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News is circulating that Carman has passed away. I responded to an altar call at a Carman concert, which was also my first concert. Turns out to have been a pretty big deal.
I grew up small-town United Methodist that was actually pretty high church in retrospect. Here is me as an altar boy.
My middle school best friend, who was Nazarene iirc, introduced me to Carman and invited me to go to the concert w/ his family.
My middle school best friend, who was Nazarene iirc, introduced me to Carman and invited me to go to the concert w/ his family.
My best friend was the friend "I could talk about God with." I'd gone to a couple of services with his family, and altar calls were just not a part of my tradition. I have a vague memory of saying the Sinner's Prayer around age 5, but it's not as clear as the Carman Conversion.
In middle school I was under a lot of medication for epilepsy. They had put me on a 16-pill a day cocktail, b/c they (the doctors) feared my seizures - which were minor - could get worse. I had terrible side effects and had to stop playing sports. I got religion.
I was always a spiritual kid, but in the way that Superman and Jesus co-existed, and the world was full of wonder. In that formative time, I turned inward and became susceptible to evangelical messaging.
You know who thinks they're terrible people? Anxious tweens and teens who don't understand what's happening to them. Primes you for 'all have sinned' type stuff. That's what happened. I can't lay everything at the foot of Carman's stage, but it helped set a trajectory.
I got into CCM more heavily. When we moved, I found my built-in friend group at a youth group. I got a job at a Christian bookstore. I chose to go to a Christian college because I 'felt the call to ministry' at 17.
Would all that have happened if I hadn't had that experience at a Carman concert? Probably, but I'll never know. I can't restart from that checkpoint.
It's easy for me as a person with an anxious/depressive tendency to only look back and see the trauma and the sadness that resulted, but because evangelical life is so totalizing, I might never have met the people that have given me the greatest joy, incl. my spouse, either.
So I choose to focus on that today, too. The friends and loved ones I know and love because of things like attending a Carman concert in small town Indiana that brought them into my orbit.
Yes, the Carman videos are cringe. But stories like this are an example of how these media, these communities, these beliefs impact and permeate our lives.
