The Funnier Moments of My Fundamentalist Upbringing.

How being a rebel saved my soul.

Children tend to take everything they are taught at face value. I certainly did, at least until I was around ten or eleven years old.

I have a distinct memory of sitting alone in my bedroom, and for the first time, questioning whether my parents really did speak the truth about everything. I felt my world tilt sideways and a feeling of distinct unease creep into my mind.

If this thought were true, then that would change everything. Where were the boundaries? Suddenly the world felt a whole lot bigger and I wasn’t so sure that I liked it.

One of the biggest issues was around church and Sunday School. My Dad didn’t even go — stubbornly avoiding the issue and holding out against my mother’s immersion in the Pentecostal church. Who knew what that taciturn man really thought?

The one advantage he had, was my mother’s adherence to the traditional teachings of St Paul (bless his misogynistic sandals,) which stated that a man was the head of the household and should be respected above anyone else.

Consequently, they lived an uneasy compromise where he chose to overlook her religious zeal, as long as it didn’t directly affect him.

With the onset of adolescence I became a moody, angry and rebellious child, no longer able to go along with my mother’s insistence that my brother and I still attend Sunday School.

By this time we’d moved away from the English South coast, to a busy town closer to London. I’d gone from a small junior school of around four hundred pupils, to a massive comprehensive school with over two thousand other children.

I felt both insignificant and conspicuous, and also that I was being treated like a baby. Nobody in my classes at school went to Sunday School — how embarrassing for an almost, thirteen year old.

So, my brother and I developed devious ways to avoid going to the church each week. Sunday school at the new church was held in the afternoons, and we were expected to make our own way there. Seriously? What fresh hell was this?

Rather than deliberately lie to our parents and not go, we would create imaginative ways of walking the half mile to the bus stop where we waited for a ride to the Elim church in town.

One week, we agreed to walk the whole way backwards; another Sunday we did two steps forward and one step back. These methods would naturally take us far longer to get to the bus stop, the unspoken intention being to miss the bus.

‘Oh no, look! There it goes!’ One of us would exclaim with feigned disappointment, as the bus just disappeared out of sight around a bend in the road.

Or better still, we’d stand at the stop, knowing full well that the bus had departed ten minutes ago, and have good natured arguments about whether to count to one hundred or five hundred, before heading back home.

After all, we had tried to go to Sunday School, hadn’t we? It wasn’t our fault if the bus didn’t show up.

The most ridiculous Sunday School, avoidance incident happened when we discovered a dead cat, lying in the gutter beside the main road. It had obviously been hit by a car some hours earlier as it had an eyeball hanging out and was stiff as a board.

Since babyhood, I had an enormous heart for animals and was forever rescuing injured and abandoned birds, most of whom died anyway, thanks to my ignorance.

Dead animals distressed me, as I figured they needed just as much kindness and to be honoured in some way that I didn’t know how to satisfy.

I was so upset about the plight of the poor, dead cat, that I picked up its wooden body, dried blood and all, and carried it home to my parents who were enjoying a quiet afternoon, sitting in the living room reading the Sunday papers.

They were understandably, horrified when we walked in with a stiff, gory cat, pleading with them to do something — like some sort of funeral, perhaps?

They insisted that we take it out immediately and return it to where it had been found. Rightly so in some respects, as there must have been a worried owner somewhere. They were pretty annoyed, though, and felt that this time my eccentricity had gone too far.

Thankfully the cat had proven the necessary, welcome distraction we needed and Sunday School was forgotten. Not long after that I was granted permission to stop going, whereas my poor brother was required to continue for another two years.

There eventually came a dramatic incident, where my poor brother staged his own protest about going to Sunday school, and point blank refused to go.

He locked himself in his bedroom and attempted to escape my mother’s wrath by climbing out of the bedroom window and onto the flat roof of the extension below.

My mother insisted that my father get involved and do something, which ended with my father half heartedly attempting to water hose my brother off the roof.

It sounds kind of funny, but in reality it was anything but.

I remember being in awe of my little brother’s determination to stand up for himself — he was up there for ages, cold and soaked to the skin. I was also appalled at what had quickly resulted in an abusive situation where both my parents knew that they had lost control.

All this to insist that an adolescent boy be indoctrinated with religion against his will.

It was these kinds of incidents that created a great bond between my brother and I. It’s a bond we still share today, and one which now includes our younger brother. We still make each other laugh with our private sibling jokes and have found ways to survive the last few years of our mother’s intensifying, evangelical fervour.

We have a long running, WhatsApp conversation, which although initially, set up to discuss her increasing need for support, frequently deteriorates into fabulously childish and religiously irreverent humour. She would be appalled, but it keeps us sane.

I get my dark sense of humour from my Dad, and now he’s gone I have so much more appreciation for him, and how tough life must have been for a clearly, autistic man living in Hallelujah House.

Being able to find humour, even in some dark places has been a great survival tool, for which I’m profoundly grateful.

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AJ writes heart warming stories that I really enjoy. Give your heart a little lift and check out his work.