My Teenage Rebellion Was Fundamentalist Christianity

While other girls my age were sneaking off with boys and getting drunk, I was becoming a zealot—and trying to convert my parents.

Illustrations by Deb JJ Lee

On a summer Thursday evening, shortly after my 16th birthday, my face was pressed into the maroon carpet again. Mildew filled my nostrils and I coughed. My youth pastor’s wife, Jessa, was playing piano, and my youth group friends and I had spread out and each found our own nook on the floor to meet God.

“The only thing holding us back from being in the Secret Place is our own sin,” Jessa shouted, her neck held high. I was mesmerized by the way God moved through her.

The Secret Place of the Lord was the place we could dwell if we lived holy lives. In the Secret Place, God would whisper divine revelations to us and show us miracles. I dug my face harder into the floor — lying prostrate was how we humbled ourselves before the Lord. I sang, improvising a new melody to the Lord. I felt something release as I sang, something like the warmth of God. I kept singing and the tears started flowing, as they always did when I prayed long enough. They dripped off my face and darkened the carpet underneath.

I’d joined the fundamentalist Pentecostal church when I was 13. I was a homeschooled girl with only a smattering of friends. My best friend, Siena, lived just down the road from me, on the pine-speckled canyon seven dusty miles from town. I adored her, but Siena was a public-school jock by then and had way cooler friends than me. I was lonely, and this Pentecostal church had the only youth group in town.

I wanted a group to belong to. Didn’t we all?