How I Escaped Evangelical Hell: A Memoir

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. Not because he wanted to, but because if he didn't, there would be hell to pay. "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, and then I was figuratively free for the day. I remember looking outside to see the kids in the neighborhood running and playing because school was out for the summer—but I had to stay inside to type the Bible. I’m doing God’s Work! Don’t I want God to love me? Keep typing! Now, you may be thinking, 'how did it take 6 years to type 900 pages?' 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. Infuriatingly, he would repeat this over the years by mysteriously losing chapters or entire books. 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 bravely reveals his slow drowning by the hands of his radical evangelical Christian family in their pursuit to raise the perfect Godly boy. In doing so, Jones found his salvation through the very computer on which he was forced to write the Bible.