I was eight years old, surrounded by Barbies and a plate of chocolate chip cookies. I sat on the floor of my grandparents’ living room on a warm summer night as a familiar sound played through the television speakers. 

“From coast to coast, and around the world, it’s time to Praise the Lord.” 10:00 pm. Time for Praise the Lord, the flagship show on the Trinity Broadcast Network. Paul Crouch, the white-haired, moustached former Assembly of God minister in a brightly tailored suit, and his pink-haired wife Jan in her layers of lace, tulle, and mascara were the hosts throughout my childhood. They would tell stories, introduce singers and speakers. They would pray for the lost souls of the world and the soon return of Jesus Christ. Most importantly, they would ask for your donations, you know, to do the Lord’s work. 

My grandparents were all in for Jimmy Swaggart and all the stars of the Trinity Broadcast Network: Benny Hinn, The Tripp Family, and of course, Paul and Jan. I remember the gold color coasters bearing the TBN logo on their living room tables, no doubt after their generous donation during a telethon. It wasn’t really my thing. Church on a Thursday night? I was already there multiple times a week. I grew up next to a church. But I recognized many of the songs, and I got to stay up past my bedtime, so I kept playing with the sounds of praise in the background. 

All these memories came flooding back to me as I was listening to the recent series about Jimmy Swaggart on one of my favorite podcasts, The Ex-communication station. I couldn’t help but start a deep dive into YouTube clips of Praise the Lord, Jimmy, Jim and Tammy Faye, Benny Hinn. These figures always loomed in the background of my childhood, and I vaguely remember people talking about the downfalls of Jimmy Swaggart, the infamous cry of course, and Jim and Tammy Faye. As a kid, I knew their falls were bad, but I didn’t know exactly what happened. I just knew it had to be bad. My research uncovered that Jimmy, Paul and Jan and Jim and Tammy Faye all had their roots in my church’s denomination, the Assemblies of God. I remember a picture at our church campground of a time when Jimmy spoke there, every seat full, people sitting in the aisle, but I never knew he was affiliated with the AoG. I started to wonder what it is about that denomination, which was pretty young as far as churches go in the 1980s, that attracted these huge personalities and fostered their temptations until they crashed and burned. My research uncovered lots of rumors of other affairs covered up, and how the Crouches covered up the rape of their own granddaughter and had another granddaughter expose some of the dirty secrets of their $800 million empire, secrets that were blatantly there, but to have your own granddaughter say, hey, this isn’t right, and then fire her, her husband and your son, her father. Wow.

I took a break from my research and watched a YouTube clip of a Praise the Lord episode shot in Branson, Missouri. At some point, my 9-year-old daughter looked over my shoulder, made a face and said, “What are you watching?”  She was confused by the scene, not at all impressed.

Raising my children outside of evangelicalism, I can now look at those clips that were the background of my own childhood and say yeah, the entire scene is absurd. I can look at some clips of Jan talking about how little old women should give their grocery money to TBN and recognize how they are downright deceptive and manipulative. And I can watch a Jimmy Swaggart sermon, ranting about the evils of rock music and Christian rock, and realize there are millions of Americans who were raised in this bubble and continue to dwell there, and I can draw a fairly straight line between a lot of the rhetoric of these influencers of millions and our current state of politics and American society that is so based in fear and hate. 

I am very okay with my nine-year-old instantly seeing the absurdity of a man declaring 30 years ago that we are not long for this wicked world. And I’m happy that she seems to be a kind person, not because of some promise of heaven, but because that’s how we should treat our fellow humans. I’m relieved that she doesn’t lie in bed at night wondering if she’s going to heaven or hell, praying for forgiveness until she falls asleep, just in case. 

But when you deconstruct from something that had such power over you, like evangelicalism, and you one day hear the opening chords of “I’ll Fly Away,” or the cadence of Jimmy Swaggart’s delivery when he’s on a roll, a strange nostalgia sweeps over you. It’s not necessarily that you want to be in that world, but when those images and those songs are wrapped up in people you care about and in ways you saw your identity, that nostalgia is there, albeit tinged with melancholy. And there is the realization that, of course, for the better, but nonetheless disconcerting, that the people you love now and surround yourself with can never really understand that world, that world that you still struggle with, the world that shaped parts of you.