Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  “Dad enjoyed being mean to us—it was his hobby, like some men watch football or tie flies, Dad’s passion was cruelty. He was a squat, flat faced man with a permanent expression of contempt. He looked like one of those ratty, cigarette reeking carnies with Brylcreem hair swept back in hoodlum waves, the kind of guy who would love to see a kid stumble off the Ferris wheel and puke all over the grass—that would give him a real hoot. He logged trees for a living, but his real calling was alcoholism. He’d come home smelling like turpentine, his red suspenders stretched tight over his filthy T-shirt and liquor belly, with the darkest, deadliest expression a man could wear—like he’d kill you for a nickel. And we were never quite sure that he wasn’t about to. He’d crash through the front door, collapse into a dining room chair, and demand that Mom get him something—anything: water, coffee, a Lucky Lager. He’d shout that she was such a slut the least she could do was have coffee ready when he got home after a long day. He’d say she’d probably been sleeping with the milkman all afternoon. That was the only provocation Mom needed.”

  David continued, his eyes still trancelike, “She would tear the percolator plug from the wall and throw the whole thing across the room at him. Then Dad would burst off the chair like a crazed bull and leap on her, slugging her with his closed fists. Jimmy, my younger brother, and I would jump on his back and try to pull him off, which made him leave her lying in a heap and start punching us until we couldn’t see straight. When Dad wasn’t beating us, he was telling us how completely worthless we were. ‘If you don’t break it, you’ll shit all over it,’ he would say.” David then laughed the way people do when they don’t really think something is funny at all. “When I played third base on the high school baseball team, he refused to go to any of the games, because he said he knew we’d never win.”

  “Oh, my God, David,” I said, “that’s terrible.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing he got saved a few years ago, or he probably would have killed someone. Dad and I got along great for a few years after his conversion, but lately he’s been getting pretty mean again—not drinking or anything, just dry-drunk stuff. You know, verbally abusive to Mom.” With that David abruptly ended his story and said, “I’m not feeling so great, let’s call it quits for the day.”

  Hours later, as I sat on my bed in the dorm, I was still feeling a bit shaken by what David had told me when Jean popped her head into the room. “Hey,” she said, “what’s new with you and Mr. Good-looking?”

  “Well we’ve finished memorizing Philippians, and we’re starting in on Colossians.”

  “No, goofball, I mean on the relationship front—what’s up?”

  “Well he is very sweet and incredibly smart.”

  “I think you’d better put your hooks in this guy before he graduates,” Jean said in her no-nonsense way. “Know what I mean? You aren’t going to find a man like that walking the streets of Anytown, U.S.A. He’s a rare breed. And, come on, he’s nuts about you.”

  That night I thought about what Jean and Dan had said to me, and I told myself that I had never been one to shirk the responsibility of a decision—some might even say I was too impetuous—but I was nineteen years old, and the way I saw it, once the Lord spoke to you through things like powerful attraction and sympathy for someone, together with direct counsel from two spirit filled Christians who happened to be your best friends, you’d better jump on the God inspired counsel before He got weary of trying to get your attention.

  The next day, when David and I met to start memorizing Colossians, I said without flinching, “I think God wants us to get married.”

  “Wow …” David looked up from his Bible, smiling shyly. He hesitated for only a moment before saying, “Well, I’m not about to argue with the Lord.”

  So just like that, David and I started to chart our life together. Our plan was this: After he graduated in a few months, David would move back to Washington State and get a job. I would stay in Montana and finish my degree, and a week after I graduated from Big Sky Bible College, we would get married, move to Seattle, and start seminary together.

  That spring, the day he left, it rained lightly as I stood in my dorm room and watched the rich ferns and evergreens drip on the sidewalk two stories below. Down on the street I could see David loading cardboard boxes into a white panel truck. Half the boxes were lined up on the curb; the other half, in the aluminum lined interior of the truck, stacked neatly, carefully bound with brown shipping tape. It was a long step down from inside the truck, and as I watched him hop heavily onto the asphalt, I felt a rush of love flutter deep within my rib cage, a sensation that was exhilarating but almost frightening too, as though all the light of spring were filling my lungs, making them visible through the cotton material of my shirt. In a year I would be married to this handsome man. I watched him, olive-skinned, his arms rippling with muscles, his dark curls wet with rain. He was breathing hard too, though from loading boxes and not, like me, from longing. David swung himself up into the truck and lifted another heavy package.

  “I love you,” I said to him even though I knew he couldn’t hear me. And I did love him: his great outward calm, his unflappability, his even temper, his brilliant mind, his sad past, his obvious respect for the opinions of women. That last trait comforted me the most. It was something that had been dancing in the back of my mind for some time now: how lucky I was to have found a Christian man who didn’t talk about the importance of women’s submission. In the past I had worried about how once a woman got married, her husband took over as head of the household and insisted that her main role was to serve as his godly helper. I knew that David would never demand such blind obedience. I could tell by the way he treated me now; Jean thought so too. What a great life we were going to have together—equals in the Lord’s service.

  I looked down at my watch and realized that I was almost due to meet David in the academic center to say good-bye. I put my Gore-Tex raincoat on and ran across the street. As I opened the huge black-glassed door of the foyer, David reached out from the entry-way and grabbed my hand, which was unusual since we tried to keep our physical contact to a strict minimum. I followed him silently up the corridor while a yielding feeling settled over me like a spell. There was something magical about him, I thought. He pulled me into the empty auditorium with its high domed ceiling and orderly rows of black seats with a spiny projector jutting up front.

  “I’m going to miss you,” David said, the enormous, carpetless room returning his voice with an echo.

  “I’ll miss you too.”

  I felt like something important was about to happen. I found myself sucking in my upper lip and biting a row along its underside and then taking the bottom in and doing the same, as though I were finishing an ear of corn. He pulled me against him for the first time ever, and I could smell the wet musk of his hair. I looked up at his dark, shapely ears, which lay snug to his head in a way that made me want to feel them, so I reached up and touched them lightly; they were softer than I had expected. He shivered and grabbed my face and kissed my lips—our first kiss. My knees went limp; he held me against him. My breasts were young; they wanted to be touched, and I think he knew it, but being so dedicated to the Lord, he dropped his hands to his side. Hearing laughter down the hall, we broke away from each other, afraid that someone would burst into the auditorium and find us there, doing things that people committed to Bill Gothard’s teachings would never do. We both stumbled backward, and he smiled and said, “I think I should go now.” I could still taste him, smell him. What loveliness it was. What utter loveliness.

  We ran outside into the rain, which had darkened the concrete sidewalks and was pushing heavily against the tree branches, moving them gently back and forth above our heads. Suddenly I was crying, gulping back the air—holding it in, letting it out. I felt as though a giant hand were squeezing my chest, rhythmically expelling the blood in my heart, swish … swish … swish … David pulled me to him again, clutching me to his body, his jacket b
unching around his shoulders, and whispered in my ear, “I have to go now, my love. I’ll call you tonight, when I get to Missoula.” I watched the white panel truck pull out as my tears melted into the rain dripping down my face and neck.

  David did call that night, and he wrote letters almost everyday during the next year. I was so heartsick and lonely for him that I trudged through classes almost oblivious to the months ticking by. He moved back into his parents’ house because he didn’t manage to land a job and thus didn’t have any money, and I could tell when his voice came scratching across the line that his spirits were low. Then one night the phone rang, and David’s voice sounded desperate, almost as if he had been drinking. “Did I ever tell you about the time that I was in high school and I came home from class to find Dad demolishing the furniture with a sledgehammer? When he started to blow holes in the ceiling with a shotgun, I went to the phone and began to dial the police. He aimed the shotgun at me and said, ‘Put the phone down now if you know what’s good for you.’ I know I should love him, Carlene, now that he’s a Christian, but he is still so angry and cruel. And Mom doesn’t help. She craves the battles they fight and even encourages them. Even though they don’t physically abuse each other any more, it’s still the same mental torture.”

  “Isn’t there any place else you can go? Take a job anywhere and move out?”

  “It looks like maybe this position at Boeing, as a machinist’s helper, will work out, and as soon as it does, I’m gone,” David said. “Maintaining my spiritual life was so much easier at Bible college. This last few weeks I’ve really been fighting the flesh.”

  “Fighting the flesh.” The words stuck in my mind, but I didn’t ask David what he meant because it could have been so many things, various temptations we considered a direct assault to spirituality, ranging from lusting over the opposite sex to neglecting to spend an hour on our knees in prayer each morning. He was such a fine example of a “prayer warrior,” he must be having difficulties with his prayer life, I thought. I was more concerned that the sound of his voice, which I had come to recognize as strong and confident, now sounded weak and afraid.

  “I think you should get out; this is taking too much of a toll on you.”

  “Well, Bill Gothard says children should resolve their conflicts with their parents, and until I’m married I am still under the authority of my father, which makes me think I should stay here and deal with my feelings of anger toward him.”

  “Okay, I understand,” I said, but I was not sure that Bill Gothard, never having any children himself, was necessarily the authority on father-son relationships.

  I was glad that David could at least feel complete acceptance from my parents, who adored him. For years my brother had reported to everyone at home what an amazing Christian David was, winning preaching awards and being such a perfect example to the other students on campus. Dad and Mom had met him at the airport the summer he and Dan returned from smuggling Bibles into Eastern Europe, and had immediately taken to the handsome, self-assured young man. Once we decided to marry, they knew he would make a great addition to the family. They were also proud that David and I had decided to attend seminary together in the fall, after our marriage.

  I hardly saw David that year; our primary contact was over the phone and through letters. Our wedding was planned a week after my graduation, and the closer it approached, the more jitters I was getting. I was a twenty-year-old virgin and had never known any real intimacy with anyone. I hadn’t seen David in so long the physical passion that had developed between us as we memorized Scripture and during our brief encounter in the academic center seemed like a distant dream. But a week after I graduated from Bible college, I stood in the foyer of the small white church in Lolo, Montana. David stood up front, twenty-six years old, tall and slim, his solemn face revealing an uncharacteristic lack of self-confidence, something I had never seen in him before. He seemed as apprehensive as I was as he faced me, looking down the aisle in the presence of God, friends, and family. The sun streaming through the stained-glass window merged him with the wedding party up front—Jean, Dan, and the others—in a slow rainbow of color, white softening to pink, purple merging from scarlet and royal blue.

  In the foyer, waiting for the wedding march to begin, I gripped the wad of pastel dyed daisies and baby’s breath, the words What am I doing? battering around in my skull like swallows trapped in an attic. Was I really sure about this? It was too late now for such questions, I told myself. In the pews all eyes shifted to the doorway, waiting for Dad and me to start down the aisle. As the wedding march began—their signal to rise—we stepped through a path of strewn petals.

  That night as I stalled in the bathroom, I felt dread and anxiety instead of eager anticipation. I lingered, hesitating to put on my white lace nightgown, brushing my teeth another time, reap-plying mascara. I thought, So this is what Rebecca felt like when she became Isaac’s bride—a man that she didn’t know. David seemed as uncertain and inexperienced as I. Gone was the Bible smuggling bravado and student body president self-assurance I once knew. After months of equating physical contact with sin, we fumbled at each other, thick fingered and red faced. We’re just used to thinking of sex as a vastly illegal drug, I told myself. We’ll learn to relax and this will start to be fun. But even so I could still feel my teenage expectations crash and lie in splinters on the frigid floor. I would have to gather them and embrace my new life.

  Five

  A New Life

  WE DROVE TO WASHINGTON and found a dilapidated farmhouse that we could rent cheaply. Built in the 1920s, it had chipped paint and lots of bare wood—one unwatched candle and the whole thing would have gone up in flames. The house was not far from David’s parents, in the little logging town where he grew up.

  In our spare time, which was plentiful because we didn’t have enough money even to go to the movies, we kept practicing at making love, and the situation did get better. We just needed to slow down and quit thinking that it was evil and remember that we were married and that God had said sex was okay once you were legally bound in matrimony forever. “Sex should be fun,” some preachers even said from the pulpit. One night after making love, the air abruptly filled, every cubic inch of it, with the damp ozone smell of a summer storm. I got up and walked over to the window, where I idly traced the cracks in the caulk. Even though the rain was coming down in torrential sheets, I thought about how peaceful it was. “What a beautiful thunderstorm,” I said to David, thinking we would have many more years of seeing such things together, that we would stand in front of the windows season after season, watching the different kinds of Washington rain—there’s so much of it, and it changes all the time. It would be just the two of us, watching the rain knock the fall leaves from the broadleaf maples or melt the winter snow into the rusting storm drains. From now onward into forever, this would happen. We would laugh at our children playing in the cloudbursts, splashing in the puddles, jumping up and down in their yellow galoshes. After we died, we would observe it together from heaven, David and I. Into eternity, I thought. After the Rapture and the thousand-year reign of Jesus and the Final Judgment, we would still be watching the rain shower down onto the earth.

  The rain seemed to affect David differently, though. He didn’t like it the way I did, probably because he had grown up with it, and it wasn’t so new to him. He started to lumber up out of bed late most mornings, calling in sick to his job at Boeing and falling into deep, unexplained depressions. He said it must be the town, because it reminded him of his violent childhood. We tried to discuss the awful things that had happened to him as a boy, but that didn’t seem to relieve the sadness either. I couldn’t help but notice, as we talked about the anger he felt toward his folks, that his eyes would become as cold as a barren landscape. Sometimes he seemed to be living far down inside himself, in a secret hidden passageway. His only solace came when he’d have a chance to get away and read the Bible, mostly off at the church library in town, or late at night
in his study.

  I had to admit that David seemed much different than he had in college. But I knew this was simply a time of adjustment for him. At Big Sky he had clear direction from God. Working for Boeing didn’t challenge him or put his talents to use. Once he was serving the Lord again I was sure things would change. It’s why I was so relieved when David started—and I went along to audit—classes at Northwest Baptist Seminary in Tacoma. We arrived on the first day after driving down the winding road through the huge old brick estate overlooking Puget Sound. The grounds, built in 1923 by the Weyerhaeuser family, had an Ivy League charm and made my heart race with hope and expectation. Rose gardens, a stained-glass chapel, and a greenhouse surrounded the lofty academic structures. The place was enchanting. But when we stepped into class, I knew something wasn’t right when several of the seminarians turned and stared at me. By lunchtime I found out that I was the only woman attending NBS, because it refused to grant theology degrees to women, following the First Letter of Paul to Timothy 2, which forbids women to hold roles of leadership in the church. The fact that I entered the school dressed in blue jeans also added to the offense (any type of denim was completely unacceptable attire for a future pastor’s wife). I decided to keep my ears and eyes open to make sure that I didn’t commit any more terrible blunders.

  It was then that I remembered a seminar Jean and I stumbled into by mistake during a pastors’ conference at the Bible college years before. We were headed for the lecture on Christian Apologetics but were so absorbed in our conversation that by the time we burst into room 223 instead of 234, it was too late. Jean looked at me sideways, shrugged her shoulders, and we sat down. Up front was a long rectangular table with seven women perched in a row. On the blackboard the lecture title read BEING A GODLY ADDITION TO YOUR HUSBAND’S MINISTRY.