Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  I thought about my recent clandestine studies as I peered out the foggy window: Scripture had been used to justify acts of imperial conquest, torture, and coercion throughout history. During the Holy Inquisition, Christians used Matthew, Thessalonians, John, and Acts to hold the Jewish nation responsible for the crucifixion of Christ. They persecuted and killed Jews, accusing them of kidnapping children for blood rituals, poisoning water, and stealing consecrated communion bread to desecrate the body of Christ. They also excluded Jews from public office, denied them citizenship, and forbade them to own property. During the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, the church used Isaiah, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Exodus to justify the imprisonment, torture, and murder of an estimated forty thousand women as witches. Taking verses from the Bible, Catholic priests created The Witches’ Hammer, an official document that came into wide use in the late 1500s, giving specifications for identifying a witch and torturing her to extract a confession, and procedures for her sentencing and execution.

  During the Reformation, when Anabaptists cited the Book of Acts to justify their separation over the issue of adult baptism, Protestant reformers Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli countered with Old Testament law and demanded that the Anabaptists be drowned or beheaded for their heresy. The books of Isaiah and Matthew were used to justify the Thirty Years’ War, along with other aggressive Christian onslaughts. Religious leaders used the Bible to teach slaves not to challenge their masters and to willingly accept punishment.

  The Bible had also been used to defend either side of countless moral battles. Matthew was cited to condemn capital punishment, while passages from Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus were said to support it. (In reality, I found that an unbiased reading of the Bible requires capital punishment for those who work on the Sabbath, commit adultery, disrespect their parents, eat or drink to excess, or masturbate.) To some Christians Proverbs and Isaiah forbid the drinking of wine; for others, Isaiah, Matthew, and John justify it. To forbid work on Sundays, they’ve used Exodus (ignoring the fact that the Sabbath is actually Saturday); to condone work on Sundays, Matthew and Mark. To oppose war they have used Luke and Isaiah; to justify war, Matthew. Many claim that Exodus, Ecclesiastes, and Leviticus condemn homosexual relations, while others say the Book of Samuel suggests that David’s love for Jonathan could well have been sexual. The Catholic Church has used Corinthians and Matthew to enforce the celibacy of priests; those opposed to an unmarried clergy have cited Corinthians, Timothy, and Titus.

  And if the Bible is authoritative concerning the attributes of its own God, He himself is a being of rather dubious character. In the Old Testament, He was jealous, played favorites, and punished children for their fathers’ sins. He changed his mind, created evil, and had a temper. He violated his own laws against killing and tempting people, sanctioned slavery, deceived people, and told them to lie. He ordered men to become drunk, steal, beat slaves to death, and take prostitutes. He demanded virgins as a part of war plunder, required a woman to marry her rapist, and ordered the killing of innocent women and children. He ordered the slaughter of entire cities and fifty thousand people merely for looking into the Ark of the Covenant.

  Biblical criticism also reveals that errors are scattered throughout the manuscript. Using the Bible to force hats on women, or to enforce any other moral dictate, seemed as ludicrous as using it to predict the Second Coming of Christ. I laughed inwardly at the thought of Hal Lindsey’s end-time scenario and the apocalyptic vision that had once scared the bejesus out of me. I hadn’t heard much about Lindsey lately, the poor man having fallen out of favor with Christians once 1981 came and went with no Jesus in the clouds. And then there were all those other embarrassing missed predictions: the European Common Market had not turned out to be the ten-member Revived Roman Empire spoken of in Daniel (by that year, 1987, the ECU had twelve members); the Jews had not rebuilt their temple in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah; the Soviet Union had not turned out to be the great enemy from the north and was no longer a threat to world peace; and the nations of Africa had not united with Russia to invade Israel. But most shocking of all for Christian prophecy buffs was that the Israelites had occupied the land for over a generation, and Jesus had missed his Rapture rendezvous.

  Suddenly I saw myself at seventeen, sitting in our old farmhouse kitchen while that wild rainsquall beat against the windows, sending rivers of water down the glass much as it was now doing on the car windows. At that time long ago, imagining the fabulous Beast of Revelation rising out of the sea, his seven heads bobbing and slavering toward the shore, I was young and naive and full of faith. When you’re a child, everything is simple, I thought—you know it all. You leap into the boat and begin rowing without hesitation, without shame, without reflection. Then one day you lift the oars from the water and let your arms rest, take a moment to look around. Suddenly you begin to hear it, miles away and still out of sight: the faint roar of the current as it swirls and crashes over the sharp rocks downstream. You sit up and taste the mist in your mouth and feel the chill of disaster in the distance, the long falls plunging and crushing everything into the rocks below. Only then do you realize that you must row—this time for your life.

  Tears filled my eyes, and I turned my head toward the Cascade Mountains, obscured in fog. I cried, not over my loss of faith, but because I didn’t have the guts to pick up the oars and save myself from the catastrophe ahead, to leave the church or my marriage. Although I no longer believed in the prescripts of the Bible demanding that I stay, I felt I couldn’t make it on my own. I feared that all of my family and friends would react as Susan had when she said, “I hate to say it, but technically girlie shows don’t qualify as adultery.” Her additional argument chilled me as well: “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.”

  Lightning smacked in so close that it sounded as if our own bones were being snapped, yet David stared, unnoticing, glassy-eyed, through the sheets of rain, lost in his own fantasy. He had vanished again, temporarily escaping these fleshly bonds, like a man gazing out from the railing of a cruise ship toward an island that he dreams he is on. Who knows—or cares—what David’s thoughts are? I told myself. Over the months a great, dark chasm had formed between us. I had given up. I didn’t care to bridge it. I wondered when I had fallen out of love with him. Had it been over the years of emotional distance he so expertly maintained between us? Was it because of the control he insisted upon? Was it my own selfishness? Had I ever really known him or loved him, or had we both been too young, too naive, and too blinded by religion? At that moment I had to acknowledge that our marriage had been in trouble long before his girlie show revelation.

  We pulled into the driveway at home cold as two sarcophagi. There, next to a bright blue sedan, stood Dr. Martin, the church’s district superintendent for the entire northwest region. The sight of Dr. Martin stunned David. He jumped out of the car, hand extended, and walked briskly toward the man.

  “Welcome to rainy Seattle,” he crooned. “What a delight to see you!”

  I stepped into the mist and breathed the cool into my lungs for a brief moment while I listened to the trickle of water run down the drainpipes and watched its wet spill over, leaf by leaf, onto the emerald lawn. I loved the damp of the Northwest and couldn’t wait to see the kids. I was glad Dr. Martin was here; he was always full of secret stories about the latest sacred scandal in the district.

  Dr. Martin, a large fellow with winter-white hair, always dressed in immaculate three-piece pin-striped suits and expensive woolen overcoats, all custom made and costing a bundle, I was sure. He had an old-fashioned face with meditative, dark brown eyes, widely set apart and vaguely sad. He stood as if planted in the driveway, looking a bit confused. I knew that he had a tough job to do, which was to keep the churches in the Northwest in order, patching up organizational disputes and overseeing discipline. The superintendent was
a big fan of David’s, claiming he was one of the district’s most promising, up-and-coming ministers. It wasn’t unusual to have him drop by whenever he was in town. Although he was decades older than my husband, he always came to David to share confidences and get advice. He trusted him completely.

  “Come on in, Dr. Martin,” I said, “and please stay with us for dinner.”

  “Heavens, no, I didn’t even call and give you warning first.”

  “Oh, we wouldn’t hear of anything different,” David said.

  “Well, then, all right, that would be very nice,” Dr. Martin said, relinquishing.

  While Dr. Martin and David sat down across from each other in the living room, I scurried around the kitchen, making coffee and grabbing red peppers, celery, and green onions from the fridge. Throwing them into the sink, I pulled the knife from the drawer as I heard Dr. Martin’s weary voice drifting in.

  “I’m so discouraged. Many of the district’s parishes are in a mess: churches embroiled in petty ecclesiastical power battles, wayward ministers…” Then, lowering his tone to a whisper, he said, “I swear, David, some of these pastors make Jimmy Bakker look like Desmond Tutu.” I scooped the vegetables from the sink and laid them on the counter, watching them drip onto the Formica like the cold sweat that suddenly streamed down my back. Oh, my God, I thought, maybe he knows about David. But how? I held my breath and chopped until the peppers, celery, and onions became tiny specks of confetti, then disappeared into pulp. “Fallen ministers are the worst to deal with. You know Tim Dean in Clearview, don’t you, David? Well, we just found out he’s run off with a teenage girl from the high school.”

  “Oh, no.” David sounded horrified.

  “I’m going to recommend that he take a leave of absence and, of course, seek counseling.”

  “My goodness, you’ve had a rough year.” David shook his head.

  The previous spring, one of the district’s pastors, a father of four, had hopped an Amtrak train with a sixteen-year-old from his youth group. A week later he finally returned, broke and apologetic, with the girl at his side. But almost as amazing to me as the event itself was the district’s dedication to “restoring these men to Christ” rather than reporting them to the police. In every case I’d witnessed, the church dealt with the scandal internally. Although the guilty preachers were forced to step down, I couldn’t understand why they weren’t doing time in a state penitentiary.

  I took two cups of coffee in to the men and set one next to Dr. Martin and the other next to David, who was leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, cool as a cucumber. I was sweating from head to toe, while David basked in the sunlight of self-assurance, as though it were unimaginable that anyone might suspect impropriety out of him. And apparently it was. I darted a glance at Dr. Martin, who was gazing back at David, completely taken with his charismatic protégé. Dr. Martin could never believe David capable of misconduct, even if he had a file folder full of indictments in front of him.

  As for the dinner itself, it went so smoothly and without incident, it might just as well not have happened. No one made a questionable statement or spoke out of turn; no one drank any liquor or challenged any of the fundamentals of the faith. The pureed seafood chowder was a nice complement to the dull conversation about the necessity of prayer in schools. As Dr. Martin left that evening, he said, “I wish all of our pastoral couples were as happy and dedicated as you two.”

  David had his arm around me, smiling graciously as he closed the door. I turned and went into the kitchen to wash the dishes. David followed me and stood behind me in silence while I squirted Ivory liquid onto a big green sponge and then picked up the five-gallon stew pot and began scrubbing it, running it under water as hot as I could stand, then scrubbing it again. He turned and breezed past me, and I could hear the bedroom door shut. Standing at the sink in a cloud of steam, I felt my eyes go molten as the sweat continued to stream down my back. I placed the sponge and the soapy pot on the side of the sink. Pressing my hands over my face, tears began seeping through my fingers, warm and oily. I tried to turn my thoughts toward planting the new perennials I’d just picked up at Swanson’s Nursery, or to the girls’ upcoming dance recital, and not to the spiral of destruction overtaking our lives.

  Since confessing his pornography addiction to me, David’s drinking had increased, as though his dark side, now exposed to the light, could grow unimpeded. During the first years of our marriage, he had refused even a sip of liquor, saying that because he had a serious drinking problem as a teenager, he didn’t want to tempt fate. I abstained as well, oblivious to what I was missing, since we had never had alcohol on the farm. Then after we arrived at Calvary Baptist, David gradually started to order wine with meals whenever we’d drive to Seattle for dinner, away from the watchful eye of the congregation. I followed suit and soon grew enthusiastic about the taste of a good merlot—the tangy leather feel of it on the roof of my mouth, the biting edge of it on my tongue, the warmth of it moving down my throat, filling the emptiness, the hot surge that waved along my limbs in a ten minute countdown. By our third year in the ministry, our wine consumption had drastically increased (I had also secretly added Susan’s top-shelf gin to the list); David and I were downing a bottle of wine for dinner and then several more glasses afterward while we danced at the club Parker’s in Seattle every Saturday night. Then to my surprise David came home one evening and said, “I asked Robert if he and Susan wanted to join us this weekend.”

  “I didn’t think graduates of Bob Jones University danced,” I said.

  “Hey, if the pastor can dance, so can the flock,” David said, laughing.

  Several months before, Robert had been elected to the board of elders. David liked Robert from the first day he saw him, just as I knew I would get along so well with Susan. They had started to have coffee together, and David had encouraged Robert to run for a position on the board of elders. “Thank God Robert got on!” David said after the vote. “What a lively addition to that group of old dolts.”

  Robert and Susan didn’t seem to be one bit squeamish about the idea of drinking and dancing. Susan called me the next day to say, “Wow, I had such a wonderful time. Let’s go again next weekend!” Once they were adequately incorporated, David added one more couple from the church roster, Hal and Tina, to round off the group. I had the feeling that our companions were being handpicked for some odd reason, but my fears quieted as the months went on, because our partying seemed quite innocuous. Then slowly they became nights of increased revelry, too much drinking and worse.

  The six of us piled into Robert and Susan’s minivan one night under a moonless sky without clouds and drove up suburban streets, the lawns black and the trees dark sticks of shadow; the headlights of oncoming vehicles looked like the lamps miners wore as they traveled deep into the belly of the earth. We sped onto the freeway and crossed the University Bridge. The water below us, dead now in the quiet, was curiously beautiful, moving beneath us like melted candle wax. Over the bridge’s crest, the skyscraper lights of Seattle illuminated the darkness, looking particularly radiant, maybe because Susan and I, having gotten a jump on the evening, had already consumed a strong gin and tonic. We pulled off the freeway into Seattle and up to the fluorescent marquee of the Fenix Underground.

  The nightclub was dark and noisy and crowded. Color flooded Susan’s high cheekbones, and she looked stunning in her tight black Lycra dress. We girls ordered a martini for ourselves, and the men ordered shots of tequila, while a Glenn Frey look-alike sang “The Heat Is On.” One gin … two gins … three gins later, my mind was jumbled. I caught my reflection in the polished table and stared stonily down at it, dazed, glassy-eyed. I looked confused, frantic, letting go. I turned away. “Let’s get out of here and do a little hottubbing,” David suddenly said.

  We stumbled to the van and drove out of the city to Robert and Susan’s backyard and onto their cedar deck, which smelled fresh and warm from the summer sun. The starry night stretc
hed so close over us, it looked like a holey tent roof. Robert pulled the cover off of the sunken hot tub while pinprick clouds of gnats disturbed the air. Giggling, we windmilled our hands in front of our faces to keep them away.

  “How about a nightcap?” Susan asked, with a snicker.

  Then David raised his hand as though he had something very substantial to say, the same way he did when he came to the climax of a particularly moving sermon. “You know, nakedness is nothing to be ashamed of,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt and unzipping his pants. “God made our bodies, and we shouldn’t be afraid to take our clothes off in front of one another.” With that, everyone smiled blankly and followed their beloved pastor in his spiritual call to nudity. I listened to zippers whizzing down and shoes hitting the deck as I took off my silk dress and panties, thinking, Amazing … In a culture where short skirts are forbidden, David’s got us all stripping to the flesh.

  Susan brought us another drink while we sank, loose limbed, into the hot water. Robert turned the conversation political, as he often did. “Can you believe that slimeball Gary Hart? Just like a Democrat to be screwing some young intern.”

  “Are we sure that they actually had sex?” Hal asked.

  “Are you kidding, man? Why else would he take her on a boat named Monkey Business?”

  “Oh, come on, Robert, maybe they were just out for a little pleasure cruise,” Susan added. “Besides, she’s a model, not an intern.”