Losing My Religion

Igrew up in a strict fundamentalist Baptist home beside a mud-brown river in Elkview, West Virginia. From the door of my house to the front doors of the Baptist church, where my dad preached for thirty-eight years, was a walk of about fifty steps. From the back of the house, once you stepped out of the yard you were standing before the twin metal doors of the pole barn that served as the church gymnasium. Inside were two sets of basketball hoops on padded poles; the floor markings were not those of a basketball court however, but of two AWANA circles. AWANA is a club where children have team competitions on the circle and learn arts and crafts, but that is just a way to get the kids in. The real purpose of AWANA is to make kids memorize Bible verses and imbibe the Absolute Truth they contain.

I will give you the short version of what I grew up learning was Absolute Truth: God created the world fully formed, sometime between six- and ten-thousand years ago. Eve sinned first, and then Adam with her, bringing death and suffering to all earthly creatures, and eternal hellfire to humans after death. God established different governments, or dispensations, for dealing with people and giving them a way to get to heaven and avoid hell; we are in the age of grace, which means you are saved from hell by asking Jesus to come into your heart, save you, and be your personal Lord and Savior—there is no other way. All these claims are true because the Bible says they are true and the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God; the Bible is the infallible Word of God because it is written in the Bible. Finally, if you question any of these articles of faith you are at best backsliding, and at worst, not saved and dangling dangerously over eternal hellfire.

This was the constant driving message of my pastor father, and the guiding principles of my mother’s work as a keeper at home. I came to ignore it as best I could—which you had to do to keep from becoming a basket case thinking of all those millions of people dying and tumbling into eternal suffering, all because you had not gotten to them in time with the Good News of Jesus. When I was in high school, my chief interests were playing soccer and writing bad poetry to a long series of girls I loved with all the passion in my youthful heart. I went to church, as they say, every time the doors were open. The soccer team and the Elkview Baptist Church youth group were my circles.

The youth group was vibrant and growing at this time—a cult of personality, as those kinds of bursts always are, though parents speak of how the Lord is working or the Spirit is moving among the kids. The personality in EBC’s youth group at this time was Joe.

Joe was one of those youth pastors who seemed to have a sure calling, the kind of guy people called on fire for the Lord. He preached fearlessly, with the zeal of a prophet; unlike others who believed they had the gift of prophecy, Joe did not see it as an excuse to be a loud and judgmental asshole. He was open and honest, transparent about his struggles. It drew us kids to him. He and his wife opened their home to us, were endlessly patient with the teenage noise, hormones, strife.

Joe’s Sunday school classroom was packed. He led emotionally charged prayer meetings and revival gatherings, full of crying and repentance. He had a beard and crazy hair, and eyes as wild as John Brown raiding Harper’s Ferry.

In 1983, an anti-rock and roll wave that swept through the group after they went downtown to a Marty Tingelhoff crusade where the evils of rock ‘n roll music were presented along with musical demonstrations. Tingelhoff played The Eagles and Led Zeppelin and ELO backwards—and, yes, Queen’s “Another...