A Certain Kind of Christian (Part One)
No one in my family thinks I’m a Christian, and I’m trying to not care anymore.
It took me a long time to come to a place where I thought it might be okay to not care, but that’s the best thing about being in your (late) thirties…you begin to care a lot less about what other people think of you. To make sense of all this, and how I finally came to accept myself as a Christian, I have to go way back to the beginning, when I was a little child.
I was raised by well-meaning, loving parents in a well-meaning loving church. A Holiness church, which is a sect of Pentecostalism, but part of no organized body. Because there is no true umbrella group like the United Methodist Church or the Southern Baptist Convention, every Holiness church has it own doctrines, but the main thing that makes a Holiness church is a belief in the gifts of the spirit, which includes speaking in tongues and prophecy. Since all Holiness churches are so different, I won’t attempt to talk about any of them except the one I grew up in.
At the Lily Holiness Church I felt completely loved and surrounded by good people. Lots of them were family, and the ones who weren’t felt like family. We did everything together: we loaded into the church van and headed off to Mammoth Cave, singing all the way (“I’ve got joy joy joy, down in my heart! Where? Down in my heart! Where? O, down in my heart!”), writing shoe polish messages on the windows: Honk If You Love Jesus, Praise the Lord!, John 3:16; Wednesdays were Gospel Night at Finley’s Roller Rink, so we would all put on our Holy Rollers t-shirts and go skating together (the deejay played music by the McKamey’s and The Singing Cooke Family); we ate together at Homecoming, Pastor Appreciation Day (the pastor got a brand new suit from Dawahare’s department store every year and a cake shaped like the Bible), Old Fashioned Day (when everyone dressed up like characters on “Little House on the Prairie”), and any other chance we got. In short, we were our own culture, so that I grew up identifying as part of three very distinct cultures: Southern, Appalachian, and Holiness. Each of these cultures provided their own beauties, joys, comforts, and complexities.
We went to church all the time. I’m talking three or four times a week. Sometimes more. My mother was a singer—“as good as Loretta Lynn,” everyone said, in awe of her not only for her singing but for her sacrifice of not going off to Nashville to become a country star so she could stay at home and sing for God—and that meant we went to church even more than the normal Holiness family. When we weren’t at regular church meetings, we were at tent revivals, camp meetings, brush arbors (these were my favorites because the stage and “altar“ were made of felled trees and branches that had been dragged from the woods, an old tradition dating back to the 1700s when people didn’t have churches), nursing homes, radio stations, or funerals. I believe that one of the main reasons I’m a writer is because I went to church so much, and the only permissible thing to take with me was a little notebook (which everyone called a “tablet” back then, a word I still love) and pencil.
So I wrote all the time. I wrote character studies of the people at church:
Ray-Harm Couch is built like a pencil and has a head like a car battery.
Bernice Conley moves like a flower floating on the river and has eyes that are all kindness.
Fannie Sizemore is as warm and smushy as a half-baked biscuit and always smells like honeysuckle.
I wrote short stories and novellas and recorded entire conversations that I eavesdropped before the church service started:
Joette Lewis: How’s Nellie doing, Helen?
Helen: Oh, honey, she hain’t no good. She hates it so bad that she can’t make it to the church-house no more, and don’t know what to do since they took Jimmy Swaggart off the television.
Joette: I know it, I hate that over him a sight.
Helen: I don’t know which depressed her the most, her hip being broke or Jimmy Swaggart getting caught with that old hooker.
I still write to music, and I think that’s because I learned to write while at church, listening to all those songs. At our church, and most Holiness churches, the majority of the service was the singing. A regular service lasted at least two hours (usually longer) and 90 minutes of that was the music.
It fills me with nostalgia and a bit of remorse to recall all those mornings of Sunday School, all those evenings of Bible School. The church basement always smelled of chalk and grape Kool-Aid. The old women all hugged me close to them, the men shook my hand like I was a man, then tousled my hair like I was a child. Sometimes I would love them all so much I couldn’t stand it. I knew every book of the Bible, in order, and could recite them like a poem: “Matthew, Mark, Luke, John…” There were always offerings of peppermints, and Juicy Fruit, and Fruit Stripe. When someone would start to speak in tongues, my pencil stopped moving and I sat still, in reverence, as the strange, beautiful rhythms of the foreign-sounding words rang out over the church. “Om, shah-die! Om, shad-da-da-da-die!” The words were beautiful. They were music. They were holy.
But by the time I was sixteen, I started to notice things in the church that bothered me.
I hated it when the preacher would talk about the way women were inferior, referring to the verse I Corinthians 11:3 that reads “But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.” What I hated even more was the way the women in the audience would agree, nodding their heads and calling out “Amen, brother!” I hated that my mother agreed with this, and lived by it. Even as a teenager I had some inkling, I think, that I might someday have daughters, and that I wouldn’t want them to think this way. I thought to myself how this verse had probably been used over the centuries to victimize women, to make them feel worthless. It didn’t feel right.
I hated it when the preacher would say things like “Now I don’t know about you, hah, but I don’t serve no Buddha, hah, I don’t serve no Allah, hah, I don’ t serve no Mohammad, hah! I serve Jesus Christ Almighty and that’s all, hah, ‘cause them other ones, hah, don’t matter now, childurn, hah! They hain’t God!” For those of you who don’t know, the “hah” in there is a kind of rhythm marker, or a part of the call and response method that allows the audience to know when to give feedback, and a way for the preacher to catch his breath since this kind of preaching is a real workout, used by many Holiness preachers. I had never met anyone who wasn’t at least Protestant, but I still didn’t like the notion of discounting every other religion in the world when it was clear that the preacher didn’t know a thing about those religions.
I hated it when the preacher would talk about homosexuals and lump them in with pedophiles, murderers, blasphemers, and idolaters. I didn’t completely understand it then, but I knew enough to know that there was a big huge difference between being gay and being those other things, namely that those other things were evil and being gay was not. And I really didn’t like it when I once heard a Holiness preacher (not ours, a visiting evangelist) say that “all the queers should be rounded up, put on an island, and taught the Word of God” until they changed their ways. No use in even mentioning all the dinner conversation where some member of the church would take this a step further and say the queers should be rounded up and killed.
I especially hated it when getting an education was ridiculed by the preacher, saying things like “Now I hain’t been, hah, off to no big fancy college, hah, and learned no big bunch of theology, hah! Because I don’t need to, hah! Because I’m washed in the blood of the Lamb, hah, and that’s all the education I need, hah!” I had dreamed of getting a good education, of being the first person in my family to graduate college, but when I saw them all sitting there shaking their hands in the air to show their approval and calling out “Amen!” and “Hallelujar!” it made me want to throw up, and it also made me realize that even though they claimed to want me to go off to college, too, they would never think of it in the same way. That it would, in fact, someday become a division between us.
These are only the top things that bothered me. I won’t go into the rest, but suffice it to say that I left the church because of this line of talking and thinking. I left, and I wandered alone in the wilderness for years and years. For decades.
I tried being wild for awhile. I had been taught that if I wasn’t a perfect Christian who went to church every time the door was cracked and avoided all sins that I would burn in hell forever and ever. This led me to believe that I might as well try everything. My nature wouldn’t allow me to try quite everything, but I did go too far. I drank too much. I lived for honkytonk weekends. (to be continued…Part Two will be posted July 5)
