Book · Memoir
How I Escaped Evangelical Hell
A memoir
The story of a radical evangelical childhood — and how a computer meant to keep me copying scripture became the way out.
#1 Hot New Release in Religious Cults on Amazon.
Every day at apartment #54, inside his tiny Section-8 bedroom, Jon Jones would stare at the pages of his father's Amplified Bible. Then he would turn to his IBM clone 386 SX-25, pick that day's chapters, and type out what he read. Outdoors, children would be playing baseball; he could hear them, but he would be typing.
"From the age of eight to fourteen," writes Jones, "every single day, before I was allowed to eat or go outside or even do my schoolwork, I had to type out my chapters… When I finished the Bible in its entirety for the first time, my father 'accidentally' deleted the entire thing and 'didn't have any backups,' and I had to start over from scratch. I estimate that I've typed the Amplified Bible somewhere between five and ten times. There are over 880,000 words in the Amplified Bible."
In How I Escaped Evangelical Hell, Jones reveals his slow drowning at the hands of his radical evangelical family in their pursuit to raise the perfect Godly boy — and how he found his way out through the very computer on which he was forced to write the Bible.
This was an extremely difficult book to write. It lays bare my religious upbringing, and how my pursuit of a career in the video game industry saved me from it. It's actually a pretty funny read, but still unflinching in its criticism of the dark side of evangelical culture.