Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  Thoughts of Hemingway’s Paris caused the carnal yearnings trapped inside my young flesh to burst forth like ale from a tapped barrel. On the Left Bank, I watched a young girl lean over to kiss her companion on the cheek, twice, once here and then once there. The slow beauty of it was so insouciant: the way that they did things in Paris. You could feel it, the passion of Sartre and Picasso, Joyce and de Beauvoir, haunting the narrow streets. I thought of Hemingway, living there in the 1920s in a stone apartment, with flowers cascading from windows that overlooked the Seine, standing, gazing above the rooftops of Paris as he agonized to create his “one true sentence.” All at once I was his lover, observing him bare chested and warm, pulling him away from his literary angst to make damp love to me while sheer silk curtains billowed in the summer breeze.

  Paris enticed me into a warm lust for life. For a brief glimpse, the city illuminated the dark lens of religious pessimism that I had faithfully worn as prescribed. Its beauty revived a deep longing inside me to experience all the sensual pleasures that the world had to offer, its sumptuousness washing over me, releasing the oppression that had dogged me since the drive over the empty prairie highway to Big Sky Bible College. I felt an urge to flee from the group, to slip away to attend the Sorbonne and live la vie de bohème. As I looked around at the city, I wondered how I could ever return to Bible college, and at that moment the doubts that would come back to trouble me years later first surfaced in my soul. Suddenly Christianity seemed a shortsighted, silly assessment of the human condition—just then our driver yelled, “Load up!”

  At that moment, I decided to ignore such questioning and plung forward into the future.

  Four

  A Leap of Faith

  I FELT AS THOUGH I were a hologram, one that changed as it was tilted under the light: one tilt, I was a dedicated Bible smuggler; the other, a lustful sinner—diametric opposites, never appearing at the same moment, but always present. The hologram shifted a degree, and I stepped into the van. As we pulled out of Paris, I sat in silence feeling as though a clammy burial shroud were being wound about my limbs. In desperation I remembered the apostle Paul’s battle with the flesh and his cry for help in the Letter to the Romans: “O, wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” God answered by instructing him to deny his flesh and serve “the Law of God.”

  I told myself it was my weakness and lack of dedication that brought about such lust and wrestling with the spirit. I asked God to forgive my wicked, wandering heart and tried to ignore the world’s enticements, keeping my head down as we traveled back to Billy-Montigne, so that I might avoid all the voluptuous temptations of the magnificent countryside.

  The next week I flew home from France just in time to start the fall quarter. When I arrived at the Great Falls airport, my parents, my brother, and David Brant met me. Dan and David had traveled throughout Eastern Europe, performing far more dangerous assignments than anyone on our SGA team. Instead of literature, they had smuggled currency to Christians behind the Iron Curtain. Transporting American money was a greater offense than sneaking in Bibles and carried a mandatory prison sentence in Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and Hungary. David had sewn hundred-dollar bills inside the lining of his jacket and, without knowing the language, sneaked them to Christians in each of those countries, miraculously avoiding detection, just like Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me. As I listened to him tell hair-raising stories of near apprehension and imprisonment, I thought about how brave and handsome he was. It was obvious that he didn’t wage the same battle with sinful thoughts that I did.

  Once I got back to campus, Jean threw her arms around me and told me about her steady walk with the Lord, which had brought on a very fruitful summer. Her mission group had led twenty Belgian souls to Christ, many of them Catholic converts to the faith, finally come to know true Christianity as we Baptists did.

  Back in the quiet of my room, a fall rainstorm beat the window with a fiery sounding crackle as my faith shivered. Why was resisting the flesh—just following the Bible and rejecting the world and everything it offered—so hard for me? I started having nightmares about my wayward mind, dreaming that I was making a distressing journey though a succession of hostile landscapes. I was a dazed wartime nurse, lost among the rubble of London in 1945, running through a labyrinth of bombed-out multistory buildings; then a bewildered Puritan, shaking in a dank prison and waiting to be examined by the magistrate for the devil’s mark. In the final dream I was fleeing from the German inquisitor (a man who had the same mailbox mouth as Mr. Foreman), hiding in a barn loft and peering out into the quiet snow that whispered softly down to the earth. I woke with a start and, from my top bunk, looked out the dorm room window into an early snowfall.

  I crawled down from the bunk, put on my bathrobe, and headed for the shower. As hot pinpricks of water hit my face, I thought about the philosophy of the nineteenth-century Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, who said that a life devoted to art and pleasure would fill a person with despair. He reasoned that once they experienced this hopelessness, they would often try to alleviate it by leading a more ethical, rational life, which would also lead them to despair. The only way to find true meaning, he argued, was to embrace a nonrational act: the leap of faith. Kierkegaard taught that true belief begins when people understand the limitations of art and intellectual thought, and take a leap over reason into paradox—to know by not knowing, to see by not seeing, to believe beyond thinking. Since Christian asceticism and dogma embody ironies that are offensive to reason, faith must be adopted by virtue of the absurd and not the rational, he said.

  Ah-hah, I thought. Just the approach I needed. Instead of dwelling on the difficult aspects of Christianity, I would throw myself into the arms of God and thank my lucky stars that I had been saved and set apart from a lost and corrupt world. A great gust of relief began to sweep over me as I imagined my “hallowed standing in Christ,” as our professors called it. I was a chosen child of God. It seemed that the Lord rewarded my obedience a few weeks later when David Brant stepped up to me in the checkout line at the bookstore, where I was buying a copy of The Collected Works of Søren Kierkegaard, and said, “Carlene, I would be honored if you would accompany me to the winter banquet.”

  The eyes of the freshman in front of me widened, and she looked back and grinned as if to say, “It’s your lucky day, girl.” My mind started to race, and I felt too jangled to breathe, with barely enough breath to blurt out, “That would be great!” Inwardly I grimaced, knowing I had sounded far too eager and desperate as I clutched the cover of my not yet purchased book, searing sweaty fingerprints into the image of poor Kierkegaard’s dour head. David smiled shyly. “How about if I pick you up in front of your dorm at six thirty?”

  “Sounds great,” I squawked, now completely out of oxygen.

  I ran back to the dorm and burst into Jean’s room. “David Brant just asked me to the winter banquet!”

  “Well I’ll be a son of a gun,” she said, which was the closest thing to strong language I had ever heard from Jean. She jumped up and grabbed me. “You see? Look how God has rewarded you for working so hard at your studies and doing a dangerous summer mission.” I knew she felt a little like Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady; I was her Pygmalion. “You’ve made a marvelous transformation since I first met you. David Brant isn’t going to mess around with anyone who isn’t completely dedicated to the Lord.”

  Within days the campus was buzzing about our date, because although many of the girls had crushes on David, he hadn’t asked anyone out in the three years he’d attended Big Sky Bible College. When people brought the subject up around Jean, she said it didn’t surprise her one little bit, because I was just as dedicated to the Lord as David was, being such a serious student and Bible smuggling missionary and all.

  The evening of the banquet, Jean and I chatted happily as we slipped on our long gowns. She wore a Kelly green velvet formal that brought out the highlights in her auburn hair and took
her from quite handsome to strikingly beautiful. I put on my floor-length white dress with capped sleeves and an empire bodice, which had small pink roses circling the scooped neckline. “Let me do your hair,” Jean said, grabbing the brush and pulling it back into a loose bun, letting long wisps fall down my face and back. “There, that’ll get him,” she said, beaming.

  David stood on the front lawn, tall, dark, and Clark Gable handsome, grinning his take-no-prisoners smile as I stepped onto the grass, which immediately swelled beneath my wobbly feet. The tingling warmth rose through the soles of my white high heels, up my legs, and radiated through my body—a thrumming wave. “You look lovely,” he said, and my knees collided, causing me to grab the car door and duck into his yellow ’69 Galaxy before sheer anxiety caused them to give out completely. I was glad we were sharing the ride into Lewistown with another couple; we could chat about classes, and my body would have a chance to regain its composure. We arrived at the Argosy Banquet Hall, where David and I walked to the front of the room and took our chairs on the raised platform. President Longston had asked David to serve as master of ceremonies for the evening, and he and his wife sat next to us, smiling broadly in presidential fashion.

  The banquet waitress delivered our food as the crowd mingled below, starched and uncomfortable, inhibited by their formal attire, new dates, or perhaps both. David smiled sideways at me and placed his hand ever so lightly on the fork, an inch from my hand. He leaned toward me, grinning a mischievous, conspiratorial, we’rein-this-together grin.

  “Someone needs to liven this crowd up,” he said.

  I could feel his body close to mine, and his presence made a jolt of heat course up through my spine as he held my gaze for a moment before turning and rising to the podium. I’d never seen anyone move so comfortably; such poise and control in a man was, for me, a disarming sight. Time slowed down. Inside my head the room grew quiet, still and warm. David greeted the crowd, telling jokes and introducing the speakers with his signature wit and lighthearted humor. The crowd relaxed immediately, laughing and teasing him back. People whispered and smiled at us sitting on the platform. I could see them commenting to one another, and I imagined them saying, “What a marvelous preacher that David Brant is going to make—Carlene Cross had better hold on tight to that guy.”

  We laughed our way back home that evening, David still in master of ceremonies form. Sitting in the passenger’s seat I had a chance to study him, intimately, as I had never seen him before from the auditorium of the chapel or the sidelines of a basketball game. I noticed a dimple in the side of his mouth that appeared only when he frowned, a dimple to break your heart. Close up, I could see that his eyes had tiny flecks of green and that he had a wild patch of white hair in the back of his head, contrasting with the jet-black waves. Once we got back to campus, the other couple thanked David for the ride and jumped out. He pulled his rumbling yellow Galaxy up to my dorm, shut the motor off, and walked me to the front door.

  “Would you like to get together to memorize Scripture?” he asked.

  “Sure, that sound’s great,” I said, acting casual but catching the signal he was sending me, which extended into the future and made my insides melt. I smiled as I backed into the dorm, tripping over the mat. “Thanks, David, I had a wonderful time.”

  As the door closed between us, he stood motionless with his hands clasped together and called back, “Me too.”

  I was in heaven. In our circles, asking a member of the opposite sex to memorize Scripture with you was a portentous sign. Bowling at Snowy Lanes or having pizza at Big Cheese Pizza was one thing, but memorizing the Bible represented completely different motives—something significant and eternal.

  We met in the lobby of the administration building the next day, a Saturday, and although it was bone-chilling, it was one of those bright Montana winter days that make you feel as though spring might get impatient and burst forth any minute. David was waiting inside, standing tall and erect as always, with his Bible tucked under his arm, authority radiating from every pore, along with a boyish sexuality.

  “Great day, huh?” I said.

  “Just wonderful,” he replied. “So, what book do you think we should start with?”

  “Start with”—I liked the sound of that.

  While our mouths did a dialogue dance about which passages might be appropriate—something very formal and serious—our bodies were busy having another conversation. The tingling which started in my chest was now moving down into my hands and toes. David must have been affected by the same feeling, because suddenly he leaned toward me.

  “Let’s talk about something other than the Scripture,” he said softly, in a murmur that carried a kind of miraculous intimacy and fidelity. It sounded as if he were whispering to me in bed, or at least that’s what I imagined since I did not know that kind of love yet. It was odd: at that proximity he felt like the sun to me, warm and delicious. Dear God, I want to put my hands on him—not anything carnal, mind you, but just as a test. Just to touch his face or his arms and feel whether the heat coming off them was as hot and exciting as I imagined it to be. I knew that if I did touch him, if I felt his skin and then the muscle beneath it, I could get to the soul underneath that hard muscle. But then I realized that I shouldn’t be talking to God like that, He being completely holy and without sexual cravings and so on. So I said to David, “Do you have a cat back home in Washington?” which was the only question I could think of in my addled state.

  “I have a dog named Pandy,” he said, smiling. “He’s a cute little thing with white hair and black spots, but with a bad itch that we can’t seem to cure.”

  David told me that his family had taken Pandy to every vet in their hometown, but none of them could figure out what was wrong. He went on and on about the dog, and even though I was not particularly fond of dogs, I listened politely, which is the thing to do when you want to get a better look at someone. The skylight illuminated the waves in his raven hair, and his eyes were soft and warm as he spoke—which made it obvious that he loved Pandy the dog a lot. Then he asked me the dreaded question about what it was like to grow up on a cattle ranch (which he knew about because he was friends with my brother, Dan). I told him more than I wanted to about the boring ordeal, but he listened to me as if everything I said, even commonplace occurrences like chasing cows, was the most noteworthy event he’d heard recounted in a long time—he was a real gentleman.

  David and I began to meet daily to memorize Scripture, and I quickly realized that the rumors about his intellectual prowess and spiritual commitment were all true—he had at least ten whole books of the Bible memorized and could quote them, word perfect, from beginning to end. And although the attraction between us was sometimes almost unbearable, he never once tried to touch me. David was an avid follower of the Fundamentalist leader Bill Gothard, who taught that Christian couples should refrain from all contact during courtship. “I believe that if we follow Bill Gothard’s suggestions, God will bless our relationship,” he would tell me.

  “All right” I said, being less of an expert on both Bill Gothard and God.

  “That way we won’t have lust obscuring our senses,” he added.

  Such a commitment, along with the fact that we were sequestered in the mountains at this remote Bible college, did give us plenty of time to memorize Scripture and talk about important doctrines like dispensationalism, transubstantiation, and premillennialism. Even so, some of our talking evolved into a rather interesting non-verbal kind of communication. Like the day when we were having lunch, going over chapter 4 of Philippians, and David grabbed a large red apple out of his brown paper bag and slowly started taking bites, watching me hungrily as I quoted verses 1 through 4. Suddenly with a soft smile on his face, he handed the apple to me. I held it in my hand and gazed down at the marks his teeth had made, raising it to my mouth and putting my lips and then my tongue on the spot where his teeth had been. The apple’s juicy sweetness warmed me as it made its way down my thr
oat. Somehow the whole procedure made me look in the opposite direction from David, in an effort to keep him from knowing what I was thinking.

  “All right,” he said, “we’d better start on verse 5, ‘Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand.’”

  That very day my brother Dan called on the intercom after I returned to the dorm. “Hey, sis,” he said, “do you have a minute to talk?”

  We met in the student union building, where we took a chair amid the buzzing crowd, everyone stomping the winter snow off their feet and milling around the tables, holding paper cups of coffee by the rim to keep from burning their fingers, laughing and commiserating about the upcoming Christian Epistemology test.

  “It’s wonderful that you and David have been spending so much time together,” Dan said. “You know he’s one of the most incredible Christian men I’ve ever met. He is such a strong spiritual leader and mentor to all of the guys in the dorm.” Dan hesitated for a minute and then said, “He would be such a great catch, Carlene.”

  I told Dan I would think about his advice. He was a smart guy, and it was good counsel. David would be graduating in the spring, and there was a long list of girls behind me who would jump at the chance to swoop him up. I also knew that besides Dan, David was the most respectful boy on campus when it came to a woman’s rights.

  Within a week David and I had finished memorizing Philippians and were discussing which book to tackle next, when he said, right out of the blue, “Carlene, my father was a very violent alcoholic,” a fact I already knew from campus legend. Then his eyes sort of glazed over, and he began to talk in a tone and mood I hadn’t heard before, describing his childhood in a way that would have sent Dracula into a cold sweat.