The Former Protagonist

 One of the big unspoken truths that was impressed upon me while growing up in Evangelical (or, as I like to call it, Protagonist) Christianity was that people who aren't living their lives based on the gospel have terrible lives and relationships. I don't know if any adult who was teaching me would have actually come out and said that—but it was definitely the message I, and many other young people, received. We stayed away from the outright prosperity gospel, so I knew that God didn't promise Christians a good or easy or rich life. In fact, he promised suffering. Just look at Jesus! But through that suffering, he promised joy, fulfillment, and rich purpose. The inherent lesson there was that people who were NOT suffering for Christ did not have joy, fulfillment, or purpose. They were building their houses on the sand. Marriage? Probably going to fail. Kids? Most likely going to turn out badly. Friendships? Shallow and fake. Since literally none of my close friends were no...

I’ve been thinking recently about my upbringing in the evangelical Christian faith and how I would characterize it. After hearing many stories from other people who were raised in stifling religious environments, I’ve come to the conclusion that I wasn’t raised in fundamentalist Christianity. I was raised in what I’ve decided to call, “Protagonist Christianity.”  What is Protagonist Christianity? In this subculture, I wasn’t controlled by fear (at least, not overtly). They didn’t use fire and brimstone speeches about hell to force us to comply, and “legalism” was a dirty word. In Protagonist Christianity, we didn’t follow God’s laws because we were afraid of punishment; we followed them because this was clearly the best way to live. God’s ways (which is to say, our ways as handed down by our interpretation of what God wanted) were obviously the best: the best way to have relationships, to live, to work, to be joyful and fulfilled. Everyone else—from non-believers to adherents of o...