Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  Once my mind thawed, I blurted out, “Thank God this isn’t any worse than a curable VD, Jean. You have to get out of this marriage!”

  “But Doug has repented,” she said. “He’s promised he’ll never do such a foolish thing again.”

  “Jesus Christ, Jean! David told me the same thing about his addiction. You can’t take the chance. You can’t go back to Mexico.”

  Jean’s eyes widened, showing life for the first time that day. She was more concerned with my taking the Lord’s name in vain than with her own potential exposure to the AIDS virus.

  “I’ve decided to follow the Bible and not my own selfish yearnings. Don’t you remember what God promises us in Proverbs?” she said, her voice rising till she sounded like some wild-eyed television preacher. “‘Those who put their trust in the Lord shall be safe’—Jesus will protect me.”

  And that was it, her final stand, no matter how hard I argued. I felt frantic. I had known Jean for a long time, since my first tentative days in Bible college, when she took me under her wing and transfused her own great religious convictions through my blood. Now I wanted to instill some of my own disbelief and mutiny into her soul. But the space around us had changed; we had both endured personal storms, but we had dealt with them in radically different ways. I had taken shelter from religious life; Jean was determined to soldier on, stiffening her face into the coming gale. A few weeks later, she and Doug returned to Mexico, leaving me to wonder if Jesus, as when he defied the laws of nature and raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead, would perform the miracle my friend counted on. I thought about the gullible, greedy innocence of Jean and me as we started out in college. It was like believing letters that come in the mail telling you that you have won a free Ford Escort or a vacation for two in glorious Waikiki. Jean and I had fallen for the cruel hoax, a shoddy piece of scam artistry, so obvious now in my flawless hindsight. It had altered our lives forever.

  My cynicism continued to spiral upward when I took a political science class that semester and began to study the teachings of the Founding Fathers concerning the separation of church and state—a feeling that was cemented at a party I attended at Robert and Susan’s. The house and yard were full of people. Some of them were old friends from Calvary Baptist whom I hadn’t seen for ages. I walked into the backyard and looked at the sea of bronzed bodies, surrounded by a circle of torches whose flames stretched out in the breeze. Suntanned faces came toward me, white teeth flashing in the dark: “Carlene, we haven’t seen you in forever.” The hair on the back of my neck was wet with nervousness, giving me a little chill, causing a shiver to slip down my limbs. Hal waved at me with a gin and tonic in his hand, docile as a frog. “We never see David anymore. It’s very sad.” I moved on, saying hellos here and there. Over at the drinks table, Susan was talking, one hand holding a martini, the other moving rapidly. Susan was a gracious hostess, and she loved a good party. Her satin dress, the same red as her lipstick, clung to her breasts, making her look like one of those women on the cover of a magazine dedicated to country living.

  Everyone in the crowd seemed quite contented, eating and drinking and surveying one another’s spouses—everyone, that is, except Robert. He had emerged from the house and stood on the deck looking irritated and a little tipsy, his gaze roving the crowd—hunter’s eyes. Once a fan of James Dobson, Robert had now become an avid Rush Limbaugh devotee, listening to the man’s talk show every day, then whipping himself into a rage over the “femi-Nazis,” the liberal media, or Bill Clinton’s complete lack of morals in the White House. According to Susan, Robert’s demand for control at home had also escalated that year; any show of independence from her was interpreted as a lack of submission and thus as disobedience to God. His intimidation had gotten so bad that during one argument in their bedroom, Robert went to the gun cabinet, pulled out his rifle, and laid it on the bed next to her. Susan told me that my lifestyle had also alarmed Robert—he was concerned that I didn’t attend church any longer and hadn’t dated anyone since my divorce from David. It all made him wonder if, at the deep-down core of things, I wasn’t a lesbian.

  Robert spotted me and stumbled across the deck, careening off lawn furniture like a pinball. “So how’s our little Clinton lover tonight?” he said. “You know, Rush Limbaugh was saying the other day that our great Mr. Clinton is addicted to prescription painkillers. Clinton admits to it—from some kind of back injury, he claims. What kind of a commander in chief is that for our great nation?”

  “Jeez, Robert, I missed that particular broadcast,” I said.

  “We have to get these amoral morons out of the White House. Rush has called this country back to God. It’s time we bring the Lord back into government and honor the faith of our forefathers!”

  “The Founding Fathers were Deists, not Christians, Robert, and they were adamantly opposed to mixing religion with government. Haven’t you ever heard about the separation of church and state?”

  “The words ‘separation of church and state’ aren’t even in the Constitution,” he barked back gleefully, pulling a line directly from a ditto-head script.

  “I didn’t say they were, but the Constitutional Congress built this country on the concept of separation, one that has been upheld in every court decision since the Constitution was formed. Maybe you should read the writings of our forefathers instead of listening to Rush Limbaugh so much.”

  Robert’s eyes narrowed, and he smiled with his teeth bared. How dare I question his authority under his own tiki lamps? Seeing Robert headed toward me, Susan had already crossed the lawn with a plate of appetizers and was now holding it between us, as if her stuffed mushroom recipe might protect me from her husband.

  “Take a mushroom, Robert,” Susan whispered, “and calm down.”

  In that moment, I realized how much my worldview had changed—from the terrain of unblemished belief to faith’s own boneyard. The Fundamentalist movement now seemed preposterous to me. It was the early 1990s, and Limbaugh (and the Religious Right) were frantically trying to save this country from the moral morass of the liberals, using the argument that Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues had intended Christianity to be an arm of the state, and the United States a Christian utopia. This distortion of history was now accepted truth in the expanding ranks of conservative religion. Moral Majority preachers like Pat Robertson were proclaiming from the pulpit, “Christians founded this nation, they built this nation, and for three hundred years they governed this nation. We can govern it again!”

  I looked at Robert, wanting to bounce his tipsy head off the deck. I was tempted to ask him if he knew that Thomas Jefferson had once said that there wasn’t one redeeming feature in the American superstition of Christianity. Or that the atheist John Adams said that in the best of all possible worlds there would be no religion. I longed to inform the homophobic, chauvinistic duck’s butt that James Madison believed that religion had never been a guardian of the liberties of the people and that the worst form of government existed when religion and politics merged. But I could see Susan humming nervously the way Edith Bunker used to when Archie was about to do something rash, so I swallowed the words back into my throat.

  It seemed to me that Robert—and the entire Moral Majority movement, for that matter—was confusing the Founding Fathers with the Puritans. The Puritans, who arrived a century and a half before the Constitution, had sought religious freedom and fled spiritual persecution in Europe. However, once in America, they were perfectly contented to establish their own brand of theocracy, denying such liberty to anyone else. They levied taxes to support their religion and jailed those who refused to pay. The Puritans made sure that only members of the state sanctioned congregationalist church could vote. They compensated ministers from government coffers. Their civil leaders enforced Fundamentalist doctrines and persecuted Catholics, Quakers, and other minorities, even executing innocent “witches” in Massachusetts.

  Protecting Americans against this kind of religious oppression w
as exactly what the Founding Fathers set out to do over a century later. Jefferson insisted that the Bill of Rights was to protect the “the infidel of any denomination.” He and his Constitutional Convention colleagues realized that most wars, conquests, and tyrannies were a result of the alliance of religion and state (as we have seen today in Northern Ireland, across the Islamic world, in the Balkans and the Sudan). The Founding Fathers believed that true religious freedom would result from pluralism, and so they set out to create a framework for the revolutionary concept that we call modern democracy: the secular state.

  Instead of saying what I wanted to say that night, I smiled at Susan and took another stuffed mushroom while mosquitoes dive-bombed my shoulders. From around me, the sounds of laughter, conversation, and music all blended in a murmur that was like some sort of undercurrent I didn’t care to be pulled into. I nursed my gin and tonic for a while and then sneaked past the crowd, whispering to myself that I would never return—a promise I would forever keep. Out on the freeway the night was dark—no moon, no stars, the sky locked up tight with a humid fog sweeping in from the Pacific. I thought about Robert and Fundamentalism and America and was glad that “amoral” Bill Clinton kept religion out of politics. God forbid that we should get a Fundamentalist in the White House someday.

  It was only a few weeks later that I answered the phone and heard Susan on the other end of a hissing line, her voice frail. “I’m outside on my cell,” she said, sounding as if she were calling from halfway around the world. “I’m so freaked-out,” she whispered. “I was cleaning the back closet last weekend and discovered a huge box of hard-core porn. After hours of denying it, Robert finally admitted that they were his. And they aren’t just Playboys,” she went on, “but really violent stuff—women submitted to unbelievably degrading acts.” As I hung up the phone, I wondered what Robert might have to say about the amoral state of America now that Susan had discovered his secret.

  Twelve

  The Dark Night of the Soul

  I STARTED TO THINK that Karl Marx had been right about religion being the opiate of the masses. No, I thought, it was worse than any deadly drug. It was like floodwaters roaring into the brain, spilling onto the synapses, short-circuiting electrochemical signals everywhere; religion set up a new household; it rearranged the furniture, pushing the cerebrum to the corner, cramping the hypothalamus, reshuffling common sense in the basal ganglia, jumbling all logic into madness. The best thing to do was to run in the opposite direction of the horrible flood of any organized creed—sprint for high ground and never look back.

  I knew my cynicism would only add more confusion to my kids’ lives, so I never mentioned in their presence how I felt about religion. I knew that coming to grips with the divorce was difficult enough for them, so I found a good counselor for us to see each week.

  “I feel like I should help Dad more—he seems so sad, and sometimes I think things are my fault,” Carise said during one session.

  “Carise, there is nothing you could have done to stop this divorce,” Dr. Hines replied. “The issue is purely between your dad and mom. Do you kids understand that?”

  Perched on the counselor’s brown velour couch, they looked like little birds on a fence. Carise and Micael nodded, and Jason fiddled with the round glass paperweight on the coffee table.

  “Dad needs to keep a job so he can buy a car and get to work on time. That’s not your fault, Carise,” Micael told her sister.

  Jason fumbled the paperweight, and it rolled across the floor.

  “What do you think, Jason?”

  “I dunno,” Jason said, crawling under the table to retrieve the glass dome.

  I did take comfort in the fact that even in the midst of her anxiety, Carise was still getting good grades, playing flute in the school band, singing in the school choir, and constantly surrounded by a gaggle of happy girlfriends. Micael, as well, seemed on solid ground, starring in the school play, staying on the honor roll, and becoming the crown champion of her fifth-grade Jeopardy tournament. I worried most about Jason. His emotions seemed bound up in irons, and it was hard to get him to talk about anything. His grades were starting to fail, and his third-grade teacher kept calling to report that he was being disruptive in class. Besides counseling (and grounding), the only way I thought to help him was to encourage him to participate in athletics. So when I wasn’t working or in class, I darted from Jason’s soccer and Little League games to the girls’ school performances. As I stayed active in their lives, I felt our hearts knitting together with an enduring bond—or maybe we were just clinging to each other for survival.

  In order to weather the upheaval of a broken home, I knew it would be important for us to remain close, so when it came time for me to transfer to the University of Washington, I knew that something had to change. I couldn’t remain involved in the kids’ activities, work full-time, and earn a GPA good enough to qualify for graduate school, which I now wanted to try for. David was unemployed, not even teaching at the Religious Science church anymore, so there was no hope of receiving financial help from him. My only other possible means of income was public assistance. I decided to quit work, even though it meant losing touch with my friends at the Space Needle, and apply for welfare. So in the winter of 1992, I would take a journey into what felt like a figment of Dante’s imagination.

  I stepped from the freezing rain into the large waiting room overcrowded with empty and confused faces. It was as if having lost your way was a requirement for admission. The place reeked of damp, musty clothing long overdue for a wash. Everyone sat bundled up, huffing, coughing, glassy-eyed from the wet chill. A young mother gazed straight ahead, her expression distant, as if her consciousness were receding like a balloon swept up into the sky. Her children, racing around her chair, crashed into her limbs, eliciting no response. A man whose hands were shaking pulled at his greasy blond hair, which stood straight up off his head like jute rope, rough-edged and matted. He stared at me blankly, his face as impossible to read as a headstone faded by decades of storm, while the overpowering smell of whiskey rose off him. No one engaged in conversation but instead stayed huddled inside their threadbare coats, sheepish and apologetic—I guessed that the welfare office was no place for small talk.

  As I approached the front desk, the well-nourished receptionist kept her eyes focused on her document, shoved the sign-in sheet toward me, and said, “If you brought all of your children’s birth certificates and Social Security cards, then sit down—your name will be called.” I looked up and read the sign hanging above her desk: DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, but from the feeling of the place, I imagined that ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE would have been more fitting.

  Every seat was taken, so I leaned against the wall and blew warm breath into my hands, closing my eyes, silent, buried in my own memories. I began to imagine I was a girl again, lying in the meadow behind our farmhouse on a baking August afternoon, watching the breeze transform the Montana sky. Earth and grass encircled me in a womb of warmth and safety, smelling of fresh alfalfa. The vast prairie stretched before me in miles of gentle rise and fall as the wind swirled the sky into dancing circles of white and blue. If I kept perfectly still, I could follow its movement: the huge Montana sky changing like the Pacific Ocean.

  “Carlene Brant, your caseworker will see you,” a voice boomed over the loudspeaker, startling me back into the dreary present. The thud of my name sounded like a dull ax hitting green wood: blunt, dead. I rushed toward the door to avoid another announcement of it.

  She was standing in the office doorway in front of me, but I could tell by her eyes that she was secluded behind a brick wall, detached and anonymous, like a checker with cold hands who dispatches your change in the market. “I’m Doris, your caseworker,” she said impatiently, without smiling. I walked into her office: government posters pasted above a stainless steel desk polished to an antiseptic sheen. The glaring green table lamp amplified the set lines in her jaw. She stared at me over
the rim of her half glasses, scrutinizing my appearance like a suspicious parole officer. Once she’d taken her fill, she looked down without a word. As she began reviewing my application, the creases in her eyebrows burrowed deeper. I had a gnawing feeling that she didn’t like me. Relax, I told myself. I was getting paranoid, mistrustful of everyone lately. Then Doris removed the fountain pen from its holder and, on a yellow legal pad, began scratching out notes. Finally she said without looking up, “It bugs me that they haven’t changed the laws yet concerning student status. I believe your financial aid package should be counted as income.”

  In other words, my caseworker didn’t think I should qualify for welfare. If my student aid were recognized as income, I would not be eligible for government help. “But most of the money I get is in loans that I’ll have to pay back,” I objected. Now Doris had a real reason to dislike me. She glanced up at me, rolling her eyes as though I were Pee-Wee Herman lecturing Pelé on the rules of soccer.

  “Where do you shop for food?” she asked.

  “Safeway.”

  “You know, you can get canned vegetables much cheaper at Dilly’s. It’s a warehouse in Everett that sells discount food in dented cans.”

  “Oh, I’ll check it out,” I lied.

  “Clothes?”

  “Nordstrom Rack.”

  “There’s a Goodwill on Fifth and Olive. How about makeup?”

  “Uh, makeup. Well, let’s see, Bartell Drug.”

  “You must think this is degrading, but most recipients aren’t as careful as they should be with state money,” she said.

  I breathed an internal sigh of relief. Doris had called me a recipient. I must be eligible for public assistance. I stumbled out of the interview, sweat damp on my forehead, and sat down to catch my breath next to a young mother with a toddler on her lap. I must have looked a mess, because she shattered the silence of the waiting room by saying, “That bad, huh?”