Chapter 2: My Testimony, If You Will
From People's Chosen God, by Chad Hayes
Many of my earliest memories are in church. I can still hear the congregation joining each other in singing hymns—Amazing Grace, Nothing But the Blood, Just As I Am. I can still smell my grandfather, who was the pastor at our small Southern Baptist church, after he finished preaching (really preaching)—a distinctive mixture of sweat and Aramis cologne. He loved me. I would go to see him after the service ended, give him a hug and feel the stickiness of sweat on his shirt, and then stand beside him while he talked with congregants as they were leaving.
I distinctly recall a sermon that my grandfather preached when I was six years old—or, rather, how that sermon made me feel. It was during the Gulf War, and the sermon had included some discussion of soldiers dying, which forced me to contemplate my own mortality. And, as seems to be unavoidable for Southern Baptists, it had included a pretty graphic description about what hell would be like for those that died without Jesus. I didn’t know much, but I knew that when I died, I didn’t want to go to hell. So that night in January 1991, I prayed with my parents and asked Jesus to save me. It was motivated mostly by fear, but I meant it.
I called my grandfather and grandmother to tell them the news. They were elated, and told me that having Jesus in my heart would change me and make me more like him. I wondered what that meant. I was a pretty good kid and rarely got in trouble. I kept waiting for something to change, but I never really felt it. But at least I wasn’t going to hell.
At the next possible opportunity, I got baptized. As Baptists, we practiced baptism by immersion—none of that sprinkling shit like the Catholics do. And this was done only after a person had made a decision to become a Christian, not as an infant. Behind the pulpit from which my grandfather preached his sermons, and a story above the choir that flanked him, was a plexiglass-fronted baptismal pool where my grandfather would stand waist-deep in lukewarm water beside people who had “asked Jesus to come into their hearts.” Pronouncing, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” he would dunk them under the water and then pull them back up (occasionally with assistance) in a symbolic representation of the blood of our Savior washing away our sins.
My baptism was special for my grandfather, not only because I was his grandson, but also because my cousin, a year older than me, had recently prayed for salvation as well, and we were baptized together. It was a big day for my grandfather. It was a big day for me.
But the night after that sermon wasn’t the last time I said that prayer. There were dozens of others, maybe a hundred, over the next decade. I worried frequently that perhaps I hadn’t said the right words. Or hadn’t truly meant them. Or hadn’t “confessed with my mouth” after “believing in my heart” on the most recent occasion. Or that possibly, I had done something bad enough that my salvation may have been revoked. Could it be revoked? This has been a centuries-long debate among theologians.
I worried that I had said that prayer—many of those prayers—because of fear and not because I wanted a “personal relationship with Jesus.” But to the extent that I ever experienced a personal relationship with Jesus, it was an abusive one—one in which I felt that I was being constantly monitored and judged, perpetually reminded of how much he had done for me and how little I deserved it. This idea is pervasive in the evangelical world and perhaps best illustrated by the lyrics to the songs we sung:
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.”1
“Jesus loves even me.”2
“Just as I am, without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me.”3
“Have you any room for Jesus, He who bore your load of sin?”4
“What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”5
The messaging worked.
Looking back, I never truly wanted to go to heaven, which had been vaguely described to me as a place with pearly gates, mansions, and streets of gold where we would praise God forever (but only after judgement day, in which everyone would watch some sort of video montage of every bad thing I had ever done). But I was terrified of hell. Some of that fear was manufactured, like the late-October youth group trips to a nearby church’s “Hell House” where members of their church would act out scenes of four teens that got into a car accident. I sat next to my girlfriend in the dark, secretly holding hands, while the teens that weren’t saved (the ones that listened to Metallica or drank beer or swore) were damned to eternal torment.
Sometimes other emotions were manufactured, as they were at the culmination of a week of church camp. Several dozen sleep-deprived teenagers would sit around a campfire on the final night as the youth group leaders asked us to share how Jesus had changed our lives during a week of worship music, water balloons, and T-shirt-covered one-piece swimsuits. The pressure was high, especially when you’re dating the youth pastor’s younger sister, so I always came up with something. I couldn’t ever admit that I might not have been saved before, but I always said the prayer silently just in case.
I worried about my salvation a lot. And then I worried that I might need to get baptized again “to get my baptism on the right side of my conversion”—was that really required or not? Why couldn’t Christians agree about when and how baptism should be done? I worried often when I found myself alone in the house that perhaps the rapture had happened, and Jesus had come and taken my family, leaving me behind. The Left Behind novel/film series and dc Talk’s reboot of Larry Norman’s song I Wish We’d All Been Ready had a lot to do with that, but I was also constantly reminded that Jesus could return at any moment. Of course, there was always a more mundane explanation, frequently involving my parents washing the cars or going for a walk. I was supposed to want Jesus to return. And I felt guilty because I didn’t. I wanted to learn to drive. To grow up. To enjoy life. To find love. To have sex, someday.
But it wasn’t just my own salvation that concerned me. I worried about other people, too. I wondered about infants who died and where they would go. I’d been told that we are sinners from the moment we are conceived, and that without accepting Jesus, we are all condemned to hell for eternity. But nobody wants to believe that God would send an infant to hell, so I was told that if they died before the “age of accountability,” they’d go to heaven. I wondered what age that was, if it was the same for everyone, if God would allow a grace period of a day or two—or a year or two, and if the same grace would be granted to older children or adults who don’t have the mental capacity to make this decision.
I worried about my younger brother, whose interest in “getting saved” was not taken as seriously as I thought it should have been by my parents. This was likely because they correctly concluded that at 5 years old, he wasn’t yet prepared to make microwave popcorn, much less decisions of eternal significance. But I had heard recently at my Christian school that Jesus had said, “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”6 And in my mind, my parents were standing in the way of his salvation, at least until I expressed my concern, citing this verse.
I wondered about other people—the majority of people—who are born in countries where Christianity isn’t the dominant religion and never hear the story of Jesus—or, if they do, dismiss it as easily as my family dismissed stories about Allah, or Vishnu, or Thor. I wondered about the ones who were born before Jesus and weren’t fortunate enough to be God’s chosen people—a term that evangelical Christians in the United States have shamelessly appropriated from Jewish people. I wondered why the God who created everyone felt compelled to choose a people.
These fears were a natural response for a child who had been told that there was a literal place where people would be tortured forever if they didn’t find salvation—especially given that the Savior who offered that salvation said quite plainly that there were many people who believed they were serving him, but would still be denied before God and cast into hell. The sermons I was subjected to would frequently reference Jesus’s teaching that “Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ He responded “‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’”7 Was I one of those people? How could I be sure?
I wondered how exactly God told the authors of the Bible what to write. I wondered how he ensured that it remained faithful through millennia of copying and translating. When my grandfather told me about the Dead Sea Scrolls, I wondered why those other books hadn’t made it into the Bible and who got to choose and how they knew which ones God wanted them to pick. But I was told that the Bible was the “inspired, infallible, inerrant Word of God,” so I found a way to believe it. I rationalized away my doubts and accepted that God probably had good answers for these questions that I just couldn’t understand—or that I could ask him when we finally met in heaven, as was the typical answer from my frustrated Sunday School teachers.
I accepted this book as the literal truth that I’d been told it was: the stories about the 6-day creation of the universe, the sun standing still in the sky, a flood that covered the entire earth, water being transformed into wine, and thousands of people being fed by the biblical equivalent of a Long John Silvers basket. Stories about dead people coming back to life, a donkey talking, an axe head floating, a city’s walls falling down at the sound of trumpets, Jonah surviving for 3 days underwater inside the belly of a fish (not a whale—common misconception)…all of it.
Because I believed the Bible, I allowed what it said—or rather, what I was told it said—to inform my thoughts not only about how I should behave, but about how others should behave as well. I internalized a negative view of people that didn’t believe the same things I did, who looked or dressed differently from me, or who acted in ways that I thought the Bible said they shouldn’t. They were wrong. I was right. I had the truth. Perhaps there was hope for them to find salvation and change their ways.
I experienced a lot of shame for thoughts and actions that were completely natural. I felt like I had failed every day. Sure, all I had to do was ask for forgiveness. But I needed to ask for forgiveness for everything. And what if I forgot? Would a quick “Please forgive me for all the bad things I did today” suffice? Maybe not. So I’d list them all. Every time I got angry, said something mean, failed to do something kind, or had a sexual thought (which Jesus equated to adultery). I had been told that “all sins are the same in the eyes of God,” which didn’t seem to govern how everyone around me saw certain ones. But to me, seeing an attractive girl and wondering what it would be like to have sex with her was viewed by God as a sin severe enough to require the death of his son. Even for a relatively straight-laced kid, it was a lot. We humans are famously imperfect.
I don’t mean to make my childhood sound terrible. I was safe. I was happy. I was in a far better position than most children—honestly, it was decades before I realized how bad things could be. My parents loved me unconditionally—and still do, despite our religious and political disagreements. If I wanted anything that I didn’t have growing up, it was a luxury and not a necessity, and it wasn’t until much later that I would realize the sacrifices they made to make that happen.
I believe that my parents are genuinely good people whose worldviews have been shaped by the religious subculture that we shared (and have evolved in positive ways over time). And I truly believe that every decision they made for me was, based on the way they viewed the world, in my best interest. When I left religion at 32 years old, I struggled with how—or whether—to tell them. I worried not only about how it would affect our relationship, but also about how it would affect them personally. They had poured everything they could into raising me to be a good Christian man who was true to the values they upheld—the values of a subculture in which the words “good” and “Christian” were used synonymously. I knew it would be devastating for them to learn that, not only had their son stopped attending church regularly, but that he had stopped believing in God altogether. I had decided, for the time being, to avoid telling them, even though that meant I couldn’t be honest about who I was.
But my mom brought it up. They had come to visit me, my wife (now ex-wife), and our three children. As we were sitting around the table after eating, my mom asked if we had been going to church. I said that we hadn’t for a while and that I had been having some doubts. That was a lie. The last of my doubts had disappeared months before. She asked what I was doubting, and I said “all of it.” And then my parents and I went out on the screened porch, and I told them everything.
When I was sitting there on the porch with my parents, I tried to take them on my journey. To get them to see that I wasn’t angry at God or running from him, but that I just didn’t believe—couldn’t believe—that he exists. That I wasn’t looking for this, but that the process had begun as a sincere attempt to strengthen my faith and find God’s plan for my life. And most of all, that while I no longer shared their belief in a specific version of a specific god, I was still the same person.
Except that I wasn’t. Because every moral and political view that I had was based on the Bible (or more accurately, how I had been told to interpret the Bible), I had to rethink all of those when the foundation crumbled. I did a lot of work and made a lot of progress with my thoughts and internalized attitudes about sex, gender and sexual orientation, abortion, race, and the role of government. I took a hard political left. I was still the same person, but I was free to be myself no longer encumbered by the evangelical subculture that had shaped my beliefs and actions since childhood. And to them, that wasn’t the same person.
They were devastated. Their son was going to hell, quite possibly taking his children with him. They were angry, or at least I felt they were. I was the embodiment of everything they stood against. I had rejected the thing that was most fundamental to them. It was a rough day. It was a rough few years.
Today, we have a great relationship. They have been enormously supportive. They’ve been there for me through the darkest moments in my life. They’ve put our differences aside and demonstrated genuine and unconditional love for a person whose beliefs about religion and politics are in large part antithetical to their own. We’ve had some difficult but respectful conversations. I’ve demonstrated that I can be a good person without believing in God. And they’ve demonstrated—not that I ever doubted—that they are great parents, great grandparents, great spouses, and great friends despite being part of a subculture that I believe causes a lot of harm. And while I feel that the particular expression of Christianity that I grew up with harmed me in many ways, I don’t blame them at all. I have no doubt that every decision they made for me was a decision they thought was in my best interest.
Now, as I write this, I have the same fear that I did that day on the porch. I worry that telling my story in its truest form may damage that relationship. Mom and Dad, I love you. And I hope that as you read this book—if you read this book—you read it in the way that I intend it, as a critique of a system that I have found to be harmful. It won’t be an easy read.
One of the decisions that my parents made for me was to enroll me in a private Christian school, starting in 5th grade. My mother has been an educator her entire adult life and worked for the local public school district. But we had moved to a more rural area where the schools weren’t ranked as highly. They looked at the options, and decided to enroll me in Bob Jones Elementary School (now integrated with the middle and high schools as Bob Jones Academy). This school was on the campus of Bob Jones University (BJU), an infamously conservative Christian institution. So conservative, in fact, that when we’d driven by it before, we’d made jokes about it. I would soon learn that while the rumors about blue and pink sidewalks were untrue, they weren’t far off. But it had a good reputation academically, and that’s where my parents felt I’d be best served.
Despite my heavy involvement in the churches I attended, much of my exposure to the beliefs I discuss in this book occurred through my experiences at this school from grades 5-12. I did my undergraduate studies at the United States Naval Academy, so I didn’t attend BJU, but my high school was heavily integrated with it. We shared a campus, went to the same chapel services, and had pretty much the same rules. Although my family and the churches we attended would be considered conservative by most standards, BJU took this to another level. They would object to being lumped in with evangelicals, preferring the term “fundamentalist,” but they would object to a lot of things I do, and when the distinctions are relevant for the purposes of this book, I’ll point them out.
Bob Jones College was founded in 1927 by Bob Jones, Sr. who was not a college graduate himself. He had seen “students whose faith was shaken during college” and “recognized the need for a thoroughly Christian college that stood on the absolute authority of the Bible to train America’s youth.” So he set out to create an institution that would combine “academic excellence, refined standards of behavior, and opportunities to appreciate the performing and visual arts,” in a “place where Christ would be the center of all thought and conduct.” After two changes in location, and expansion to their academic offerings, Bob Jones College, now in Greenville, SC, became Bob Jones University in 1947.8 The elementary school “was added in the 1970s, and within just the first six years, enrollment increased fourfold.”9 It was decades later that I would learn about segregation academies—private, often Christian, schools that were founded in the 1950s to 1970s for the explicit purpose of ensuring that white children wouldn’t have to be educated alongside Black children as public schools were integrated.
BJU is a remarkably insular institution. The campus includes education from preschool through graduate school, an auditorium with required chapel services four days a week as well as church services on Sunday, and housing for many of its faculty and staff. They own BJU Press—a publishing company that produces educational curricula for their schools as well as Christian schools and homeschooling families around the country, a radio station, a film studio, and a truly impressive gallery of religious art. In the past they owned both an on-campus hospital that delivered babies and an off-campus dairy farm. While many faculty and staff live off campus, BJU could function as a commune for those that are interested; for those who choose to eat in the dining hall and attend the on-campus church services, there’s little reason one would need to leave the campus.
Unless, of course, one wanted to have fun. Students at the university—almost all legally adults—are prohibited from enjoying “any types of entertainment that could be considered immodest or that contain profanity, scatological realism, sexual perversion, erotic realism, lurid violence, occultism and false philosophical or religious assumptions.” With regard to music, this means that “all musical choices are to be intentionally conservative in style and are to avoid the markers of our current corrupt culture which often finds its musical expression in rock, pop, jazz, country, rap or hip-hop,” even if Christian lyrics are set to any of these types of music.10 My parents didn’t have these same rules, and I grew up largely on classic rock and 90s country. But all the presets in my Jeep were to the university’s radio station. Because sometimes they checked.
Video entertainment is extremely limited as well: “Students may view PG-rated movies and movie trailers and TV-PG television programming in both homes and the residence halls. Unrated content (including original series on streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime or Netflix) frequently contains objectionable content that has not been cut to meet rating standards and is not appropriate.” Movie theaters are strictly off-limits to avoid even the possibility that someone might think a student was attending a PG-13 rated movie, and at least one of my high school classmates was expelled for exactly this reason. Internet use is filtered and monitored “to restrict access to biblically offensive material on the internet,” and the use of mobile hotspots is prohibited. To “aid students’ pursuit of purity online,” the university offers free access to a service called Covenant Eyes that monitors internet usage on all devices, sending a report to whomever the student chooses. They reserve the right to inspect dormitory rooms, lockers, emails, and “any electronic device” for objectionable content.11
Life off campus is difficult to monitor, so in order to live off campus, a university student must live with a close family member who is at least 23 years old or is married or has completed a bachelor’s degree program. Restrictions are in place to ensure that students don’t live with family members of the opposite sex if they are close in age, to avoid the whole incest thing, based on the assumptions that: 1) heterosexuality is universal, and 2) any time a man and a woman are alone together, there’s a decent chance they’ll bone. Exceptions are made for married students, students at least 23 years of age, college graduates, and veterans.12
Drinking, smoking, and drug use are strictly prohibited, as is any type of physical contact with the opposite sex. There is a strict dress code both on campus and off, with the goals of promoting professionalism in men and modesty in women, so as to prevent them from sparking the lust of men (thus placing the blame for men’s sinful thoughts or actions on them). Dormitories, intramural sports, and swimming pool hours are segregated by sex. To facilitate the development of godly, heterosexual Christian couples, they have a “Dating Parlor” where students can sit together on closely-monitored couches and allow love to blossom.
In addition to attending chapel services four days a week, students are required to document their church attendance every Sunday. The dormitories are cleared and locked from 10:30am to noon every Sunday to facilitate this. Students may attend church on campus, or the university will help them find another acceptable church “by providing a representative church list of regional churches that are in general alignment with our philosophy.”13 And if that wasn’t enough, the university has decided to forego spring break, instead scheduling an entire week of mandatory all-day chapel services.
If all of this sounds extremely invasive, perhaps you’ll feel better knowing that it was worse in the past. An edition of the student handbook from when I was in middle school made the characteristics of a high-demand group (frequently referred to as a cult in a religious context) even more apparent, stating that “it is the business of Bob Jones University to know where its students go and with whom they associate. Therefore, dormitory students must have written permission to date off campus. Dating off campus without proper permission may result in expulsion.14 And because enforcing that was difficult, they enlisted the aid of the students to narc on each other:
Bob Jones University expects the cooperation of its students in developing respect for and enforcing the rules of the institution. Any student enrolled in this institution for one year or more who knows or suspects that another student intends to violate any rule of the school and does not attempt to check the violation, or who “covers” another student’s wrongdoing by failing to have the matter brought to the attention of the proper authority will be considered disloyal and will be disciplined.15
As one would expect, BJU’s attitudes towards sex, sexual orientation, and gender expression are as conservative as they come. Despite the scarcity of nuclear family structures depicted in the Bible, they define marriage as “an institution ordained by God and prescribed by Scripture to be a monogamous relationship between a man and a woman physically created in these respective genders by God.” Accordingly, they prohibit “any sexual activity outside the context of a biblically defined marriage between one man and one woman…Additionally, any sexual behavior that is inconsistent with these standards—including sexual intercourse, other sexually intimate forms of touching and sexual communication in written, verbal or visual form—is prohibited even when consensual.” As they believe firmly that God created just the two binary genders, which are always consistent with one’s genitalia, not only is “altering one’s biological sex through medical transition or transgender expression” forbidden, but publicly advocating for the rights of others to do so is as well. Same for same-sex relationships.16
Their “Posture Toward Those Who Disagree With Us,” can be summarized as, “Stop.” Appealing to the timeless evangelical compulsion to “speak God’s truth in love,” they kindly remind everyone that disagrees with them that God is merciful to sinners, and that he’s ready and willing to forgive them if they’ll only admit that they’re wrong about whatever the disagreement is and repent of their sins.17
Around the same time that I enrolled in this Christian school, my parents decided to leave my grandfather’s church in favor of a larger Southern Baptist church that had more children for my brother and me to interact with. I joined the youth group as a teen. I played guitar in the praise band and trumpet in the church orchestra. I was there at least twice a week, sometimes more. I dated the youth pastor’s younger sister. I went to Bible studies and prayer groups. Hell, I organized Bible studies and prayer groups. I was in it.
It was in this large Southern Baptist church and my fundamentalist Christian school that I spent my formative years, and that I developed my worldview. It’s where I was taught how to think about race, gender, sexuality, marriage, other religions and cultures, politics, and so many other things. And it’s where I met the girl I would eventually marry a week after I graduated from college at 21 years old. You know, so that I could finally have sex, at least without feeling really guilty. That decision would become my single greatest regret.
Turn the page to Chapter 3: Pure Bullshit, or go back to the beginning and start with Chapter 1: Original Sin.
Newton, John. “Amazing Grace.”
Bliss, Philip. “Jesus Loves Even Me.”
Elliott, Charlotte. “Just As I Am.”
Unknown. “Have You Any Room for Jesus?”
Lowry, Robert. “Nothing but the Blood.”
Matthew 18:6 (NIV)
Matthew 7:22-23 (NIV)
https://www.bju.edu/about/history.php
https://www.bobjonesacademy.net/about/history/
2020-2021 Student Handbook, Bob Jones University: 29.
2020-2021 Student Handbook, Bob Jones University: 32-33.
2020-2021 Student Handbook, Bob Jones University: 40.
2020-2021 Student Handbook, Bob Jones University: 15.
1997 Student Handbook, Bob Jones University: 28.
1997 Student Handbook, Bob Jones University: 5.
2020-2021 Student Handbook, Bob Jones University: 51.
2020-2021 Student Handbook, Bob Jones University: 69.