Growing Up Gay “In My Super Fundamentalist Christian Church”
Growing Up Gay “In My Super Fundamentalist Christian Church”
Kevin James Thornton grew up in a small Christian town in Indiana. His early life started at a Baptist church, but once he discovered a Mega Church focused on rock bands and the youth, he became enamored and doubled down on his faith. A Jesus loving, self motivated chiId then teen, he loved his fully immersive church and heavily partook in extremely questionable youth events, but something inside himself felt wrong. Driven by his desire to fit in and “fix himself” he wouldn’t even allow himself to have the thought that he was gay.
He attended youth group bible study religiously and went to inner city parks in NYC dressed as “sin” clowns to perform “morality plays”. They even put on extreme HeII based haunted houses with graphic scenes played out by the youth. Things started to feel grim for Kevin once the group graduated high school and the boys he had crushes on coupled up and got married, leaving Kevin feeling more alone than ever. Always having buried who he really was, it wasn’t until he escaped to college and found himself in a new group within theater that the inner turmoil would subside.
Kevin dives into what it was like selling everything to move to LA to become a comedian, and how he blew up on TikTok during the pandemic by sharing his old bible study memories (with a splash of autotune).
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Chapter Marks
00:04:24 Kevin’s early church experiences as a southern baptist
00:06:58 How Kevin changed churches and why it appealed to him as a teenager
00:09:40 How this mega church appeared to be less conservative but doctrinally the opposite
00:10:50 What Kevin’s parents thought about his dedication to church
00:12:14 What the messages were like at the new church
00:14:28 Youth group mission trips to inner cities
00:19:10 Messages from the church and the pressure to proselytize and bring more people to the church through events
00:22:35 Kevin’s dissonance with his s*xuality
00:26:56 The story about home bible study during youth group
00:30:13 How people in the same situations can have different experiences
00:33:25 The mega church’s haunted houses for Halloween
00:37:27 Kevin’s feelings at the time on the haunted houses
00:39:06 When Kevin started to realize there were issues with his church
00:43:28 How seeing other gay people be acceptable helped Kevin accept himself
00:47:14 How his old youth group felt about Kevin’s new life in college
00:49:56 How reaching out can make someone second guess the best path for themselves
00:52:17 Kevin’s shift from his old life into the comedy scene
00:59:11 How an app and the pandemic changed Kevin’s comedy
01:06:08 How Kevin is doing today
01:11:47 Linda, Listen
**Disclaimer: Thanks for joining us at Cults to Consciousness. This storytelling podcast is meant to be for entertainment purposes only and does not substitute for medical advice. We may discuss triggering topics and we ask that you make your personal mental health a priority. Lastly, the opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host.**
Shelise you are so gentle and wise and knowledgeable. (E.g.39 mins and what you said ealier about the B.I.T.E. model which I’d not heard of but which fits). I love what you have done with your experience, educating yourself and healing yourself to such a degree that you can spread wisdom and sanity so gently and firmly. You ‘hold’ a lot of people by doing so. Jonathan is obvioudly wonderful too. X
IT WAS THE NINEEEETIES!!
If anyone wants to learn more about Hell Houses (Christian haunted houses) I cannot recommend the video that Fundie Fridays did on the topic enough.
Really loved this!
Kevin is a national treasure!!! His comedy is the best part of my day.
48:14 i’ve had phases where i had very similar feelings. for me though it was just a small secret hope that someone would care enough to reach out. but no one from the church i had spent like 90% of my whole life in even sent a text asking if i was okay. it was extremely eye opening. and simultaneously heartbreaking and relieving, because i finally knew it wasn’t my fault. they were just like that.
Inspiring story, thank you for sharing!
I was so excited when I saw you were having Kevin on! I love him! Such a beautiful human being❤
Love you Kevin ❤
Kevin is amazing and i love him SO much!❤
Clowns with candy pantomining premarital sex and abortions, seems very safe and non suspect
1:02:26 There’s a great quote by Oscar Wilde "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you."
This whole thing has been very cathartic. Thank you both.
Amazing interview!
You should watch the Fundie Fridays video about these haunted houses. Jen does a deep dive and it’s super interesting. If I remember correctly, I think she said that some company would go around to all these churches across the US and market their haunted house product and like help the church put it on. That’s why they’re all similar.
I just love your flowered top in this one
Two of my favourite people having a good old chin wag! How lucky am I?!
36:51 How were all the churches doing the same programming at the same time? From my experience as the daughter of a church staff member (choir director’s daughter for 40 years), I imagine the youth directors got their programming from catalogs and conferences. I grew up in the United Methodist church, and we always had catalogs from Cokesbury, the UM publishing house, around the church. That’s where all the Sunday school stuff, and much of the youth Sunday school programming came from. I remember seeing Focus on the Family programming catalogs on teachers’ desks at my Christian school. And Dad would get catalogs from several music publishers with tapes, and later CDs, twice a year. We’d listen to the sample CDs on our summer road trips, picking out our favorites and mocking the really awful songs. So yeah, if someone in a mega church came up with an idea for Hell Houses before the internet, it would spread either in teaching materials through catalogs, or be suggested at Youth Pastor conferences, or spread by word of mouth from one small town to the next.
I’m so glad we never did a Hell House at my church. We did do a “haunted house” with bowls of guts, eyeballs, blood, a mad scientist, and a scary maze for a few years though. I went to a progressive church that mascaraded as traditional.
In fact, I think that’s more common tha Shalise would expect. Most mega churches with bands and “progressive” worship tend to fall into more “traditional” theology, and more traditional worshipping churches with choirs and liturgy tend to be more progressive theologically. This is not hard and fast, but in my experience is most common.
This was so fascinating; is it a cult or isn’t it? And I love Kevin’s ‘it was the 90s’ sound. Context!
I already know I’m going to love Kevin!!!
It was interesting to me to hear you say that you would think a mega church or a church with a rock band for the worship service would be progressive in their thinking. I grew up in something similar to this, so I always assume churches like the ones described in this video are incredibly bigoted in their teachings, and truly, they usually are.
Love Kevin! Saw him in Dallas and wow! Yay for this episode.
Great show, thanks
Omg I can relate to this so much as a child or the 70s 80s and 90s. Thank you for sharing! I had a few laughs at myself back then. I still have a few scars but much happier since walking away from all these things….
“Buried in shame and fear” so. Profoundly. True
I had a weird experience with youth group where I did seem to fit the narrative…too well.
I struggled to understand how anyone could be so overwhelmed by lust that they couldn’t abstain. So, I believed that those who were having premarital sex & affairs were intentionally morally deficient.
I later came to realize I was demisexual and that’s why abstinence was never problematic for me. The “temptation” of lust was never going to be a big struggle.
Since the church (& society in general) never taught us that different ways of experiencing (or not experiencing) lust existed…it made me assume that everyone else was just more sinful.
This was my experience exactly growing up. Hearing Kevin put words to my experiences is so helpful. Thank you so much for this interview.
He has such a wise and insightful way about explaining his journey that made this so healing for me and I’m sure many others ❤ to call out how so much of his trauma was subconscious. I have wondered why it took me 10 years to call out-even in my own mind- my unbelief, and it makes so much sense to me now. We were told "people like that" were the lost ones and we were the chosen ones. Well leveling that inside, when you realize you have the same stuff inside you, can come at such a massive cost to your identity.
Love this guy!
Awesome ❤ thank you
Kevin needs a Sorry about what I said when I was in a cult Tshirt!
Entirely tangential, but something about Kevin is really giving Karen Kilgariff
My high school years where in the 2000s. His stories are so relatable it’s hard for me to chuckle at times- im having horror flashbacks of way back when. His churches sound like two churches where I’m from in southeast tn- church of God of whatever and the fat ass Baptist churches. I narrowly escaped both.
Shamala hamala!!
I want them to mention chick publications-tiny comic books which were given out on the public streets or just left at bus stops, on transit seats to show people the ‘hell’ of not believing in that interpretation of christianity. i find them insane/inane/hilariously awful.
kiiiinda funny he grew up to go proselytizing The Silliness all over kingdom come
We had a haunted house, my Baptist church helped fund that we went to. In like 2009. It was internet based, it told the story of a girl who thought she met a boy online and was then murdered by a serial killer. And how she should never have been sinning and talking to boys essentially. And at the end after the scene of her in hell (the murdered child) there was a heaven scene with angels weeping she could have been saved. As if “God” couldn’t make the decision to not condemn a child for being groomed by a creep.
❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
Every single episode you put out is so good!! They all have so many great nuggets of amazing information. The Linda listen on this one seemed like it was just for me. Thank you, Kevin!
This guys Instagrams posts are hysterical
This is so relatable. There is so much deception in a fundamentalist church like the one I grew up in. Rock music and trendy clothes were a thin veil for extreme judgement and purity culture.
Liked. Commented. Subscribed ❤
I l e this guy! And I actually attended church with him. Thanks for this podcast.
Yaaaay! His shorts reappeared in my notifications recently. Glad to see he did an interview with you. Looking forward to watching this.