Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  These scholars pointed to a third symbol unique to these goddess worshippers: their celebration of sexual union. For millennia in Sumer, Babylon, and Canaan, priestesses had lived within temple complexes, residing there to have sexual intercourse with those coming to pay homage to the Great Mother—a sacred religious rite representing union with her life-giving energy. Early Bronze Age cultures deemed these rites a commemoration of love and procreation—sacraments that connected humanity to the fundamental rhythms of life. The notion that such ceremonies held negative ethical implications did not occur to such ancient people, who had not yet developed systems of sexual morality. Procreation represented part of the divine movement of eternal power, and when humans mingled with the energy of the Great Mother, they came away rejuvenated.

  I spent a lot of time on the beach of Lake Washington that summer, reading these fascinating academic and social interpretations of ancient history. The kids and I would throw our wide-striped towels in the back of my rusting green Plymouth, jam the cooler with sandwiches and soda, and head for the shore. Micael and Jason always raced to the beach, laughing and nudging each other as they ran, he diving straight into the brisk water, she wading in right behind him. I watched them splashing each other and realized that they were happier and more relaxed lately. They seemed to be stabilizing since the initial shock of the divorce. Carise stayed with me, calm and peaceful as ever as we chatted quietly and made our way down to the beach behind them. I would fix my eyes on the glistening, deep blue water, utterly calm and so unlike the churning Puget Sound only five miles to the west of us. Unfolding our towels at the water’s edge, we would sit, Carise finding the dog-eared page in her current Baby-Sitters Club book, and I digging my toes into the wet sand and watching the red nails vanish and reappear. Then I would put on my sunglasses, tinting the sky dark, and return to the ancient world of the goddess.

  I read that summer about the replacement of the goddess religion, which Eisler claimed had happened around 5000 BC when tribes of nomadic herdsmen swooped down from the north and west, invading the indigenous people who had lived in the Fertile Crescent for thousands of years. One of these conquering tribes was the ancient Hebrews. Along with their bronze weapons of destruction, these marauders also brought a new form of religion, introducing a young warrior or, in the Hebrew case, a supreme father god.

  Then a fascinating aspect of the story emerged, making me sit straight up on the beach, pull my sunglasses off, and stare out onto the water. Once victorious, Eisler claimed, the priests of the invaders began to rewrite the creation myths of the conquered peoples in order to solidify their own position as the new ruling authority. For instance, when the Assyrians overthrew Babylon and brought their god Ashur with them, Assyrian priests took old Babylonian tablets and recopied them, substituting the name of their own god for that of Marduk, the Babylonian god. The work wasn’t carefully executed, however, and in some places Marduk’s name remained.

  And if the conquerors didn’t out-and-out rename a deity, they forced it to share power with their god. Eisler and Gimbutas argue that the archeological record reveals that instead of replacing the goddess, the triumphant invaders incorporated her into their own stories. Gods and goddesses merged their power: the Greek storm god, Taru, and the sun goddess, Arinna; Zeus and Hera; the Canaanite Baal and Astarte. They wrote that this sort of “remything” was customary whenever a victorious nation wanted to consolidate its control—marry their god to your goddess. There was one notable exception during this historical period: the Hebrew deity Yahweh, who said, “You shall have no other gods before me.”

  I watched Micael and Jason’s horseplay in the water, pondering what I had just read, until the sun sank below the giant cedars and hemlocks behind me. I dropped my book onto the sand and lay back into the waning heat, pressing my fingertips into my forehead as the immense implications raced through my brain, darting and dancing like overheated molecules. I was still thinking about this ancient remything when I stepped up the porch stairs and into the house that evening, taking off my sandals and walking barefoot across the soft carpet and upstairs into the bathroom. I undressed, turned on the shower, and stepped in.

  So what if Genesis three is simply a remything event? I thought. In the Old Testament the serpent (a prophetic and oracular symbol of the goddess) cunningly advises Eve to disobey the male god Yahweh. Eve takes counsel from the snake and is tricked into believing that she will receive divine knowledge—precisely the purpose of the goddess rites in Babylon, Egypt, Crete, Canaan, and Greece. Eve takes the fruit from the tree—another representation of the goddess Astarte’s life-giving sustenance. Once the transgression occurs, Adam and Eve cover their nakedness with fig tree leaves, gaining an understanding of sexual pleasure and procreation—possibly a parallel with the celebration of the sexual act performed in the goddess temples. After the snake enlightens the couple, Yahweh curses both the snake and the couple. He goes on to afflict Eve with pain in childbearing and subjects her to the rule of man.

  I stepped out of the shower and went back downstairs in my bathrobe, leaving wet footprints on the carpeted steps. I made my way to the living room and sat on the couch, folding one leg under me and letting the other foot brush the floor. I thought maybe that was why Yahweh told the Hebrews to annihilate the people of the land: to eliminate the female threat found in the goddess worshippers. In so doing, Yahweh (or his priests) had been quite successful in establishing a patriarchal system that ruled without rivals.

  I knew that there was much academic controversy concerning this prehistoric time from which no written record remained. Who could be sure about the history of the goddess? Yet as I explored the social climate of the ancient world that summer, I began to realize one thing was very clear: in all the years that I had studied the Old Testament, I had never understood the plight of its women. Whereas in the goddess worshipping societies, archeologists claimed that females held equal power with men, in Hebrew society their value was based primarily on their ability to produce offspring. I reconsidered the life of women in ancient Jewish society and discovered a laundry list of exploitation: If she was not a virgin when she was married, she was stoned. If a man raped her, she was forced to marry him; her rapist’s only obligation was to give the girl’s father a proper wedding gift and not divorce her. If she was unfortunate enough to be engaged to another man during her rape, she was to be stoned along with her rapist because the crime was considered an affront to the man who owned her (her betrothed) and an offense against the girl’s father, robbing him of the money he would have received upon her marriage. Ancient Hebrew women, it seemed, had almost no rights.

  One summer evening, after hours of reading, I felt angry and exhausted, my thoughts beginning to bunch up in a corner of my mind. I needed some air, so I closed my book, threw on my overcoat, and began walking up the street while a fine mist covered my face. I pulled my jacket tighter around my chest as voices flooded my memory: poor Lydia, calling out from under her football helmet hairdo years ago at women’s Bible study, “Peter claims it’s God will that I dress the way he likes—even wear my hair the way he wants it.” And the expert preacher’s wife admonishing us at the Black Lake pastors’ retreat, “It is essential that you keep a professional distance from the other women of the congregation.” “Every woman who enters a sanctuary should have a hat on—and refrain from speaking as well,” shouted the paunchy professor from Western Baptist Seminary. They all tumbled through my mind, frame by frame, memories overlapping one another, propelling the past into the present. By the time I got back to the house, the sky had turned a vivid electric green, and rain pounded against the windows. I ran inside and pulled off my soggy overcoat. I needed to discuss what I had been studying with someone I respected, someone in the Christian movement who was both intelligent and thoughtful. My brother immediately came to mind.

  That holiday season I finally got my chance. The whole family was scheduled to meet at the ranch in Montana. The kids and I arrived la
te the evening before Thanksgiving, to a house warm and fragrant with smells imprinted on us long ago. Carise often said as we drove through eastern Washington, “I love it at Grandma’s; it smells so warm and safe there.” My mother stood curved over her cooking pot, giving a dash of this or that to the beef stew she always made for our arrival, as logs of pine and fir crackled in the stone fireplace. Boots lay piled in the corner as they had for as long as I could remember: cowboy boots with the toes curled up like croissants, rubber boots for winter, leather work boots for summer, black galoshes. I closed my eyes and breathed in the aroma of being home, feeling protected and seeing my children run to throw their arms around their grandparents. I hugged my brother and looked at his face, grown older since his years at Bible college. Gray hair now flecked his temples, thinning in the same pattern as the men on our mom’s side, but his expression still showed that farm boy virtue, strong and sincere. I knew he worried that I no longer attended church, but I took comfort in the knowledge that he didn’t know how far my faith had fallen.

  I waited a couple of days into the holiday, and then one afternoon when we were alone in the living room, I said, “Dan, did you know that the Old Testament demands that a woman be killed as punishment for being raped?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I found Mom’s Bible, opened it to Deuteronomy 22, and handed it to him. “Read this passage.”

  As he read the chapter, his face blotched and his expression dropped as he came to the last verse. I could see his eyes dart back to the beginning of the chapter and slowly reread the passage. After a moment of silence, he shook his head and said, “I’m not sure what’s going on here. I’d have to study these verses more.”

  “There are plenty of passages like this one in the Old Testament, Dan—passages that I’ve never really noticed before. I’ve been rereading it, and it’s getting harder for me to believe that its teachings can be applied to the modern world. I’m starting to suspect that it’s simply a document priests wrote to preserve their power. The New Testament seems just as bad. The apostle Paul was a sexist.”

  “That’s a misinterpretation of Paul,” Dan said, his brow creasing.

  “How about in the Letter to Timothy, where he says that if a woman comes into a church without a hat, her head should be shaved like a prostitute’s? Or that a woman can’t teach a man? And she shouldn’t even speak in church; if she has a question, she should wait until she gets home to ask her husband. Sounds pretty sexist to me.”

  “Paul is just illuminating God’s twofold truth,” Dan said, his voice still calm. “While on earth, wives must submit to the guidance of their husbands. But once they die and enter heaven, the chain of command is eliminated. God views women as morally equal with men, but there must be a leader in any organization, so He simply placed man in that position.”

  “The Bible never gives women the same moral footing as men,” I said. “In Corinthians, Paul says that women are to serve men because they weren’t even created in the image of God, but in the image of man. You know the rib thing—that doesn’t sound like equality to me.”

  Mom and several of the grandkids looked up from their pinochle game in the next room, so Dan and I lowered our voices. He said, “I’ll send you Gilbert Bilezikian’s book Beyond Sex Roles. It’s supposed to be a good new book from an open-minded evangelical on the roles of men and women in the church. Let’s both read it, and we’ll get together and discuss this some more.”

  Once I was home the next week, the book arrived in the mail. In it Bilezikian, a teacher at Wheaton College, attempts the same sleight of hand that I had come to expect from Christians on the subject. Bilezikian claims that although women aren’t made in the image of God, they possess a special position that mirrors the fullness of human splendor. “In the presence of God and the angels, she possesses the authority to reflect the glory of unmingled human personhood.”

  “Unmingled human personhood,” I thought. What a crock! It sounded like the line I gave my kids about raw carrots: “They’re just like orange Popsicles.” They fell for that story until they were about four. Then, in an even more blatant attempt to sanitize Paul, Bilezikian simply throws 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 out of the Bible—the passage where Paul teaches that women must remain silent in the church because of Eve’s fall into sin in Genesis. “This appeal to the Old Testament constitutes in itself sufficient proof that Paul is not the author of this statement,” he declares.

  When we met at the ranch again that Christmas, Dan and I went for a walk, our boots crackling down the road in the bone numbing chill. The whole valley was frozen stiff, granular ice coating the bare black limbs of the poplar trees, the strands of frosted barbed wire glimmering on the fence bordering the road.

  “So when are you going to move back here so you can enjoy this weather?” Dan joked.

  “Right after you do,” I said.

  We trudged down the road in silence for a while. “Hey, thanks for the Bilezikian book.”

  “Sure. What did you think?”

  “You know, my biggest objection was when Bilezikian eliminated First Corinthians from the Bible because he thinks it’s inconsistent with Paul’s other teachings. That kind of selective exegesis represents the inconsistency rampant in conservative religion. Fundamentalists insist that every word of the Bible is breathed by God and that it must be interpreted literally—until they come to a passage they don’t like. Then they concoct an explanation that contradicts the original meaning, ignore the verse, or simply throw it out.”

  “I think you are wrong,” Dan replied. “Bilezikian is doing what every believer of God’s Word must do: correctly applying the Bible to the modern age.”

  “Christians can’t have it both ways. You can’t insist that every line of the Bible is God’s inerrant Word, then ignore passages that don’t fit your program.”

  “All Scripture is inspired by God, and we are expected to obey every word.”

  “Christians never obey every word, or even try to. Instead they use the Bible as a baseball bat. They comb through it, pick out the condemnations that fit their agenda, then clobber people over the head with them and ignore the rest of the book.”

  I could tell that Dan was horrified at what I was saying. Pain registered on his face as his limbs hung heavy in the cold. I knew what he was thinking: not only had he lost his best friend, David, in a nihilistic freefall, but now his sister was abandoning the faith as well—the faith he believed in so strongly that he’d dedicated his life to it. I felt sad for Dan, but it was as though something strange had overtaken me—like the sensation you get when you first go skiing. You expect you’ll have some trouble learning to move on skiis, but immediately you learn that getting moving isn’t the problem—it’s stopping.

  “Christians want to hold society hostage to certain verses,” I recklessly went on. “They attack the gay community using Levitical law, but they ignore Deuteronomy 21, which requires that gluttons be stoned. Like Jerry Falwell, for instance—the guy spews out judgments right and left, but he’s a hundred pounds overweight.”

  By that time we were back on the front porch, stamping the frost off our feet. The door opened, and a flood of children burst out, followed by their limping grandfather. Dan and I gave each other a silent look of truce and started talking about the price of beef futures on Wall Street. I thought about how much I loved my brother. He was a good man, full of kindness and integrity, a conservative minister living the same life that he preached others should live. I respected him for his beliefs, but I could no longer live them myself.

  After we got inside, Dan and I poured ourselves coffee, blowing on it to force the steaming heat back onto our red noses. “Oh, you’ll never guess who called the other day and asked for your new phone number,” he said. “Jean. She and Doug are back from the mission field—some sort of unplanned furlough. She asked for your new number, and I’m sure you’ll be hearing from her.” He smiled.

  Jean did call the next week, and we agre
ed to meet at a Denny’s restaurant halfway between us. Although we had corresponded faithfully over the years, I had never been honest about what was happening between David and me; the notion of putting my spiritual collapse on paper, to Jean of all people, always seemed overwhelming. Now I would have to come clean. As I drove toward the restaurant, I wondered what Jean would say about my divorce from David. She never was one to compromise her Christian ideals. And from her letters over the decade, there was no evidence that she had tempered her convictions. Her, and Doug’s, service in the remote Mexican village had been tough. They had no running water or electricity, living in such unsanitary conditions that their children were often infested with a nasty tapeworm. In order to kill the tapeworm, she was forced to give her children medicine so toxic, it couldn’t be purchased in the United States, because the FDA had banned it as a potential carcinogen. On the other hand, if they withheld it, the tapeworm could kill the child. They wrestled with the dilemma but always ended up administering the dangerous drug, because leaving the mission field was out of the question. As always, Jean had a burning assurance that her calling was to save “native” souls for Christ.

  When we met at Denny’s for lunch, Jean’s appearance startled me. She looked nothing like the pretty young woman who had left for Mexico years before. Her once peach colored skin and auburn hair had been bleached to a pale orange in the tropical heat, her pearl white teeth were gray from lack of dental care, and her figure, once lithe and athletic, was rail thin and exhausted looking. As her story unraveled, I understood why. “It was so weird,” she said, keeping her eyes on the cup of tea she stirred in front of her. “One day I found a sore on my genitals. I took the long trip into Mexico City to visit a doctor, and after my examination he told me I had syphilis.”

  I sat frozen in stunned silence.

  “It took Doug a while, but he finally confessed that on his monthly trips to Mexico City to get supplies he had been visiting prostitutes.”