Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  Many of us at Big Sky Bible College could feel the Final Days approaching and wanted to make the most of our time left on this earth, and so we volunteered for summer missions. Jean decided to go to Belgium to participate in revival meetings and march in the street, holding up a placard that read REPENT FOR THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS AT HAND. Dan and David signed up with a mission headquartered in West Germany that smuggled Bibles into Eastern Europe. I stood back and watched them as if they were volunteering for the army. When a representative from the Slavic Gospel Association, another organization that sneaked Bibles into Eastern Europe, visited campus, I decided to join up too; getting Bibles behind the Iron Curtain was the least I could do in God’s final crusade. I kept it secret that I was glad to be based in the most beautiful place that any of us were going: the northern tip of France. It took some talking, but I finally convinced Dad that I would be safe and that it was a good opportunity for me to prove my commitment to the Lord. As always Mom was supportive of my spiritual adventure, and I wished I could take her along with me to see Europe for the first time.

  I boarded a plane to Chicago, where I spent three days at Wheaton College, taking classes on cultural sensitivity along with fifty other Bible college and seminary students, from places like Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and Houston, who would form our team. On the fourth day we flew to Amsterdam, loaded our baggage into a fleet of white vans, and headed out across Holland for France. As we sped west past lush vineyards and tiny cottages, waves of excitement shot through my body as if my nerves had been shattered into a thousand tiny slivers of ecstasy. The entire landscape held an elegance and grace that made me feel that life was permeated with exciting unknown possibilities. Such beauty revived a deep inner longing to experience all the sensual pleasures this world had to offer.

  I stepped out of the van and onto the street of the French village of Billy-Montigne, which would be my summer home. Our Bible smuggling hideout was a splendid three-story former hotel, resembling a brothel out of the Wild West. The rectangular multipaned windows lining its facade all opened onto small wooden balconies. Inside the hotel it was quiet and bright and smelled richly of historical presence: aged woodwork, smoke in the fireplace, weathered Turkish rugs in the once grand sitting room. Behind a great winding stairway on the first floor a door opened into a lovely French kitchen, where tired parquet squares of the antique floor warped under pot racks hung with skillets, colanders, saucepans, and great copper-bottomed stew pots. Rows of Old World cabinetry still held the remnant smells of coq au vin simmering in deep, velvety red wine, and apple tarts baking in the big brick oven.

  I let myself fantasize that I had been in this grand old hotel at different times in history, to see the place at its turn-of-the-century glory or later, in 1945, after Billy-Montigne had been liberated from the Germans and people danced in the streets. I imagined myself as a beautiful French girl with coal black hair and Audrey Hepburn eyes, standing in the doorway and keeping watch on the cobbled streets in expectation of my handsome British lover in his crisp blue officer’s uniform. In my fantasy we met often, rendezvousing in this romantic hotel with the smell of fine French wine and beef burgundy soup seeping up to our top-floor room overlooking the village. I’d see him in the distance, and my heart would race as he ran to the door, and we’d rush up the spiral staircase and into each other’s arms. Kissing my bare shoulders, he would unzip my blue silk dress and let it slip over my hips and drop in a rolling swell on the warm-scented wooden floor.

  Such thoughts left me feeling a mixture of elation and despair. They felt lovely but feverishly immoral, and I was afraid such passion would send me to hell in a wink if I weren’t careful. Now that I was in Europe, a place where it would be easier to fall deep into sin, I had to keep my mind pure. The last thing I wanted was for God to be angry with me and let the Communists capture and torture me just as payback for my wickedness. More praying—I would do more praying. I began to rise at five and tiptoe down the hall to the hotel broom closet.

  It was a good thing that I got myself under control, because it was clear that the Great Dragon controlled the Soviet Union. Our Bible smuggling operation would put us in a face-to-face conflict with him. The SGA staff taught us tactics in espionage and staged mock interrogations to prepare us for the road ahead, filled with forks and hairpin turns that could drop us into enemy hands at any moment. In years past several of their students had been caught behind the Iron Curtain and interrogated. In the midseventies Communist authorities strongly embraced Marx’s belief that religion was the “opiate of the masses” and were dead serious about keeping Bibles out of their countries. They strictly forbade the possession of religious literature, imprisoning and, in some instances, torturing those who possessed it. The idea of young American religious zealots driving vanloads of Bibles across their borders threw them into a fury, which in turn filled us with a great zeal.

  To get us ready for the spiritual warfare we were about to enter, SGA divided us into teams of three and gave us the details of our assignment: the route and location of our border crossing, the address where we would deliver the literature, the story we would stick to if caught by the secret police. Our route took us via Argonne and the Vosges Mountains to Stuttgart, through to Vienna and then over the Carpathians, dropping down and crossing the Hungarian border at Mosonmagyaróvár. Once in Hungary, we would separate, and our leader, Pete, a student from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, would deliver the Bibles while we kept watch in a coffee shop across the street.

  SGA was serious about training us in a realistic fashion. Once I learned the bogus story, I was blindfolded, and someone with rough hands grabbed me and pushed me forward, down some stairs into a dank basement filled with a series of narrow passageways—they were below the old hotel; I didn’t even known they existed—while an unfamiliar voice kept shouting in a heavy Eastern European accent, “Keep moving!” Disoriented, I hoped that God would help me avoid confessing details of the mission. Finally my captor pushed me into a stale-smelling room, threw me onto a chair, and tore off the blindfold. I looked up at crumbling cement walls and a drippy ceiling, then into the face of a stout, brutish-looking man I had never seen before. A single bare bulb swayed overhead, and the small table in front of me didn’t separate me far enough from another stranger, a skinny, rodentlike fellow with a scarred face and a lumpy potato nose. The swinging light cast shadows from side to side, further distorting my interrogator’s vile, smirking expression. (Later I learned that the men were actually Hungarian Christians who called themselves George and Jake and who, before their escape to the West, had been interrogated and tortured by the KGB for smuggling Bibles into Russia.) But at this moment it was easy to forget that this was all playacting and that these were really the good guys, not here to disfigure me but to prepare me to be a successful Bible smuggler.

  “Your friends have told us all about your mission,” Jake whispered in a sinister voice.

  I said nothing.

  “What did you think you were doing, transporting illegal literature into our country?”

  I stared back at him.

  His accent began to rise. “You are no longer in America, silly girl. We have your passport!” He leaned into my face with ferocious eyes. “Don’t you realize the seriousness of your situation? If you do not cooperate with us, you will never see your family again. America can’t help you now!”

  I suddenly felt tied to the noble fraternity of Christian martyrs, tortured for the gospel’s sake, whose stories Jean had horrified me with back in our college dorm room. I would handle myself with the stoicism of Faustines and Jovita, who silently endured their agony with such dignity that their tormentor, Calocerius, finally cried out, “Great is the God of the Christians!”

  I stared at the fearsome figure across the narrow table and confessed nothing. In the end George and Jake gave me high marks for my ability to resist. The intrigue of the interrogation simply reinforced my determination to enter the Troja
n horse and be wheeled into enemy territory, to present my body as a living sacrifice to God. I knew that this kind of commitment would, of course, hurl me into spiritual warfare with Satan. But as long as I kept up my morning prayers and stopped my mind from loitering with thoughts of sinewy British soldiers, I was sure that God would find favor with me and reward my self-sacrifice and zeal.

  Once our preparation ended, each team was assigned a white van from a fleet camouflaged in a nearby warehouse. We pulled up the floorboards, placed Bibles in the empty spaces, and nailed the planks back down. The next morning several teams fanned out over Eastern Europe, heading from various checkpoints to the borders of Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Romania. Within a few weeks, Hungarian border guards apprehended one of our teams. The terror-stricken expressions on the young American faces must have aroused suspicion at the crossing. Police pulled the van over and found the Bibles—contraband as serious as arms or illegal drugs.

  They confiscated the vehicle, separated the students, and threw them into dank prison cells, where a crooked-nosed official, with the same intensity as Jake, shrieked in their faces that they would never see their families again. He demanded they tell him the location of our base in France and the destination of the Bibles. Since the students would not confess, they spent a week isolated from one another, with little food and water, not knowing if they would ever see American soil again. Then suddenly one morning the police took them to the border and set them free. It took them several days to make their way back to our headquarters in France.

  When the lots were drawn, I was happy to be assigned to go into Poland; the Poles needed Christian support from the West now more than ever. That summer workers’ strikes against the Communist party racked the country. Six years before, such protests had prompted the government to send tanks into Gdansk and fire on demonstrators—the dead had numbered into the hundreds. Now in June of 1976, the same kind of labor trouble had broken out all over the country again. A man named Lech Walesa, chairman of the strike movement, had just been fired from his shipyard job as a result of his trade union activities—an action that was prompting rioting in Poznan, Gdansk, Ursus, and Radom. The local French paper reported that the secret police had gone into action and hundreds of workers were being arrested and sentenced to prison. I decided not to write to Mom and Dad and tell them where I was headed.

  My assignment was to take Christian textbooks into a religious camp north of Poznan and remain there to sing at tent meetings. The SGA leaders had heard that I sang alto in my high school and college choirs and decided to recruit me for the vocal/transport mission. My partner, Dee, a pretty girl with straw colored hair and such long limbs she seemed to have given up on controlling them, was a music major from Wheaton College and sang in a lovely soprano. Together we threw our open suitcases onto our beds and tucked Christian booklets into them as we discussed the summer’s political unrest and wondered what we might be walking into. And even if Poland turned out safe, we had to get the contraband through East Germany, the Doberman guard dog of Eastern Europe. We boarded a train from Lens, France, with tickets that would take us through Berlin to Poznan.

  All night the train tossed back and forth like a boat in heavy swells. I couldn’t sleep, thinking about my suitcase heavy with Christian literature, and so I slipped away past the snoring bodies slumped together, slid our compartment door apart, and made my way toward the open window to watch the train hurtling past Belgian cow pastures and West German villages. I let the rhythmic knocking and clacking mesmerize me as I stared, sleepy eyed, into the dark landscape.

  “Are you an American?” I heard a smooth, guttural masculine voice say.

  I looked over my shoulder and into the eyes of a slender, narrow faced young man with thick golden curls.

  “Yes,” I said. “And are you German?”

  “West German,” he said, and introduced himself as Tomas Schuster, a philosophy professor at Humboldt University of Berlin. His vocation showed, I thought, on his intelligent face: premature creases around ice blue eyes framed by round wire-rimmed glasses. He wore a silk Armani shirt, jeans, and Nikes, like a hip academic with a taste for Italian fashion; he spoke quietly, as if he were in church or about to cross behind the Iron Curtain.

  “I hate the Reds,” he murmured. “They rape Berlin daily. Yesterday a beautiful young woman stepped out of her car in the dead zone between checkpoints, and the bastards shot her like a dog.”

  I looked back out the window, feeling every click-clack of the rails in the pit of my stomach. I was a kilometer from Checkpoint Charlie in East Berlin, with a suitcase stuffed with contraband. Letting the breeze from the open window blow my hair into my eyes, I listened for the train engine five cars ahead of us, hoping it would drown out my panic, but its noise was only a distant rumor.

  The train screeched to a halt at Checkpoint Charlie, and passengers returned to their cabins as steam rose up the sides of the railcar. I fumbled with my passport, and Dee darted a firm “hold tight” look at me, herself becoming as serene and poised as Princess Grace. The cabin door flew open, and a tall, steely eyed East German policeman entered as though he’d stepped out of a sepia-toned World War Two movie, smirking with a cocky, affected assurance. He circled around the cabin and grabbed our passports one by one. His face looked flinty and papery white. As he reached for my passport, his lip twitched but revealed no real emotion; I tried to look tranquil while the bile percolated up my throat. Then, for some odd reason, he grinned and repeated the address listed on my passport.

  “Camas Prairie, Montana.” He threw his head back in a belly laugh, his brittle face cracking as if there were a secret joke about the place called Camas Prairie, Montana.

  Still laughing, the policeman handed me back the passport, turned on his heels with a click, and left the cabin without checking a single bag. Dee looked at me wide-eyed, then shook her head in disbelief. It was a sign, I told myself, that God had found favor with us and was rewarding our service for the cause of Christ. The train pushed on, and we traveled through the night, crossing the border into Poland without event. By 8:00 a.m. we were in Poznan.

  We stepped from the train and out into the dirt road, where a wizened old man drove us away on a wood-wheeled wagon brimming with newly cut hay. We rocked down the dirt road, past fields that looked like a Constable oil painting, eventually reaching an open meadow filled with tents. The camp had no electricity or running water. Even though the Poles understood little English, and we spoke only a few words of Polish, they laughed and yelled out, “Hullo, hullo, hullo, wulcome, wulcome,” as the wagon rocked into camp. The fact that our presence might easily have meant danger to them never seemed to cross their minds. On the contrary, they acted as though hosting us was akin to having the royal family over for dinner.

  Tucked into the center of the camp was an ancient farmhouse, where giggling Polish grandmas prepared borscht on a fiery stove, while a strapping teenage boy, grinning shyly, pumped water from the well for us to wash up after our long journey. We slipped down from the wagon and into the old stone hut, quietly delivering our religious literature to the camp preacher, who immediately led us back outside to a long table. Steaming dishes lined the twenty-foot rectangular table: dumpling soup and cabbage rolls, potato pancakes, kielbasa with sauerkraut, rye bread, poppy seed cake, and raisin pudding.

  For two weeks we camped there and were stuffed with food by our hosts. They also provided us with our own interpreter, an effusive, portly fellow named Toleck, who shadowed us and translated every word of Polish we heard. During the sweltering, lazy afternoons we swam in Goplo Lake; then at night Dee, in her flawless soprano, and I, in my faltering alto, sang hymns in front of the gregarious crowd of a hundred Eastern European Protestants. Although the Poles were fearless of official suppression and told us not to worry, our voices skipped a beat as a shadowy figure materialized from the woods each evening when we rose to sing to the crowd. Our hosts recognized the dark intruder as a government agent there
to take tally. The secret police left Dee and me alone but periodically reappeared during the day to take a Christian camper in for questioning. After two weeks of duets and pierogi, Dee and I left Poland with wonderful memories and several extra pounds. We traveled back to Billy-Montigne, satisfied that we had served God with honor, spiced by the hint of danger, behind the Iron Curtain.

  By August our Bible smuggling missions were over, and SGA gave our team two weeks to explore the French countryside before we flew home. We took our white vans and hit the road to Rheims, Amiens, and Lyon, exploring fragrant boutiques, ordering brioche in tiny bistros, and visiting World War Two museums. We slept on the beaches of Dunkerque, then headed south to Paris, the City of Light. As we approached, I looked into the enchanted cityscape and felt the energy of a thousand years in one moment. The stunning lines of the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame against the sky lured me into a renewed love of the world and its history and left my body bristling with a strange vitality. In the Louvre, I marveled at the enigmatic face of Mona Lisa and the marble white perfection of Venus de Milo, caught a glimpse of the French Revolution of Antoine-Jean Gros, and the Italian Renaissance of Raphael. We drove out of Paris to the royal court at Versailles, where, walking the granite halls, I could almost hear Louis XIV shouting, and Marie Antoinette’s bewildered cries as she was seized by the mob. Back in the boutique district, I bought crystal at Aurelia Paradis, and lace panties from Etam. At Montmartre, in the midst of a village of lively painters, I had my portrait sketched and drank espresso at the Closerie des Lilas, where, fifty years before, the virile Ernest Hemingway watered more than a thirst for wine.