Looking back at a rich (and often richly absurd) alternative Christian universe...
From kindergarten through high school, I attended a strict Christian fundamentalist school.
school” conjures images of stern nuns holding forth before classrooms of dutiful, uniformed students. The mood is vaguely punitive, and it’s understood that the students must be miserable, repressed, or both. Popular culture reinforces this – movies about religious education rarely rise above camp in their depictions of believers. Parochial school is the setting for the formation of a teenage Goth witches’ coven in the 1996 movie The Craft , for example, as it is for the story of viciously sanctimonious evangelical tween hypocrites in the 2004 comedy Saved! .
The school’s everyday rituals were imbued with Christian purpose. Every morning, we pledged allegiance to the American flag... and then turned to pledge to the Christian flag. That was followed by regular prayers we said aloud throughout the day, weekly chapel services, and capped by our school mascot, the Crusader. It’s no wonder that by age eight, I was convinced my destiny was either to be the world’s most effective missionary – or to be raptured. For many people, the phrase “parochial
48 May 2018
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