The Evangelical Kids Who Never Got to Be Kids

“Bear with me.” He actually said, “Bear with me.”

I was eight, maybe nine, and never in a million years would I have thought of using a phrase like that. And maybe I was young, but I was also old enough to feel a wave of inferiority to the boy who was giving his “testimony” at a Sunday night church service. He was younger than me, and yet he spoke his sinner’s story into a mic wired to speakers that projected the sound of his voice all over the populated sanctuary, the one with a small white sheep with the words “The Lamb of God” in a stained-glass window.

No child that age should ever learn or say the words “bear with me.” While there’s something supremely wrong about that, it was just as wrong that I felt inferior, that I thought about how mature he was, a little second grader, giving his testimony and knowing how to use that adult phrase. This memory of this grown-up boy has stayed with me my entire life.

As evangelical children, we grow up too fast. We are asked to search our hearts and see how black they are. We are expected to “accept Jesus” (which presupposes that you were already rejecting him), taking on the same soul-shaking change as an adult who time warps from being a smoking, drinking lech to a Bible reading, church-going saint. With only a scripted prayer, we earn our credentials in a religious community, a friend group, and even in our own family identity, flattened and paltry as it might be. We enter K-12 schools and colleges that are “Christian,” and we consume a preapproved subculture and media content. We both take on and enter into this identity—and yet we’re just kids.

What Psychology Tells Us About Identity

Developmental psychologists talk about how children grow up through stages. As their brains and bodies grow, they attach to others emotionally, learn language and develop cognitively, master certain locomotor skills, and participate in more and more complicated tasks. Child psychoanalyst and psychosocial theorist Erik Erikson talks about human development not just through early childhood but through eight stages of the span of life, the most crucial being the formation of identity at the age of adolescence. At the teenage stage, we experiment, try on all the sizes and shapes and behaviors of our immediate society and culture. We establish what might be called a sense of self, or as Erikson says throughout his works, “the ability to recognize ourselves as we are recognized by others.”

Well before adolescence, in preschool stages children must master a sense of initiative in the world around them. Simply put, initiative means taking an interest, engaging, getting involved in and excited about life beyond immediate physical needs. Conversely, if a child fails at this, if they can’t find an encouraging and permissive enough environment to explore, they feel guilt over their sense of desire. Then they take this with them to the next stage, the elementary school age where they must master more of a sense of industry, competence, and problem solving, and if they cannot, they will struggle with feelings of inferiority (like me not being able to give a testimony and say, “bear with me.”).

Growing up evangelical, we never get a chance to be kids. We never get to fully explore, play, and engage with the world and the people around us, unless it is the world of “Christians.” Having grown up evangelical, a child who searches their heart for sin creates a trumped-up sense of guilt at an age when they are just learning, and very much needing, to explore life and make mistakes and not have Kierkegaardian levels of existential angst. For me, finding myself in an all-consuming Christian community meant acceptance and social clarity, where the rewards for good behavior came cheaply. I remember being praised for being mature and feeling special about that. Yet I was left with little understanding of how to be so special yet join in activities with those outside said community with whom I felt fear. This is the learned narcissism of evangelicalism.

While Erikson talks about normal identity formation in the adolescent stage as a time when our hormones kick in and we’re likewise fully testing the limits of the roles we might play, my sense of growing up as an evangelical kid was that I was not allowed to have any such “identity crisis.” I solved that problem years before when as a little kid I stopped being just the same as that smoking, drinking lech. I had already completed the initiation, passed the test, grown up. I didn’t need to be a teenager. I already had a clear identity and sense of purpose. So I thought.

Precocious Identity Formation: A Stolen Adolescence

In all the reading I’ve done in psychology and religion, it wasn’t until The Psychology of Religious Doubt, a long out-of-print 1972 book by clinical psychologist Philip Helfaer, that I discovered a label that in three words so aptly describes evangelicals and their children: precocious identity formation.

As early as five or six, evangelicals initiate their young. Well before our teenage years, Helfaer writes, we experience adult baptism and precociously repeat the language of testimony. We experience a powerful sense of ourselves, even a sense of purpose. Our participation in a community of Christians feels special, holy, chosen, and exclusive. All our movements, even life’s minutia, are submitted to and transformed into decisions willed by God. Our chosenness and sense of life direction might also lead us to privilege a job in ministry or see our regular jobs as temporal and not our real jobs.

Make no mistake, there is little room for adolescence in this scenario. No experimentation, no wandering, no exploring the boundaries and limitations of our ideals and attachments. We instead give ourselves over to an evangelical community that circumvents deep ownership of the desires, wants, and needs that help us figure ourselves out. Beneath the surface, Helfaer notes that when we rigidly, even giftedly form this identity, we also begin a life of intense inner conflict, a massive repression that puts severe limitations on our ability to love and relate to others. This inner conflict has a social cost. In my own life—and I’ve noticed this in other evangelicals—I’ve enjoyed moments of intense interaction and togetherness in evangelical-defined spaces but also found myself shy and introverted outside of it. Relatedly, I’m amazed at how those who didn’t grow up evangelical seem more comfortable in their own skin. They are more self-assured, more aware of their interests, and even better connected in a wider community.

In Erikson’s eight stages, each stage has a task to master, and if we can’t achieve some level of mastery, we remain stymied and saddled with the task of that stage. In the case of showing initiative, we’re continually sabotaging our efforts to express ourselves in creative ways, and we instead experience guilt and self-recrimination for showing initiative. We stumble through subsequent stages, inhabiting their negative dynamics. Instead of feeling a sense of industry at school age, we feel inferiority; instead of healthy identity formation in adolescence, we experience role confusion; instead of intimacy during adulthood, we are defined by relational isolation, and so on.

Breaking Free: Reclaiming Play, Exploration, and Self-Discovery

For those of us who were indeed quite precocious with our precious Christian identity, for those of us who were told we were mature for our age, for us men who were told we were good little boys and went on to be pastors and theologians and “leaders,” and for us women who were told to be feminine caretakers and respecters of our great men, what then do we do to get back to that preschool age and rediscover our robbed sense of initiative?

We must mourn this evangelical identity and its assigned roles. Perhaps it was useful in some ways, but it was never that healthy in the first place, never something of value that we were willing to share. Instead, we must get angry with those ideal attachments for as long as necessary and as often as necessary. It is difficult, unsatisfying, and melancholic work—not over until it’s over and done. And yet living in melancholy and eventually expressing anger paves the way for clearing the air and the area for starting over again. Our previously suppressed life-giving desire can find room to go out and play.

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung is known for saying, “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” Acknowledging the false identity we’ve lost, or in other words deconstructing it and holding it accountable, helps us return to a sense of desire, and then discover the things worth our appreciation and study. There is so much to discover that our evangelical backgrounds either told us to avoid or instead, we were so wrapped up in our salvation and our Bible studies that we never saw beauty right before our eyes. The more we deconstruct, then the more we make room for a preschool sense of wonderment, the elaboration of the school-age child’s skills, and the healthy adolescent identity that we never knew.

Instead of our precocious identities, a “testimony” and a sense of “clear” purpose, instead of an all-compassing social code in thought in action, it’s time to get out into the world. Experiment, read widely, and develop an interest that has nothing to do with what you think is religion. Be magnanimous, get involved in activities outside of church, or start some yourself. We can capture a sense of hope and enchantment by re-entering a space of play and wonder, to be like little children. Stop acting like children who are adults, and then we can be adults who act like children.

Adapted photo by Beninu Andersen: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-man-in-gray-long-sleeves-standing-on-the-podium-8531905/