More Than Conquerors
A Memoir of Lost Arguments
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Megan Hustad and her family try to reconcile an evangelical upbringing in a post-Christian America
When Megan Hustad was a child, her father uprooted their family from Minneapolis to embark on a cross-cultural journey in the name of evangelical Christianity. As missionaries they brought the Gospel to the Caribbean island of Bonaire and later to the outskirts of Amsterdam. After a decade away, they returned to the States only to find themselves more alien than before. The evangelical landscape had transformed from the idealistic, market-averse movement it was in the 1970s to one where media-savvy pastors held sway over mega-churches. As the family struggled with the economic and spiritual aftermath of their break from middle-class Middle America, Megan and her sister, Amy, began to plot their escape.
Megan sets her sights on New York City, where everything she was denied as a child would be at her fingertips, and Amy makes her home among the intellectual swagger of New Englanders. But fitting in proves harder than they'd imagined. As much as Megan tries to shake them, thoughts of the God she was ignoring follow her into every party and relationship.
In More Than Conquerors, Hustad explores what happens when the habits of your religion coincide with the demands of your social class, and what breaks when they conflict. With a sharp tongue and deep insight, Hustad offers a vivid account of the cultural divisions, anxieties, and resentments that continue to divide our country and her own family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The daughter of Christian evangelical missionaries, Hustad (How to be Useful) offers an earnest, at times brain-rattling and murky, overall very human attempt to reconcile the ideals of her parents with the clash of the secular world. In 1978, the Minnesota-based family, consisting of her father, Stan, a teacher, her mother, Karen, a secretary, Hustad, then three, and her older sister, Amy, embarked on several years of mission work: first to Bonaire, in the Netherlands Antilles, where the parents worked at the evangelical Trans World Radio. The family had to rely on donations by the home congregation, indeed they were a "charity case," as Hustad and Amy recognized only much later, yet rich in faith and a willingness to fit in, such as learning Dutch in the Catholic school the girls attended. Relocated with her family to Bussum, Holland, in 1983, then back to Minnesota four years later, Hustad was considered by her contemporaries as a kind of exotic, clueless about cultural cues such as music and dress as she was beginning to doubt her own faith in God. Full-throttle secularization accompanied her move to New York City and work in publishing. Yet she remained forgiving toward her family's unconventional trajectory, as amply demonstrated in this groping, endearing attempt at "fumbling way back toward hopes we called God."
