Marlene Winell was 18 years old and sitting in church when she decided she wanted to leave.
“The pastor was holding up a newspaper about the Six-Day War in the Middle East, and everybody cheered because war is one of the end-of-times prophecies,” she told HuffPost. “He was happy the war had broken out. And that to me was the last straw. It was one of my last days in church.”
(This might sound familiar if you’ve been paying attention to comments circulating in the early days of the current war with Iran.)
Winell’s parents were fundamentalist Christian missionaries in China and Taiwan, and after she grew up in Taiwan, they sent her to a missionary boarding school in Southern California. Winell was part of the Jesus Movement — an evangelical Protestant revival that was popular in the 1960s and 1970s — living in a commune with those she described as “Christian hippies” and “Jesus freaks.”
That is, until she graduated from high school and started to question things.
