Aaron Hartzler’s new y.a. memoir, Rapture Practice, is the funny-sad-hopeful story of one kid’s lonely journey of self-awareness and spiritual angst while growing up in a fundamentalist Christian family. I was particularly excited to read the memoir because I made a similar journey when I was growing up in an evangelical Christian family. I loved the way Aaron kept bitterness out of the story but wrote honestly and lovingly of his family and his experiences and I couldn’t wait to talk to him about how he kept his perspective and how his family has responded to his memoir.
J.L.: This was a tricky memoir to write—how to portray fundamentalist Christian culture, and your experience within it, without anger or bitterness. You depicted the very real love your parents had for you, their desire to do the right thing both for you and by you, yet revealed how misguided it was and how the very way they tried to love you caused your rebellion. What did you need to do to create that kind of balance in the story?
Aaron: I needed to do a whole lot of writing. I didn’t sit down with the express goal of writing a book that “wasn’t bitter,” or portraying fundamentalist Christian culture in a certain way—or at all really. I was only concerned with writing my teen story as honestly as possible. I hate memoir where the author is constantly jabbing you in the ribs telegraphing how you should feel about what’s going on in the scene. I worked very hard to keep my adult perspective out of this book, which is why I wrote it in present tense.
That was a big process, and these stories didn’t start out as a book. I began doing one-man shows, standup, and essay nights back in 1999. I wrote a lot of these stories, over and over again trying to find the heart, and the funny, and the focus. In the beginning, I was in my mid-20s and I was really angry. I did a show in New York in 2002 and, trust me, there is a theatre somewhere in the East Village where the paint is still blistered from the heat of my rage.
At the same time, I was seeing a really good therapist and I was doing a lot of basic, garden-variety work on myself—unpacking what had gone on. Some of that had to do with the distinct mind meld of religious dogma, but a lot of it was the sort of garden-variety unfinished family business I believe we all have to come to grips with as adults.
Being able to find empathy for my parents and individuate from them to see that they did the best they could with what they were given helped change my perspective on my anger. Dealing with those issues allowed me to find a way in to the stories that wasn’t angry. I found that this was key to letting other people into my stories as well.
My parents are loving people. They were constantly training us to go out and do the kind of “service work” focused on social justice. Those things are the best-case result of organized religion. They’d constantly take us to do stuff like serve food to homeless people in shelters. Dad taught at a Bible college, and we’d often have students over for holidays when they couldn’t go home because their parents were missionaries in other countries. That’s the kind of altruism that I love, the sort of open-heartedness that they’re capable of.
J.L.: But they couldn’t have it for their own kid.
Aaron: The thing I learned about my writing was that I couldn’t start from a place of anger. If I did, there was no story. My parents aren’t villains, or hypocrites. They really believe the things they say they believe. When I started writing from a place of, “Aaron’s parents loved him so much that this is what happened…” then suddenly I had a real story with fully fleshed-out characters that aren’t caricatures.
A lot of memoirs end up being a baby with the bathwater experience. People toss out everything—and it’s more complicated than that.
Thought there are parts of their theology and worldview that I adamantly disagree with, they did (and do!) love me very much. Today I have the perspective not to let my anger about those things override my ability to have a relationship with them and with others.
J.L.: In some ways while I read the book, I kept thinking that your parents loved you TOO MUCH.
Aaron: That’s why every single thing I did mattered to them so deeply. My eternal soul seemed to hang in the balance with every single choice I made. As I talk to teenagers about this book, that’s the thing that I hear most often: Other people are making my decisions for me. Even teens who have never been to church and have no idea what the “Rapture” is seem to relate to the book on that level. At some point, my curiosity about the world around me took over, and I tried to take the reader through my discovery of that world.
You always hear people say, “Write like your parents are dead,” but I’ve said from the beginning that I wanted this book to be a parade, not a baseball bat. While I didn’t pull any punches, I wanted this book to be about my journey to understand who I was and how I could still love my parents without losing my emerging sense of self. Because of that focus, there were a few things I decided not to put in the book. These were things I felt would have skewed the narrative towards a place that it could not come back from—we’d have left the reservation, so to speak.
J.L.: Having grown up in an evangelical Christian house myself, I went through the same struggle that a lot of teens in that environment go through: how to distinguish between parental approval and God’s approval, between what parents say is right and wrong and what God might say is right and wrong. Of course, every teenager wants to be loved and accepted and approved by their parents. Why is this a special note of concern for teenagers growing up in evangelical or fundamentalist Christian households?
Aaron: I can only speak to my own experience. There were two seemingly diametrically opposed concepts that I learned in my fundamentalist background. One was that to seek for God was to find God. The other concept was from a Bible verse: “I would that you were either hot or cold but because you are lukewarm, I [God] will spit you out of my mouth.”
I knew for sure I didn’t believe everything my parents did. I felt like I was seeking. I had tough questions of the faith I was being raised with. Searching was supposed to be good, was supposed to be part of it, right? But then, on the flipside, if you didn’t believe that the Bible was absolute truth, you were considered lukewarm, which, was basically the same as not believing.
This was the eternal dichotomy of my fundamentalist roots: either you believe the Bible is the inspired word of God or you don’t. Period. There was no middle ground.
I was on a panel for the LA Times Festival of Books in April and one of the guys on the panel was a gay Christian guy who is still very active in a gay-affirming church in New York. He kept referring to his “community of believers,” and so I talked to him about what he meant by that. I pointed out that the gay-affirming churches I’d attended don’t believe that Leviticus is the inspired word of God, they don’t believe that some of the dreadful things the apostle Paul said about women or slavery are the inspired Word of God. This is important because I find so often that religious moderates don’t really believe the things the Bible says—that the extreme right wing of their faith, people like my parents actually do believe. Yet, they throw shade for the people who do actually believe that stuff and say, “You should respect their beliefs.”
Well, I don’t. I don’t respect the beliefs of theologians who tell teens that they’re sinful for being gay, just as I would not respect the beliefs of a scientist who says the Earth is flat. I will question that every time. Vocally. Strenuously.
Most of the teens that I’ve heard from—especially the LGBTQ ones—are struggling with the idea that their faith is set up as an all or nothing proposition—and that was my struggle. It opened up a real chasm in me as a teenager and I struggled with it for years. Eventually, I was unable to reconcile that discrepancy, and I left religion altogether.
J.L.: It was hard to let go of religion, wasn’t it?
Aaron: Yep. I was hard-wired for God—my mother was reading Bible verses to me in the womb. When you are raised with that operating system, it affects every program you run. The updates and software patches of therapy and a loving community of friends have been incredibly helpful.
I hope to write a second memoir soon that covers my year in Bible college, my coming out story, and leaving the church. In Rapture Practice, I chose to stick to my teen years, and not tie everything up with the tidy magenta bow of my coming out story. For one, I came out to my parents the first time (yes, it took several attempts before it stuck) after my first year of college, so the chronology felt awkward trying to shoehorn that ending on. Also, I wanted to capture my authentic high school experience—which for me was about questions, not answers. The answers I discovered in college and grad school are a different book.
J.L.: There were times during my own journey out of the church when I wondered if I would make it. I don’t mean physically—I’m not talking about suicide—but I mean emotionally.
Aaron: I’m so glad I was gay. I think it’s trickier for straight kids to leave that realm sometimes because they don’t come up against the brick wall of their sexual orientation. For me, it became fairly clear in my late teens that I was going to have to look around for some other options because there was no place for me in the world of fundamentalism.
The thing I remember most is that there was love there. However flawed or imperfect that love was, there was some part of me that remained whole and unbroken—that allowed me to be a successful person. My grandmother (“Nanny”) in the book was a huge part of that for me as a kid.
One of the things I talk to teens about is that it does gets better—not because other people change, but because you change. As difficult as my high school struggle was at times, I wouldn’t go back and undo it because I truly believe our experiences make us who we are. I’m so pleased with the man I grew up to be.
J.L.: You end the book on a real note of hope, that your relationship with your parents can be characterized by grace—that is, undeserved mercy and love. What is your relationship like with your parents and siblings as an adult? How did they respond to the memoir?
Aaron: I don’t know if my dad has read the book. My mom was going to try to finish it on vacation last month. I haven’t heard back from her if she did or not.
I’ve taken some heat for saying that I believe unconditional love is a “two-way street.” (Lots of people countering, “I don’t love serial killers unconditionally!”) That’s not what I mean. What I mean is that I have taken my parents off the hook for my happiness. Their actions or acceptance aren’t the basis for whether I love them or not. I love them regardless.
That doesn’t mean I lie down on the dotted yellow line of the two-way street and get run over. Guardrails are important. There are certain conversations I now cut off mid-sentence—kindly, but firmly. I don’t allow us to get into subjects where we’d just be rehashing old arguments anymore.
Friends have said, “Just walk away. Cut them off.” I do limit the time I spend with them now, but we communicate, and my door is wide open to whatever level of relationship they will allow. Instead of walking away, I have learned to meet them where they are. It’s not the completely accepting, truly personal relationship I wish we had, but I am willing to hang in there with them.
My parents can give our family’s story a truly happy ending if they choose to. I hope they give me the something extraordinary to write about next—the complete acceptance of their gay sons. In the meantime, we can all hang out as a family for a couple days every so often, and not have to have the big arguments that we once did.
I hope that when I write the sequel to Rapture Practice things will have changed completely—that they’ll want to meet my boyfriend, and accept us without condition. I have a gay brother who is married. My parents finally agreed to meet his husband for the first time over dinner last week. The idea that my parents have met my brother’s husband is blowing my mind.
If you’ve read the book, you know that this is no small thing. It’s a giant step forward. I’ve lived for a long time with the idea that my parents may be as powerless to change as I am. Maybe it’ll never be perfect, but it feels like we are moving towards each other and not away from each other. To me, that’s the most important thing.
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