Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions Read online

  But baptism was clearly the distinguishing field mark. Baptists baptize by immersion and reserve the Sacrament for professing believers only, while Presbyterians, like most other Protestants, baptize by sprinkling, and administer the Sacrament not just to new Christians who haven’t been baptized previously but also to the infant children of Christians.

  The logic of the Baptist position, articulated by my father, seemed unassailable to me. In the Bible, John the Baptist baptized converts, not converts and their babies. And this was no misting of houseplants; it was a manly Sacrament, performed in rivers. People got wet. Of course no Orthodox Presbyterian believed that baptizing infants conferred salvation. The children of believers were as depraved and hell-bound as the most unchurched pagan of those humid places where missionaries went. But the Presbyterians argued that infant baptism demonstrated the parents’ public commitment to raise their children in the truth.

  Baptism was a problem for me. I wanted to become a Christian. I prayed for this every day. And although I knew baptism wouldn’t save me, it seemed a convincing proof of one’s election. But I had never learned to swim and couldn’t even put my face in the water. Hell, I was afraid of taking showers. How would I ever endure baptism by immersion? If we were Presbyterian, I would’ve been baptized as an infant and that would’ve been that. What rotten luck to have been born to Baptist parents!

  I did have occasion to be thankful that at least we weren’t Brethren. Once during those church-hopping years we visited a Brethren church while they were baptizing a large crop of new Christians. The Brethren, like Baptists, practice believers’ baptism. But they do triple immersion. The baptizee goes under three times, once for each person of the Trinity.

  The service was interminable. And one of the baptizees, a girl not much older than I, had obviously never learned to swim either. She spluttered and gasped each time she surfaced and tried to say “Wait!,” holding up her arms, heavy in soaked and clinging baptismal robes, to resist the pastor. But he kept pushing her down again: “In the name of the Father,”—dunk—“the Son,”—dunk—“and the Holy Spirit”—dunk. People around us tittered, but I was swallowing hard, trying not to cry.

  It was a relief to return to the dryness of the Orthodox Presbyterians after that. They were a friendly lot, the OPs, frequently inviting us to their homes for lunch after the morning service. Our doctrinal differences rarely came up, but when they did, it was always good-natured.

  “One day a Presbyterian pastor runs into his friend, a Baptist pastor,” began a joke told at one of these gatherings. “They begin to talk about baptism.

  “‘What if a person gets in the water only up to his feet?’ the Presbyterian asks. ‘Would that count?’

  “‘No,’ the Baptist minister says. ‘You have to go in farther than that.’

  “‘How about up to his knees?’ the Presbyterian asks.

  “‘No,’ the Baptist says. ‘That wouldn’t count.’

  “‘Up to the hips?’

  “‘No, no, no.’

  “‘To chest level?’

  “‘No.’

  “‘How about the chin? That’s almost all the way in.’

  “‘No.’

  “‘Up to the eyes.’

  “‘No,’ the Baptist insists. ‘You have to get the top of the head wet.’

  “‘The top of the head? That’s what matters?’

  “‘Yes.’

  “‘Well, we’re in complete agreement!’ the Presbyterian pastor declares. ‘We get the top of the head wet too!’”

  4. OF FAMILY DEVOTIONS

  God is to be worshipped everywhere, in spirit and truth; as, in private families daily.

  —Westminster Confession, XXI:6

  Many evenings after dinner, my father would call us together for family devotions. Lasting about half an hour, it usually included a Bible reading, some catechism, and a closing prayer. It was torture, especially for Mari. We had to memorize our fair share of scripture verses—in the King James version, of course. Worse was having to memorize the Westminster Shorter Cathechism. This document, completed in 1647 by the same good people who brought us the Westminster Confession, consists of 107 questions and answers about doctrine presented in gorgeous seventeenth-century English. I can still perfectly recall questions 1 and 4:

  Question 1: What is the chief end of man?

  Answer: Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.

  Question 4: What is God?

  Answer: God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.

  My father spanked us if we failed to correctly recite the assigned passages. I had a knack for on-demand, short-term recall, and avoided getting hit. My sister was often not so lucky.

  5. TREATS OF INDIGNITIES SUFFERED AT VACATION BIBLE SCHOOL

  God gave to Adam a law, as a covenant of works, by which He bound him and all his posterity to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience; promised life upon the fulfilling, and threatened death upon the breach of it; and endued him with power and ability to keep it.

  —Westminster Confession, XIX:1

  The summer after I finished second grade, my parents sent me and Mari, who’d just finished first grade, to Vacation Bible School. It went for one week, meeting two or three hours every weekday evening at the OP church in Garden Grove, one of the many places where we’d occasionally worshipped. Mari and I had to carpool with an OP family we didn’t like very much: April was snotty, Andy bratty, their mother meek, and their father quiet except when he exploded with violent rage at one of his kids.

  The theme for the week was God’s Law—always a crowd-pleaser with the elementary school set. The hymn for the week, which April and Andy’s parents made us practice in the car, was #450 from the Trinity Hymnal, the official hymnal of the OPC:

  Most perfect is the law of God,

  Restoring those that stray;

  His testimony is most sure,

  Proclaiming wisdom’s way.

  O how love I thy law! O how love I thy law!

  It is my meditation all the day.

  O how love I thy law! O how love I thy law!

  It is my meditation all the day.

  Bible stories illustrated the theme throughout the week: the stalwarts who followed God’s ways, no matter how repugnant or illogical—Abraham, who showed God he was willing to kill his own child; Moses and the Israelites, rampaging their way as instructed through the Promised Land; the brothers James and John, who abandoned their father, Zebedee, at a word from Jesus. Counterexamples were also presented for our edification. Look what could happen if you didn’t obey God! Jonah, swallowed by a whale; Ananias and Sapphira, who dropped dead after lying about money in church; and poor Achan, who couldn’t resist sneaking forbidden war booty into his tent and was stoned and burned to death along with his entire family.

  Mari and I were in different classes for the week, and we both had problems with our teachers. An aide in my class had big, bleached blonde hair. She wore short skirts, low-cut knit tops, perfume, and makeup. She had a distinctly un-Presbyterian name—something like Deena. But this was the clincher: she didn’t know the Bible stories. I finally accosted the head teacher and told her Deena did not seem like a Christian.

  “Well,” the teacher whispered back, “she’s not a Christian.”

  “She’s not?”

  “We thought helping out with Vacation Bible school would be a great way for her to be introduced to the Gospel,” the teacher explained. “Can you please pray for her?”

  “Oh. Okay,” I said, but I was appalled. What were they thinking, foisting an unbeliever on unsuspecting kids? What if she, you know, led us into error?

  But at least Deena was nice, whereas Mari’s Vacation Bible School teacher told her that she wasn’t coloring correctly. At home this was met with more outrage than my news that one of my teachers wasn’t even a Christian. Mari was a very talented artist. I give my pa
rents credit for this: they took their total depravity seriously and harbored no illusions that Christians were better or smarter than other people. They gave Mari to understand that this woman who’d criticized her drawings was an idiot. “Pay no attention,” my mother said. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  Though my notions of Presbyterian common sense and courtesy were sorely tested that week, they were somewhat restored after class on the last day. On our way to the parking lot with Andy and April and their parents, Mari said she needed to go to the bathroom. The classrooms were locked up already, but someone directed us to the main building. Mari didn’t want to go alone, so I went with her.

  The heavy double doors shut behind us, leaving us alone at one end of the long, dark, silent sanctuary. We hurried to the bathroom and finished as quickly as we could, then rushed back to the doors we’d come through, but the doorknobs wouldn’t budge. We pressed our small bodies against the double doors but nothing happened. It was Friday night, everyone was leaving, and we were locked in the church.

  I have some memories of trying to be brave at times when I knew Mari was scared, but this isn’t one of them. I panicked, and Mari followed suit. We cried and banged on the doors, screaming for someone to let us out. The staid Presbyterian interior, so lacking in inspiration on Sunday mornings, was, in complete darkness, as terrifying as the most Gothic cathedral.

  Eventually the pastor of the church came in through a side door and rescued us. “Look,” he said, his seminary-trained voice low and soothing, “all you have to do is press on the bar. See?”

  We hadn’t realized that the wide metal bars spanning the width of each door would open them. We may not even have seen them in the dark. He opened the door, and outside a whole bevy of OPs was clucking about how they’d been trying to tell us what to do but we’d been so busy carrying on that we couldn’t hear. The pastor shushed them and took Mari and me back in the church, gently insisting that we open the door ourselves, to see how easy it was, so we’d never have to be that scared again.

  Seven years later, an American Airlines DC-10 crashed shortly after takeoff at O’Hare, killing that kind pastor and 270 other people on board. I’ve since learned that that bar he showed Mari and me how to use, so common on industrial doors, is called a panic bar.

  6. IN WHICH I LEARN THAT CHURCH TRUMPS EVERYTHING, EVEN DEATH

  The bodies of the unjust shall, by the power of Christ, be raised to dishonor; the bodies of the just, by his Spirit, unto honor, and be made conformable to his own glorious body.

  —Westminster Confession, XXXII:3

  In April of 1973, when I was finishing up third grade, we moved to the East Coast in order to attend a particular Reformed Baptist church, and our church-hopping days ended. But in the months before we left California, my parents more or less settled on one OP church. This congregation convened, of all places, in a mortuary in Cerritos. The building was shaped like a boxy U, with the main entrance and a spacious lobby at the bottom of the U, the chapel along the right side, and on the left a wing of small rooms, very nicely furnished, that we used for Sunday School classrooms in the morning. The children liked the lobby, which had an indoor koi pond. We were forbidden to touch the water, but most of us, at some point or other, dipped in a finger or shoe, and a few of the more intrepid kids managed to touch a fish.

  The place looked very much like a church, and most of the time we could forget that the building had other uses. But there were occasional reminders, like the evenings we had to wait for a memorial service to conclude in the chapel before we could go in for our evening service. And there was the time one child (I think it was Andy) reported to the wrong classroom for Sunday School and spent some minutes sitting by himself next to an open and occupied casket before one of the adults discovered him.

  Then there was the awful smell. This happened rarely—twice, that I specifically recall, both times in the evening. It assaulted us as soon as we entered the lobby. Bitter and cloying, the stench traveled straight up our nostrils and deep into our heads. It corresponded to no previous experience of smell—not to bathroom smells or garbage smells or to any of the industrial odors of Southern California. The nauseating stench of unchanged water in a vase of cut flowers that have died—it was like that, but much, much worse.

  “Ew! What is that smell?” the children all asked. One of the mothers said it was a dead fish from the indoor pond, and no one contradicted her. Mari and I knew this wasn’t true. We’d spent the earliest years of our life in Japan. Dead fish did not smell like this. We knew it, and so did all the other children. We knew what the smell was, knew it in an instinctive, olfactory memory of the collective unconscious way. This was the stench of death. Human death.

  Incredibly, no one would leave. The service would proceed as scheduled. Ladies clapped handkerchiefs to their faces. The men sat upright in pews, manfully inhaling, faces green. The grown-ups instructed us not to complain. I figured out that if I breathed in and out through my mouth I wouldn’t smell anything, but there was something sickening about this too, as if I were ingesting death. We sat there, enveloped by the stinging perfume of human decay, hissing through the hymns, all of us watching the clock and waiting for deliverance. The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. Were we having fun yet?

  Why couldn’t these people, who had not the slightest hesitation about telling their children that they would burn forever in hell when they died, be honest about the real-world manifestations of physical death? Here, surely, was the real “end” of man—dead, breaking down into volatile organic compounds, a mortician’s project. Talk about a powerful object lesson. But all we got by way of explanation was dead fish.

  I was a logical child, a legalistic child, a self-righteous pain-in-the-ass of a child. So I wondered: If Ananias and Sapphira were struck down dead by God for telling a lie in church, why were all of our parents still alive? But I did not say this aloud. By age nine I already suspected that much of what people said—even Christians, even parents, even Reformed Baptist and Orthodox Presbyterian parents—was not to be relied on. But I also understood that they could not help themselves. They may have been elect of God from before time, but they were still, after all, totally depraved.

  Direct Line to God

  Cami Ostman

  The oldest of us is Donny. He’s twenty-two, and even though this is only my second time meeting him, I’m already enamored. The first time we met was at church, the one time I visited with Hope a few weeks ago. Donny’s got this black hair styled up in a stray-cat-strut swirl and milky white skin, smooth—and warm, I’ll bet. His eyes are so blue I have to look away when he greets me at the door and says, “Come on in.” His gaze makes me blush. Donny’s roommate, Ted, is beautiful in his own right, with sandy hair and hazel eyes that sparkle when he says your name, but he doesn’t have that edgy, forlorn expression that Donny wears. I’m a sucker for forlorn. It runs in my family.

  At only fourteen I’m the youngest in the group. I’m even younger than my best friend, Hope, who is also fourteen but whose birthday is almost a month before mine. There are thirty of us in all, but I know only Hope and Donny and Ted so far. After Donny invites us in, Hope makes her way around the room greeting everyone. I take a seat in the circle next to a girl with extra-white hair, thick glasses, and eyes that flutter around like she couldn’t hold them still even if she tried. She’s an albino; I can tell because you can practically see right through her skin. She says Hi and It’s nice to meet you and My name is Hedda, what’s your name? I tell her and then we look away from each other and pretend to study the carpet.

  Donny and Ted’s place is in the basement of somebody’s house and it’s super ugly. The rug is don’t-look-too-close-or-you’ll-find-gross-stuff-down-there maroon and the walls are paneled with wood. Hanging next to the front door is a velvet picture of Jesus holding an electric guitar. The picture glows in black light. I know this because as soon as everyone is seated, Donny plugs his ow
n guitar into his amp and turns down the lights. Only one lamp stays on and it has this pulsing, buzzing bulb that radiates a purple luminosity—I love that word, luminosity. Anyway, the velvet Jesus becomes brilliant and his red guitar shimmers—Donny’s that is, not the guitar in the Jesus picture. Jesus’s guitar disappears when the lights are low and turns into a shepherd’s staff. It’s cool.

  Even though the apartment is small and cramped and smells like mold, it’s the only place we can all go out of adult earshot. Since Donny and Ted are the youth pastors at Hope’s church and are considered adults, the main pastor has given his approval for youth group to meet here. I’m glad because if my mom found out I was going to church, she would flip a switch. This way, I can go to church service without lying, exactly.

  Donny leads us through about five choruses. I don’t know the words, but I think it’s awesome the way everyone sings like they’re singing love songs, with their eyes closed and swaying. Only, I’m a little embarrassed when kids start raising their hands in the air like they’re reaching for something they can’t quite get to, even on their tippy toes. I’m not sure where I’m supposed to look. They seem like they’re doing something private, like when you touch yourself at night, but they’re doing it here right in front of everyone. I close my eyes, too, so no one catches me watching.

  The guitar gets really quiet. Donny picks out a gentle melody, and I open my eyes. He’s got his eyes open too, and he sees me looking at him and winks. I’m totally in love with him even though I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to be since he’s the youth pastor. Closing my eyes again, I suddenly hear somebody near me talking quietly in what sounds like a foreign language. Hope told me about this. She says it’s called “tongues” and that it’s a sign that God lives in your heart when He’s given you the ability to talk in a foreign language you’ve never learned. She says it might be an earthly language that somebody can translate or it could be a heavenly language—the language of the angels—so you can pray things to God that you don’t even know you’re praying.