Obviously you didn’t have to buy nothing but Christian stuff. So believe, go to church, and buy Christian stuff. But you had to keep believing in God because it was believing that kept you in Heaven, a clean place where your family was, and not Hell, which, not to like scare you or anything, was worse than the worst feeling you’d ever felt in your whole life, and you felt it for all of eternity, which is a billion years times a billion only way longer. Sometimes, you were warned, your peers in the world would Persecute You for Your Faith because of the influence of Satan, and that these doubters would try to trick you into not believing in God. You were made to understand, too, that not everyone at school or in “the world” (as in: the secular world) went to church or prayed at dinner or would be joining you in Heaven, which was sad but necessary. We had our own symbols-cross, fish, crown of thorns-and our own buzzwords, like “sanctification,” “fellowship,” and “atonement.” You could throw these words around at church with a straight face, but you got the sense (or learned the hard way) they wouldn’t play well at school. I learned early on that we Christians and our wares were set apart. Like the Baptists, a lot of Churches of Christ had in previous generations boldly claimed to be the One True Church and the Only Path to Heaven, but they were beginning to chill out on this point by the time my dad came on the scene. Since before I was born he’d been preaching in the Churches of Christ, a mid-size Protestant denomination known for its a cappella singing, full immersion baptism, weekly communion, and slavish emulation of the practices of the Early Church.

When I was seven, my family moved from Springfield, MO, to Annandale, VA, so my mom could go to grad school and my dad could become the new preacher at the unfortunately named Falls Church Church of Christ. (from Bible Adventures by Gabe Durham)