I was raised in a very Christian household. As Christianity was the entire life of my mother and grandmother, the concept of God and Jesus managed to seep into every aspect of my upbringing. God to them was everything, is everything, and faith in him determined everything, including the quality of one’s life, and furthermore, the quality of one’s afterlife. If I were to do something bad, I would be threatened with eternal hell. For a young child who barely understood the concept of time, being weighed upon heavily by existentialist thought, launched me into a childhood soiled with guilt and fear. 

Christianity is what molded me into the person that I am today. Whether it be negatively or positively, I’m not sure. However, it is a part of me that I must recognize in order to pinpoint where my preconceived prejudices and biases are derived. The entire religion is constructed on the notion that all people only reach heaven through Jesus. The very survival of the religion is due to the belief that this is the only truth. By instilling the fear that believing in anything else will sentence you to several lifetimes of misery, it was able to condition centuries of people. That message being taught to the impressionable minds of young children easily forces them into an obstinate, exclusive belief system. 

While Christians may be able to present themselves to the world as an accepting people and consciously aim to act with little prejudice, I believe that it is subconsciously impossible as the very foundation of their religion is to refuse any other way of thought. This is also applicable to my mother and my grandmother. As I aged and discovered my own beliefs, this exclusion and judgment prevalent in the religion became increasingly apparent. Mentions of being queer brought all parties to tears of frustration. Talking about my opposing spiritual beliefs was returned with quotes from a book that both denied many parts of who I am, and which I do not dictate my life around. Choosing not to go to church every Sunday was a year-long battle, and every morning went the same. I’d wake up late with no intention of going, have my door banged on, and I’d respond “I’m not feeling up to it today”. My mother and I would bicker back and forth. Ultimately, as I covered the sheet back over my head, my mother would say that she was sorry for me and would promise to pray for me as if the action held the same value to me as it did to her.  

It hurt me to see the pain in her eyes—the genuine fear that her baby wasn’t going to the same place as she was after death. I tried not to feel pity for the ignorance and illusionment she might live in because that would make me no better. I say “might,” because I know that Christians could potentially be as right as anyone else, and I only wish that that same understanding could be reciprocated. But, after years of wishing for that to be the case, I understand that this one realization would create a crack in a belief system of which Christians have built their entire life around, and bring it crumbling down. Although I wish for better, it would be unfair for me to judge my own mother, family, and all Christians as immoral for this reason, because each one was raised with that same fear eternally engraved in their subconscious. 

Through their evangelism, Christians are convinced that they truly are saving souls by projecting fear onto impressionable minds. While the preaching may be well-intentioned, the harm is irreversible, as hard as I try to deny it. The “what ifs” nag at me each time I refuse to pray over a meal, when I kiss a girl, or when I roll my eyes when my grandmother launches into the story of Adam and Eve. That fading Cristian voice, which was the one to raise me, is always at the back of my mind. It translates into a monthly routine of crying in bed late at night and apologizing to “God” over my “sins”, and I ask him to forgive me for the time I’ve spent away. Tears fueled by the fear that everything my mother told me might be true. That next morning, I’ll step out of bed, returning to my Daoist-like beliefs, unconcerned by what’s to come after I die. Yet still, as I try to concern myself only with my personally determined beliefs, that fear and guilt that Christianity caused me will live with me forever. All I can try to do is promise that if I ever have kids, I will not pressure them to strictly believe any which way.