.09 Performing Faith

Public speaking is terrifying enough without eternal salvation hanging delicately in the balance. While my peers worried about presenting their science projects, I worried about presenting my soul. “Professing" – a gentle euphemism for publicly declaring absolute belief in rigid doctrines – was the spiritual equivalent of performing Shakespeare with no rehearsals, except Shakespeare merely kills his characters; my God might actually send me to hell.

Professing signaled commitment and membership that was never, ever called membership. To be considered Professing, one first had to Profess. At a Sunday night Gospel meeting or during the five-day summer Convention (yes, where I slept in a barn), the Workers would announce that if anyone had been called by God and wanted to answer that call, they could share this by standing during the final verse of the next hymn. Until I realized I had to take this test, I’d enjoyed craning my neck to see who professed. Nothing remotely interesting happened at meetings, so someone standing up like this was akin to the new season of your favorite show finally dropping.

I was thirteen – the universally acknowledged age of peak awkwardness, when hormones wage war on your complexion and your identity simultaneously. At a summer Convention – part revival meeting without the fun of actually reviving, part anxiety-inducing spiritual marathon – the invitation to Profess arrived as casually as an offer for more potato salad at a church picnic. To be clear, we did not consider ourselves a church (churches were for the worldly, the misguided, the damned), and our picnics were joyless affairs staged with the grim determination of Stalin planning a parade. Beneath the casual tone lurked a clear expectation: stand up, declare your unwavering belief, or remain seated, broadcasting your profound and possibly irredeemable spiritual inadequacy to the entire congregation of the saved.

In those electric seconds before standing, my mind frantically calculated the odds like a desperate gambler. Stay seated: temporarily safe but permanently branded as spiritually suspect. Stand: affirm my righteousness but commit myself publicly to a lifetime of tightly wound buns and hemlines that would make the Amish look risqué. And when I realized there was no third option – no divine fire to consume me where I sat, no rapture to whisk me away – my traitorous legs had already propelled me upward, as if possessed by a spirit more decisive than my own.

Thus began my career as a reluctant performer in a theater of belief, where the audience consisted entirely of severe-faced judges masquerading as supportive congregants. Each Testimony, delivered weekly at Meetings in living rooms that smelled of lemon polish and suppressed individuality, was a performance – measured and scrutinized with the intensity of Olympic judges scoring gymnastics. The pressure to appear authentic was excruciating. My Testimonies were hastily concocted minutes before delivery, stolen snippets from safer-sounding Psalms, delivered with just enough speed to mask my uncertainty but not so quickly as to suggest irreverence.

I became adept at spiritual mimicry, echoing the pious tones, humble nods, and dramatic pauses favored by the devout. I learned to lower my eyes at precisely the right moment – not too early (which suggested insincerity) nor too late (which signaled pride). The trick was striking the perfect balance between humility and conviction, earnestness without arrogance – believable authenticity without a single shred of doubt in anything but myself. Each week was a high-wire act without a net, the smallest verbal misstep threatening to expose my hidden heresies. My palms would sweat against the thin pages of my Bible, leaving ghostly imprints on Paul's epistles as I stood to speak.

The internal contradictions grew sharper as time wore on. Privately, I was skeptical, anxious, and increasingly resentful of the narrow path laid before me, bordered on both sides by eternal damnation. Publicly, I was unwaveringly faithful, serene – a beacon of youthful righteousness in my sensible shoes and hair pinned so tightly it gave me headaches. The gap between these two selves widened into a chasm, and navigating it became exhausting. My authenticity felt dangerously thin, stretched between who I was expected to be and who I secretly knew I was – a spiritual impostor with a talent for theological ventriloquism.

The true irony, of course, was that in a cult that referred to itself as "The Truth," truth was the first casualty. Authenticity wasn’t what they sought – it was the illusion of unwavering belief, like an Instagram-perfect life where the filters hide the cracks. Every convincingly performed prayer, every cobbled-together testimony, felt like one more betrayal of the girl who’d once joyfully chosen between slide or swing rather than heaven and hell.

But I continued performing, even as anxiety churned relentlessly beneath my modest dresses and carefully pinned hair. In this theater, I’d become an unwilling star – a master of professed belief, quietly counting the days until I could exit stage left, the taste of freedom as sweet and forbidden as the lip gloss I wasn’t allowed to wear. Yet, for all its cruelty, the stage had forged something inside me. Standing on display, heart pounding, twice a week for years – offering my soul for inspection, waiting for judgment – was its own kind of training. Now, I could walk across hot coals or step up to a podium with a steady voice, even if my insides were unraveling. The rehearsed certainty, the forced composure, the ability to project conviction no matter the doubt beneath it – what had once been a survival skill became something dangerously close to strength.