Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  Even as a snobbish child, however, I had to admit that my father did possess talents. He could read my face like a Las Vegas cardsharp, which meant that he knew I considered him a common farmer and that being his daughter was like being dealt a bad hand at blackjack. I might have been spared a whipping or two if my rebellion had ended with merely thinking disrespectful thoughts rather than acting on them as well: sassing him or rolling my eyes when I felt he was being particularly farmerlike. Such acts of defiance always brought on sound spankings, which I considered a moral outrage and thus, during their administration, refused to shed a single tear, sparking a titanic clash of wills between my father and me. I told myself that no matter how long it took to wear him down, I would not weep.

  As he got the wooden paddle down from the top of the refrigerator, he would say, “You’re like a wild horse, Carlene—one that needs broke.”

  We’ll see, I thought. As the paddle came down on my bottom, whap … whap … whap … whap …, I bit my lip, or sometimes even laughed at him. To me it was like winning a chess tournament; as the paddle vibrated my father’s arthritic hand, I told myself, It’s simply a matter of the mind.

  After these conflicts I often ran out into the vast grassland to feel the pure, wide emptiness of its silence. The rolling hills enfolded me with warmth and the fragrance of sage as I stood and gazed at the distant granite peaks, purple on the horizon. In these silent moments I wondered about God. Did He live in the enormous sky and visit only when the clouds broke and His finger traced the meadow floor? Or did He really want more to do with the world and so hid Himself in unexpected things like the killdeer and the cottontail? I knew that a great deal of human energy, mine included, was spent trying to figure out how God acted and why some people got help from Him and others didn’t, like the ones who got thrown from cars and broke their necks or were killed in weird wheat-threshing accidents. Did it help if you joined the right church or said complicated prayers? Did these appeals put you at the head of His priority list? I thought a lot about how God kept track of things, but mostly I kept these wonderings secret.

  The only people who seemed unembarrassed to talk about such things were the teachers at Vacation Bible School who came to our valley each summer. Rocky Mountain Bible Mission, an organization that took on the task of bringing the gospel to rural areas in Montana, sponsored the Bible school. They started out by sending missionaries to the homes of farm families in the valley, encouraging them to let their children attend the weeklong event. One spring day in 1963, a pleasant, slow-talking, born-again cowboy arrived at our ranch. He pulled up in a brand-new red pickup, got out, and leaned himself against the door of his shiny rig. As I watched from the bedroom window, I knew immediately that this guy was in deep trouble. He wore a big, wide cowboy hat and drove a four-wheel-drive—both things that Dad called “overkill.” He introduced himself to my father as Sam Guptal, a minister from the Rocky Mountain Bible Mission, and said, “I wanted to invite your children to the Vacation Bible School we’re sponsoring.”

  Dad told him he had thirty seconds to get off our property. My father mistrusted preachers of any persuasion. When he was a young man, his mother, a devout Catholic, was diagnosed with cancer. The doctor told him, his brothers, and Grandma’s priest, but did not tell her. The brothers, grown and with ranches of their own, were fiercely protective of their mother and still carried the pain of the sudden loss of their father. As they were gathered in Grandma’s kitchen to decide what to do while she lay resting in the back room, Father Connelly appeared at the door.

  “I’m needin’ to speak with yer mum, boys.”

  “We will deal with this our own way,” my father answered.

  “Aye, t’would be a mortal sin keepin’ her from preparin’ her soul for final unction. ’Tis a mortal sin—an unpardonable one.”

  “Get out,” one of Dad’s brothers told Father Connelly.

  The priest returned to his car, pulled out of the driveway, and hid down the road. When he saw the brothers leave, he sneaked back to the house and told Grandma she was dying of cancer. My father saw the priest’s car from the ridge and came barreling back to the house, but it was too late. Livid, he ran Father Connelly off the property. Fifteen years later he did the same to the Rocky Mountain Bible preacher.

  Eventually Mom convinced Dad that Sam Guptal was different from Father Connelly (her great-grandfather had been a Protestant minister), and Dad let us go to Vacation Bible School. I knew the only reason he budged on the issue was because he loved Mom so much. But he did warn her, “I’ll tell ya, Mary Lou, you’re gonna have to keep an eye on them people. I don’t trust ’em, not one damned bit.” To my astonishment, he even let Sam Guptal talk to Mom about religion. The preacher began dropping by to discuss the mysteries of God and leave religious books for her to read. She loved the company and the conversation on philosophical subjects—more compelling than hog futures and wheat prices. That my father was leery of him made me even more curious about what the preacher had to say.

  After that first summer, each June the mission sent four college students to stay with families in the valley and teach Bible school. We always boarded two of them in our bunkhouse. They were from towns with fascinating names like Edmonton, Toronto, and Kamloops, also in the foreign country of Canada. I worried that these students would feel like purebred champion show dogs thrown into a pack of junkyard mutts, but they actually seemed charmed with farm life, wanting us to drive them out in the fields to see the cows, asking questions about the upcoming harvest season, and even volunteering to help my Dad change sprinkler pipes—offers that utterly bewildered me.

  During that week, to the delight of the valley’s farm kids, the Bible college students set up class in the nearby two-room schoolhouse. Lined up in ragamuffin rows, we sat at our wooden desks, listening raptly to exotic stories about the Holy Land and a loving man with flowing brown hair and piercing eyes named Jesus. I liked it most when the teachers pinned pictures of him on the bulletin board: the Savior holding a tiny lamb or, with his hands outstretched, feeding the five thousand. The Lord’s hair waved in long, soft curls, like no man I’d ever seen, and his face looked peaceful, calm, and sophisticated—a guy who wouldn’t holler or cuss about anything.

  We’d spend the week covered in paste, glue, and felt, constructing colorful art projects from Popsicle sticks, colored yarn, and paper plates. We’d learn serious Christian choruses that seemed far more cultured than the Hank Williams songs I heard on the radio. “Onward, Christian so-o-oldiers, Marching as to war, With the cross of Jee-sus Going on before…,” cried our little militia as we marched in formation. Each Bible verse we memorized earned us a gold star, placed in a column above our names, and I delighted in stacking them up like shining stepping-stones to heaven. We’d quiz each other until we could rattle off the words without a stutter. Standing proud, we’d recite, “I beseech ye therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.” Biblical words seemed superior to plain country talk, and I loved to wrap my tongue around the sonorous phrases. Our teachers told us that the object of memorization wasn’t just to win prizes, but to come to the point where you knew you were a sinner and needed Jesus in your heart. The concept seemed logical to me. I did have to admit that I had a hard time doing what I was told. So at age eight I asked the Lord to come into my heart and clean it up. In return I promised to serve him forever.

  But even my pledge to God didn’t diminish my romantic fantasies. At age thirteen, my braces came off and I began studying Seventeen magazine for tips on how to look like a New York model. Next to the bathroom sink lay a dog-eared copy of the magazine, and strewn across the counter was a rainbow arsenal of shadows, mascaras, and blushes that I needed to help me make the transformation. But when my father saw the effects of my efforts, he said, “Wash your face.” In keeping with my general attitude toward obedience to him, I acquiesced, then sneaked my makeup onto the school bus and put it on during the long ride int
o town. By the time I entered my freshmen year I had decided that if I was going to take LA by storm I’d better do a test run in my high school. I became a varsity cheerleader; then that year and each one following, I became a class officer, which in a student body of a hundred wasn’t exactly like being elected to Congress, but I imagined it was.

  My sophomore year I discovered Ernest Hemingway and, with his stories, a new world of carnal sensations. When our teacher, Mr. Davis, assigned For Whom the Bell Tolls, I instantly fell in love with Robert Jordan, the young American in the International Brigade who had gone to Spain to fight the fascists. When Hemingway described Jordan’s love for his compatriot Maria, odd things awakened inside my body, forcing my heart to speed up, and a strange catch to rise in my throat. Reading “He put his lips behind her ear and moved them up along her neck, feeling the smooth skin and the soft touch of her hair on them,” I felt a delicious sensation rustle in places hitherto undiscovered. I finished the book early and checked out every novel the library had by Ernest Hemingway. His muscular sentences and virile characters filled me with a new, curious energy. Then I turned my imagination from Hemingway’s characters to the man himself: robust and rosy cheeked, brimming with passion. I wished I could have been his expatriate lover in the 1920s, gone to Paris to live with him in the Latin Quarter overlooking the Seine. Hemingway and his sensual words only heightened my wanderlust dreams.

  Late at night, as a pale sickle moon rose over the mountains, I’d lie in bed, press my new transistor radio hard against my ear, and slowly turn the volume up. Like a prisoner of war, I’d strain to hear informed voices from the outside world, roaming the dial for distant echoes, strange whisperings and hissings, the rise and fall of the signal sounding lonely and searching—an adventure companion. In my imagination I thought of all the faraway places in the world. I pictured English royal guardsmen and Scottish pipers, the drums of Africa, boatmen riding the Nile, French stone cottages with thatched roofs, and bedouins in the Sahara, olive gardens in Greece, wine sippers chatting in a Paris café. There was a great big world out there, and I would see it all. Starting in Los Angeles, I would get a degree in art, and then travel to all the exotic places I’d dreamed about. I ordered a catalog from the California Art Institute, careful to abbreviate my return address from County Road 382 to CR 382, so the admissions counselors wouldn’t suspect my lack of worldliness. Only twenty-four months to go until graduation—even I could put up with chasing cows that long.

  Then in 1973 the Rocky Mountain Bible Mission started a year-round church in our local town of Hot Springs, preaching that the Bible represented the exact words of God. Mom began attending and even convinced Dad to join her when there were no pressing needs on the ranch. Although he came along, he seemed uncomfortable, keeping to the edge of the crowd, hands in his pockets, like an ill at ease schoolboy. Mom was glad to see the church open its doors, because over the years she had put away her books on literature and increased her study of the Bible. No one in the valley wanted to talk about Little Women or Under the Lilacs. On the other hand, Sam Guptal was stopping by more often, giving her books on end-time prophecy. Her favorite author was no longer Louisa May Alcott but Hal Lindsey.

  Lindsey taught 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, a time when the Antichrist, the Beast, would rise from the sea and become the leader of the European Common Market. The Beast would make everyone take his 666 mark and then would cause the armies of the world to enter into the great and awful battle of Armageddon, the most hideous war ever imagined, when blood would run so high that it flowed like a river, reaching the horses’ bridles. Many Christian scholars were writing that the Bible declared the timetable for this heart-stopping event had already begun. In Matthew 24, Jesus said that once the Jewish people came back into the Holy Land, as they did in 1948, he would return before a single generation had passed away. Oh, my God, I thought, counting forward, I only have a few years left.

  Suddenly instead of dreaming about faraway places, I conjured up visions of the Beast and the heavenly angels of Revelation crying, “Woe, to the inhabitants of the Earth,” as they opened the scrolls of judgment to torment all who were left behind. In my nightmares I saw celestial beings tearing the fifth seal, which opened the bottomless pit. The sea became blood, and the fifth angel prophesied, “Men will seek death and will not find it.” Some nights these visions would be so real I would sit bolt upright in bed, my cotton nightgown drenched with sweat. My attraction to Fundamentalism was not out of quiet reflection but cold fear.

  Dan, who was a year ahead of me in high school, also got caught up in the end-time fever and left for Big Sky Bible College in 1974. He started writing home about his prophecy classes and other fascinating courses like Christology, pneumatology, and hermeneutics. One night at the dinner table Mom quietly suggested that I follow him the next year. Although I didn’t want to be left out of all the exciting temptations in New York and California, I certainly wasn’t keen to miss the Rapture and be left to endure the Tribulation. With blood flowing in the streets, even Los Angeles lost its allure. Considering the upcoming evil, my worldly fantasies were both petty and futile—how attractive could a young woman be with 666 burned into her forehead?

  Two

  Big Sky Bible College

  ON A SCORCHING SEPTEMBER day in 1975, Dan and I drove Highway 200, a road that snaked through the Rocky Mountains and flattened out across the patchwork wheat and cornfields of eastern Montana, true as a surveyor’s line. As we barreled over the narrow two-lane black-top toward an empty horizon, Dan described the new world that I was about to enter. I leaned against the window and gazed at the abandoned homesteads, their slats and rafters twisted into violin curves littering the desolate grassland.

  I studied Dan’s wide-open face as he drove. He was every inch a farm boy, with his heart in the usual place: on his sleeve, in plain view. A year older than me, he had been generous and easy to get along with over the long eternity of our childhood, and we had developed a deep, comfortable friendship. Changing sprinkler pipes in the sticky gumbo clay or baling hay on hundred-degree afternoons, we had worked together, tugging, sweating, feeling the muscles in our arms and shoulders turn sore, the searing Montana sun on our backs. I respected Dan for bearing his farm responsibilities with dignity, working twelve-hour days in the field without complaint (unlike me), driving enormous tractors, hay rakes, and combines at the age of ten. But Dan admired my streak of independence, and I knew he wished he could say the kinds of things that had earned me whippings more than once. Such disrespectful talk would never have fought its way across his lips. Yet even though we came from opposite poles of temperament, we never disagreed on anything important. While bucking hundred-pound bales into huge rectangular pyramids, we discussed our devotion to Eric Clapton, the Doors, and now, speeding off to Bible College, we forged a new and exciting common bond—Fundamentalist religion.

  “The campus is an old army base,” Dan told me, “sold to the school when the military moved out in the early seventies. President Longston has a great vision from God that the college will grow from 250 to over a thousand by the end of the decade—won’t that be cool?”

  He went on to say that the administration was trying to get accreditation status for the school, but it was difficult because national education requirements mandated that they have more PhDs on the faculty (they had only one) and build a much better library (which then housed only twenty thousand books). Dan added that I should take Mr. Harmon’s Old Testament survey class but avoid Mr. Johnson’s Christian Education. As far as the dress code went, women had to wear skirts unless the temperature dropped below zero, but I shouldn’t worry about that, because once winter hit I could wear pants most days.

  “Your roommate, Jean, is really smart,” he said. “She’s the only woman in Greek class and the best exegete in the room on top of that. She’s a straight-A student in
every class and is very dedicated to the Lord.”

  A mixture of anticipation and anxiety made my stomach churn. I knew that Dan had flourished at Big Sky Bible College, as he had in high school, where he was an honor student and athlete—a typical firstborn: eager, serious, scholarly, an overachiever on all counts. It was nerve-racking to think that everyone might be expecting the same from me—especially my new roommate, Jean. Just thinking about how easy it would be for me to become a blight on the family name made me feel even more nauseated.

  It was midafternoon when we arrived, sweaty and sticky from our five-hundred-mile drive. The cowpoke community of Lewistown stretched before us, its main street lined with antique brick buildings bearing bleached and forgotten hand-painted ads: Marlboro, the girl with the Coca-Cola bottle cap on her head, LIVE BAIT—all faded and crumbling under the relentless Big Sky sun. Cowboys walked bowlegged down the dusty Wild West streets, in search of feed or tractor parts or Calamine lotion from the Rexall Drug.

  The college was tucked away in the mountains fifteen miles north of town, so we turned onto Highway 81 and drove the last leg in silence, winding deep into the Judith Range and pulling a horsetail of dust behind us like a burning fuse. The road narrowed, and dirt clods thudded on the floorboard beneath our feet. At a switchback in the mountain road, a group of concrete buildings emerged—identical box houses standing at the entrance of the compound like soldiers at attention. The Quonset huts that once held army officers now housed the college’s faculty and staff. Disguised in great semicircular steel mounds stood a gym, post office, and mess hall, and, farther up, olive-drab barracks melted into the tree line like a camouflaged tank battalion. It felt like arriving at boot camp on the backside of the moon.

  I peered out the window as the car slowed and we passed the guard shack. Dan waved to a clean-cut couple strolling down the sidewalk. “That’s Pete O’Neill and Jane Parks—very spiritual people. You’ll like them a lot.” I wanted to ask Dan what it took to be a “spiritual person,” but since I wouldn’t have confessed under torture that I didn’t already know, I simply said, “I can’t wait to meet them.” As I watched young people laughing and hugging one another, the feeling that I was in a strange and foreign place began to ease. It was obvious that a strong camaraderie united the students at Big Sky Bible College as they exchanged greetings of “Praise the Lord” and “God is faithful” like secret handshakes. Dan wheeled into a parking space next to a group of students unloading bags and boxes, pole lamps, and pictures. In the open plaza a crowd was gathered around a young woman who, Dan told me, had recently returned from a summer mission in Africa. “It was miraculous…,” she was saying with tears in her eyes.