Christian Girls

Virgie Townsend’s short story “Heavenly Bodies” transported me back to grade school. I remember listening to my favorite Christian radio station detail the impending end of the world and praying at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999 for Jesus to save me.

As someone who grew up in Southern Baptist and nondenominational churches, I felt seen when I read Virgie’s work. “Heavenly Bodies” is an excerpt from her debut short-story chapbook, Because We Were Christian Girls, which was a finalist for the Fall 2019 Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook Competition, the Cupboard Pamphlet’s 2020 Annual Contest, and the 2021 Newfound Prose Prize. Virgie’s stories capture the complexities of growing up in a strict religious setting, while also showing the friendships and nostalgia that can come from those communities.

This conversation was the first time I spoke with Virgie, but we connected easily. It felt like talking to an old friend who knew everything about the world in which I was raised.

Anna Gazmarian: What drew you to write about a group of fundamentalist Christian girls?

Virgie Townsend: My mom became Independent Fundamental Baptist when I was nine months old. The way she’s described it, my dad was abusive, she’d messed up her life, and she needed Jesus. I went to a conservative Christian school until I graduated from high school.

I wrote the collection’s title story, “Because We Were Christian Girls,” eleven years ago. It’s pretty close to what actually happened to me at Christian camp one summer when I was twelve. I misheard the camp’s lifeguard during a swim test and jumped in too early. He pulled me out of the pool and publicly shamed me.

Evangelicalism is often driven by shame. It’s not a coincidence that during the same week at camp, I took a vow of abstinence after a long, torturous chapel service about how having premarital sex would make us unlovable to our future spouses and God.

Anna: How did writing these stories affect your faith?

Virgie: When I was seventeen, I began what we now call deconstructing — trying to unpack and examine — my faith. I questioned whether the beliefs that had been ingrained in me actually resonated with me. My stories have evolved through that process.

After I wrote the first story, I realized that it could grow into a short-story collection, but I wasn’t ready yet. I didn’t want to relive fundamentalism. I was thirteen when we left my childhood church, seventeen when I graduated from a Christian high school, and wrote the first story at twenty-five. Because We Were Christian Girls was published when I was thirty-six.

It took a long time to write all the stories, because it takes time to process the hard experiences.

Anna: How has fundamentalism changed since your childhood?

Virgie: It seems like beliefs that we had as fundamentalists have become more pervasive in evangelicalism and in broader conservative politics. I think that fundamentalism is a testing ground in some ways, or a seed that grows and has greater influence over time. I wrote the story “Instructions,” with the opening line “Don’t say gay,” before the “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida. I knew that there was a strong aversion in fundamentalism to even saying the word, but I couldn’t have anticipated that there would eventually be legislation around it.

I get the feeling that some of the folks that I grew up with who are still in the church may also have been exposed to more mainstream culture than they were when I left almost twenty-five years ago. When I was a kid, the adult leaders in our church wouldn’t even go to a movie theater, but some do now, or they have social media, whereas they avoided the Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Facebook now sometimes suggests that I add people from my childhood church as friends, though I’m in contact with only one or two former members, including the musician and artist who created the Because We Were Christian Girls cover art.

Anna: “Heavenly Bodies,” which is about Y2K, really resonated with me, because as a child I had so much anxiety about the world ending. When I try to explain that to people, they laugh. But you write about that feeling as a full-body experience: it’s not just a funny belief, it is all-encompassing.

Virgie: My church was split on what was going to happen when Y2K hit. There were folks like my mom who weren’t concerned about it. And then other people thought it was the beginning of the apocalypse and were truly reordering their lives in preparation.  For kids growing up in evangelicalism, fear of the Rapture is real. We were scared of being left behind, alone without our loved ones, and experiencing the Tribulation — we were taught that the Antichrist and his global government would murder people who were left behind and then became Christians afterward, and those who never truly became saved would be thrown into the lake of fire to burn for eternity.

I remember writing in my journal at midnight, saying essentially, well, that didn’t happen. I was curious about it. At that point, my family had begun to open up a little bit more. We had cable. I was sneaking around watching TRL with Backstreet Boys. I was beginning to wonder who I was as a person. I started my period. All of that.

Anna: I remember being taught that Jesus would only return when no one expects it. So no one can think about it. And I was constantly thinking about Jesus coming back and worried that I was preventing the Rapture.

Virgie: There’s this weird dichotomy in a lot of evangelicals: On the one hand they think the Rapture is going to happen — all the signs and symbols are there, but on the other hand, they believe that other people won’t expect it. They know, but no one else knows. I was in high school in 2000, and one of my teachers predicted that we were in the end-times and made a blatantly anti-Semitic comment about a world leader they thought could be the Antichrist.

Anna: Why do you think so many Christians base their faith and identity around the end-times?

Virgie: Everyone has moments when they would welcome the idea of going to Paradise and being spared further suffering. There were a lot of folks in my church who had been abused as children, folks who were in abusive relationships, people who had grown up with parents dealing with addiction. People who had never been validated as children needed this tight-knit community to control the chaos that they felt in their lives. And the Rapture would be the ultimate validation: I’m chosen. I’m getting my reward after suffering.

Anna: Do you think you can ever fully walk away from those beliefs? I have found that those thought processes and the way that I react to things now are still intertwined.

Virgie: That’s what the line at the end of my book is about: “I’ll join secular society, but I’ll always be a little fundamentalist. Just not fundamentalist enough.” Even growing up in it, I didn’t feel fundamentalist enough because I was questioning things and kind of weird and creative. But it’s still very much a part of me. I’ve worked on keeping what’s good and setting aside what’s harmful. Even now, if the moon looks strange, I think about how the Book of Joel describes the Rapture: “The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the Lord come.” There is a part of me that thinks Rapture even though I know that’s not what’s happening.

Anna: When I found out my book was getting published, I was up all night because I was worried that God would punish me for not being thankful enough.

Virgie: When I was writing the acknowledgments for my book, my cousin, one of my best friends, died suddenly from cancer. She was thirty-one years old. And for a moment I wondered, Could this be punishment for writing a book that I know fundamentalists are going to hate? I know logically that that’s nonsense. My cousin’s life and death are bigger than me or some petty, vindictive conception of God. But my brain went there. We were taught those lessons by leaders we trusted, and it takes a long time to unwind.

Anna: Do you feel a sense of loss over your childhood because of your upbringing?

Virgie: If someone gave me a magic wand and told me to change one thing about my life, that wouldn’t be my first. But it was harmful, and I am not choosing it for my own children. That said, I think people outside of that culture don’t realize that there are beautiful things about it. There’s a reason why people choose it. There is community. There is a sense of connecting with something greater than yourself.

Fundamentalism is the reason I became a feminist. All of those women’s retreats and friendships nurtured between girls because we weren’t allowed to talk to boys ultimately fostered a strong sense of community with women and caring about issues that impact people who experience gender oppression.

Anna: I think it’s scary to write about a subculture that you once really loved and were a part of, knowing you are going to hurt the people who are still part of that community. My biggest fear is being called a heretic.

Virgie: I’ve had to do a lot of internal work on making peace with the fact that the people whose approval I used to seek, people I saw as the arbiters of Christianity and God’s will, would say that I’m going to hell. They teach that God holds us accountable. Not holding us accountable would be totally counter to what they believe. So if writing about the harm that they’ve done causes them to say that I’m living outside the will of God, then their opinions are not worth my time.

The reason the stories in Because We Were Christian Girls are fiction is because I did not want to hurt people I grew up alongside. They are essentially my fellow victims, friends who grew up in that culture. Their stories aren’t mine to share. But I don’t feel like I have to protect adults who did my family and me harm. That’s different.

Anna: How do you envision readers without your upbringing responding? What did you want to leave them with?

Virgie: I hope that they read it with compassion and an open mind for kids who grow up in high-control religion. I tried to capture the fact that people who grow up that way may feel differently about it when they’re adults. They are just in one phase of what this will mean to them throughout their lives.