermons, I listened to him connect the dots across the scriptures with such certainty. Each sermon built logically off the last, presenting a beautifully coherent theme. Furthermore, the difficult passages I had deeply struggled with during my freshman year suddenly became clear; he provided a foolproof framework for resolving any problem text.

I remember by the end of the summer feeling that as long as I have the correct interpretation, I would be safe.

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