Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  Fleeing Fundamentalism

  A Minister’s Wife

  Examines Faith

  BY

  Carlene Cross

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  All the events in Fleeing Fundamentalism are true. Only the names have been changed.

  Contents

  Preface

  One

  The Farm

  Two

  Big Sky Bible College

  Three

  The Lord’s Work

  Four

  A Leap of Faith

  Five

  A New Life

  Six

  Calvary Baptist Church

  Seven

  The Inferno

  Eight

  A Way Out

  Nine

  Leaving the Faith

  Ten

  Going Alone

  Eleven

  The Goddess versus the Word of God

  Twelve

  The Dark Night of the Soul

  Thirteen

  Micael: One Who Is Like God

  Fourteen

  Going Home

  Fifteen

  The Gun

  Sixteen

  The Absence of Dogma

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Preface

  AT THE DAWN of the twenty-first century, religious Fundamentalism has emerged as one of the most powerful forces at work in America. Contesting modern secular values, it threatens scientific advances such as stem cell research, the separation of church and state, and the civil liberties of many. Yet for all its visibility, the Religious Right remains incomprehensible to a large number of people.

  For years, as a minister’s wife in the Fundamentalist movement, I embraced its ideology—one that measured all moral choice against the dictates of an error-free Bible and then set out to force that intrepretation upon America. Fleeing Fundamentalism is the story of my conversion as a child to this often airtight system, as well as my later escape, taking my own children with me. Alongside my story, I have tried to show how and why Fundamentalist groups came into existence, and what motivates their startling and troubling worldview.

  In telling my story, I hope to examine this modern phenomenon and challenge its notions, those both individually inhumane and universally grandiose. I hope to remind people of the warning Thomas Jefferson gave us: that when government teams up with religion, it creates a “formidable engine against the civil rights of man.”

  The Religious Right’s biblical creed translates into a frightening sacrifice of societal and personal freedom. Nationally, this loss of liberty is encroaching upon our political system. Privately, it is being played out between individuals and families in homes across America. Fleeing Fundamentalism is one such story.

  Fleeing Fundamentalism

  One

  The Farm

  I WAS SEVENTEEN on the day my destiny came to claim me. That evening in 1975, I sat in the kitchen of our old farmhouse and listened to the rainsquall move over the Rockies and into our valley. I felt the air grow heavy and oppressive, almost purple, as off to the east leaped platinum branches of lightning, momentarily suspended in silence until thunder shook the windowpanes with a great crash. A second lightning bolt flickered in the alfalfa field outside, illuminating the page open before me: “And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.”

  I looked up as torrents of water slammed against the windows like buckets of silver paint, and I imagined the awful Beast of Revelation rising out of the firmament, his seven heads leering toward the shore. Twisted bone like ram’s horn grew from each skull, and every mouth gave the roar of an enraged lion, his huge yellowed canines gleaming in the moonlight. His bellowing heads swept from side to side, sending a fearsome echo through the mountains, and pendant loops of slaver whipping the air. I pictured the Devil standing on the white beach calling out to the creature at sea, “I give you authority over all tribes, tongues, and nations. Everyone whose name is not written in the Book of Life will follow you.”

  “I will burn my mark into their foreheads,” the Beast screamed back. “No one will buy or sell without it.”

  “Six … six … six,” Satan cried, with a howling laugh.

  Closing Mom’s Bible, I shivered as goose bumps sprang up on my arms. How, I wondered, were Satan and his hideous Beast planning to sear 666 into people’s skins? Would they be like the calves we branded in the spring, bawling pitifully as the white smoke and the stench of burning animal flesh filled the sky? I could just see the heavenly angels of Revelation crying, “Woe to the inhabitants of the Earth,” as they opened the scrolls of judgment, releasing hail and fire down upon mankind, and locusts and scorpions to torment all who were left behind. I thought about the desperate future of the world and how Mom said that Jesus was coming back to rapture all the faithful Christians to heaven and leave all the unsaved behind to live through the Great Tribulation and wear the Beast’s brand. It was in that moment that I stepped from the pathway of my normal life and detoured into another world—that of serving God rather than indulging my own sinful flesh, which, until that instant, I had always been happy to do.

  IN THE YEARS before this epiphany, I grew up in a farmhouse at the far corner of a valley in a far corner of Montana, itself a far corner of the world. Who could tell why I was embarrassed to be from the country, so unlike the seemingly contented folks around me? While others confined their dreams to the Sears catalog, I squandered long winter evenings in front of the crackling fire, dreaming about the outside world, where fine folks shopped in grand department stores and slick-shoed salesmen with immaculate fingernails asked if they might be of some assistance. I had been cheated. I knew that everything in the city was exciting, even thrilling, because I saw the evidence every night on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, or in the glossy magazines I pored over in the back of the school library.

  I was mesmerized by the modern world, and the only place within less than two days’ drive that it could be found was in the pages of McCall’s, Life, Look, and Harper’s. Thankfully, these treasures were kept in the library’s alcove, where a person could find some privacy and dream uninterrupted about becoming as beautiful as movie star Faye Dunaway or skating heroine Peggy Fleming.

  These magazines never came to our house. We got only the pictureless, brown-papered Farmer’s Journal, which detailed some boring new farm bill Senator Mansfield had introduced to Congress. I knew that people in New York debated sophisticated notions like high fashion and romance; they never worried about the depressed future of livestock. Instead of boots caked with cow manure, they wore gleaming cordovan Florsheims and rode up the elevators of sparkling glass skyscrapers that looked out across endless miles of a tempestuous sea. Back here on the farm, people kept both feet—and their imaginations—firmly planted on the ground. But in the city people were masters of their own destinies.

  In the January 5, 1968, issue of Life, I read about a confident actress named Katharine Hepburn, who never let anyone tell her what to do. When Ms. Hepburn was acting in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? she had the guts to tell Stanley Kramer, the director, how to perform his job. It made him pretty mad, but he forgave her, and they won two Oscars for the movie that year. I wanted to be like Katharine Hepburn, self-assured and witty—not plain and coarse like the people who lived in my stifling world, people who didn’t enunciate their words or finish their sentences.

  Our kitchen table collected these characters like hogs collect lice. On winter afternoons when northers rolled down from Canada, chilling the valley so fast yo
u could watch the mercury fall, my father and his friends gathered in our kitchen to tell stories. They would come in from the blizzard, fumbling out of their leather jackets and stomping the snow from their boots, while the blaze in the river-rock fireplace spread its heat throughout the house. Mom moved quietly through the kitchen, plugging in the percolator and putting huckleberry pie in the oven. As the smell of warm berries and tamarack fir scented the room, the grown-ups hardly noticed my skinny frame, wedged into the corner. There I fantasized that I was a visiting anthropologist recently arrived to study the language and ways of a primitive tribe. I knew I could gather all I needed to understand them from the stories they were about to tell. Anecdotes forged in raw, abbreviated sentences—the bones of a tale without a morsel of flesh.

  My father loved these hours of yarn spinning. He would stretch back from the table, his head of curly black hair resting back on calloused hands the size of dinner plates. He had a handsome face, with boyish dimples and the dark eyes of his Slavic ancestry. But his brow, lined with furrows like a new-plowed wheat field—that marred his looks. Only during these unguarded moments of storytelling would the worries fade and his expression melt into a roguish grin, hinting that another man, less anxious and more playful, hid inside that powerful frame. I suspected that he kept himself reined in for fear that a lapse of his stern vigilance would allow the whole farm to slide into hell—or worse, foreclosure.

  Dad’s Bohemian parents immigrated to America in 1910, moving west to homestead in Montana. I figured his seriousness came mostly from a devastating experience he had as a small boy. When he told the story, I could tell it had changed his life. “Mom was in town for supplies, and Dad and me was just standin’ there lookin’ at the hay crop, when all of a sudden he collapsed. I started pushin’ his chest to get his heart goin’ again, but he was cold as a stone. It was thirty-six—the dark days of the depression … thought we was gonna starve that winter for sure.”

  I shifted in my little corner of the kitchen, telling myself that all such misfortune could be avoided if one lived in the city, where people didn’t have to wage war against the elements of nature and spoke with proper English. I made a pact with myself to talk like my mother and my teachers in town, who never confused was and were, or dropped the g in looking. With my speech straightened out, I might even be able to move to California and make it in the movies, and no one would ever know I came from the farm.

  But I had more flaws than country speech: number one was my limp hair. I knew that the whole world admired luxuriant hair, because women who made it in Hollywood always had plenty of it. My teeth were a mess too, and I had a bad premonition that given my reedy frame, the voluptuousness that my chosen future required might make success a real long shot.

  Thank God Mom was proactive in my self-improvement. Although she teased me about my wispy hair, I knew we were secret accomplices in my eventual escape from the farm. Every Tuesday morning we’d jump into the brown ’54 Fairlane and head off on an extravagant eighty-mile adventure into Missoula for dance lessons. As I grew older, the trips would expand to include appointments for braces and piano lessons. Gliding along over the county road, I would glance at my mother, with her bright blue eyes, shining hair, and thousand-kilowatt smile. It didn’t surprise me she understood the importance of such cultural refinements, because she came not from hardscrabble immigrants but from an impressive lineage of French sea captains, Revolutionary War heroes, and poets. And Mom, too, was accomplished far beyond your typical Montana farm-wife. After graduating from high school, she had left the valley and earned her RN at Holy Rosary School of Nursing in Missoula.

  I looked out the car window and up onto the hillside at the homesteads dotting the desolate prairie like ships wrecked on a vast shoal. Mom doesn’t belong here, either, I thought, in this place where cows drooled along the roadside, and dilapidated homesteads buckled and warped, their rafters finally tumbling into their cellars. This was no place for a woman who loved to read, to bask in a heavenly reprieve from raking second-cutting alfalfa and immerse herself in Jane Austen. Most farm women came back from the harvest to happily put on their aprons and sprinkle flour, sift icing sugar, and dream of a new stove so they could bake more blue-ribbon pies. But not Mom. Mom shucked off her boots and coveralls and started another book or a more complicated piano piece, or grabbed up my brother, Dan, my sister, Melanie, or me and read to us. Her proper English had a different rhythm to it than Dad’s or any of his friends’. I wondered why she had ever consented to live in such a harsh place with winter snowdrifts the size of school buses and dust that swirled through the valley all summer long. I dreamed about coming back to rescue Mom after I got my big break in Hollywood. Then she could live the life I thought she deserved. I soon learned that someone else had that same notion long before me.

  It was a hot August afternoon when Mrs. Goodman drove up our dirt road, followed by a plume of dust that filled my mouth and eyes as I jumped into her car. The Goodmans owned the farm at the far end of the valley, and their daughter, Sally, was my best friend since third grade. Mrs. Goodman baked a lot of pies, cakes, and buttery pastries, and she and Sally were heading into town to pick up next week’s supplies. She had called Mom to see if I wanted to come along for the ride. As the hot westerly wind blew over the prairie, sending rippling green waves across the wheat field, we stuck our heads out the window and let the scorching breeze hit our faces.

  Then all of a sudden, Mrs. Goodman said right out of the blue, “Ya know your mama nearly married another man.”

  “She did?”

  “Yep, when she was in nurses’ training, she fell madly in love with an Air Force pilot named George Johnson. Some say he looked like James Dean no less, ’cept in a officer’s uniform. Real handsome fella, he was—serious career man too, with all them stripes and stars on his sleeve. He gave her a big diamond ring and asked her to marry him and move away with him to Spokane—big city and all. Your mama was mad about him. And he was crazy as a loon for her too, him makin’ that four-hour drive all the way from Washington State and all, even in real bad weather.”

  I sat silently, unsure whether I wanted Mrs. Goodman to go on. I looked into the glaring sun and imagined my mother living on a tree shaded lane, surrounded by manicured lawns and free from the dust that swirled off the dirt road and settled like a thin sheet over her furniture. I pictured refined Air Force officers and their wives coming to dinner and saying things like “What did you think about that new Faulkner novel, Mary Lou?”

  Mrs. Goodman interrupted my thoughts by saying, “Then one night George come into town during a bad storm, took your mum out for a fancy dinner. When she came back that night, she was gigglin’ and carryin’ on, tellin’ all the girls about the new house George wanted to put a down payment on.”

  I imagined Mom bursting into the nurses’ dormitory that night, describing the lovely stucco bungalow in Spokane and the girls staying up to chatter about the upcoming wedding. Affected by the great joy in the room, even the nuns were probably swept up in the moment and got out some wine they had hidden away for special occasions.

  “Saddest thing,” Mrs. Goodman went on. “George headed back out in the blizzard to get himself home safe. Then right outside Missoula his car hit an icy patch on that old bridge—you know that death-trap overpass near Lolo?”

  “No.”

  “Threw him right over the cliff and killed him. Your mum took it real hard, just wouldn’t stop crying.”

  I sat motionless on the brown vinyl seat while the summer sun beat onto my pale stick legs, causing little rivulets of sweat and pasting me to the seat. Mrs. Goodman continued: “You know, yer dad, who folks say always loved yer mama, bless his soul, drove into Missoula that night and took her back to her family out here. She married him … ’bout a year later.”

  In my mind I heard the phone ringing as the young nurses and nuns poured more wine and clicked their glasses together, until one of the nuns picked up the phone and handed it to Mo
m. After listening a moment, she cried a terrible scream and collapsed onto the floor. All I could think about for days was how Mom had buried the life that might have been. She never gave so much as a wistful hint of it as she tugged on long underwear, jeans, rubber boots, plaid flannel wool jacket, and mismatched mittens to go out into twenty-below winter weather to wrestle breech calves from their mothers’ wombs. Dad never talked about such subjects either—he was too focused on keeping the ranch alive, and maybe on trying to prove to Mom that he could make a go of it on this unforgiving patch of land.

  Besides working with tireless devotion, Dad also pinched every penny he could. When we went into Missoula, we ate at the Oxford Café, where a dollar fifty could buy you ham hocks and lima beans or cow brains and eggs. On the way home Dad invariably stopped at a scrap-metal depot called Pacific Hide and Fur, where elk heads, deer hides, greasy machinery parts, and rusty beaver traps hung from the walls. In the dog days of summer the sluggish air in the old wooden building reeked of 90-weight oil and rancid animal flesh as my father rummaged through the scrap piles, filling a box to the brim with spare parts and then paying three cents a pound for them. He took the rusting steel home to mend or build farm equipment with, welding and pounding it into rakes and plows and harrow disks and teeth. One of the contraptions Dad made from the scrap metal he bought there was what we called the hoopie. Instead of acknowledging his ingenuity, I rolled my eyes at the rattletrap Frankenstein as it bounced across the field scooping up hay, and prayed that my friends from town wouldn’t drive by and see it.