Oh, the pressure of perfection.

Is there any child who reads a text with the intensity of an evangelical 12-year-old reading the Bible? So asks Charles Marsh, our guest for this episode and the author of “Evangelical Anxiety: A Memoir.”

We resonate.

Katelyn and Roxy reflect on the amped up nature of an evangelical upbringing, recalling childhood fantasies of martyrdom, the high stakes proposal of eternal salvation or damnation, and Christian bumper stickers.

GUEST:

• Charles Marsh is a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia and director of the Project on Lived Theology. Charles grew up as a preacher’s kid in the Deep South in the 1970s and writes about those experiences in his new book “Evangelical Anxiety: A Memoir.”