I’m reading Hermann Hesse’s Demian for class right now. It was a sensation when published, right after WWI; it’s a spiritual coming of age story for a young man who looks an awful lot like the author himself.

Hesse was born to returned missionary parents, who had served in India but ran a missionary printing house near Stuttgart in southwestern Germany. Hesse’s was a rebellious adolescence. Nothing terribly remarkable there; that’s the tragedy of human life period: broken family, lost love, generational contempt.

But Hesse actively didn’t like the Christianity of his upbringing, a robust version of Pietism, any of several spiritual movements in German-speaking countries, movements with some analogies to fundamentalism and evangelicalism in the Anglo world.

Although he professed some interest in Catholic praxis, especially the smells-and-bells parts, which seemed so different from the bare-bones Pietism he was fleeing, Hesse never returned to his roots. He experimented all over the place, and his seeking resulted in part in his Asian-spirituality novel Siddhartha and his psychedelic novel Steppenwolf, both of which were big in the English-speaking world among the sixties countercultures.

But—here’s the point—Hesse’s story is deeply moving to me, because, as a missionary-kid myself, I understand him in a deep way, even as I disagree with him and regret his decisions.

Missionary kids, turned adults, are a different breed, marked for life with the field of tensions intrinsic to missions: on the one hand, the embrace of the world, and on the other hand, and quite often as a result of that worldliness, an impossibility of living a quietly rooted life. Many MKs marry people with deep roots; many become cosmopolitans. Very few grow up to be “normal”.

More importantly, very few Missionary Kids grow up to be nominal Christians. They’re either deeply committed (as am I; as is Urbana director Jim Tebbe), or they’re actively, even urgently NOT-Christian. Hesse certainly belongs to that camp.

Why? There are probably dozens of answers, but parenting is a big one: some MKs resent their parents’ ministry. They’ve been robbed of normalcy. Missionary kids may be children of the world, but natives of nowhere. And some people hate the feeling, and can never build a whole soul.

For myself, I remember taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator once, during an InterVarsity training camp. I tested kind of funny, and the instructor suggested, rather indelicately, that I was either double-masking, or worse—or: was I by any chance a missionary kid? That explained everything.

I love what God allowed me to experience. I feel like a happy, whole, and continually growing believer. But I know many others who’ve walked away from faith altogether. Nominal faith, crowded with busyness, is simply not an option for them. They’ve seen Christianity in its heart—meaning its frontiers, where our intentionally global and cross-cultural faith is most acute—and they either love or hate what they’ve seen.