"Wonderful essay. Really honest and thoughtful."
Does an honest person claim to be charismatic when only his parents were?
The author was never a charismatic Christian like his parents became. He was raised as a dispensational Baptist kid whose parents then moved on from that and became charismatics and embarrassed him. He was preoccupied with the end of the world, not with the gifts of the Spirit.
Dispensationalists, of course, were not charismatics before the so-called neo-charismatic movement. They were instead strong cessationists. They believed the gifts of the Spirit ceased with the deaths of the apostles, whose job it was to be guided into all the truth by the Spirit and write it all down in the Bible. The Southern Baptists were a stronghold of cessationists, among the least likely to be . . . open.
Ryan Zickgraf's essay was originally entitled "I was a charismatic Christian", but he changed it to
My father went to war with a demon bird: I miss my parents’ enchanted world .
... I had trouble hiding my incredulity. I was in college at the time, studying journalism, and had already begun the long, self-conscious process of distancing myself from the faith I’d been raised in. I told him he was embarrassing himself. Are you seriously going to drive three hours to fight a mythological demon bird? ... The quasi-megachurch we first attended, Calvary Temple in Springfield, was one of many congregations that got swept up by the Third Wave. It was once a more staid Southern Baptist church ... I shudder when I recall being haunted by A Thief in the Night, a quartet of evangelical films released across the ’70s and ’80s, the precursor to the Left Behind novels of the ’90s. I was one of tens of millions of kids who saw them at church watch parties, disturbed to see characters unlucky enough to sleep through the Rapture and wake up in the Great Tribulation, where the United Nations was running guillotines for anyone who refused the Mark of the Beast. I didn’t need Freddy Krueger or Friday the 13th movies; that was fake. I had eschatology, and it was real; at times, it was difficult not to approach every service with a sense of both thrill and fear. Would someone at church prophesy that the Rapture would occur next week? Maybe. ... By my teen years, I was forced to attend three-hour revival services ... There is a reason why I felt like an outsider in my tight-knit religious community until I left the church at age 30. ... What my parents had, what they tried to give me, what I received and then rejected, and what I am still sorting through wasn’t a set of beliefs that happened to be wrong. It was a way of inhabiting the world, a posture of openness to the possibility that the world might be, in some sense that resists clean explication, for you. ...
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| https://unherd.com/2026/06/i-was-a-charismatic-christian/?edition=us |
While it's hard to say what will become of Ryan Zickgraf, one thing sure has stuck with him from his childhood Southern Baptist days.
... Pastor Johnson preached constantly about the coming Rapture, once speculating that the Antichrist would be incredibly gay ...
