I can identify with Luke Evans’s childhood memories (‘I thought I’d die at Armageddon’, 26 October). I didn’t grow up in a Jehovah’s Witness family – we were conventional churchgoers – but as I moved into adolescence and my 20s, I became more and more exposed to extreme kinds of evangelical Christianity, through organisations such as Crusaders and the Christian Union, and the hullabaloo around Billy Graham’s visits to London.
In particular, like Luke, I had all the dogma about the “last days” and Jesus’s “second coming” dinned into me. It scared the life out of me then, and still, in my mid-70s, I feel anxiety verging on panic, even though I’ve put my religious past behind me, and I try to avoid news headlines as much as possible.
Didn’t anyone who peddled that stuff ever stop to think about the psychological damage they were doing? I guess not. We were told that if we were frightened by the idea, we were obviously not “saved”. What an appalling, inhuman message to inflict on a sensitive, impressionable child, such as I was. Did I ever confide in someone about what was bothering me? No – I didn’t even know that was possible. “Trust and obey”, went the song, and we were expected to just get on with it.
Mike Wheeler
Derby
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