Halloween, Witchcraft, and Child Sacrifice

In the spirit of Halloween, I can think of nothing more bone-chilling than this video. I first viewed it a few years ago, but it still makes me shiver.

My parents never took me trick-or-treating, because Halloween glorified Satan and we served the Lord, Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who loved us so much he offered his beloved and only son Jesus as a sacrifice on our behalf. Dad picked me up early from first grade on Halloween, so I wouldn't have to participate in the costumed parade down the sidewalk with the rest of the class. The next week I saw photos of my smiling friends, and my teacher, Mrs. Welch, dressed up as a bottle of grape juice and wondered what danger I had been protected from.

A year or two later, Mom hosted a neighborhood Thanksgiving-themed party as an alternative to Halloween Everyone dressed either as Pilgrims or Native Americans and Mom constructed a paper teepee in the living room. We even bobbed for apples. That was probably the year after we handed out Christian coloring books to trick-or-treaters. Every year afterward we turned out our porch light and stayed away from the front windows.

Not that we didn't have our own ghost stories. Just owning a Cabbage Patch doll, for example, could give demons access to your soul. Owl decor could prevent childbirth from progressing. Wearing a Buddha on a chain or playing with a Ouija board could open a person to demonic influence. God commanded his people to kill witches, which was why I had to exchange the copy of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe that I won as a Sunday School prize. The Witch of Blackbird Pond was permissible reading material, because the woman who was accused of witchcraft was really just a misunderstood Quaker.

My friends devoured Frank Peretti's novels of prayer warriors fighting demonic armies, though the books were too spooky for my mom to allow me to read them. I was an adult when Harry Potter arrived on the scene, but the stories of spells and magic were deemed inappropriate for Christians in most of my circles. Sorcery was nothing to make light of. The Bible likened the sin of rebellion to witchcraft, and if our legal system truly followed the Law of God, parents could have disobedient kids executed. As it was, we had to make do with spanking.

Today, stories like Isaac's make me shudder. They make me want to hug my children close and assure them that I will always fight for them--against gods, if need be. That it is my responsibility to protect and care for them and no one, not even a god, could convince me otherwise*.


*Any parent who does hear such a voice in their head needs to seek help, quickly, for their children's sake.

Journal Excerpt: Learned Passivity

This is what my 14-year-old self had to say on a long ago New Year's Eve:

What I’ve learned most this year:  God will provide for my every need. All I need and ever will is Him. Since His love is SO great, He’s the only Being I’ll ever need to be content and joyful. He wants what’s best for me, knows what is best, and will supernaturally take care of it. I don’t have to do anything, trying to make my plans work out. If I trust Him, He’ll show His power.

Just a few years earlier, I was an active girl with dreams and goals and ideas for the future. Dad wrote on my 6th grade homeschool report card that my "interest in spiritual things" was limited to "just the facts".

Somewhere between ages 12 and 14, I learned that I was to be passive, that I was to wait, that I was to be guided, led, and provided for by a supernatural being. That I didn't know what was good for me. That I didn't have to do anything.

Circling the Christianity Buffet, Part 4

In Which I Return to the Beginning

We had exhausted the church options in our own community; now we crossed county lines heading east, south, and west. We piled into our 12-passenger van and rotated directions each week, laughingly calling ourselves a "circuit-riding congregation".

The Church of Christ had fired their ATI pastor, and he was now leading a small fellowship of mostly homeschooling families who met on Sunday mornings at a public school to the east, near the lake. The school would rent them the library for something like $10 a week, and we could drag in a piano from down the hall to accompany the pastor’s guitar. This band of believers sang a lot of praise songs I remembered from my childhood. The pastor would print out his sermon notes and pass out copies to everyone. Then he would put the same notes on the overhead projector, stand to the side, and proceed to read them to us. But the homemade cubes of communion bread were nearly as delicious as the charismatic kind, and they served it every single week. On Sunday nights, many in the church liked to have bonfires, s’mores, and guitar-led sing-alongs on the beach.

In the opposite direction, we knew an ATI family pastoring an old country church. Their theology was more covenantal than ours and the congregation more blue-collar, but their music was safely conservative and I borrowed interesting books from the minister. Having connections to the Methodist tradition, they took their monthly communion at the altar rail. Until I asked the pastor to officiate at my wedding, I did not realize that Bible Methodists do not endorse jewelry—including wedding rings.

Other weeks, we drove south to join an eclectic "plain" fellowship meeting in a township hall. Some families were ex-Amish, having been forced out of their communities when they were "born again". One couple had been raised Catholic and now vehemently objected to the celebration of Christ-mass. Another had been Episcopalian, turned Amish (exchanging their minivan for a horse and buggy), and were now neither. When they decided to have a baptismal immersion service at a farm pond, no one knew how to do it. The baptismal candidates didn't even get completely moistened, though, as a female observer, I didn't tell them so. 

Everyone homeschooled, the girls all wore dresses, there was little interaction between the sexes, and the women all wore scarves around their hair, with only an inch or two revealed above their foreheads. The a capella singing was painfully slow. The men took turns preaching. I doubt anyone in the group had a college degree; some of the adults had not even finished high school. I cannot recall the fine points of their theology because it was primarily discussed at men’s meetings. As non-members, we would not have been allowed to take communion.

I was annoyed with the extreme patriarchy and made a point of wearing lipstick (gasp!) and my boldest pale pink dress (short sleeves, print of scattered full-blown roses, dainty lace collar, decorative brooch-like button, and wide belt). Though I enjoyed hats, I did not wear one there. I was accustomed to being the most conservatively dressed in any social group, so feeling like the "harlot" was a new experience! I suddenly realized how most normal women must have felt when they visited our family. 

After months of riding our little circuit on Sunday mornings, we settled at the fellowship that met at the school. The pastor was soft-spoken and kind, there were lots of other children, and the families were the most like us. In many ways, that church was a spiritual rehab center or halfway house, attracting the hurt, the lonely, the ones who didn’t fit elsewhere. It was, for the most part, a safe and quiet place for us to park while our emotional wounds healed.

I moved to Oklahoma (to work for Bill Gothard's cult) and fell in love with a Christian & Missionary Alliance Church there. For the first time since childhood, I looked forward to going to church. The people were friendly and the service combined all the elements I most enjoyed. Even though I couldn't remember the CMA church of my infancy, I had a feeling of returning to the beginning, of coming home to where I belonged, and for a year I participated to the fullest extent my cult involvement would permit.

Theologically, I liked the CMA teaching on the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts; after all I'd seen, it felt centered. One week the pastor prayed for a sick man to be healed. The man was anointed with oil and we all prayed. I went home for a visit and when I got back, the man was dead. I tried to understand. I wrote a poem for his widow, imagining the man in heaven and trying to put a hopeful spin on his passing. Faith was so mysterious.

One of my coworkers at Gothard's training center was confident she heard God’s spirit communicating with her. We talked about faith and what we wanted it to mean. During the lunch hour one day, we went up to my room and she prayed for me to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. That afternoon I spoke in tongues for the first time. After decades of stories, curiosity, contradictory advice, and yearning to "experience God" in a physical way, this strange and awkward exploratory event felt like losing my spiritual virginity. I basked in a sense of fulfillment for a while.

But my job moved out of Oklahoma and CMA church in my new city wasn’t as inviting. The charismatics weren't down-to-earth enough; the Lutherans were too old or too certain; the Baptists far too stuffy. I kept exploring, learning from each church I was part of, but never able to put down roots. I married, and we eventually settled at a Christian church in our neighborhood that both my husband and I could appreciate. The music leader played with skill and gusto, though some of the more suggestive songs about Jesus made me giggle now that I had sexual experience.

Since Christian churches share a common ancestor with the Church of Christ, communion was a weekly ritual. Unfortunately, this particular congregation used tasteless minuscule crackers that got stuck in my teeth. I tried to think reverent thoughts, picturing the tiny cup of grape juice "blood" as an oral vaccine, passing Christ's immunity on to me and strengthening my resistance to various temptations. It helped for a while, but eventually I started taking two crackers at a time, to get a morsel big enough to chew. Then I switched to selecting the darkest bit on the plate, because at least Burnt Bleached Flour is a flavor.

Once in a while, I would pray in tongues again, sometimes because I felt overwhelmed by life, other times just to see if it still worked. This went on for years until one week, sitting in the sound booth in the back of an evangelical church in the middle of Kansas, my husband and I knew we didn’t belong anymore.

In an attempt to preserve what faith we had left in the God of the Bible, we found a Methodist church with a beautiful pipe organ and a heart of compassion. But even singing anthems with the robed choir, attending the pastor’s Bible class, and dipping bread in grape juice in his study didn’t help. One Easter Sunday, we helped the children’s department with the resurrection-themed crafts, then quietly slipped away. Even as an atheist, I found I could still speak in tongues.

Friends sometimes suppose that if I had ever met their Christ, I would have to love him. But I was presented to the Lord at two weeks old and have seen more of the Body of Christ than most. I found that we simply weren't compatible. For thirty-odd years, I thought we had a relationship; I even thought we were close. But after years of thinking the problems were all mine, his behavior at last began to trouble me.  Could he be trusted? Could he be schizophrenic? Was he cruel? Was he real? And I finally had to conclude: eternity would be far too long to spend with anyone so enigmatic.

Circling the Christianity Buffet, Part 3

In Which I Learn I am Not a Baptist

Now we were Baptists, or nearly so. Some of the men in suits were my Dad’s clients, successful businessmen in the petroleum industry. One man managed our grocery store, another the Christian radio station. Another dad sold computers at the local store. A retired public school teacher led the congregational singing, but many of the musicians we heard at church were professionals, some even affiliated with an internationally-renowned arts center.

I was mesmerized when a guest harpist performed one week. My heart melted when the pastor’s son accompanied his own voice at the piano on a visit home from college. The sound guys could have turned off the microphone when one of the deacons played a trumpet solo, but for the most part, Baptist music was crisply timed, properly rehearsed, and perfectly orchestrated. Only once did a soloist break down in the middle of her song and let the soundtrack run on without her.

The morning service, recorded and aired on a local radio station at night, ran on a fixed schedule. There was no open-floor "quiet time" and prayer was not spontaneous. The opening song was always cheerful, the closing song always introspective. Even altar calls were predictable, unless someone actually went forward and we had to sing another verse of the hymn. Personal testimonies and hymn requests were reserved for the evening service.

The Baptists were very sure about some things that we had previously left open. Jesus would return AFTER the Tribulation, and salvation was a permanent deal, unless you didn’t get the genuine article the first time. Baptism had to be by immersion, not for salvation, but as proof of salvation. They knew that God didn’t use "speaking in tongues" anymore, though they still prayed for healing for a long list of sick people on Wednesday nights. And their pastor had to write three sermons a week!

We finally left Bible Baptist because Bill Gothard had convinced my parents, who convinced me, that songs with a backbeat—even songs about Jesus—were tools of Satan. The elders were tolerant of our beliefs for a while, but they came to look with disfavor on a family of nine standing up and filing out of the sanctuary during the soloist’s "ministry of music" week after week, even if we returned to our pew for the sermon! It was a mutual break-up in the end, because the church introduced a "contemporary" early service, with a drum set up front, and my parents could not attend a church that resembled a rock concert.

So it was back to the church search, though we knew our options were very limited by now. Two other homeschooling dads in our town were followers of Bill Gothard (and members of his ATI program). One was the pastor at a Church of Christ, but their doctrine was suspect. The other attended a tiny IFB church close to our house. We started visiting there, and there was nothing offensive about the music if you didn’t care about quality, or the lyrics. The hymnal we used had been edited by John R. Rice, and the songs we sang were almost entirely of one genre (and almost entirely written between the years between 1850 and 1950). Here, there was an uncomfortable divide between the Gothardite homeschoolers (only two families now, but we made up more than half the minors in the church) and the rest of the congregation.

The pastor left shortly after we started attending, so we sat through repetitive interim preachers, guests, substitutes, and prospective young men interviewing for the position. In the end, the other ATI dad was "called" to the pastorate, which was convenient since his family was already living in the parsonage. He was a layman with his own audio-visual business, and it was odd thing all ‘round. My parents were not part of whatever voting process landed him the church, as they were waiting for the new pastor before they officially joined.

The new "pastor" ruled with a heavy hand. We didn’t know he was an abusive man at home—that would come out years later when two of his daughters escaped his house. We only knew he wore a somber suit and tried to make people feel guilty. We sat uncomfortably in those pews for two more years. All the normal people disappeared, leaving only the most rigid fundamentalists—and us. Since the former pianist had gone, I played the Gospel songs for the southern-style worship that emphasized sins, blood, and dying Lambs. Being a novice accompanist, I had some input on the song list, but the male leader had the final say, and his whims determined how many stanzas we sang. He typically announced, " e’ll sing the first, second, and the last!" I once told him I would hate to be a 3^rd verse in a Baptist church.

Much as we looked the part in our long, homemade dresses with our KJV Bibles, we weren't really fundamentalists. We were tolerant of dispensationalism, but not sold on it. We watched Billy Graham movies at home (sometimes skipping objectionable songs), we prayed with Presbyterians, we visited gloomy Lutheran Lenten services, we once attended Mass with our Catholic cousins, I read a New Testament paraphrase, and we didn’t think the evangelicals building the huge complex down the road were on the path to hell. Dad even read us a book about glossolalia—stories about people praying in tongues that were supposedly unknown to the speakers but recognized by others within earshot. Stories that directly contradicted the pastor’s sermon series on Acts.

At home, I dug out a songbook from the 70’s with familiar guitar tunes from the days of the Home Fellowship group and the Sunshine Inn. After Sunday dinner, I would play stormily, pounding out my frustration and wounded spirit in haunting minor chords. I sang "Our God Reigns", "God and Man at Table Are Sat Down", "You Are my Hiding Place", and eventually drifted to hymns like "Be Still, My Soul" and "Blessed Quietness".

One day the pastor and the one remaining elder asked my dad not to come back anymore. It was both a relief to me and a deep sadness. Other might talk of their "church home", but we were spiritual refugees again: too "Pentecostal" for the Baptists, too "plain" for the charismatics, and too "Baptist" for our Mennonite friends. Too full of emotion to know what to say, I wished I could pray in tongues.

Part 4: In Which I Return to the Beginning

Circling the Christianity Buffet, Part 2

In Which God and I are Friends

This particular group of Friends was unique in that they did occasionally celebrate Communion, with grape juice and fluffy white bread. Everyone tore off a piece as the loaf was passed down the row. The congregation was small and the old wooden meetinghouse drafty, so they set up chairs in the basement for services through the winter. The pastor was young, with a sweet wife and baby boy. Through every sermon he would remove his glasses, set them on the lectern, put them back on, take them off, and so on. There was no band, no overhead projector. In the middle of the service, everyone sat down, even the pastor, for fifteen minutes of "quiet time".

A short white-haired lady whose neck had gotten lost in multiple chins frequently filled the silence with stories or thoughts from her week. Other times a grandfatherly jail chaplain shared his thoughts about God in a reassuring voice. His daughter-in-law played the piano for our services. There were college students who occasionally attended in shorts and t-shirts, a one-armed man who frightened my mom, a blind mother of three who played the guitar, a dairy farmer who also worked as a nurse, and a dark-haired young outdoorsman with a beard that made my pre-teen heart beat faster.

Dad took us all to midweek hymn sings and prayer meetings at the parsonage, where I learned to follow along from a hymnal. Mom and I did a discipleship study with a small group at the church, which groomed my shy child-self to pray aloud with an adult partner. I recall a boring video series called Ordering Your Private World by Gordon MacDonald, former chairman of the board of World Vision. About the time we were watching MacDonald on a TV screen, he was resigning as president of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship after admitting to an adulterous affair. But the Internet had not yet been born, so we knew nothing of MacDonald’s private world.

Another video presentation was more memorable. It warned of the AIDS crisis: the American population was forecast to be decimated in ten years’ time, or was it twenty? I didn’t really know what they were talking about, only that public restrooms could expose me to a deadly virus. The video had a lot to say about "homosexuality". Dad leaned over from his folding metal chair next to me in the dim room and whispered into my ear, "That’s when a man sticks his penis into another man's bottom." My eyes must have widened, but there was nothing to say.

I was twelve or thirteen the Easter that some of the church ladies decided it would be cute to have a children's choir. They taught us a Michael Card song (that included the line: "You can choose what not to believe in…"). There were perhaps eight of us on the stage. Standing there in the new skirt and blouse Mom and I had sewn for the occasion, I was painfully aware of being the oldest.

Changes came as more families followed us from the charismatic fellowship to the Friends church. When the congregation withdrew from the Quaker denomination, I joined the adults in voting for a new church name and was pleased when my favorite won out. "Cornerstone" soon voted to align themselves with the Evangelical Free denomination. We parted ways with them at that point, because the "E. Free" allowed divorced men to be pastors and my mother’s interpretation of the New Testament did not permit such low standards.

My best friend during this period was part of the local Mennonite church. Our family occasionally attended special meetings there, and we loved their potluck meals. Like us, Mennonite girls wore homemade dresses and eschewed make-up. Unlike us, the adult women all wore their hair tucked up inside pleated white caps. They sang unfamiliar hymns in four-part harmony from shaped notes. Marriage was a permanent bond. The pastors were laymen; women were homemakers who planted spectacular gardens and made their own ketchup. Their Anabaptist heritage ran deep; some couples spoke German at home. But the insurmountable difference was their approach to education: my parents were passionate about homeschooling, while the tight-knit Mennonite community expected all its members to support the church's one-room private school. So in spite of all we appreciated about the church, we could never really have fit in.

To his credit, my dad, despite homeschooling and delivering his own babies, never felt comfortable with home-churching. But hunting for a new church is a daunting process—all the more with five children in tow—so Dad and I formed a search committee and visited local Sunday morning services together, discussing their merits on the way home and reporting back to the rest of the family at lunch. Dressed in my mom’s hand-me-downs, I was mistaken for his wife more than once.

We settled at the Baptist church we’d driven past so many times early in my childhood: a traditional brick building with padded pews, a grand piano, and an organ. Dressed comfortably on our way to the charismatic church and gazing out the car window, I had always felt sorry for the proper, well-coiffed Baptists in their suits, Sunday dresses, and heels. They were obviously rich, and, I imagined, smug. I knew they didn’t dance or speak in tongues.

Part 3: In Which I Learn I am Not a Baptist

Circling the Christianity Buffet, Part 1

An abridged version of this article appeared as a guest post on the blog Ramblings of Sheldon.

In Which God and I Are Introduced

By age 23 I had made a full circuit of the American Christianity buffet table and if I hadn't tasted everything, I had at least gotten near enough to smell it.

I was dedicated to the Protestant God by my parents and a Pastor Dibble at a Christian & Missionary Alliance church in a college town in Pennsylvania. My parents, raised Lutheran from infancy, had been rebaptized there by immersion. They were enthusiastic about Bible study and campus evangelism.

I was wearing toddler sizes when I invited Jesus into my heart before bed one night. There wasn't a CMA church in our new town; my parents fellowshipped with a small, casual group that met in an old building named the "Sunshine Inn". I remember watching the adults perform skits for one another, sharing potlucks, everyone dancing to "Father Abraham", and a small printing operation in a back room. When the group decided to construct their own multipurpose church building, my dad was among the volunteers helping to lay block or hang drywall.

The church was young and charismatic, its members idealistic. Instead of hiring a single pastor, they attempted to follow the pattern of the book of Acts: a group of elders shared the responsibilities of leadership, sitting in front of the assembly together and taking turns teaching from the Bible. Our dentist was one of the elders--until his daughter returned home pregnant from Oral Roberts University and he resigned. Once when I was sick, a group of men from the church (some of the elders?) came to our house to anoint my forehead with oil.

During church services, people prayed out loud, prophesied in tongues, and danced or raised their hands in worship. Song lyrics were shown on the wall via overhead projectors and the song-leader was usually playing a guitar along with a handful of instrumentalists in the "orchestra". Against the wall were inconspicuous wooden boxes with mail slots in the top. Dad often let me slide his tithes and offerings envelope in—a treat I enjoyed and helped him remember. The envelopes were printed with a large Roman-style coin, cut into pie wedges to illustrate the ten percent that belonged to God.

There was a warm water baptistery off to the side of the sanctuary/gymnasium at the church, but my dad baptized me in the Great Lakes in a small ceremony with one other family. They sang “Our God Reigns”—my favorite. My friend’s mom wrapped me in my bath towel with the elephant on it, and I was excited because now Mom and Dad would let me share communion. Elders would stand in the aisles at church holding bottles of grape juice, ready to refill the the common cup as it passed down the rows. The cubes of homemade unleavened bread were fragrant with coriander and star thistle honey. I always tried to nonchalantly pick the biggest piece when the plate made its way to me. I still have the recipe for that bread; it’s one of my family’s favorite snacks.

I remember the men of the church being kind, and I was very aware of their contributions to the community. One was a Vietnam vet who became a veterinarian; he was renowned for his gentleness and good humor. My friends’ dad was an auto mechanic; his father served as principal for the church school and supplied bottled honey to local stores.  A craftsman builder with huge hands did the remodeling on my mom’s kitchen, and helped me ride a bike. When pipes in our house froze one winter, we called the plumber from our church; my brothers and I watched him work. Another dad built cabins from logs he cut himself, and showed my brothers how his bear trap worked. One couple collaborated on art and publishing.

Women and men seemed to participate freely and equally in everything but direct preaching. Except for the elders being an all-male group, I was never aware of restrictions based on my gender. Many adults, including my parents, took turns teaching Bible lessons to the kids in the school classrooms that doubled as Sunday school rooms. I can still quote many of the Bible verses I first memorized there, amid the alphabet posters, stacks of math workbooks, and cabinets of craft supplies. My teachers gave me The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe as a prize, but Mom made me exchange it at the religious bookstore. By then, all fantasy, not just witches, was banned from our home. If my parents had heard of C. S. Lewis, they had certainly never read him.

My parents came to object to sensuality in the church. The church orchestra became more of a band, and this made my parents uncomfortable. They were more concerned about several of their friends’ marriages falling apart and about two divorcees from the church marrying each other. This upset my mom so much that we left that church and started attending a Friends meeting.


Part 2: In Which God and I Are Friends

Chapter 6: Finding Harmony

Continued from Chapter 5: Cognitive Dissonance

In the summer, I went away to a real university to study linguistics with Wycliffe Bible Translators. (See a picture of me here!) Finally in a predominately Christian environment without the influence of IBLP, I was able to evaluate my own values for the first time as an adult.

I enjoyed the chapel services with slow, rich, harmonic, sacred choral songs equally with the mornings when Dan Everett jammed on his electric guitar. I attended "normal" church services and instead of fleeing, I let the songs fill and move me. I even danced if I felt like it! I still had a lot of hangups and anxieties, but I was breaking free! I tried my wings in other ways--buying my first jeans, swimming without sleeves, going to a movie theater, taking communion with real wine, chatting with a male friend unchaperoned. Every step was tentative, I was always figuratively looking over my shoulder, watching for evidence that God had removed his protecting hand.

Returning to my parents' home in August was. . . stressful. As soon as I could afford it, I flew to the Philippines to spend a few months with a team of Wycliffe linguists. I had just settled in when I had a little shock. I was working on a slow computer project when my missionary friend . "Put on some music if you want to," she offered, gesturing to her CD collection. "Who do you like?"

I reached back quickly across the years, aware that my musical tastes didn't match my age. "I kind of like Twila Paris," I said, scarcely believing my own voice.

"We have this one," she said, pulling out The Warrior Is A Child. At the sight of the album cover, my head began to whirl. I was thirteen again, rewinding the borrowed tape again and again. I loved that song! But I wasn't prepared to face those emotions--not here, not now. I turned back to the computer and mumbled something noncommittal.

Over the following weeks, however, I did plunge into those emotions. Deep down I was still afraid--afraid the music would expose me in some invisible way to dangers or temptations I couldn't handle. But I had no desire to be controlled by fear, much less fear of a mere fantasy.

The couple next door spent most of their time living in the mountains with their language group. Becky left me with a key to their house and invited me to use her piano or borrow from their music collection. Entering the dark, silent bungalow was like going through a wormhole. Becky had been a young adult when I was just a kid, and her cassette cabinet was a treasure trove, my own little Narnia. Inside its doors I encountered all my old favorites: Twila Paris, Michael Card, Sandy Patti, Michael W. Smith, John Michael Talbot, and even made some new acquaintances, like Rich Mullins.

And so I recovered my childhood faith, starting not exactly from scratch but from where I left it when I turned fourteen.

Talbot sang me to sleep with songs about love, Card affirmed the value of wisdom and truth, Mullins expressed my deep conflicted hopes, and I sang Twila's songs about trust and mercy nearly every day. When she sang "Daughter of Grace", I saw myself as in a mirror.

She spent half her life working hard to be someone you had to admire
Met the expectations and added something of her own
So proud of all that she had done...
So proud at all she had not done...   

Broken and discovering that she could fail
Heard her own voice crying for help and she was

Carried in the arms of love and mercy
Breathing in a second wind Shining with the light of each new morning Looking into hope again 

Finally ready to begin
Born for a second time in a brand new place

I now recognized legalism as a poison, and like Luther, I saw grace as the antidote. The picture of God that I constructed that year on a tropical island in Southeast Asia was a beautiful one. I had lots of guidance from friends who had seen more of life than I had, but the finished product was my own. And that God sufficed for quite a few more years during which I moved back to the States, started a family, and found a church that worshiped the same God I did.

My husband and I collected numerous contemporary Christian albums from the 80's and 90's that we would have enjoyed if we hadn't been giving heed to Gothard:  Michael W. Smith, Twila Paris, Rich Mullins, David Meece. We went to to hear Michael Card sing in person; we attended a Phil Keaggy concert. I even performed in church with an accompaniment track.

The years of internal trauma left permanent scars, though. My parents went back to the church we used to walk out of. The baby brother I used to carry out to lobby started a praise band there. I was happy for him, but when we visited, sitting through a service in that sanctuary filled to the rafters with memories was emotionally exhausting. Dancing at weddings also attended by my parents would leave me agitated to the point of physical symptoms.

And when my husband and I found ourselves looking for a different church, I would frequently have panic attacks in the pew. Sitting in a beautiful auditorium, surrounded by symbols of hope and peace, listening to sweet songs of grace based on the Beatitudes, the tingling would start in my feet and creep up my legs while I silently reminded myself that I was safe, that there was nothing to fear, no invisible enemies, no one to throw me out or send me home.

As I moved out of fundamentalism back through evangelicalism and kept on going through liberal American Christianity, I inevitably outgrew the concept of God with which I had begun. I found I actually had more in common with Michael Jackson and Katy Perry than with Rich Mullins or Michael Card, though I remain grateful to them for helping me along the way.

Because, in the end, music is (or should be) art, an expression of the heart, a tangible sharing of intangible perception. It may be lovely, it may be angry; sometimes it is hilarious, other times it may not even make sense. What speaks to me will not be the same as what speaks to my husband, or to my kids. It won't be the same every week, or every year. Art is not algebra; it is not static, its meaning is not intrinsic. Like life itself, we imbue art with meaning according to what we bring to it. 

Music can be a powerful means of uniting people, or of separating them; a means of broadening our understanding of each other, or of isolating ourselves. There will always be artistic expressions we don't understand. If we approach them with fear, we will inevitably view them as hostile. But if our hearts are open and our minds curious, each composition becomes a way to enter another's experience.

Music is not a force to be feared, but a gift to be shared. 

Raising Atheist Kids in the Bible Belt

My daughter announced one day last spring that she'd stopped saying the "under God" part of the Pledge of Allegiance at school. I smiled. 

I have those kids now.

My son could tell Bible stories in circles around his classmates, but some of the other third-graders badly wanted him to attend the school's Bible Club. "I don't believe in God anymore," he explained. 

"Don't believe in God?!" the little boys gasped. "Then you're going to the hot place!"

These children have already learned how to use religion as a weapon: "This table is only for people who believe in God." Third-graders. 

Months later, they wanted to know if B-- had changed his mind yet. "If you don't believe in God, you're going to h-a-l-l," they spelled circumspectly. 

"That spells Hall, and I'm already in it!" B-- responded, proving once again that superior spelling trumps dogma.

I grew up truly believing that Christians were persecuted in America. Not as much as behind the Iron or Bamboo Curtains, certainly, but persecuted nonetheless. I guess I really thought that when I joined the ranks of unbelievers, I'd be in the majority for the first time. Hearing my kids stories from public school, where a framed faded motto declares "In God We Trust", was a rude awakening.

We signed B-- up for his first soccer season this year. The Young Men's Christian Association has a facility right at the edge of our little neighborhood. We ignore the prayer request cards in the corridor when we are there for gymnastics, karate and swimming lessons, but religion seems otherwise absent. Until soccer games. Before they began playing, the coaches led the boys in "I pledge before God..." and I winced.

Other fifth-graders don't know what the word "atheist" means, so my daughter educates them. (She has classmates from various faiths--some more obvious than others.) The teachers at the middle school she will be attending assume she has a religious affiliation. M-- is required to log 15 hours of community service this school year. When we asked her teachers for suggestions that would fulfill the requirement, all of them were church-related: babysitting for church programs, helping with Vacation Bible School, etc. <sigh> Fortunately, I have non-religious friends who have helped us find some other options.

Chatting with my daughter last week, I remarked that it must be different for her, not having spent so many years steeped in faith and belief. She agreed. "I never really believed it all," she told me. "I never said my prayers every night, and I read the Bible because you made me." So I did. Just as my mother did with me.

Since they do live at the edge of the Bible Belt, I am sometimes glad my kids have experience with VBS, Sunday School, and AWANA. From a socialization perspective, they are "normal". But I'm glad they don't feel pressured to accept beliefs that aren't their own and that frustrate their intellect or their sense of right and wrong.

Children are not born with a belief in god(s)--but they do naturally trust, and desire to please, the adults they depend upon. When I was a little girl, I wanted to feel secure, to fit in. I wanted to believe the same things my parents did, to be on the same side with them. If God was going to take them straight to heaven, I didn't want to be left behind. If he was going to take care of them during a scary thunderstorm, I wanted to be safe, too. So I would pray in Jesus' name, recite verses about God's protection, and promise to obey him. But I was still afraid of the God whose hands controlled the sky and sea and whose eyes could always see me in the dark. He was said to be loving and good, but when the clouds rolled in, it seemed apparent that he had a fearsome temper, too--much more than my parents ever displayed.

My kids are anxious about the same things I was. But instead of teaching them that there really are creepy invisible spirits in their rooms at night, we explore the science behind shadows, sounds, lightning and weather. If the fear is irrational, we listen to them, reassure them, and help them take charge of their own minds. We teach them to practice the techniques that help us: thought-stopping and thought substitution, relaxation, meditation. Their minds are their own, and they can choose how they will use them.

And what better situation for the use of one's own mind than as an atheist in the Bible Belt?

My Abusive Ex

I used to be in an abusive relationship.

My abusive ex was God.

Yes, there were other people involved in the manipulation, bullying, over-protection, brainwashing, deceit, neglect, ignorance, isolation, control, and cruelty. But none of it could have had the effect that it did if it weren't for my "personal relationship" with the God I encountered in my Bible.

I thought I loved him and that he loved me.

I believed he was older and wiser and would take care of me. I gave him my heart, and my will. I didn't make a decision without consulting him.

I thought he hung the stars and made the sun come up every morning. His smile was my sunshine. He warned me about his violent temper: like earthquakes, tornadoes, and wildfire. But he assured me that his anger took a long time to heat up. As others had observed, "clouds and thick darkness surround him", but I got used to that.

I was a loyal lover. When other people criticized my God's social skills, I defended his innate goodness, his super IQ,  and even his, um, existence? I didn't doubt he was listening, even when he was quiet. I would wake up early to spend time with him. I wrote him poems, hung his promises up on my wall, spent years learning about his preferences and adjusting my tastes to his pleasure.

I depended on him completely and trusted him implicitly, even when it hurt like hell. When I felt ready to burst inside, I'd cry and sing this Twila Paris song:

"Sometimes my little heart can't understand
What's in Your will, what's in Your plan.
So many times I'm tempted to ask You why,
But I can never forget it for long.
Lord, what You do could not be wrong.
So I believe You, even when I must cry.

Do I trust You, Lord?
Does the river flow?
Do I trust You, Lord?
Does the north wind blow?
You can see my heart,
You can read my mind,
And You got to know
That I would rather die
Than to lose my faith
In the One I love.
Do I trust You, Lord?

I will trust You, Lord, when I don't know why.
I will trust You, Lord, till the day I die.
I will trust You, Lord, when I'm blind with pain!
You were God before, and You'll never change.
I will trust You, Lord."

Yes. That's the song.

But...

As I learned more about the characteristics of healthy relationships, I came to realize how unhealthy my relationship with God really was.

I saw victims of spiritual abuse whose behavior resembled the symptoms exhibited by Stockholm syndrome victims: "who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness". Come to think of it, that description almost sounds like the paraphrase of a worship song, or a sermon by John Piper, or Jonathan Edwards. What kind of being would be pleased with such fawning submission? Surely not a good god?

I started taking more initiative, making more choices on my own and then running them by God for his "approval".

As I grew emotionally stronger and gained confidence, I was able to see that he had flaws, too. I didn't really need a flawed god. Turns out I'm not really into the strong, silent type, especially if they remain strong and silent when their friends are in trouble. And I have no respect for guys (or gods) who lose their temper and scare little kids.

It took a long time to admit it, but it slowly dawned on me that I would not want to spend a lifetime--much less an eternity--with the God of the Bible, even if I could still believe that my world depended on him.

* * * * * * * *

As Julia Sweeney has described in her monologue Letting Go of God, there is a downside to losing the relationship. When I'm scared or hurt, there's no all-powerful being I can beg to make things better. I don't have a king's ear. I'm not really a princess. Without an imaginary friend, I have to make real friends, or feel very alone.

The universe may not be "on my side", but it does support me in countless ways. While allowing me the freedom to make choices based on my own preferences and what I believe will make me happy, and making no demands in return. I no longer feel obligated to defend my god's behavior, or worry about his temper. I don't spend time coaxing him to intervene on my behalf, assuring him that I know he had a good reason for ignoring my requests, or waiting for him to drop nice things in my lap. There is no more temptation to ingratiate myself. When life is going smoothly, I don't wait for "the other shoe to drop".

Turns out other people didn't like my god much, either. I thought they did when we hung out together, but when I mention him now, they tell me they realized he really was terrible. They're sorry for my experience, they say; I must not have really had a god, or maybe I had the wrong God. They want me to try theirs now. If I just want a good god badly enough, they say, the right one will find me.


I was always told I had an inner void only a god could fill. But since I said goodbye to God, I haven't yet experienced such a void.

I am content without a god.


Life is better without my abusive ex.

Building on Sand

I was about six when my parents gave me my own copy of the The Living Bible and encouraged me to begin reading in Genesis. I loved the illustrations and the crinkly sound the thin pages made. And I listened to the dramatized audio version of the New Testament by the hour. The book of Acts was my favorite: I learned most of the lines and all the voices by heart.

My family read through the books of Psalms and Proverbs every month for years and years. On the 5th of any given month, for example, we'd read Psalms 5, 35, 65, 95,  and 125, plus chapter 5 of Proverbs, taking turns reading our share aloud.

Following breakfast, Mom would read to us from a children's devotional. We might sing a hymn together. Then she would set a timer for 15 minutes and each of us went to our rooms for our own "Quiet Time", reading our Bibles or Bible storybooks.

In addition to mere reading, I started Bible study young. There was a Navigators' study I did with my parents, a couple of correspondence courses for young people, a discipleship study at the Quaker church. There were topical studies, Sunday School classes, Baptist and Mennonite vacation Bible schools, and family foreign missions camp with New Tribes missionaries who taught the Bible in jungles far away. When I was older, I participated in Bible studies at the local jail.

I had my own Strong's Concordance, and studied New Testament Greek. The phrases of the King James version permeated our family's speech, and our humor. The Picture Bible was our comic book, the judges and David's mighty men our superheroes. The Old and New Testaments--revered as true in every detail--  not only determined our theology and ethics, but also our understanding of science, history, relationships, diet, and sexuality.

Mom and Dad had us memorizing passages from the Bible before we joined ATI. It only got more intense when we started the Wisdom Booklets. Dad paid us to learn chapters, or entire books, and urged us to recite the Christmas story in concert at holiday gatherings, like a Peanuts special. Knowing the challenge of memorization, I looked up to men who were said to have memorized the entire New Testament.

In our household, the Bible trumped all other arguments. We learned to wield scripture like the ultimate weapon. We knew it backwards and forwards and could use it like lawyers for defense or prosecution of any position.

As I grew older, I came to view our scripture obsession as a kind of idolatry. It was as if our Bible was an extra person of the Godhead.

I felt we'd confused The Word that came from God (Jesus) with "The Word of God" (the Holy Bible). On the other hand, everything we knew of Jesus was revealed to us only through the scriptures. How would we have heard of him otherwise? I decided the secret was to read the Bible more simply, with less commentary from "experts", less interpretation, less wrangling over application.

While I sorted out my own theology, I spent a year living among a group of missionary linguists who labored year after year to express the words of the Bible in other languages and with strange alphabets for villagers who lacked schools, jobs, hospitals, toilets. Sometimes I got to help out, as when I helped type a manuscript of the Gospel of John.

One of my friends there had completed a New Testament, yet the fruit of her labors sat in boxes; many people of that region practice a folk Islam and have little interest in reading it. Another woman described her feelings when she finally completed her translation. Releasing it to be published and distributed to people as the word of God "traumatized" her, she said. Though the New Testament was the main priority, a few worked on translating the Old Testament with its stories of ancient battles, instructions about nocturnal emissions, and abecedarians for the Hebrew alphabet. An elderly translator spent her days refining the book of Job for a rural ethnic group with its own gods and folklore beliefs. (Thinking about it now brings to mind Samuel Wesley's Latin commentary on Job.)

Still, I believed that giving anyone the Bible would offer them Christianity in its purest form, guiding them to all the benefits of faith with the fewest glitches and hang-ups. Rather like the reassuring note the pharmacy prints on my prescriptions: "Remember that your doctor has prescribed this medication because she has judged that the benefit to you is greater than the risk of side effects."

Then I got married. After the wedding, we were faced with the daunting task of finding a church that fit the two of us. We spent months visiting different services, listening to pastors and interim pastors and guest speakers, trying out small groups. Even when we settled on a church, our loyalty was not exclusive. Each fellowship and each denomination seemed to have unique strengths, and I figured the clearest, most faithful image of God's would be a mosaic formed from contributions across all of Christendom.

So in spite of our freakishly encyclopedic Bible knowledge, we took numerous opportunities to learn from other angles. I did Bible studies at a conservative Lutheran church ("You should see how Baptists do baptisms. They have a hot tub up behind the altar!"), a megachurch with an awesome ladies' brunch every Tuesday, a tiny Christian church with no other text than our Bibles, a Methodist church with video lectures and graduation certificates. And the more I learned about what how other people interacted with this book, the more questions I had and the less impressed I became.

I was teaching the Bible to my kids by this time. Helping them memorize its most famous passages. Taking them to AWANA clubs. Rewarding them for reading "God's Word". Giving them their own children's editions.

But eventually, the questions caught up with me. What made this book different from other texts? Was it more reliable than other writings held sacred by other faiths? Was it a superior guide for morality? Surely its characters were no more virtuous than other ancient heroes.

And the God it described gave bloodthirsty orders that horrified my children. It was a stretch to connect this God of Genesis, Deuteronomy and Judges with the Jesus in the happy little board books of their toddlerhood.

Did the prophets really hear God speak? Or were they like my anxious friend who would hear God telling her she shouldn't eat more granola for breakfast?

How did these books come to be compiled? Who decided what God had said, and when? The eminent Bible translator Martin Luther, architect of the "grace" theological model, thought the author of James' epistle "mangled" and "opposed" scripture. "I will not have him in my Bible to be numbered among the true chief books," he wrote.

Why did some of my Bibles include Matthew 6:13 ("For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever") while others left it out? The more I researched about translation, texts, and manuscripts, the less confident I felt. If God had intended to make his character and desires clear to mankind through a book compiled over many centuries, he could have done a lot better.

The paradoxes in scripture had never bothered me much before. Some passages just had to be read metaphorically; sometimes you had to count fractions and not whole days or nights; sometimes you had to use your imagination, other times some common sense. Photosynthesizers could use some other kind of light before God made the sun. The writer of Hebrews meant that Sarah was "as good as dead". Or maybe he meant Isaac. A miracle here and there could clear up a lot of the seeming contradictions.

Thing is, I didn't much believe in miracles anymore. Oh, I might still pray in my head while searching for a missing library book, but it was more a habit than an expression of faith. Something akin to saying "gosh". Parenthood had given me a lot more experience with biology, and the laws of nature seemed pretty immutable.

And I was losing patience with everyone who had given me half-truths, exaggerations, well-meant deceptions, and bald-faced lies. My God was above that kind of thing. He was the Truth. He wasn't the author of confusion. Well, I was confused. His whole church seemed confused. They were confused about what it meant to be a believer and how God wanted them to treat other people and how to find mates or raise children. My God didn't manipulate, so why did I find myself invoking his name to make my kids feel guilt and shame?

Turns out I was still pretty fucked up. The one influence that had been consistent for 30 years of my life was the book I was devoted to. The book that taught me about my god, about relationships, about my self. A book that contained the most shocking and disgusting stories I'd ever read. A book used to promote both benevolence and abuse. To defend the weak and to subjugate them.

To quote from that troublesome book of James: "Out of the same mouth proceeds blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be. Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter? Can the fig tree, my brethren, bear olive berries? either a vine, figs? so can no fountain both yield salt water and fresh."

Jesus taught that a wise man built his house on the rock, and it did not fall when the rain came down and the streams rose and the winds blew and beat against it.

"But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."  --Jesus

Strangely enough, what I thought was rock-solid turned out to be sand. I see lives built on it collapsing all around me.

I tried to build a life on Jesus' words, but became exhausted repairing cracks in the wall every time the wind picked up. Eventually, I fled for firmer ground to build a life that I hope will be happier for me and a whole lot safer for my children.

Religion

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had been raised with religion in a milder form.

I have friends who are gently religious. Their faith brings them comfort; it gives them strength. Their warm and welcoming God loves and supports them. They are loving parents, loyal spouses, kind neighbors. They would never metaphorically clobber someone over the head with a Bible. Their religion makes them feel better and in spite of my atheism, I have no desire to take that away from them.

But when I explain why I am leery of religion, they understand.

After leaving the cult behind, I took years to reexamine my beliefs, slowly picking out all the legalistic bits that had been ingrained in my belief and trying to rediscover the essence of my childhood faith in Jesus and his love. I explored more generic evangelical churches and read books and listened to songs about God's "amazing" grace. I sang to my babies about God's care. I taught my children passages straight out of the Bible, as unadulterated as the pure fruit juice I put in their sippy cups.

As my husband and I got more comfortable in our new life, we began to refer more freely to our not-so-distant past.

At first we talked about "legalism", and then we said "cult-like". It was hard to admit we had been members of a cult. After all, our teenage memories are all steeped in "the kool-aid". Our early friendship, even our marriage put down its first roots in that choking soil. Many of our friends were still involved in IBLP; whenever we drove through the Chicago area we liked to revisit memories at the IBLP campus. Remember when we rode our bikes together here? Remember sitting on the rug, reading Winnie-the-Pooh? Remember taking Miss L--- shopping? To completely reject the organization, would we have to disown part of ourselves? After a lot of research, we gave in to the truth. Personally, it was a huge step forward. Relationally, it was a huge step away from many people that were still important to us, especially family.

After a few more years of painstakingly combing out our beliefs and rejecting what didn't line up with our new understanding of Jesus' teaching, we woke up one day to the realization that our brand of evangelical American Christianity didn't line up with it that well, either. By now our life experience had softened our hearts toward other struggling human beings. Our shifting values showed up in our politics, in our parenting, in our purchases.

We sold our snug paid-off home and moved across town to a larger home with an enormous playroom, a big backyard with a swing set, and plenty of trees. We voted against a Republican. We stopped spanking.

Wanting our children to see a more generous Christianity, we started attending a "mainline" church. Many people there were warm and accepting, and they viewed themselves as Jesus' hands and feet in their neighborhood. They focused on meeting people's flesh-and-blood needs in Jesus' name: meals, warm clothing, a place to sleep, clean water, functioning toilets, respite care for families of the disabled.

There was a lot of good stuff there, and the church was a haven for me to heal and grow when I was in an emotionally fragile place. But ultimately, what remnants of our faith we brought with us faded even as we prayed, sang, studied the scriptures, listened to the pipe organ, took communion. When it was time to leave, we just knew. And we knew we wouldn't be back.

Today, I don't have a problem with religion, per se. Like other mythologies (Pegasus, Robin Hood, Santa Claus, the Pilgrims...), it has been around a long time and plays a role in the culture. Religion can bond a community. It conveys heritage and values and ideology from one generation to the next. I get that. But I have a problem with ignorance, especially religion that is based on ignorance, that encourages ignorance, that is dependent on maintaining ignorance. If you want to use ancient literature to justify a public policy position, I expect you to be at least curious about where that literature came from and how it has been interpreted in the past.

I also have a problem with religion that teaches people to be cruel. Christianity taught me to be hard on myself and on other people. The God of the Bible is harsh: he created labor pains to punish a woman for listening to a talking snake. He drowned the first batch of people he made. He sent serpents and boils and marauding armies. He is also a bully. He killed Egyptian children, sabbath-breakers, whole families who happened to be living where he wanted his people to live, and a guy who tried to steady a holy box. In the New Testament he has his own son murdered so I can have the privilege of being one of his kids, too. Otherwise (according to some versions of Christianity), I stink too bad to even be in the same house with him.

It's no wonder fundamentalist Christianity treats "different" people so unfairly. Depending on the criteria of a particular religious group, "different" might include:

• gays & lesbians
• the poor
• women
• Catholics
• children
• transsexuals
• the divorced
• teenage boys
• public school teachers
• single parents
• immigrants
• Planned Parenthood volunteers
• other races
• the sick or disabled
• Muslims
• scientists
• the mentally ill
• working mothers...

And on it goes. When human beings are abused, neglected, berated, belittled, harassed, manipulated, vilified, condemned and disgraced in the name of any god, it makes me angry. And while we're on bullying, this is bullying at its finest: telling another person what an invisible being wants from him/her, under threat of unlimited punishment to be served after he/she dies!


So, I sometimes wonder--

     If I had been raised with a religion that did not condone cruelty,

          If I had grown with a faith that cultivated curiosity and honest inquiry,

               Would I have stayed?

Library Shelf: The Birth of Satan

Without Satan, why believe in God?

". . . it is hardly surprising that many monotheists have constructed the embodiment, in stories and art and imaginings, of the energy and forces in life that seem inhospitable, disorderly, fractious. This is the character we know as Satan, whose origins are the subject of this book. We cannot know, or at least we do not, whether there is a Satan beyond this Satan. But. . . [Satan] is worthy of our respectful consideration."

The Birth of Satan: Tracing the Devil's Biblical Roots, by T.J. Wray and Gregory Mobley, was earth-shattering for me. This library book kept me busy on a plane trip to Philadelphia, and I was so excited about it that I kept reading pages aloud to my sister on our drive to my uncle's Delaware beach house. 

For years I had been troubled by an incident in the life of King David. Like many David stories, this one is recorded twice: once in II Samuel 24 and once in I Chronicles 21. In both versions, the king gets in big trouble with God for ordering a national census and the whole population is punished. Only in the Samuel version, God is already angry with Israel, so he purposely incites David to order the census, and then everyone gets in trouble and 70,000 people die. In the Chronicles version (the later one), Satan opposes Israel by inciting David to number the people, God gets mad, the whole nation is punished and 70,000 people die. 

Now it seemed to me as a well-versed teenager that there ought to be a pretty big difference between Satan doing something, or God doing it. When I was young my parents liked to talk about putting God on the throne of my heart and not letting Satan sit there. We wanted to make God glad and that would inevitably disappoint Satan. They were polar opposites, right? Except for a strange heavenly scene in the book of Job, one wouldn't expect to find Satan and God hanging out together. So how did the Bible writers get these two characters mixed up?

A 19th-century commentary by the theologian Albert Barnes waves away the difficulty: "All temptation is permitted by God.... If Satan therefore provoked David to number the people, God allowed him. And what God allows, He may be said to do." Wow. That little sentence puts an awful lot of responsibility at God's feet. He committed the Holocaust. He burned witches in Salem and Protestants in Europe. He rapes women in Africa and altar boys in America. He infects people with AIDS, flies planes into buildings, and murders children in their schools.

As it turns out, monotheism is a very difficult balancing act. To make it work requires a devil so the one god left can be wholly good. Otherwise he's a monster, or bi-polar. The evolution of the Satan concept in Judaism pretty much blew my mind. The "satan" (common noun) shows up as a generic villain late in the history of the Old Testament, relieving Yahweh of some of the responsibility for his more "repellent" behavior. When the post-exilic Chronicles accounts were compiled, the scribes chose to make the satan responsible for tempting David.

Satan (proper noun) takes form as a character during the inter-testamental period, roughly around 200 B.C.E., and begins to be described as God's nemesis. The legend grew with interpretations of Genesis that accounted for the supernatural origin of demons. Followers of Jesus continued to develop this theme, supplying details and linking Satan to Old Testament characters and symbols that predated him as a personality. Dante and Milton added a great deal of color and shading to the picture, visualizing ever more horrific images in their descriptions of Satan and his infernal abode: Hell. 

Authors Wray and Mobley outline some of their findings in this fascinating WBUR interview, but the book's bibliographic notes are much more complete.

Somehow learning that Satan was only a solution to an ancient theological puzzle was a seismic shift for me. Ultimately, my faith in God required a cosmic enemy--an evil being trying to snatch my soul and longing to drag me into hell. A loving God didn't frighten me, it was God and Satan both ganging up on me--like they did with Job--that made me doubt my strength.

"In the end, the patronizing answer--'Satan is the source of evil'--never answers the question of the origins of evil. Because if God is initially, fully, and finally God, the Alpha and the Omega, then Satan is merely the Beta and the Psi. Satan may have emerged before time, but not before God..."

If Satan wasn't even discovered/invented till the Babylonian Captivity, who was that sneaky talking snake? My teachers always referred to him as an incarnation of the devil, a rebellious angel bitter because God threw him out of heaven, but the Jewish scriptures never refer to the serpent that way. And who introduced evil into that perfect garden? If God used his will to create Eve in his image, but chastised her for using hers... and we're back to the age-old puzzle of monotheism. Who is responsible for evil, pain, and suffering? Is God culpable for what he allows? Is he a monster? Is he bi-polar?

I was surprised to find that losing Satan meant losing God, too. But it was strangely liberating to take responsibility for all my own thoughts. To realize that my choices were simply my own, not tied to the outcome of some cosmic tug-of-war. My desires are merely the state of being a conscious human, not fed to me by angelic or demonic forces. And King David? Well, an epidemic happened to follow his national census. Bad things still happen, whether you're a monotheist, a polytheist, or an atheist. I just find that I can move on more quickly these days, relieved of the pressure to make sense of it all or figure out if God, or his satan, is trying to get my attention.

Faith, Facts, and Fossils

A Matter of Life and Death
In my family's religious subculture, judgments were frequently made about a person's eternal destiny (i.e., heaven or hell) based on that individual's affirmation of evolution or creationism. Our dear grandmother was known to accept evolutionary scientific theory and to enjoy PBS nature specials, therefore we besought God to change her heart and save her soul before it was too late.

As children, our reading material was closely monitored for Darwinian concepts which would be exposed as false and countered with the truth of "God's Word". We were indoctrinated with publications and videos from ICR and Answers in Genesis in addition to our science textbooks from A Beka, Bob Jones University Press, and Christian Light. The sciences never interested me as much as history and language arts, anyway; I only learned enough to get by.

When I began raising my own kids, though, I found that smugness was a poor substitute for understanding. My son loved to find picture books about dinosaurs and astronomy at the library and I felt intimidated by the pages that referred to "millions of years ago". I began to encounter references to evolutionary history in an assortment of unrelated contexts and my curiosity was piqued. I'd never actually learned what scientists meant by "evolution", only that it was factually and morally wrong. As a homeschooling parent, I felt obligated to clarify and fortify my own understanding of science so I could better direct my children's curiosity.

The Biblical Record
A closer look at Genesis revealed two distinct creation accounts. In the first, men and women are created together, on the sixth day in God's image to rule over the other creatures and everything is good. The earth is shapeless and empty; light appears, and darkness, and day and night (preceding the rest of the galaxy). Photosynthetic plants show up on the third day, the sun and moon are added the next day. Men and women (or man and woman?) are created at the end of the sixth day to be the dominant life form and they are specifically instructed to eat the plants. Everything is good, and God takes a break.

Chapter 2 offers an alternate version: there are no plants yet, and no rain. God molds a man out of the earth and breathes life into him to give him a soul. God plants a garden near some rivers and puts the man in charge of it. The man is permitted to eat from all the trees save one. But the man is too solitary and that's not good, so God sets out to make him a helper. He forms the ground, like play dough, into every kind of animal and every kind of bird, and sends the new creatures to Adam to see what he will call them. When none of them prove satisfactory, God puts Adam to sleep and surgically removes a rib which he shapes into a woman. Adam is thrilled when he wakes up--since neither of them have heard of clothes--but "the woman" goes unnamed until the end of the next chapter when she starts bearing children.

For centuries, intelligent men attempted to organize the Bible's many stories (Creation, Noah's Flood, Abraham, the Exodus, the Promised Land...) into a workable historic timeline. One of those men was James Ussher, Archbishop of Ireland, who in the days of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth coordinated the biblical accounts with the best known history of other cultures to determine that the world must have been created in 4004 B.C. As scholarship advanced through the Enlightment and beyond, scientists (many of them Christians) began to talk about the age of the earth in much longer terms, and many in the Church kept pace with these new discoveries. At the same time, however, Ussher's calculations were printed in the King James Version as standard reference notes, where they remained for 200 years and eventually featured in America's Scopes Trial of 1925, a defining moment for  fundamentalist Christianity.

Christianity and Evolution
I first heard Dr. Francis Collins on NPR. A Bible-believing Christian who accepted evolution? I had to learn more. His book The Language of God opened a new world to me. Real scientists, he explained, are "anarchists", always seeking to revise theories and overthrow old research. One of the great revisions of the last century was the conclusion that the universe began at a single moment (14 billion years ago). To Dr. Collins, "The Big Bang cries out for a divine explanation."

Dr. Collins writes frankly, kindly, and convincingly. He patiently answers the common creationist arguments ("the watchmaker", entropy, fossils) while pointing out that three types of radioactive carbon dating yield concordant results: 4.5 billion years for Earth's oldest rocks. He summarizes current scientific understanding about the descent of Homo sapiens. And as the director of the Human Genome Project, he includes some information that was most definitely not in the materials from Answers in Genesis or ICR twenty years ago.

As it happens, humans have 46 chromosomes while chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas have 48. Interestingly, the second human chromosome has the appearance of being fused (parts midway in the chromosome resemble what are usually the telomeres, or ends) and the genes on that chromosome share the order of the genes in two smaller ape chromosomes (2A and 2B). Denisovan hominids had the same fusion we have, suggesting this change in chromosome number occurred previous to the first human. Scientific genetic evidence now strongly indicates a fusion of those two chromosomes took place a million years ago or even more. A rare mutation would later have reduced the number from 47 chromosomes to 46. Human life is no less amazing for having evolved--if anything, the wonder seems greater! I had to keep reading.

"You cannot get to Young Earth Creationism without throwing out the fundamental principles of geology, of biology, of chemistry, of physics, of cosmology, of paleontology."  

               --Francis Collins








  "No serious biologist today doubts the theory of evolution to explain the marvelous complexity and diversity of life."   --Francis Collins



Scientific Evidence
In A Natural History of Time, geophysicist and researcher Pascal Richet traces mankind's attempts to determine the age of the earth, our solar system, and the universe. Beginning with mythology, religion, and philosophy and culminating in geology, astronomy, physics, and the discovery of radioactivity, the curious kept imagining, exploring, calculating, and reaching ever closer to an accurate chronology. Richet brings the names to life: from Aristotle to Isaac Newton, from Lord Kelvin to Percival Lowell. This book took me months to get through, but by the time I reached the end I was cheering each new scientific discovery and was convinced that our planet really did form 4.5 billion years ago.

Even if one does not accept that fossils can be dated by their location in the rock strata, there is the inescapable issue of "missing links". I was taught that there were none, that the fossilized skeletons we find today are simply extinct species, or variations of the same species that exist on earth today. Turns out there are plenty of transitional forms in the fossil record: a manatee with legs, serpent-like whales with tiny feet, walking whales, the Tiktaalik fish, the Dimetrodon which looked like a dinosaur but wasn't, toothed birds, a flatfish with an intermediate eye position, the early bipedal dinosaur Eoraptor, the mammal-like reptile Thrinaxodon, and so on.

Additionally, there is the beautiful and predictable sequence of life forms, from most simple to most complex, that unfolds through the rock strata. Mammalian fossils are not found in the oldest rocks, nor are flowering plants. The sheer number of fossils is staggering. If all fossils were formed during a single flood, the pre-flood oceans would have been crowded with an unsustainable number of creatures! Fossils remind us that humans have not always been Earth's dominant species. We are only the latest on the scene, at the top of an ancient and elaborate tree.

Ken Ham and other evangelical creationists have been emphatic in their interpretation that there was no death until after "the Fall". Nothing died until the woman first disobeyed God. Therefore, Adam and Eve and all the first animals, fish, birds, and insects were originally created to be vegetarian. The ignorance of this simplistic explanation came to mind when I took my first college course in biology and realized that plant cells are every bit as alive as blood cells. Life and death are so much more complex than eating forbidden fruit and suddenly beginning to age.


Facts and Faith
I gradually embraced evolution--not as a "worldview" that allowed me to do what I want, but as an evidence-based way of understanding the world I live in. Which is probably why the following blog post by Libby Anne resonated so strongly with me last year:

"If my parents had not elevated creationism to the same importance as the virgin birth, I would never have had my crisis of faith. Doing so gave my faith an Achilles heel. I’m not saying this happens to everyone raised to equate creationism with Christianity – it doesn't. What I am saying is that elevating things like capitalism and spanking to the same level of truth as the trinity creates a Christianity in a box. It shuts off questions and exploration. It closes the door to differences of opinion. It creates a situation where you are either in, or out. And, more importantly, it creates a situation where questioning something as simple as capitalism means rejection and changing your mind on something as little as anti-gay rights means potentially throwing everything from the trinity to the divinity of Jesus into question."

"My parents reacted negatively to me not because I had rejected Jesus but because I had rejected creationism."    --How Creationism Drove Me Out of the Church

Young earth creationism no longer makes sense to me. The universe is too immense to be contained in 6,000 years of history. Starlight finds us from millions of light years away. Fossils give us clues to secrets that are millions of years old. Rocks bear silent testimony to billions of years of atomic energy. Antarctic glaciers record over 8 million years of history in their frozen hearts. Life is a mystery, a puzzle to tease out bit by bit, each of us adding to the random but intricate and kaleidoscopic pattern that will cause future generations to marvel.