I find myself suddenly wondering...there are surely children for whom church was the worst thing that ever happened to them, but there must also be children who thought of church as the best part of their lives.
I speculate this because, growing up as an unhappy abused child, I came to have an unhealthful attachment to the idea of school as a happy home. "real" home, the place(s) where I lived with my RL parents, was painful and miserable, a place where the only happiness was furtive. school wasn't perfect, but it had light and space and for a while there was fun and a feeling of belonging that I didn't get in my "real" home, so...school was my "home" for a while. and that was a very silly idea. even my relatively soft and cushy grade-school experiences, decades old now, had their painful and abusive moments. school ended up being a source of trauma as much as my parents' home, but the trauma tended to be more insidious, slower-acting, cumulative in its effects. and I was lucky; these days grade schools seem to be run far more openly like prison colonies, where the prisoners are drilled constantly on taking multiple-choice tests. I suspect it'd be a lot harder to love school these days...but I did love school for a time, and even after the love had curdled I kept going back to one school or another, hoping to find something there that I wasn't finding in other things.
and for that reason, I now wonder if there aren't kids who were blessed with relatively nice churchgoing experiences, who enjoyed the enforced politeness and calmness perhaps (a welcome break from an angry shouty household) and who maybe found a sense of purpose and even fun in routine church activities, and got to feeling like church was their real home. my own RL churchgoing experiences all happened in adulthood; before then I'd never been closer to a church than the front sidewalk, and my RL parents were totally irreligious. as a result it's tough for me to imagine the experience of someone growing up with church, and coming to see it as an echo of Heaven or of Hell, depending upon their experiences there.
~Chara