Going on a Christian Mission Was the Most Shameful Thing I've Ever Done

As a result of having bipolar disorder, I've attempted suicide eight times, nearly died twice, and have seen the insides of eight lock-down psych units across LA.

This behavior led to many lost jobs and the loss of my apartment. That's how I wound up in a halfway house in Van Nuys in 2009 giving a guy a blowjob for $20. When he solicited me I was pretty grossed-out, but since I had no money for food or cigarettes, I acquiesced. But my deepest shame doesn't come from giving that blowjob. I regret more than anything else an action that most Christians would deem the ultimate expression of Godliness: I proselytized religion in a poor, developing country.

The summer before my senior year in college, I flew halfway across the world to the Philippines to preach a Protestant message to Catholic Filipino high schoolers for six weeks. Every summer, hundreds of students belonging to Campus Crusade for Christ canvassed the globe to spread the Good News about Jesus Christ to heathen souls. We didn't help build houses or volunteer or donate money. Instead, we went around proselyting version of Christianity to people who wanted to just be left alone.

I became a member of Campus Crusade because I was an emotional mess in college, but my involvement in the Evangelical Church started in high school. Since the bipolar disorder was not yet diagnosed, at 16 I turned to Jesus for relief, thinking maybe He could put the kibosh on my severe depression. I clung to the teachings forced on me at my Christian high school, a school my mother enrolled me in not because she was a Jesus freak but because she didn't want me going to a massive and underfunded public school in LA.

As a result of all this Jesus talk in school, I slowly grew narrow-minded and my critical thinking skills shrank down to the size of a mustard seed. But every now and then the spiritual emotionalism elicited in those youth group retreats or Sunday sermons assuaged my depression. That was the same respite I enjoyed as a member of Campus Crusade.

Every Wednesday night, we Campus Crusaders would meet in a lecture hall to sing worship songs to the accompaniment of a live rock band composed of attractive Crusaders. They pumped out tunes with electric guitars, an electric keyboard, and a full drum set, and I'd close my eyes and connect with the tender lyrics. Often, the weight of my limbs and head seemed to vanish, my body's 150 pounds lightening to near weightlessness as goosebumps emerged on my skin, skin that tingled and grew warmer with each refrain. When this happened, I'd raise my hands to the ceiling, the loud chatter of my neurotic mind quieting as our collective voices resounded in love songs to Jesus. It proved to be a powerful drug, an activity that flooded my brain with endorphins.

When "stepping into the Spirit" mattered more than my appearance or grades or whether or not some dude liked me, I finally felt at ease. When spreading an evangelical message to fools who were too stupid to believe in the resurrection, fools who would burn in Hell without my help, I felt powerful. The evangelical message gave me an illusion of agency, even though my mental agency was long gone.

Thankfully, we weren't responsible for converting the whole of Manila to evangelicalism, which would be quite the chore since 81 percent of the entire nation is Catholic and 1.6 million people lived in Manila in 2000. Instead, we only targeted the students studying at the Mapúa Institute of Technology, one of the best high schools in the country. Our goal was to convince the mostly Catholic students that their faith would not save them from Satan's lair of fire and brimstone (evangelicals essentially believe that Catholicism is no more Christian than Judaism or Islam). To get these kids on board, we planned to instigate one-on-one conversations with the students as they hung around campus in between classes. We also hoped to lure as many as possible into empty classrooms for 20-minute lectures detailing why their faith was bullshit. We measured our success by whether or not a student requested a copy of the Four Spiritual Laws.

Our team consisted of five women and five guys; a husband-and-wife duo, with their four children in tow, served as our team leaders.When first entering campus, we met a group of six evangelical Mapúa students, allies who showed us around and helped us get acquainted with both the campus and the city. They also helped out with translating when we needed it, although the majority of students at Mapúa spoke near-perfect English. When we met up with them, they immediately showered us with strong hugs and offers to have dinner at their homes.

Meeting these kids definitely eased my anxiety. Knowing that we had partners in crime legitimized our efforts in my mind, and also served as a reminder that, yes, it was possible to convert Catholic Filipinos into our kind of faith.

Inside that courtyard, students sat on brick steps or concrete benches, socializing, laughing, studying, or just relaxing with their eyes closed. Realizing it was our job to first and foremost disrupt them—to rip them from their precious down time between classes—filled me conflict. Part of me wanted to abort the mission, bolt from the campus, find my way to the airport and fly home. I began wondering if our effort to transform these kids into our own religious likeness was not only audacious but perhaps cruel.

I decided to brush off my hesitations that first day at Mapúa, telling myself that I might in fact be doing them all a huge favor by saving their souls. In an effort to do so, I rounded up a bunch of students in the courtyard, the very ones I was terrified to disturb. Somehow, I forced myself to speak to them, despite being plagued with shame each time I opened my mouth.

"Hi there," I'd say to them. "I'm Tracy from America, and I'm leading a lecture about Christianity if you'd like to come?"

The students were kind enough to not spit in my face or tell me to fuck off. At least half of the students smiled and nodded in the negative, saying they'd rather not join me, but the other half seemed slightly intrigued, some altogether enthused to hear what I had to say.

With no air conditioning, the small, and very clean, classroom with light blue walls was rather hot. Thankfully, one large oscillating fan stood at the front alleviating some of the heat, but as I spoke a bead of sweat trickled down my forehead.

"So we're missionaries with Campus Crusade for Christ, a Christian organization from the United States," I started. "We're here to bring you an important spiritual message. Catholicism isn't the same as true Christianity. True Christianity doesn't require you to go to confession or mass."

They looked on, most of them eager to hear what my American trap was spewing. One young man nodded in contemplation, his brown eyes fixed on me in deep concentration. Beside him, two girls slouched in their chairs and pretended to care, but they kept looking at their cell phones, obviously uninterested.

Why am I doing this? I thought to myself. They don't want to be here!

Then I reconsidered and thought, But you're truly helping them! You're saving their souls! They just don't know it.

As I spoke, I became filled with both self-loathing and self-praise.

At the end of the lecture, only the guy with the concentrated stare came up to me to get more information. He took a pamphlet—we had dozens stashed in our backpacks to give out to students—thanked me, and then left.

The rest of that day, as with all other weekdays that we spent on campus, we were expected to go over and talk to students one-on-one. I tried with a few other girls sitting in the large cafeteria near the courtyard, but they obviously wanted to just relax with their friends and enjoy their food.

"No, that's OK," they said after I tried to push the Four Spiritual Laws on them. This pattern continued until the day's end, and I started wondering if this entire trip would be a bust. Still, I held onto the hope that we might really make an impact.

That first evening, we took a Jeepney home, a form of transportation unlike any you'd likely see elsewhere on the planet. These stretched jeeps, a quintessential piece of Filipino culture, are each painted in vibrant multicolored designs, some with large paintings of the Virgin Mary or saints. With no windows and just long benches lining the interiors, Jeepneys are a sort of hybrid between a bus and a taxi.

Unfortunately, the colonizing attitude of my team followed us onto the Jeepney that first night—they suddenly erupted into loud Bible songs while sitting right alongside locals who were clearly exhausted from a long day of work.

"Rise and shine and give God the glory, glory! Rise and shine and give God the glory, glory!" my team belted out with all the force of their lungs. I refused to sing. I watched a petite woman with a pale face and limp shoulder-length hair put her hands over her ears. She didn't look angry or annoyed, but just downright miserable. Prior to our singing, she had her eyes closed and appeared to be asleep.

My teammates seemed so thrilled to shop at the malls, to spend money, to eat the fast food at the many Burger Kings and Pizza Huts and KFCs littering the very Westernized city. The husband-and-wife leaders shared the same enthusiasm. For the most part, my teammates were cheery and enthused through the duration of the trip. Rather than actually open up about my misgivings to my teammates or team leaders, I kept it all to myself out of fear of being judged or chastised.

I did appreciate the one weekend of R&R that we took to the gorgeous island of Bohol. There, we did in fact lounge on a white sand beach, for a whole two-and-a-half days, drinking virgin cocktails and rocking in hammocks at a lovely—and extremely cheap by US standards—resort.

But as I look back, I wonder why we even needed R&R in the first place. We weren't working; we weren't toiling away at an actual job or even studying. Though it was certainly a chore to get to and from campus from our apartment, we still didn't need a weekend of vacation, let alone one paid for by my friends and family and former teachers who donated funds for the trip. Sure, I was grateful for the getaway but in truth we could have easily taken those hundreds of dollars we spent on the three-day retreat and given it to our Filipino friends.

We could have offered to help pay their bills, bought them food, or at least purchased them gifts, which we didn't do before parting. Hell, we could have paid for them to take the vacation instead. To me, this would have been a much more "Christ-like" thing to do.

Truthfully, I don't think our team gave two shits about either our Filipino teammates or the soon-to-be-damned Catholic students at Mapúa. When our Filipino friends came over to our apartment to spend time with us the last night of our trip, us girls were busy dying our hair all sorts of wild colors we found at this beauty shop in one of the malls, virtually ignoring them.

I remember our friends sitting on the sofas in our living room, and as we ignored them, they looked at the floor in silence. Normally, they were overjoyed to see us, chatty and loquacious—the silence spoke of their dejection. A few times, they tried to engage us.

"Will you come back?" one girl asked us.

"Maybe!" Gabrielle said, then went back to the bathroom to finish slathering green dye on her pixie cut.

After about 30 minutes of sitting in silence, with few smiles, our friends stood and hugged us goodbye, then walked out the door. Though they teared up before leaving, we Americans didn't shed any tears. We were that caught up in our self-centered obsession with hair dye.

This behavior, this unfathomable insensitivity, absolutely fills me with the most shame—not giving a gross dude a blowjob for $20. I rarely think about that blowjob. Instead, I think about that last night in Manila over and over and over, that God-awful Jeepney ride over and over and over, and bugging those Mapúa students constantly for six weeks over and over and over. Years later, I still wish I had ditched that stupid green and orange and blue hair dye to sit down with our friends and share some quality conversation. After all, I will undoubtedly never see any of them ever again.

Still, I kept going to Campus Crusade, and I kept going to church and praying, until, that is, the pastor at my church spewed out an insulting sermon in September of 2000. Pastor Erwin, an attractive man in his 40s with dark hair and dark eyes, preach. He spoke with a booming and impassioned voice into the dimly lit club.

"Everyone's sedated," he began, holding the microphone close to his mouth. "People are taking all sorts of medications to be happy because they're empty on the inside. They're empty because they don't have Christ in their lives."

A kind of anger I'd never experienced filled my entire being, a sort of confident and assured, righteous rage.

Since the antidepressants had filled me with enough energy and focus to function at a much higher level—my grades even spiked—the last thing I felt was sedated. With my anger peaking, I stood up in the middle of his sermon and walked out of the nightclub, alone. After that, I quit Campus Crusade for Christ and Jesus altogether. When my friends and family asked me why, I openly said I didn't believe in it anymore, and for some reason most of them respected that and gave me space, the same space and respect that I wish I had given those Catholic Filipino students in Mapúa.