As you might guess, a strict religious upbringing carries with it a lot of restrictions. Every kid grows up with restrictions – no snacks before supper, no soda after, and so on – but Fundamentalist kids get a triple dose.
The worst of it, for me, was music. It will not surprise my gentle reader that at that time, in Fundamentalist circles, rock music was the music of Satan (it still is, in some dark, ugly corners of the Deep South). It had not yet become the issue it would be when Cross and Switchblade preacher David Wilkerson got his lava-slinging hands on it, but it was not for us.
Case in point: The Beatles, a Saturday morning cartoon series that ran for three years in the US, starting in 1965.[1] Animated likenesses of the mop-tops, as well as their manager Brian Epstein, made up the cast of this show. Each of the 39 episodes was titled after a Beatles song, and each story was based on that song’s lyrics. Voice actors filled in for the actual Beatles, but each episode featured an actual Beatles track, as well as a sing-along section.
[1] This show was the first, though by no means the last, cartoon series to depict real people. It was rebroadcast on MTV in 1986 and 1987.
Case in point: The Beatles, a Saturday morning cartoon series that ran for three years in the US, starting in 1965.10 Animated likenesses of the mop-tops, as well as their manager Brian Epstein, made up the cast of this show. Each of the 39 episodes was titled after a Beatles song, and each story was based on that song’s lyrics. Voice actors filled in for the actual Beatles, but each episode featured an actual Beatles track, as well as a sing-along section.
In what has to be the most thunderous irony of my life (and that’s saying something), I was not allowed to watch this show.11 The Beatles were, after all, agents of the Devil’s music.
This wasn’t the only musical restriction, by far. It was Sacred Music Only in our home (though my parents would relax on this point and flip the radio to Adult Contemporary when we settled in Indiana, five or so years on). No pop, no rock.
Beyond our home, Dad was in on the whole Dave Wilkerson Devil’s Music bandwagon at least to the degree that he sympathized with his parishioners’ views on the subject. I remember finding an album in his church office in 1973, brought in by a church parent who had found the album in their kid’s room – it was Grand Funk’s We’re an American Band,12 which featured the members of the band in a barn, on a haystack, surrounded by small American flags – and naked.13
One dicey terrain I was able to navigate without a fall was comic books. I was a voracious reader from grade school on, and spent my allowance on paperback books and comics. My parents never minded this – though, if they’d gotten a look inside Denny O’Neill’s Batman turns, they’d have considered them far, far too disturbing and violent.
In this, I fared better than Kirk, whose family now lived in Huntsville, Alabama, where his father was a software engineer for IBM Federal Systems Division servicing NASA. Kirk and his little brother Jonathan weren’t allowed comics; when their family visited ours in 1972, I generously provided them an ample fix.
The music restrictions may have been the most painful, but another taboo that didn’t really register in my youth would come roaring back – and, in another staggering irony, eventually influence me tremendously.
When my father graduated from Milligan College and took his post at South Louisville Christian Church, my mother – an education major – left school before graduating. Once we landed in Lexington, she took up part-time classes at the University of Kentucky to complete her degree.
This she did, and in that endeavor, she was required to take a course in Anthropology. Human Anthropology. You know, the kind where you learn about... Evolution.
This was another one of those lines you don’t cross if you’re a Fundamentalist. I don’t know the details (I was only six when she got her degree), but the experience of her taking that class and the reaction of those around her was somehow traumatic.
This was long before the Fundamentalists’ Young Earth Creationism went by that name - it would be a decade before “creationism” would even be an actual word – but the principle was already firmly in place. Evolution was a lie of the Devil.
It was decided that I would go to a Christian college, almost certainly Milligan. No heathen university for me! I would be kept evolution-free.14
Rounding out the list of restrictions: it went without saying that Christian young people saved themselves for marriage.
I didn’t.
In short: everything my parents and my church tried to protect me from, in the long run, ended up defining me.
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