My sheltered evangelical upbringing gave me a view of Kansas City outside my world | Opinion

I used to talk about my Kansas City childhood with some embarrassment: “I was pretty sheltered as a kid,” I’d tell friends, explaining why I’d missed a 1980s pop culture reference or couldn’t relate to their stories about school dances.

The scope of my world then was mostly limited to my family’s evangelical church on a sprawling campus in the Kansas suburbs, my Christian school in a modest neighborhood on the Missouri side of the all-important state line and the little house with a big backyard, not far away, where I spent my early years. There, in my imagination, our vegetable garden became the Garden of Eden — the fruit trees planted long before us, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

We were often warned about the dangers of evil, and the importance of discerning it from the good. As I write in my book, “The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church,” many parents in my evangelical community were cautious about what they allowed their children to read or watch. Many feared “secular” influences that would corrupt their children or lead them astray from the faith. In our Christian school, our textbooks offered what in retrospect was a limited and sometimes distorted view of American history and science.

Our world was enlarged and enriched by a handful of local cultural institutions: Mid-Continent Public Library, where my mother would take my siblings and me to sit on squares of carpet scraps to listen to the children’s story hour and pick out books to fill our long, hot Kansas City summers; Kansas City Public Television, where I first heard Spanish spoken on “Sesame Street” and watched as Mister Rogers embodied what it meant to live in a diverse neighborhood; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, where I saw sculptures and paintings from people and places all around the world.

In what might have foreshadowed my public radio career, as a small child, I loved to make audio recordings using my dad’s cassette recorder. In one recording from 1985, just before my fourth birthday, I talk about my excitement about an upcoming visit to the Nelson — and a warning I’d received.

“There’s lots of fun things to look at,” I announce into the recorder, adding that it’s supposed to be “a quiet place.”

Then, my sing-songy toddler voice lowers a bit, somewhat ominously.

“My mommy said there’s idols — but they’re not to pray to,” apparently referring to some of the sculptures I would be seeing.

“They’re just to show people what people’s idol gods looked like,” I add.

I didn’t pray to any of those “idols,” for the record.

My parents sheltered us, yes, but they also took us to the museum, and the library, and encouraged us to learn about the world, and I’m grateful that they did. I’m grateful that it was made possible by Kansas City’s free public cultural institutions — where I learned the importance of trying to understand the people in my neighborhood and the larger world, and to live peacefully together, however profound our differences.

Decades later, now with children of my own, I can see that being sheltered maybe wasn’t so bad. It’s a big world, and one where children often long for nothing more than shelter. I realize how incredibly fortunate I was to grow up in a time and place where I was both sheltered, and offered a view of the larger world, just miles from my own quiet neighborhood.