Exist Yesterday.

I came to Catholicism as an adult, choosing it as rationally as I’ve chosen anything — which isn’t very — and so mostly don’t connect viscerally to most art and literature that deals in a memoiristic manner with the experience of being (or having been) Catholic. There are obvious reasons for this, of course: the vast majority of Catholics were born into the religion, and experienced it as a culture, as an identity, long before it became a set of propositions that could be accepted or rejected. It was always a set of propositions for me — at times, as I tried to force the evangelical psychology of my youth into these quite different channels, an increasingly complicated and baroque set of propositions.

But I remain fascinated by artistic and literary representations of psychologies molded by Catholicism, whether it’s Latin American magical realism, Justin Brown’s scatological comix, Coppola and Scorsese movies about Italian-Americans, the Southern Catholic grotesquerie of O’Connor and Percy, or Jack Donaghy’s Irish family on 30 Rock. (Anglo-Catholics like Chesterton, Eliot, Waugh, Greene, Sayers, and Tolkien did connect, and were actually my path into Catholicism, probably because most of them were converts themselves and retained the embattled-minority psychology so dear to evangelicals.)

Anyway I was thinking about all this because I’ve seen almost no writing that describes what growing up in a sheltered evangelical homeschooled household was like — and I don’t think it’s because people who grew up like that don’t grow up to be good writers. It’s rather that there’s no shared communal understanding of the experience that you can draw from: even the happy families are all (contra Tolstoy) happy in their own eccentric ways. The embattled-minority identity and insistence on the virtue and value of private revelation embedded in evangelicalism means that writing in a way that invites or even hopes for recognition is impossible: the best you can hope for is a ghoulish “check out the freaky way I was raised” cult-survivor tone. As though it would be impossible for other (ex-?) evangelicals to read your work, or reading it understand it; as though you remain a special inheritor of the world’s secret knowledge, convinced of the untransmittability of your private revelation even as you’ve joined the crowd. There’s always another embattled-minority identity to adopt.

And by you I of course mean me. Just as we all do.