Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  At our next meeting, Don told me I’d be teaching young women, ages twelve to twenty-two. As I prepared lessons from the Gospel of John, I wondered what Hutterite girls my age would be like. Finally, on a wintry Wednesday afternoon, six of us piled into Don’s rattletrap Ford Falcon and ventured out from the campus over the icy two-lane back road. Watching the orange sun shed the day’s last ragged light across an empty ocean of snow waves, I decided that if the Hutterites had wanted to flee civilization they had made a brilliant choice in eastern Montana. I was thankful that Don chattered through the space and solitude, interrupting himself with his own laughter.

  “I’ll be a son of a gun!” he snorted with excitement. “Can ya believe the snowbanks we’re pushin’ through? White as a polar bear lost in a blizzard.” Then he’d laugh and whistle contentedly, tunelessly, something he did all the way to the little burg of Grass Range. Once we approached the colony, however, he quieted. His manner turned apprehensive as we entered the grounds, bracketed by long barns and winter-harrowed gardens, past the huge communal dining hall, homestead-era schoolhouse, and church. The ice packed dirt road wound through a cluster of simple wooden houses to Samuel’s cottage. The moment the engine stopped, our host appeared and whisked the six of us inside, like Joshua sneaking spies into the Promised Land.

  We crossed a rough enclosed porch, passing between a row of muddy overshoes and a couple of days’ worth of split wood, entering a simple room with bare walls, utilitarian handmade furniture, and wood floors where the pine had worn darker where it got the most traffic. There, packed into simple straight-backed chairs and numbering almost forty, sat a group of somberly dressed Hutterites. It was one thing to read about these people; it was another entirely to see them in the flesh. They were the most austere creatures I’d ever laid eyes on. The men’s stark black clothing, stiff and unyielding, made them seem as rigid as statues. And the women, wearing scarves and grave expressions, were buttoned down in cotton that covered every square inch of their bodies except for a small opening that allowed the face to peek through. The strictest order of nuns would have seemed positively libertine beside them. Only the smells of the room were recognizable: farmhouse baking and dirt caked boots, cattle salves and wet hounds—staples of Montana farm life.

  Don nervously opened the meeting with a prayer and a Bible verse, his voice shaking. “We are here to share in the fellowship of our Christian brothers and sisters. As it states in Hebrews 10, verse 25: ‘Do not forsake the assembling of ourselves together.’”

  The Hutterites must have realized that we were as nervous as they, and after Don led a few verses from “Blessed Lord Jesus,” I began to see timid smiles peeking out from under their snug head coverings. I took a breath and smiled back. Once Don finished the song, he introduced us to the crowd and dismissed everyone to their classes. Rachael, a twenty-two-year-old beauty with dark eyes and full lips, approached me and said she would take me to our classroom. She was graceful and slight, with delicate features and olive skin. When we arrived in the upstairs bedroom, ten other lovely women, seated around a table, introduced themselves in a whisper; I noted only two last names among them: Stahl and Wollman. They huddled together, a flock of tiny sparrows, timid and dressed in black. And yet their eyes betrayed fascination as they stared at me, silent and direct, while their lips bit back amazement so as not to frighten me away. After I finished my lesson in the Gospel of John, I asked a question to spark discussion. No one said a word. I asked a second … still silence. It never occurred to me that the Socratic form of teaching was completely foreign to them. It was unlikely that they had ever been asked their opinion of the Bible—or of much else, for that matter—or that they had ever engaged in conversation with an outsider.

  For the first two weeks these young women studied me without making a sound. I worried all the way back to college about how I would ever be able to communicate with my new class. My curled, long blond hair, eye makeup, and blue jeans seemed to generate an unbridgeable chasm between us. Then I thought about their faces, filled with anticipation, playfulness, an eagerness to experience new things, and suddenly, as I looked out of the frosted car window, I wondered if we might not be more alike than I’d imagined.

  The next week instead of teaching them John, I said, “Your hair is just beautiful. How do you get it to look so cute?”

  They all giggled with delight.

  “Can we fix yours like it?” Rachael asked.

  They touched my hair gently, with cautious merriment, as though it might burst into a thousand tiny lights—or snakes. Rachael bent down, eyes wide, her face in mine, and whispered, “We love your black eyelashes.”

  Each of them held my hair and let it fall through their fingers.

  “It’s the color of wheat!” whispered Mary Ellen, Rachael’s sister.

  They stood, hands cupped over their mouths, gasping with disbelief as they took turns rolling my bangs. As they lost the battle to contain themselves, their small bodies and long skirts began bouncing around me. At the end of the transformation, for the final step in our secret initiation rite, Rachael’s cousin, Sarah, took her scarf off and tied it around my head. At that, they all squealed, and Sarah’s sister, Miriam, proclaimed, “Now you are one of us.” By complete accident we had discovered the intimacy women can know, across worlds of difference and language—the union that as teenagers we were only beginning to see as possible.

  After that, for the first few weeks anyway, we didn’t get much Bible studying done. Sometimes I’d feel guilty and wonder if Don would be mad if he knew we weren’t discussing John, but I suspected that he would probably just shake his head and say, “Well, for Chrissakes …” My apprehension completely vanished when I thought about the anticipation alive in the faces of these women as I told them stories about my life and, in return, they whispered their stories to me. Edna, the older cousin, had left the colony and was working at the hospital in Lewistown, Rachael said speaking softly while the others looked on, wide-eyed as though they were sharing top secret government information, the kind that would get you in deep trouble with the authorities. “No one is supposed to talk about it, though.”

  Before long Wednesday night became the highlight of everyone’s week. Even though Don heard that the elders were unhappy with our presence, we never considered ending our visits. We’d arrive at Samuel’s to find a houseful of joyful people who showered us with laughter and conversation. The girls would grab my hand, and we’d escape to our room, shut the door, and chatter like reunited sorority sisters. Then we’d launch into our study of John. Without fail my pupils had studied the lesson with scholarly meticulousness, with their answers written in German and their insightful comments and questions spoken in careful English. After our study we’d chat about upcoming events in our lives, even about boys we thought were cute. Spontaneously someone would hug me or slip her arm into mine and say, “Thank you for coming to see us.” At first their affection surprised me, but before long I took great joy in their unguarded tenderness.

  Before we left each Wednesday evening, the women filled Don’s car trunk with pastries, canned peaches, huckleberry jam, pumpkin bread, and homemade sausage. He delighted in the goodies, but I knew he cherished the friendship of his new Hutterite family even more. When they appeared with the delicacies, he would throw his head back and laugh out loud, his dark teeth in plain view and his ample belly quivering beneath his messy T-shirt. Unlike folks on campus, the Hutterites never seemed to notice Don’s ragged appearance but instead looked beneath it to his heart.

  Our small Bible study group invited us to spend a Saturday with them touring their farming operations—the only area where the Hutterites embraced modernization. In the sterile industrial chicken slaughtering house, cauldrons of boiling water bubbled next to swirling vats that removed the birds’ feathers before clippers snipped off their dead feet. The concrete floors of the pig and horse barns were fastidiously clean, smelling not of dung but of Lysol and fresh paint, as neat and or
derly as a hospital operating room. Shiny stainless steel automated milking machines lined the dairy barn, pumping milk into the processors that pasteurized and bottled it.

  Quiet and earnest, they ushered us through their stark white church with its barren walls, hardwood backless pews, and altar devoid of the traditional platform, podium, and musical instruments of modern Western Christianity. In that place all playfulness drained from Rachael’s face. They led us into an immaculate communal kitchen, where a group of women prepared lunch in steel ovens and stoves, solemnly kneading bread and chopping vegetables. Before long the men arrived from the field, hung their stiff black hats on the wall in silence, and seated themselves in order of age and rank. Only after the men finished did the women sit down at the opposite side of the dining area and eat. Everything the Hutterites did followed an age-old metronome, set in motion centuries ago to maintain precise order and tempo. Though their stringent code of piety and isolation kept them unattached to the outside world, I was delighted that in private the girls ignored its relentless, homogenizing cadence, their eager smiles like prim windows opening to welcome in a fresh spring breeze.

  When the official tour was over, the girls grabbed my fingers and we fled the crowd. In their rooms each one took turns showing me the quilts she’d stitched and the treasures she’d collected over the years, as the others looked on in silent respect, their hands politely clasped behind their backs. Out of memento boxes from under their beds tumbled the highlights of their lives: a church bulletin from a trip to the Spring Creek colony in Alberta, a wheat stalk that a young man had given her during harvest season, a lavender sachet from the Fortymile community in Wyoming. Then they each presented me with a gift from their riches: a special drawing of the colony, a dried flower, a crocheted doily made in honor of my visit.

  As we drove home a feeling haunted me, one that had been mounting for months now: what kind of real choices would my new friends ever be free to make? There was so much they would never experience, so much that would remain forever off limits to them: attending college, traveling anywhere except under the supervision of a man, wearing blue jeans. They would never be allowed to speak up in church or attend a community meeting. I agonized over the thought, because I knew the capacity they had to embrace life—the intelligence, curiosity, and mischievousness that occupied their tiny frames. I consoled myself with the idea that at least they had each other. I could see them in their old age, clinging together as they had throughout life, sharing gossip and hand-quilted blankets, bonnets they had knitted for one another’s great-grandchildren, and, I hoped, covert books. But somehow I knew they deserved more than their closed world would ever offer them. It was then that I first questioned the odd whims of religion. Religion was the reason Rachael, Sarah, Miriam, Mary Ellen, and all their bright young cousins would never cast a ballot for president, see Paris, or attend Harvard. Religion would keep them from voting even in their own colony. But I didn’t let myself dwell on the notion for too long, because I knew it had implications for my own circumscribed life. I closed my eyes, pushing the thought into a back closet of my mind and quickly locking the door.

  The preacher and elders endured our presence until late the following spring, when Rachael decided to leave the colony. I knew that something was wrong the night we arrived and all the girls but she looked grave, their faces again wearing the same somber expression as on that evening we first met. Once we were alone I found out what the crisis was all about.

  “I’ve decided to move into town with Edna,” said Rachael, beaming.

  The room was silent.

  “Do you need any help?” I asked.

  “I don’t have any jeans,” she replied in an apprehensive voice.

  “I have just the pair for you.”

  Distress lined the other girls’ faces. They understood, as I did not yet, that the inevitable had arrived like an overdue bill from an extravagant shopping spree. The next Wednesday, Rachael’s grandfather showed up with a long double-barreled shotgun. He was drunk, and waving the gun in the air he shouted, “Leave us alone! You’ll never understand our ways.”

  Before we left that night, the girls hugged me and shyly touched my hair as they had the evening they’d fashioned it Hutterite style and covered it with Sarah’s scarf. It did not occur to me that except for Rachael, I would never see any of them again nor that I might be the only outsider they would ever have a chance to befriend. They asked me not to forget them and slipped me forbidden photographs they’d taken of one another, smiling directly into the camera as though, unlike their patriarchal church elders, they realized the beauty and godliness of their own images.

  On the way home Don told us, with a catch in his throat, that we couldn’t go back. The colony preacher had forbidden us to return; he was afraid for our safety. Within a month Rachael called me from a pay phone in Lewistown. She had moved in with Edna and gotten a job at the hospital. I raced into town to spend the day with her. By the end of the afternoon she looked stunning in a pair of my jeans, which fit snugly down her long, slender legs, with her hair shining and curled and falling softly around her shoulders—and with black mascara on her lashes.

  In Church History class that quarter, I learned how our doctrines were connected historically with the Hutterites through the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation had been built on John Calvin’s teachings, and the Hutterite and Baptist faiths shared them as well. Calvin’s doctrines had been encapsulated by his followers into the acronym T.U.L.I.P. The T stood for “Total depravity”: humanity had inherited Adam’s sin and was incapable of goodness and worthy of damnation. “Unconditional election”: even before creation, God chose to save some from hellfire, others not. “Limited atonement”: since God had already chosen the saved, Christ’s death atoned for only those he’d picked. “Irresistible grace”: if God chose you, you couldn’t resist Him. “Perseverance of the saints”: once you got in, you stayed in. If you landed on the lucky side of this divine coin toss, praise God. If you didn’t he had simply left you behind, like choosing one child to save from the Holocaust and sacrificing the other, similar to Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice—only God designed the whole scenario and executed it without guilt.

  Although I accepted Calvin’s assessment of man’s sinfulness, the idea that we had no free will and that God arbitrarily rescued some and sent others to the slaughter made me wince. If Calvin was correct, humans were simply pawns in a universal chess game where the moves had been preordained and carried out before the foundations of time. Our duty was merely to endure the match. So what was the point of trying to win people to the faith?

  Like doing our assignments in Personal Evangelism class. Part of our course work was to hide Christian tracts all over Lewistown. Each quarter fifty Bible college students slipped pamphlets in department store bathrooms, hotel lobbies, and onto grocery store shelves—under, say, a can of beans. Merchants asked Mr. Foreman not to require students to inundate the small town with religious materials, but he didn’t budge; the Lord’s work had to be done.

  Although I was troubled by this apparent contradiction of thought, after much prayer I finally realized that it wasn’t my job to decide whether the unchurched were chosen or not, but to obey my duty and tell them about Jesus. After this internal acquiescence, I didn’t even flinch when Mr. Foreman escalated the class requirements to include the Pamphlet Crusade. The project required us to dispense what he called “the gospel bomb.” The bomb consisted of tightly wrapped religious literature in the form of a cylinder tied together with a thread. As you’d drive through town and throw these torpedoes out onto someone’s lawn, the string would break and religious tracts would burst all over the grass. For an A, students had to do all of the above, plus personally talk to people about Christianity. This involved approaching a stranger on the street, handing him or her a religious tract, and asking, “Excuse me, but do you embarrass easily?” The tract also had DO YOU EMBARRASS EASILY? printed on the cover. Inside it read, “You ce
rtainly will be embarrassed if you die and face judgment without accepting Jesus as your Savior.”

  Anxious to get the assignment over, my classmate Sarah drove into Lewistown and approached the first person she saw, who happened to be a dusty old cowboy sauntering bowlegged down the sidewalk.

  “Excuse me, sir, do you embarrass easily?” Sarah called out.

  The old cowpoke hesitated, looked down, and drawled, “What—’smy fly open?”

  I told myself that even if these assignments were awkward, they would teach me humility, as the apostle Paul requires in the Letter to the Corinthians, where he says that we must be “fools for the gospel’s sake.” And I also had to remember that before long Jesus was going to break through the clouds and make his appearance in the Second Coming. Then I would be very glad that I’d been such a good witness.

  Besides, as we all knew at Big Sky Bible College, the Rapture was upon us. By that spring of 1976, the world situation looked grim. Earthquakes rocked the globe, first in Italy, then China, then Guatemala. Famines in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and India were followed by revolutions and uprisings in Latin America, Soweto, and the Sudan. Floodwaters rolled across Indonesia, Brazil, South Korea, and the United States, precisely like the signs and wonders Jesus speaks about in Matthew 24, signaling the end of days. Even more alarming to Bible scholars was that the European Common Market was now looking exactly like the ten-member Revived Roman Empire that the Bible talked about in Daniel 7 and Revelation 13, which would usher in a world government, making way for the Antichrist. On top of that, the Soviet Union, which was certainly the King of the North predicted in Ezekiel 38, was right on track for its attempt at world domination, thereby plunging the earth into the final Great War by oppressing its people and even refusing to allow Scripture within its borders. All these events were coming together so fast that Hal Lindsey and other Bible teachers were confident that Jesus would return around the year of 1981. Lindsey shouted from pulpits across America that we were on “the countdown to Armageddon.”