Member-only story
The Grange: My Earliest Memories Growing up in Evangelical Fundamentalism
My earliest memory is of church, around three or four years old, circa 1991. My parents had had a falling out with the pastors at their uber-conservative holiness church, and my dad, Larry, had started a new career path at 35 years old, selling his transmission shop and embarking on an apprenticeship as a union electrician, his vocation until he passed away suddenly the summer after my senior year. Dad met a guy named Dave who invited him to his church, Cornerstone Christian Church. (I know, they sound like the names of Gru’s minions — and predictably, the other church guys had similar basic white guy names like Greg, Brian, Bob, and Steve).
My parents eventually went back to the fundamentalist church, an old-fashioned Holy Ghost revival denomination that my dad had roots in, but my earliest memories of church aren’t the hell-fire-and-brimstone sermons of that church, the church ladies in the long dresses and beehive hairdos, the red-faced, suit-wearing, hymn-singing, handkerchief-waving, pew-jumping, King James-reading, fried-chicken-eating, Kool-Aid-drinking (in more ways than one), everyone-is-going-to-hell-except-for-us preachers, though those images would eventually loom large in the memories of both myself and my five younger siblings. No, my first memory of church is a good one, which might explain why I hold a…
