When I Spoke in Tongues
A Pentecostal Girlhood
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A memoir of the profound destabilization that comes from losing one's faith--and a young woman's journey to reconcile her lack of belief with her love for her deeply religious family.
Growing up in poverty in the rural backwoods of southern Maryland, the Pentecostal church was at the core of Jessica Wilbanks' family life. At sixteen, driven by a desire to discover the world, Jessica walked away from the church--trading her faith for freedom, and driving a wedge between her and her deeply religious family.
But fundamentalist faiths haunt their adherents long after belief fades--former believers frequently live in limbo, straddling two world views and trying to reconcile their past and present. Ten years later, struggling with guilt and shame, Jessica began a quest to recover her faith. It led her to West Africa, where she explored the Yorùbá roots of the Pentecostal faith, and was once again swept up by the promises and power of the church. After a terrifying car crash, she finally began the difficult work of forgiving herself for leaving the church and her family and finding her own path.
When I Spoke in Tongues is a story of the painful and complicated process of losing one's faith and moving across class divides. And in the end, it's a story of how a family splintered by dogmatic faith can eventually be knit together again through love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilbanks, winner of a Pushcart Prize for essay writing, debuts with the captivating story of how she turned away from God. She eloquently explores her long journey from being a Pentecostal Christian who spoke in tongues to being an atheist. Wilbanks tells of her childhood growing up in a dilapidated farmhouse in Maryland where she would mark up her Precious Moments Bible with pink highlighter. Throughout college she slowly begins to recognize the "metallic coil of anxiety buried deep in my belly" that came from the questioning of her religious upbringing. As a graduate student, having rejected her childhood faith but curious to know its roots, Wilbanks researched the Pentecostal movement. She includes portraits of such people as William Seymour, a poor man living on Azusa Street in California, and wealthy Enoch Adeboye from Nigeria, who changed her thinking about Pentecostalism, which had become derisive after her conversion to atheism. As Wilbanks learned more about her childhood religion, she visited Africa and was appalled that clergy and laity punishes children as witches: "You had to look closely to see the scars." Whether writing of these scars, her dad's rusty pickup trucks, or massive Pentecostal revivals in Lagos, Wilbanks captures the scene beautifully. Wilbanks's slow deconstruction of her family-given religiosity is an evocative inversion of the average spiritual journey.