The parent forgets, but the child remembers
This is a fascinating article about a woman's recovery from autoimmune psychosis after 20 years, and the effect her illness (and recovery) had on her family -- in particular, her two daughters. I recommend all to read it (though it isn't really the point of this post).
It includes this quote:
She wasn’t sure if her mother’s breaks in memory—what she and Angie called “the missing years”—were different from her own. Recently, she had come across a proverb: “The axe forgets, but the tree remembers.” She felt that maybe she and her mother had reached an impasse that was actually universal—children have always formed their identities around blows that their parents don’t even realize they inflicted.
I resonate with this a lot as I have thought about the experiences of young Christians like my partner and I. We grew up in fairly restrictive religious environments, raised by adult converts to the faith. Our parents were particularly concerned about protecting us from various worldly influences, and were surrounded by a community of parents who felt the same.
In my experience, this can go wrong in two ways: the children rebel hard, flinging themselves into the arms of the world with reckless abandon -- or they develop a legalistic, self-righteous worldview that destroys their self-image, restricts their empathy, and stunts their ability to understand moral complexity. Neither is ideal.
There is now an entire genre of deconstruction memoirs (which really blossomed in the wake of Trump's election in 20161), and most exist somewhere on this axis. Most of these stories end with the author walking away from the faith entirely; in fewer cases the author develops a faith which is more thoughtful, empathetic, gracious, and nuanced the one they were raised in.
The most interesting dynamic in each of these stories is the relationship between the author and their parents. There is always the temptation to portray the parents as one-dimensional, malicious actors who deliberately harmed their children, rather than individuals with human faults. Make no mistake: some parents are truly villainous. But sometimes the deepest injuries are inflicted by loving parents who thought they were doing what was best for their child, and the best memoirs wrestle with this complexity.
When I talk to my parents about our upbringing they acknowledge some faults and usually express relief that my siblings and I are doing "well", and they remind themselves -- and us -- that they were not as restrictive as some. This is all true. At the same time, I don't think they fully understand what it was like to grow up in the community they chose -- and in light of that, they cannot relate to the particular anxieties and stresses it created in me. In my experience most millennials who remain in the church (for example, those of us who grew up in the era of purity culture) have a similar story. They are not sure if their parents will ever understand how it felt to be Sixteen and Evangelical -- ignorant of the world's complexity, irrationally confident in our simple answers, and parroting moral standards we struggled to meet.
But I like to think my story is one where I developed a more mature faith and a better understanding of the gospel of grace. And I think we as a generation would do well to recognize to be need to extend some of that grace toward our parents -- and in particular, the people our parents were when they were raising us. I would hope my own children would do the same.
In the last decade or so we have been treated to the shocking phenomenon where several Evangelical leaders abandoned any pretense of moral consistency in order to grasp power, and in particular, the blessing of Donald Trump. His election created a generational rupture within evangelicalism, the long-term effects of which remain to be seen.↩