Fleeing Fundamentalism Page 13

  “If David has been a victim of this addiction for years, his only hope is in counseling. I’ve seen it happen before: when ministers aren’t held accountable to anyone, they can start to believe they’re above the rules,” he said.

  “I’ll try my best,” I promised.

  Out in the backyard David was chasing the kids across the lawn. He was a good dad, spending hours reading to them and staging home video productions, writing elaborate screenplays with witty dialogue, which the kids and their friends loved to act out for the camera. He took the kids camping and hiking and talked to each of them with respect and affection. The kids adored—and needed—him as they were growing toward adolescence.

  Carise’s infant seriousness had evolved into the amenable nature of a caretaker. She was graceful, patient, and serene, even when her brother teased her mercilessly. She was the family peacemaker, breaking up scuffles between Micael and Jason as they wrestled around the living room, or throwing her arms around them in a large crowd, shielding them like a little umbrella. Micael’s free spirit was turning her into an impish explorer, attacking everything she did with ardent passion. By age six she’d decided that Claude Monet was the greatest painter who ever lived and that the musical of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables was a masterpiece. She talked casually, yet with keen insight, about subjects far beyond her years, and I knew that someday she would be a world adventurer. Jason had a jack-o’-lantern smile and a thatch of black hair tamed only by Brylcreem. He was the family clown, employing whatever means possible to get his sisters’ attention, tumbling over himself to get a laugh from them, hiding in their closets to jump out and tickle them into a frenzy.

  With the swing set project finished, the kids ran into the living room to play a video game. David slipped casually through the patio door. We were alone.

  “I’m making an appointment to see a counselor,” I said, knowing that he would rather hang himself from a rafter than tell a psychologist about his addiction.

  “Are you out of your mind?” he said, shocked backward. “What for? Okay, okay—I swear I will never visit any of those places again,” he added, as if it hadn’t occurred to him to promise such a thing before. “Besides, what are you thinking? We can’t afford it!” His face was red, his voice irritated.

  “I talked to a counselor from Focus on the Family, and he said that unless you get therapy, you won’t recover.”

  “Good God, what the hell did you do that for? Are you crazy? Don’t you get what will happen if word leaks out that I am in counseling? It’ll ruin my ministry. Do you want that? Yeah, you must—great way to punish me, honey.”

  “I’m making an appointment, and I’m going to go even if you don’t,” I said.

  The next week David accompanied me to the session but sat mutely, staring at the therapist as if he were looking at the appalling monster in the movie Alien ripping its way out of John Hurt’s guts. After an hour of stilted, one-sided conversation, we left the counselor’s office and got back into the car. “This entire procedure was a waste of money,” David said. “Now that I’ve promised to give up my addiction, our marriage is fine, and you need to get over your anger. Don’t you have any ability to forgive?”

  “Yes, I do, but I think we need to talk to this guy some more,” I said.

  “Who is the head of this household?” David yelled as he swerved toward home. “Who makes all the money in this family?”

  “I don’t care who makes all the money.”

  “You’d better start to care! You don’t have any other options!” he shouted, wheeling the car into the driveway.

  “I’m making another appointment,” I said as he walked through the door in front of me.

  “Apparently you didn’t hear me,” he said, turning in the hallway. “I’m not wasting any more of my money on that moron. Do you understand?” Then, just to add emphasis, David reached up and pulled a family portrait off the wall, and it smashed to the floor, sending splintered glass across the room.

  Seven

  The Inferno

  I DIDN’T TELL ANYONE about David’s addiction for months, I suppose out of shock or humiliation, as if the shame of it had numbed my tongue. In some ways, an out-and-out affair would have been easier for me to reconcile—that David had fallen in love with someone, had been coaxed away by another woman’s charms—but the thought of him staring owl eyed at naked dancers while I lay at home in a silk nightie was not by any means self-affirming. The story finally tumbled out one wintry December afternoon at Susan’s house, once my emotional paralysis was loosened by a few gin and tonics.

  “He what?” she shouted across the top of her glass.

  “Yes, strip joints since the first week of our marriage. And he refuses to go to counseling,” I added, telling her about my conversation with Dr. Jones and his assertion that without therapy David would have little hope of recovery.

  “Damn,” Susan whispered, shaking her head.

  “So let’s say that Dr. Jones is right and David can’t just will this thing away. What are my options? I can’t imagine staying married to him.”

  “Carlene, we are voyagers on this mad ship together. We can’t leave these guys; we don’t have the money or the biblical grounds. I hate to say it, but technically girlie shows don’t qualify as adultery. Matthew eighteen says that the only way either one of us can legitimately get out is if the bastard has an affair. Besides, who in their right mind wants to be a single mother in this society anyway? Raising kids alone—broke, in poverty—it sounds unspeakably bleak to me.”

  “I’m beginning to think that’s just why we should leave—for our kids. The other day I stepped into youth group, and Don was giving the class a full-fledged lesson on condemnation. Do we really want our children to become social malcontents huddling inside our Christian ghetto, heaving stones at every humanist, evolutionist, or homosexual who passes by?”

  “So how are we going to teach them morals?” Susan said, pouring us both another drink.

  “I don’t know; I just want to raise them with some compassion. So many Christian teenagers seem pretty weird to me. But who can blame them? From infancy they’ve been taught that they’re superior to non-Christians. While Jesus is going to let cheerleaders and football players slip into hell, God will save their pious butts because they don’t dance. Who wouldn’t be a little weird?”

  Susan looked up into the low, gray overcast, as if for an answer. “But how are we going to keep them on the straight and narrow unless we have the church? Secular society teaches kids that anything goes—try it all; nothing is off limits.”

  “Maybe that would be better,” I said, realizing that I was not being entirely facetious. “At least they wouldn’t be afraid of living. Most Christians seem intimidated by the world, clustering together like a flock of quail. And do we want our sons learning to treat women with such disrespect?”

  “You may have a point there.” A laugh escaped Susan’s lips; it was a bitter sound. “But I still think kids are better off being raised in a nuclear family, with a dad and a mom and a solid financial base.”

  Susan was right about one thing: I didn’t have the means to raise the kids alone. If I left David, he would immediately be forced out of the ministry. Fundamentalism didn’t allow divorced preachers in the pulpit, so there would be no money for child support, and I had no professional job skills. If I got work, which would probably be at minimum wage, I would have to put Micael and Jason into day care, eating up what little money I did make. And what reason would I give for divorcing David? No one would ever believe that their spiritual-giant minister could be addicted to pornography and strip joints. Not the man who preached the Word of God to them every Sunday, a genius at human nature who could communicate with a small child or a physicist with equal ease. Even if people did believe me, did I really want my children to hear the story from someone whispering it in the back foyer some Sunday? With three small children who adored their father and with no meaningful degree or work experien
ce to support them, I told myself I had no choice but to stay.

  I swallowed my panic as I drove home. I felt like the caged wolf that I’d seen as a child in a rundown zoo called the Trap. It was a place that stank of filth and anguish, a falling down roadside attraction where animals were kept in small pens so that tourists on their way to Glacier Park could see authentic “wildlife.” In one of the cages a female wolf ran back and forth along a barren wire coop, panting from exhaustion but never stopping, looking past the gawking people into the distant prairie. Even as a child I realized how silly it was to mistake this creature for the real wolf, who had died long ago; what remained of her, there in the cage, was simply the flesh and bones, pacing to keep itself alive.

  David must have played the same “no way out” scenario through in his mind too, because after he smashed the family picture to the floor, he behaved as though nothing had happened. I followed suit. We were acting like two patrons of a Vegas nightclub who had been coaxed onto stage, hypnotized, made to cluck like hens and howl like basset hounds, and then, after a snap of the fingers, sent back to their seats without a glimmer of remembrance. But even though we never spoke of it, in the months after David’s confession I felt a change come over me. I started to question the church and its culture, a culture that made it so acceptable for men to dominate their wives and at the same time made women so willing to endure the assault. The quandary stayed with me during the day, when I was washing dishes, taking prayer requests from tearful church members, or preparing the evening meal. It came and went, at times as a barely perceptible tinge, and at others it roared in a rush of rage. If love gives us a heightened consciousness through which to apprehend the world, anger gives us a precise, detached perception of its own. I couldn’t quit asking myself how the church had evolved into such an unhealthy organization. The dilemma made me decide to study the roots of Christianity, this time letting historical evidence, rather than religious fervor, lead the way. I covertly collected church history and anthropology books, philosophy, comparative religion, and sociology. I canceled women’s Bible study, telling my class I needed more time to homeschool the girls, when in truth I needed the stolen moments to read.

  Each morning the girls would sit down at the kitchen table with their A Beka Christian schoolbooks opened and their colored pencils, erasers, and rulers strewn out, and start their lessons as their brother danced around the table, jabbing at their ribs and stealing their pencils. I would sneak my stack of heresy out from the back closet and, between the girls’ arithmetic and phonics flash cards, read about the history of Christianity.

  “Mama, what do your schoolbooks teach?” Carise asked one day.

  “Oh, they’re just Bible study books,” I told her, not really lying.

  “Why do you hide them in the closet?” Micael probed.

  “Because there isn’t enough room on the shelf, honey,” I said, lying.

  As I studied, I felt as if I were following a light shining far in the distance, breaking its way through the fog. The more I read, the more I discovered that most of what I was taught in Bible college was refuted by the historical record. For instance, history showed that the New Testament was not an errorless document that had been dictated by God to the apostles shortly after Jesus’ death. Instead it was a group of letters that hadn’t even been compiled until the fourth century AD. The authentic New Testament writings had never existed as one cohesive book. The ones that finally composed the New Testament had been duplicated profusely, were filled with errors, and were countless copies—and hundreds of years—away from the originals.

  The history of the Bible’s conglomeration took my breath away. In 312, Emperor Constantine had a vision of the cross with the words in hoc signo victor eris (“In this sign you will be victor”) inscribed on it. The next day he defeated and killed his rival, Maxentius, and became the new Roman emperor. Grateful for his celestial dream, in which Jesus played a starring role, he demanded that all his subjects embrace the Christian religion.

  Then came the tricky part for Constantine: which Christian religion to establish as an official arm of the state? A plethora of sects and interpretations of Jesus’ life flourished with countless rival teachers claiming to preach Christ’s doctrines. There were hundreds of books purporting to be the exclusive testimonies of Jesus. Various groups across Asia Minor, from Rome in the West to Jerusalem in the East, professed to embody authentic Christianity and fought for dominance, so Constantine set out to establish what he believed to be the right interpretation. In AD 325, he convened the Council of Nicaea, which declared that the Orthodox view of Jesus’ life would represent official Christianity. Before long, Orthodox priests met to choose the various letters that would reflect their teachings and embody their vision of Jesus’ life. Three hundred years after Christ’s death, following heated debate, Constantine’s priests chose sixty-six books and proclaimed them Holy Scripture—the New Testament.

  Unbelievable, I thought. Fundamentalism must have an explanation for this. So I thumbed through conservative Christian apologist Josh McDowell’s book on the subject, and even he couldn’t help, saying only, “We don’t know exactly what criteria the early church used to choose the canonical books.” I stumbled over the sentence and read it again. My mind was a tornado. At that moment I felt as though I had been flying blind for years. (Many historians do have an interpretation of this event: that Constantine and his clergy selected only those writings that bolstered Orthodox doctrine.)

  I found out that by the end of the century, the Synods of Hippo and Carthage had codified Christianity and entrenched the Catholic priesthood, declaring divergent views heresy, punishable by torture and death. The church began to obliterate all manuscripts and teachings contrary to Catholicism, burning the texts of the gnostics (a divergent sect) and the contents of early libraries. In AD 391, under Emperor Theodosius I, Christians set the great library in Alexandria aflame, destroying its seven hundred thousand manuscripts, which comprised the bulk of the Western world’s ancient literary treasures. And in the sixth century, at the command of Pope Gregory the Great, the church torched the Palatine Apollo library in Rome, filled with ancient lore.

  I remember the day, sitting at the kitchen table while the girls wrote their lessons, when I closed my history book and stared out into the blank openness of the universe. If, instead of God’s direct revelation from heaven, the Bible was simply a compilation of religious writings that supported an emerging third-century religious sect, Fundamentalist Christianity was a house of cards. Its cornerstone belief that the Bible was without error and thus could be used as a textbook for modern ethics was patently absurd.

  It was at about that time that David and I attended a lecture at Western Baptist Seminary in Portland, Oregon, and the remaining withered petals of my Fundamentalist faith fell to the ground. We arrived late, rushing under a sky of puffy white clouds crossing the campus lawn, which smelled of newly cut grass. Entering the brick building, we hurried down the antiseptic hallway to 344, a long, high-windowed lecture hall. Twenty stern-faced men looked up: pastors from churches throughout the Northwest. I sat in a soft pool of sunlight near the windows and settled into the warmth. The speaker was a small, mild-looking man with a beaklike nose and a high forehead already shining with sweat. On the blackboard behind him were the words “God’s Instructions for 20th Century Head Covering.”

  Once David and I sat down, he began his talk: “As Christians, we say that God’s Word is authoritative and relevant for today, and yet many of our churches refuse to follow one very important teaching.” He paced in front of the room, his paisley tie swinging back and forth across his paunchy abdomen while he leveled an accusing stare at the audience. “In First Corinthians eleven, the apostle Paul tells us that the practice of veiling is a fixed—changeless—tradition.”

  Veiling, humm, I thought, sounds like a good Fundamentalist institution.

  “When Paul speaks of the tradition of head covering, he uses the Greek word parad
osis, which must be interpreted as a moral and religious obligation! The veiling of Christian women in the sanctuary is not an option…”

  As he went on, the ministers pursed their lips, narrowed their brows. The lecturer was talking about them. They were the guilty ones, who believed that the Word of God was applicable for today but didn’t require the women in their congregations to wear hats. In defense of the majority, one of the ministers called out, “I believe that this passage is cultural and cannot be applied to the modern church.”

  “You can’t throw it out that easy,” the lecturer called back. “Alongside it being a ‘lasting tradition,’ as Paul calls it, this passage argues that women were created to serve men from the beginning—this is an eternal position of subordination. Women are to wear hats in church to show respect for the position God appointed them from the beginning. That makes this a permanent dictate, not a cultural one.”

  This guy was definitely a misogynist but, I had to admit, a consistent misogynist. I felt he had hit on the Achilles’ heel of Christianity. When Fundamentalists came to a passage they liked, such as declaring the husband unquestioned ruler of his household, they deemed it authoritative, but when they came to a passage that they didn’t like—hats in church—they dismissed it as cultural, that is, only applicable to the first-century society in which it was written.

  “We pick and choose our way through Scripture, taking Paul’s teaching on salvation, then rejecting the veiling of women,” he continued. “But we must be consistent! If any of Paul’s teachings are relevant, then we must take them all. So, as a consequence, every woman entering a sanctuary should have a hat on—and, by the way, refrain from speaking as well.”

  David and I drove home in silence as I watched the sun drenched sky turn black. Before long the wipers were chattering rain off the windshield. I fantasized that I was back in the lecture hall, and instead of sitting stone still, this time I stood up, tall and outraged, and said, “The real scandal is not a woman’s bare head in church, but using a two-thousand-year-old religious text to dictate antiquated social mores to modern society.” I rested my temple on the window and felt the comforting chill press against me as I watched the dark clouds and felt the rain laden wind drive heavily against the car. And then a terribly heretical thought crossed my mind: I suspect that the Bible is not the Word of God but a wax nose—to be turned in any direction at will.