Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  It was the reaction of my brother Dan that would somewhat surprise me. In the years since Bible college, Dan had gone from being a ruddy faced farm boy to Dr. Cross, with a PhD in theological studies. He was the senior pastor of a beautiful stained-glass mega-church seating a growing congregation of four thousand. Over the years, Dan and David had remained close friends, spending many long hours together discussing the problems and triumphs of church growth, which theology books they were reading, and the latest debate in Christianity Today. Dan had always considered David a mentor and a guide.

  As the story unfolded, his face, one I had known so well since childhood, looked stunned, agonized, and then determined. “Leave him, Carlene. Get out now,” he said. In that moment I knew that love could triumph over religion. It was one of many surprises ahead.

  Ten

  Going Alone

  A STRANGE ENERGY SURGED within me over the next few months. I ignored Susan’s warning and steeled myself for the melee that I knew was about to begin. Like a child emperor, David was used to getting his way without question, and I suspected he would use whatever means he could to regain his former power. And he did. When the kids went to visit him, he would tell them that he loved us all very much and was unbearably lonely in his cold apartment; maybe we could convince Mommy to let him move back. One evening when he dropped them off, he stood in the doorway and wept. “I want to be able to help my kids with their homework and tuck them into bed at night,” he begged. As their father cried, Carise and Micael looked on in horror, breaking down in tears, begging me to let him return. Jason sat on the couch staring at the ceiling and talking to himself, his seven-year-old’s brain not able to process the shock of watching his family fall apart before his eyes.

  I told David he had to leave, and I shut the door. Carise and Micael ran to the picture window and watched their father drive away, tears running down their cheeks as they pressed their heads against the glass. I worried about the way such trauma would affect the kids, but my decision seemed justified several months later when David showed up at the door again. This time he burst in, saying, “I’ll do whatever it takes to reconcile. And to prove my sincerity, I’ve decided to confess a grave sin. Several months ago I picked up a prostitute in Seattle.”

  “A prostitute?” I said, counting backward on a mental calendar to the last time we’d had sex.

  “Don’t worry; she just gave me a blow job,” he said, as though they’d spent the evening discussing the beatitudes. “See? If I’m willing to be honest about that, you know that I’ll be truthful about everything from now on, and we can start over, from scratch—erase the slate clean.”

  To this day I can’t understand why David thought that such a confession would save our marriage. Maybe he knew that his visit to First Avenue wouldn’t technically give me biblical grounds (as Susan argued) to end our marriage: penetration had not occurred.

  “I’m filing for divorce,” I told him.

  It was as if an invisible club had come out of the air and smacked David in the temple. He staggered back, caught himself on the kitchen counter, then steadied himself against it before plunging forward across the table at me in a rage. “You can’t divorce me. I’ll kill you first!” I grabbed a chair and held it up between us. This simple act of self-defense stopped him, and he stood motionless for a few seconds; then, releasing the air from his insides like a deflated balloon, he began to cry, propping himself up on the table. It seemed like an eternity before he turned and walked out of the house, leaving the door open behind him.

  A few days later I filed for divorce. When I assured David that I would not ask him to pay the legally mandated child support, he agreed without contest. Although I eagerly anticipated the exodus from my marriage, long past caring what the Bible or my Christian friends said about it, when I grabbed up the divorce decree, my heart sank. Even though I scrawled my signature across it like a jubilant ex-con signing her parole forms, I wept the entire rest of the day. The distance between the heart and the mind is often an unbridgeable chasm. I was hit by the stark reality that I had failed at my marriage and now faced the prospect of raising my kids in a broken home. A great sense of shame and deep sadness overtook me; I felt buried alive under the weight of a thousand lost dreams.

  After that David began directing his anger in even more unpredictable ways. One night, in a drunken stupor, he sneaked into Dan’s church through an unlocked window in the nursery and spray-painted the white sanctuary walls with sexually graphic drawings, alongside quotes from Christian theologian Tony Campolo and lyrics from Pink Floyd, scrawled out in ancient Hebrew and Greek. The police called in David, their major suspect in the crime, for questioning—there was a small suspect pool, considering how few people were fluent in both ancient Hebrew and Greek. He confessed to the vandalism, and the state sentenced him to several days in jail, community service, repayment to the church of six thousand dollars in damages, and required that he undergo a psychological evaluation.

  Dan contemplated contacting David to talk with him but decided against it. His church had decided to press charges against David, and it seemed foolish to try to reason with him. Besides, none of us were quite sure what David was capable of at this point. Over the next few months, he rarely communicated with the children and seemed to have lost interest in seeing them. I had no face-to-face interaction with him but had an eerie sense that he was only a heartbeat away, reckless, out of control, bent on hurting someone.

  My fear seemed justified when I received a phone call from a distinguished-sounding woman. She introduced herself as Dr. Blaine, the mental health counselor who had just evaluated my ex-husband. “I’ve been a criminal psychiatrist for twenty-five years,” she said, “and in all of that time I have never come across anyone as skilled at manipulation as your ex-husband. He arrived in my office, sat down, and took over.”

  I said, “Sounds like David.”

  “He started asking me questions, where I went to school, how long I had been a counselor—like he was the therapist and I was the patient. It was a real struggle to regain control of the interview.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “Finally I said, ‘Listen, David, you are the one being interviewed here. I’m not going to answer any more of your questions about my qualifications. Now it’s time for you to answer my questions.’”

  “Good move,” I said.

  There was a pause on the line, then Dr. Blaine asked, “How were you ever able to keep your bearings with this guy?”

  “I’m not sure. But it’s certainly nice to know that you figured him out—that he can’t manipulate everyone he comes in contact with. Thank you so much for calling me.”

  Even after his psychological evaluation and finishing his jail time, David continued to grow more reckless. One night—it must have been about 2:00 a.m.—I woke suddenly, thinking I had heard someone step onto the deck outside my bedroom. Then the distinct sound of footsteps shot me straight up into a sweaty, dry-mouthed terror. The only thing dividing me from the intruder was a glass patio door. I could see him silhouetted there, hovering like a restless, menacing ghost, as I huddled up against the wall in the darkness, hardly daring to breathe. Then a fist, covered in a black glove, bashed against the window. The window shook, and I screamed, expecting it to shatter into a thousand pieces. Jumping out of bed, I ran upstairs to call the police. The intruder sneaked back to the highway and fled, but not before slitting my tires.

  When the police arrived, I was still shaking all over. I told them I couldn’t imagine who it might be, except a burglar.

  “Do you have an angry boyfriend?”

  “No”

  “Ex-husband?”

  “I can’t believe he would be that crazy or mean,” I said, and then hesitated. I thought about the recent vandalism of Dan’s church. I told the police the story.

  “It’s him,” the male officer said.

  “I’m going to get a restraining order.”

  The detectives glance
d at each other, and the male officer adjusted his belt of dangling armaments while the woman officer looked me in the eyes. “A restraining order will only make him mad. If he wants in, he’ll bust the door down before we can get here.” Her lips tightened, pulling the skin on her cheekbones taut, hardening her already grim face. “This is strictly off the record, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think you should get a gun. It’s the only way a woman can have any real protection against a guy like this. Have you ever fired a gun before?”

  “Yes,” I said, remembering the long summer days when, as teenagers, Dan and I would drive out to the garbage dump to shoot tin cans.

  Afraid of further repercussion from David, I told the officers that I was not going to press charges but that I would take their advice and get a gun.

  I felt as though I were watching my life on television while someone else was turning the dial. The normal signals were becoming less distinct, finally vanishing altogether and leaving in their place something from The Outer Limits. Before then, I would never have considered bringing a firearm into my house, but the next day, after my neighbor helped me get new tires, I drove down Highway 99, pulling off at a place I had driven past countless times. I stepped out onto the bare, sun-baked clay and looked up at the sign: DUKE’S NEW AND USED GUN HEADQUARTERS. Walking through the metal door with steel bars crisscrossing the window, I smelled solvent and gun oil. Squinting in the dim light, I saw an old man in the back lift his eyes from his workbench and watch me for a few seconds before rising and limping to the counter, fixing me with a gaze as steely as the gunmetal that surrounded him.

  “Can I see your handguns?” I asked. Without a word, he led me to a long glass case. While I studied its contents, he studied me, as if it were an official part of his background check.

  “Ya know, if you can’t pull the trigger, you’re better off without one.”

  I looked up at him, confusion in my eyes.

  “The fellah might just use it on ya,” he added, the sourpuss demeanor melting from his face.

  “I can pull the trigger,” I said, thinking, Does this guy want to sell me a gun, or does he want to go out of business?

  I bought a Beretta 92 and a package of nine-millimeter bullets. I stored the gun under my mattress and the bullets in the closet. I started to sleep at night again.

  Before long, and out of the blue, David called the kids to tell them he had stopped drinking and was back in the ministry. He had landed a job at a Religious Science church in Seattle, where he was teaching Hebrew and Christian theology. Now that he had an income, I contemplated trying to force him to pay some child support but did not pursue the idea out of fear that he would become violent again. Instead of putting any energy into trying to get David to help out, I tried to focus my time on my studies. It wasn’t difficult. I was devouring my classes at the community college the way an eight-year-old eats ice cream. Just reading the general catalog made me come alive with expectation, not only of the classes but also of the colorful people I knew I would meet there.

  One quarter I stepped into an art history class and sat beside a beautiful blond who looked about my age, thirty-three. She wore a loose tan cardigan with an abstract-patterned silk scarf wrapped around her long neck, and a tight leather skirt inching up her slender thighs. Her generous mouth flashed a wide grin when I sat down next to her. If I could read her mind, she was saying, “I bet we’re the oldest people in this room.” Instead she cocked her head toward me and whispered, “Name’s Dani, what’s yours?”

  The professor started her lecture before I could answer. “I’ve just received my PhD in art history, and I intend to teach you everything I know this quarter,” she said with a grin. By the end of the hour I believed her. She flew through the history of ancient hieroglyphic art while Dani and I feverishly scribbled notes. As soon as class ended and we were headed out of the room, Dani fished a pack of Marlboros and a Zippo lighter out of the bottom pocket of her sweater and had a cigarette in her mouth before we hit the door. By the time we were in the sunlight, she was inhaling long and easy. She closed her Zippo with a metallic smack, switched the cigarette to her left hand, and held out her right for a shake. “Your name?” she asked.

  “Carlene. Great class, huh?”

  “The best, I lo-o-o-ove art history,” she said, exhaling smoke straight up toward the clouds, “but if we’re going to pass that baby, I suggest we break a little sweat, you and me—study together is what I’m saying.”

  “Sure, I’d love to.”

  The next morning, and every school morning thereafter, we met in the student union building to quiz each other about Italian baroque architecture or eighteenth-century neoclassic romanticism. I found out that Dani was very bright. While I had to rely on memory crutches for the hundreds of details that we needed to remember, Dani’s steel-trap mind never hesitated. When asked about Gustave Courbet’s realism, she’d deliver an elegant treatise describing the dark underpainting, heavy chiaroscuro, and the pivotal significance of his work in nineteenth-century France. I hated to admit it to myself, but I had sorely underestimated Dani’s intelligence when I first met her. Plenty in life was turning out to be the opposite of the way it seemed.

  Then one morning Dani said, “So where do you work?”

  “I wait tables at the Space Needle.”

  “Whew, impressive phallic symbol, huh?” She grinned.

  “Yes.” I smiled back, never having thought of it quite that way.

  “I’m in the same business,” she said.

  “Phallic symbols?” I kidded.

  She burst out laughing and said, “As a matter of fact, yes, phallic symbols and waiting tables. I work at Doug’s.”

  Doug’s was one of those establishments without windows, a long brick facade lined with flashing hot-pink enticements—“All Nude, All Night, Beautiful Busty Babes”—in twenty-four-hour neon.

  “You know,” she went on, “seeing as you have kids to support like me, I have a suggestion. Why don’t you start working with me? I swear you could make twice as much in half the time. Give you more time to study and be with your little ones.”

  “So how does exotic dancing work?” I said, a little stunned but not wanting to hurt Dani’s feelings.

  “It’s really not all that bad. You just have to remember a few things. You can dance as close to the clients as you want, but you can’t touch them.” Then she whispered, “Of course, that’s not always possible. And a five-hour shift is such a great workout that you don’t even have to have a gym membership to keep in shape. Sure, some of the guys are one bubble off level, but most are just regular Joes wanting a good time.”

  “It sounds great, but I really do love working at the Space Needle,” I said, taken a bit off guard by our conversation, though certainly not blaming Dani’s vocation for David’s sexual addiction problems.

  In David’s case—and I thought probably Jimmy Swaggart’s as well—the question was not one of sexual gratification as much as control. For sometime afterward, I thought about Dani and Fundamentalism and began toying with the idea that maybe conservative Christianity’s “biblical” view of women was actually a contributing factor to pornography, strip clubs, and the objectification of females. Could it be that the church’s literal interpretation of Genesis encouraged men to treat women with less respect and think of them only as a means of sexual fulfillment? Maybe there was some correlation. It seemed clear that our cherished Judeo-Christian heritage had done much to keep women in subjugation for nearly four thousand years. For some strange reason, my conversation with Dani made me decide to reexamine the Adam and Eve story and see what I might find.

  Eleven

  The Goddess versus the Word of God

  THAT SUMMER, WHEN MY class schedule lightened, I hauled archeology and ancient history books home by the armload, jumping into bed and fanning them out around me, reading late into the night until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. As I read, I found that Mr. Peterson was
right. Technological advances of the twentieth century had enabled archeologists to glean troves of vital information about the ancient world. Even as far back as 6000 BC, civilizations across the Mesopotamian Fertile Crescent had created complex social organizations involving craft specialization, a variety of agricultural crops, advanced pottery, and copper metallurgy. These ancient peoples constructed elaborate art centers that showcased paintings, plaster reliefs, and stone sculptures. They crafted seagoing vessels that expanded trade and communication throughout the area.

  Amid the rubble of these archeological digs, scholars also discovered a proliferation of carved female figurines. Interpreting the meaning of these feminine carvings had thrown the academic community into a heated debate. Some felt that because no writing existed to explain this prehistoric art, its meaning could not be determined. Others believed that these female carvings held great significance to ancient civilizations, proving that early societies possessed not only a sophisticated social structure but advanced religious rites as well, which centered on a female deity. The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler had been on the New York Times best-seller list for almost a year; in it, the author claimed that these figurines and the sites where they were found were tributes to a goddess.

  Dr. Eisler and other archeologists like Marija Gimbutas, Sir Arthur Evans, and James Mellaart argued that the prehistoric world was filled with symbols representing her divinity. The pillar monument, or asherah, was one, often depicted as a fig tree—a place where worshippers paid tribute to the goddess Astarte. Researchers had found these stone pillars in homes and religious sanctuaries in such far-flung places as Babylon, Egypt, Crete, and Greece. The snake also epitomized the goddess, her divine wisdom and spiritual rejuvenation embodied as the great and wise winding serpent. The caduceus, the twin snakes entwined around the physician’s medical staff, are a remnant of this symbol of wisdom.