Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  I stepped out of the car, and a late summer breeze wafted the smells of fried food from the cafeteria, newly cut grass, and Johnson’s Floor Wax from the propped-open dormitory door—the exciting aroma of college life. As I took my boxes up to the second floor and looked for room 214, I had a strong sense that a chapter of my life was ending and another about to begin. I poked my head through the door, and sitting at her desk waiting for me was my new roommate, Jean. Jean had a somber, makeup-free face and long, straight auburn hair. She stood up and held out her hand. “Nice to meet you,” she said, surveying me with no-nonsense intensity. “Hey, let me help you with those bags.”

  I could see her scrutinizing my belongings as we unpacked them: Avon Skin So Soft lotions and mango moisturizing shampoo, lavender body powder and lacy underwear. I started to feel nervous, because by looking at Jean, I could tell that my things were probably too girlie for her—maybe even unspiritual. She was more the sportswoman type: thin but broadly built, with an athletic, unthinking vigor. I spotted on Jean’s desk a picture of her sitting on a huge boulder with the Cascade Mountains jutting white and ragged behind her, and a handsome sandy-haired man in khaki shorts and heavy-soled hiking boots with his arms around her shoulders. It looked like a great opportunity to divert her attention from my oversize makeup bag, which she was about to discover. “Wow, that’s sure a great-looking guy; is he your boyfriend?”

  “Used to be, but I broke up with him last spring. I’m headed for the mission field, and he doesn’t feel the Lord’s calling to go. So I’ve decided there just isn’t any future for us. There is no doubt in my mind that God wants me to be a missionary.”

  Wow, I thought, Dan was right. Jean must be the ultimate in Christian dedication: a woman who could spend her life in a tropical forest, translating the Bible into obscure languages and dodging tarantulas—a real Jane Goodall type, only motivated by religious enthusiasm.

  Once we hung my last floral dress in the closet, Jean said, “Great, all done—just in time for services.” We changed into our best skirts and headed across the road to the enormous administration building, where the college chapel was located. When you’re in a new world and you don’t know what to do, the best tactic is to follow people who have the routine down—people like Jean. So I noticed her every move and let each one make an imprint on me. She sat silently and watched the front row of professors assemble near the huge pipe organ, which was sounding out in glorious unison with the gleaming grand piano. I did the same. The handsome president, Mr. Longston, charged up to the podium, and everyone fell into silence. He lifted his hands high into the air, looked right and then left, at the piano and organ, and in a magnificent baritone voice boomed, “A mighty fo-ortress i-is our God.” As if pulled by a strong magnet, the audience snapped into place. “A bu-ulwark never fa-a-ailing,” they shouted with gusto. I felt a magnificent vibration elevate me above the vale of this present world, permeating the sanctuary and shaking the windowpanes next to me, drawing the flesh on my arms into goose bumps. It was as though I had been transported to the very gates of heaven. My insides warmed, and I knew that sitting beside Jean, before a company of a thousand heavenly angels, was right where I belonged, with sacred music booming off the rafters and people swaying in place, closed-eyed and euphoric in the spirit, of like minds—brothers and sisters all.

  That first week Jean and I attended all the welcome-to-campus socials, and she introduced me to everyone she knew. We’d laugh our way back to the dorm and throw ourselves on the bed, where she’d whisper, “Jan Hanford is still in love with Greg Palmer even though he broke up with her last year; he, on the other hand, is mad about Patti Schroder, but she thinks he’s pretty creepy.” Then, after the valuable social update, I’d climb into my top bunk and drift into a deep sleep while Jean stayed up into the early morning hours, her tiny desk lamp pressing down onto her huge Greek lexicon, whispering to herself, “Lambano—present, active, indicative—meaning ‘to take’; gnorisas—aorist, active, nominative, singular—meaning ‘to know.’”

  While Jean earned perfect scores in all her classes, I adapted to my new life as a student. Each day was filled with classes, chapel, devotional hours, and church services. When we weren’t occupied with scheduled events, Jean and I spent our time reading and talking about the meaning of the universe, which made me realize that I didn’t miss the conversations I might be having in Los Angeles or New York. This was the real world, not the carnal one that existed in large cities where people didn’t acknowledge Jesus as God or realize that He would soon return to rapture the faithful to heaven. I knew I’d chosen the right path, although, mind you, not necessarily an easy one. Following God would save me from the great judgment to come, but I knew it would also throw me into a battle against a treacherous adversary known by many names: the Prince of Darkness, Beelzebub, the Father of Lies, the Old Serpent, the Great Red Dragon.

  In our classes and daily chapel messages we learned that Satan traveled to and fro throughout the world looking for unwitting sinners to devour. Whenever temptation struck, the Devil and his legion of spirits caused the enticement. The horned Beast reared his ugly head in the form of humanism, liberalism, socialism, and the theory of evolution—to name a few. Those who succumbed to his philosophies and temptations not only sinned on earth, but also were headed for an eternity in hell. When I thought about hell, just as when I thought about the Great Tribulation, I was entirely relieved that I had been snatched from the jaws of death, and my feet planted safely on the path of righteousness. It was exciting to be inducted into this new family that had taken the mantle of “true defender of the faith,” standing firm on the fundamentals of Christianity, leading the fight against the Catholics, who worshipped icons, the Jews, who didn’t believe Jesus was God, and the liberals, who didn’t acknowledge the Bible as inerrant. Those poor souls would find out that hell was not only a bonfire for the lost, but also a burning camp for those who perverted the real teachings of the Bible. I was beginning to understand God’s exciting timetable for the whole human race.

  My favorite class by far was on the Book of Revelation. The first day, our teacher, Dr. Harvey, strode across the freshly waxed floor of the lecture hall, grabbed the long pointer stick that sat in the corner and began poking it into the air toward us: “The foremost lesson in Bible interpretation is that every word of Scripture is inspired. Not some of it, not parts of it, but every letter.” He paced across the front of the room, surveying the crowd with a steely glare that made us know he was talking about matters of extreme spiritual importance. “That means that every detail of history, every doctrine, every word of prophecy is without error and must be taken in its literal sense.” Then he stopped dead in his tracks and looked each student in the eye. “These are God’s very words here, young people. Don’t ever let me hear you say differently!”

  The whole faculty considered Dr. Harvey our school patriarch, a distinguished man with white hair that he carefully slicked back from his small forehead, making his pensive, ice blue eyes look as though they could cut through steel in a heartbeat. He was tiny of stature but had an electric frame that radiated energy through every seam of his slightly oversize suit. When he was a young man, he had attended Dallas Theological Seminary, America’s stronghold of Fundamentalism, along with the famous Christian thinker Hal Lindsey. The seminary had been formed in 1924 to combat the popular teachings of higher criticism (applying techniques of literary analysis, archeology, and comparative linguistics to Scripture)—in other words, liberalism. The alumni of Dallas Theological Seminary took seriously their mission to champion orthodox Bible interpretation and defeat theological lenience.

  “When the Bible speaks of a millennium, it means ten centuries. The seven-day creation is precisely that. When the author of Revelation talks about a battle between Jesus and Satan on the plain of Armageddon outside Jerusalem, that is exactly what will happen.” His tiny body shot up as if it had been zapped with a cattle prod. “Biblical inerrancy,” he shouted
, “is the doctrine that separates us from the liberals, who are heretics of the worst measure!”

  The whole class gaped at him, their young faces expectant and credulous. What an exciting quarter this was going to be! I thought, my palms sweating, my shirt sticking to my back, the bottoms of my feet tingling—learning from a man considered to be one of the founding fathers of American Fundamentalism. Knowing God’s mind on all those tantalizing end-time prophecies, I would devour this class like a starving woman swallowing crumbs off a plate.

  After months of note-taking, the scenario looked like this: God divided history into seven epochs, and according to the Bible we were presently in the sixth—the Church Age; anything after Jesus’ crucifixion was the Church Age. The Rapture would mark the end of the Church Age and thrust the world into the Great Tribulation, which would last for seven years. In the first half of the Tribulation, the Antichrist would rise from the sea and make a pact with Israel, and together they would rebuild the Jewish temple on Mount Moriah. Now the Muslim Dome of the Rock rested there, but an earthquake or some natural disaster could easily burst it asunder and leave room for the Jews to reconstruct their own holy site. Once the temple was built, the Antichrist would betray Israel, declare himself God, and set up his own worship in the temple. In the meantime 144,000 Jews would acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah, get saved, and begin preaching the gospel across the world, which would make the Antichrist furious and prompt him to unleash a great persecution upon them. A helper of the Antichrist, called the False Prophet or the Beast (probably the pope), would appear and make everyone take the 666 mark in order to buy or sell anything. After this the wars would begin. The Beast’s alliance with Israel would trigger an Arab alliance to attack Israel, which would prompt a Russian-African alliance to counterattack the Arabs by sea. This event would signal the Beast to spring into action, uniting with Red China and sending two hundred million soldiers into the Middle East for a terrible fight that would plunge the world into Armageddon, the final Great War. Then a heavenly trumpet would sound, and Christ would return in the clouds to set up his kingdom on earth, which would last for a thousand years.

  It was thrilling to see how the Old Testament books of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Isaiah agreed with the New Testament books of Matthew, Thessalonians, and Revelation, describing exactly what was in store for the human race, like a divine jigsaw puzzle. My appreciation for Scripture was growing each day: it could predict the future, give an accurate account of history, and guide Christians along the path of right living. Now I understood why students on campus memorized entire chapters of the Bible so that they would know what to do and how to act each moment of the day. Once a person realized what God’s Word said about any particular topic (and it had something to say about every imaginable human action), there was no excuse for disobedience. I did notice, however, that some sins were counted more seriously than others; even though the Bible did say that all sins were equal in the eyes of God and under the blood of Jesus, a few transgressions made everyone more nervous than the normal ones of lying, cheating, and gossiping.

  For example, there was the relationship between our school nurse, Diane, and her friend Evie. One day someone walked into Diane’s dorm room, and the women were lying next to each other in bed—under the covers. After that the faculty started monitoring their every move. At a closed staff meeting the professors discussed the shocking event and ended up suspecting that abhorrent acts, worse than the average sins, were being performed. I was embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know anything about people who were attracted to their own sex, so I waited because I knew Jean would have a decided opinion on the matter. “It’s depraved,” she stated flatly. “The apostle Paul has made the issue clear. The Letter to the Romans states that homosexuals have given themselves over to a reprobate mind.” That sounded pretty awful to me. I decided that it probably meant they were demon possessed or at least heavily influenced by demons.

  One day I was in a bathroom stall when Diane and Evie burst into the lavatory. Thinking they were alone, Evie broke into tears. As I peeked through a crack in the hinge, a fugitive flush raced over my cheekbones, and stitches of fright seized my limbs. What unpredictable lasciviousness was I about to witness? Evie was a big girl with a serious face and thick brown hair that hung in her eyes. That day her bangs were wet and stuck together like fringe, as if she had been crying for a long time. She collapsed around the sink to give her shaking legs support and wept in long, quiet waves. Diane tried to get Evie to stop crying, and when she couldn’t, she grabbed her and said in a gentle but stern whisper, “Get ahold of yourself!” Diane’s arms looked strong like a wrestler’s, and I wondered if women who liked each other naturally had more muscle than those who didn’t. As she pleaded with Evie, I could see sadness in her eyes, and all of a sudden, without the crucial time I needed to let the Holy Spirit take over, I felt sorry for her and Evie and wondered why God found it necessary to be so strict on the subject.

  I thought the two women had enough problems fighting depravity, so I didn’t tell Jean what I had seen. Even so, later that winter when I had the flu and made an appointment to see Diane, Jean declared, “I’m not letting you see the school nurse alone!” We entered the old army base infirmary, and Diane checked my throat in a professional manner. Jean was afraid Diane was going to make me take off my shirt just to look at my breasts, but she didn’t. As Diane examined my swollen glands, our dorm counselor stopped in for an unexpected visit. I darted a glance at Jean, who, I realized, must have requested that she stop by. Diane didn’t act as if she suspected anything, and prescribed antibiotics to clear up my infection. It wasn’t long before Diane and Evie left Big Sky Bible College. A professor told Jean that the administration had requested that they go.

  Besides homosexuality, demons persuaded people to do all kinds of evil things. The Prince of Darkness caused great havoc in this world and interfered with almost all the church’s perfectly laid plans. I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the eternity coin, so I decided to take the Bible seriously right from the start and follow its teachings to the letter. Doing that seemed uncomplicated to me: just believe every word of the Scripture and listen to what the professors said that it meant. It came to my great amazement, however, that one stubborn student named Odhran Welch refused to follow this simple formula. Whenever Odhran opened his mouth, I mentally slapped my palm to my forehead and thought, What is he thinking?

  Odhran was a gangly lad from Ireland, with thick glasses and lazy Dublin-looking eyes. Sarcasm tinged his oddly syllabled accent, and wild mahogany ringlets, as nonconformist as his attitude, fell around his eyes. He seemed determined to submit Christianity to the iron logic of broad daylight, even when it butted up against the college’s view of things. Didn’t he realize that the mysteries of God were matters of faith and not reason? Most incredible about Odhran’s rebellion was that it usually surfaced in Mr. Foreman’s classes—the most conservative, ill-tempered professor on campus.

  Foreman’s angry face moved like a hatchet, chopping out the words of his lecture. He was a stout, heavy-jowled man with black horn-rimmed glasses that rode low on his broad nose, matching perfectly his crew cut and 1950s wardrobe. He didn’t teach in a normal voice like most of the professors, but shouted as if he were Jonathan Edwards delivering a sermon—which had the effect of making you feel like a sinner in the hands of an angry God rather then a simple college student.

  “And what does God say your sin does to Him in chapter 13 of Jeremiah? It makes Him weep because you are like the Israelites worshipping the golden calf. He weeps when He looks down on the long, dismal span of history and beholds in horror the spectacle of the world, His people creating other gods, taken in indulgence, intemperance, and debauchery, abusing their bodies. God weeps over these abominations, knowing that every time you refuse to surrender to Him, you nail Jesus to the cross anew; that once more you hammer into His precious head the sharp crown of thorns, and the blood drips down His divine forehead in sh
eets. Think of the spikes tearing at the flesh of His hands, His feet. Think of the torment, and ask yourself if you could be responsible for it. When you refuse to surrender to the will of the Lord, you place Jesus back on the cross again.”

  When Mr. Foreman wasn’t preaching his lectures in class, he was scouring the campus with a gaze as merciless as the sun, looking for students who had not yet surrendered to the will of the Lord. He never had to look far. When he did observe someone doing anything that he felt was a bad testimony, he called the quaking religious novice into his office for a hearing. The entire student body feared Mr. Foreman and walked far out of the way to avoid any chance of a face-to-face encounter with him. Odhran was the only student I knew who actually challenged the grouchy professor.

  One morning the young Irishman confronted Mr. Foreman in a class we both attended, one on the Gospels. The professor had worked himself up to a good sweat twenty minutes into his lecture when he proclaimed that in Mark, chapter 10, verse 1, when Jesus arose from Capernaum and traveled to the coast of Judea, he actually levitated and flew. Odhran sat straight up in his chair. The professor went on, reinforcing his argument with the use of Greek, a common practice among Bible teachers. “The Greek word arose can more precisely be interpreted levitated,” he declared. “The fact that Jesus traveled from Capernaum to Judea—by the farther side of the Jordan—is a sure sign that the trip was too far to go on foot.”