Jesus Sound Explosion (review)

As a person who actually does, in fact, feel uncomfortable saying "under God" during the Pledge of Allegiance, I hardly expected Mark Curtis Anderson's memoir, Jesus Sound Explosion, to engage me. But in its own, quirky way – like all good memoirs – it allowed me an all-access pass to a world wholly foreign and fascinating: that of a Baptist minister's family.

Being part of such a family, of course, meant Anderson was constantly subjected to close scrutiny by his father's congregation, a fact that haunted him as he grew up and battled fierce desires to be a part of the world around him instead of a mere spectator. The most powerful temptation, perhaps, came in the form of rock and roll, which Anderson's mother broadly, hilariously labeled as "jazzy music."

When the Fab Four's sound began to lure Anderson as a child, his mother explained that John Lennon once said that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Anderson writes, "That's all I needed to hear. Case closed, deal done. Still, whenever I heard a song by The Beatles at a school friend's house, I wanted to hear it over and over, so I'd be able to play it in my head later." Already, it seemed, the struggle for Anderson's soul was on.

But what the memoir makes clear is that rock and roll did not contribute to Anderson dismissing his faith so much as it provided him a vehicle with which to root out and question Christianity's contradictions. In one instance, he held fast to his affection for Bruce Springsteen's music as a sixteen year old in California, despite pressure from his Baptist friends.

Church taught me about a darkness called sin that originated with Satan, the King of Darkness. The one way to overcome darkness: become born again by asking for forgiveness of sin, by accepting Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Savior. As I listened to Darkness on the Edge of Town, though, I couldn't call this darkness "sin," I couldn't call the people who lived in the darkness "sinners" or "degenerates," and I couldn't positively say that they needed Jesus. I hadn't yet lost my desire to proselytize, but I knew that I didn't have the words to save these people, and they didn't need anything that I had to offer.

In an age of religious extremism, it's refreshing to hear a rational voice combing through the knotty difficulties of faith; and though the book concentrates on how and why Anderson ultimately left the fold, despite his family and upbringing, such moments demonstrate just how deeply he cleaved to, and how closely he examined, his Christianity.

Anderson informs readers in the introduction, though, that he has indeed fallen away from the church. When we first meet him, he's smoking on the porch of his house in Minneapolis. He ponders his crumbling marriage, waiting to work a shift at a record store called "Electric Fetus," when his sixth grade Sunday school teacher suddenly pedals by on a bike. This man, along with everyone else in the area Anderson had known as a child, had seemed to stop existing for Anderson, so he's shocked at the sight. "There I was then, here I am now, and now looks nothing like I pictured. The straight and narrow way has been abandoned, the way to get home has been lost, but Wally Johnson, it seems, has been riding by all this time." The quiet, resonant power of the anecdote frames Anderson's story perfectly, articulating a sense of wistful loss regarding the past, despite its difficulties, while also demonstrating that the seemingly less restrictive present has its share of challenges and heartache, too.

And while rock and roll played a part in Anderson's departure from organized religion, girls and beer (not surprisingly) also offered pleasures he found hard to resist as a teenager. In one hilarious passage, Anderson explains how he used his Biblical training and learning as...