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cathrineteague · 5 years

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Condo by the Lake of Fire

A personal essay - originally written in 2012

God help me, but I think I want to talk about religion. Christianity, specifically, but not Christianity as it’s written in the Holy Bible itself. The Bible is hardly the root of the problem.

There is a place down South called the Bible Belt, where Church is the wheel on which everything turns. You know as soon as you’ve crossed into this strange, alternate world because suddenly one church per town won’t suffice, and Sunday morning just isn’t enough time for preaching.

You’ll see billboards in the big cities (Don’t make me come down there. – God). And on those otherwise beautiful stretches of highway through miles of green farmland, you’ll come upon the occasional massive, ominous white cross, looming over the highway as if to remind all who pass through whose country they’re traversing.

Don’t stop. Don’t get out of the car, not even to take a picture. Everyone you meet will be vying for a chance at your soul. Evangelical Christians—terrifying creatures bred on generations of threats of hellfire and brimstone—don’t know how to meet a living thing without inquiring about its status with regards to God.

“Hi! Nice to meetcha. Where ya come from? Where ya headed? Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior and if not, would you like to do so this very day? For we are living in the End Times! None of us is promised tomorrow, brothers and sisters, and God is not willing that any one of His children should be lost, say amen.”

More frightening for an outside observer than the prospect of crossing this land—to get to some more desirable locale where they don’t try to walk you into such a long-term commitment right away—is the idea of what it must be like to grow up in it.

Don’t weep for the little children, though, you heathen Yankees! They do just fine. They learn all the lessons they need to know at school, at Church and at home. And if one of these places tends to bleed into the others, well…hallelujah, that’s consistency! Sometimes it’s hard and painful of course, but what good, worthy things are there in life that don’t require some work? We have to purge our children of their sins before the Devil gets a foothold!

It’s violence, really. Emotional terrorism, praise the Lord and give God the glory. See the little girl sitting in the third pew, in an itchy pink dress she had to be wrestled into earlier that morning? Teach her Your ways, O Lord.

Teach her that when she gets older holding hands with the little blonde girl next to her won’t be okay anymore, to say nothing of all the other things she’s going to want to do. Teach her that her body and her mind are great betrayers, teach her to shut them down and ignore what they tell her. She must suffer as Christ suffered.

When Jesus was a little kid, did he want to hold hands with the other boys? Teach her not to ask such sacrilegious questions.

Teach her to be ashamed of having questions at all. A good Christian with a healthy relationship with God doesn’t have doubts or questions, and never-you-mind that Jeremiah prophet. He was a prophet, after all, and you’re just a girl. The Bible says women ought not to speak in Church.

Send your children to summer “youth camps” and winter “retreats.” Let them spend all day at the water park in some perpetually sunny Southern city, shrieking with laughter and not a care in the world. Send them, sunburned and still smelling like chlorine and the sunscreen they put on in the morning, to the dimly-lit interior of a hotel conference room. Show them how to raise their hands and sing at the top of their lungs to God, all the more joyful abandon, so the rocks don’t cry out.

Sit them down and bring out a fat, happy guest preacher who says he is their friend. He dresses like they do. He talks the way they do. He knows who their favorite musicians are, knows how to play the saxophone. They are all in agreement: he’s a pretty cool guy, and in the space of half an hour they trust him like they’ve known him all their lives.

Let him talk to them for another sixty minutes. By the end of it they’ll all be on their knees in the altar, sobbing. They’ll cling to each other as they gasp out those prayers, begging God to forgive them for those seconds of the day when they forget themselves and are human. For that single unkind thought, for that dirty joke at lunch three weeks ago, for these offenses and a million more. They will beg forgiveness for everything they’ve done in their lives between Monday mornings and Saturday nights.

And no matter how hard they try, there will always be new seconds of imperfection to cry over come next Wednesday, when their young, handsome youth pastor gets up to remind them of the commitment that he’s sure “some of y’all have already forgotten.”

The battle begins on the first day of school, after all. When you’re walking through the overcrowded hallways, trying to get to your locker across the building in the five-minute break, trying to absorb useless details about ancient Mesopotamia that you’re sure you covered last year, and the year before, trying to understand what’s so great about A House on Mango Street anyway…don’t forget the commitment you made at winter retreat, and renewed on Wednesday night, and Sunday morning, and again on Sunday night.

They all forget, of course. Maybe not habitually, maybe only for a second, but it’s enough. Every single second out of the day they don’t spend in awe of Almighty God is fodder for their guilt-ridden prayers at the Sunday evening service.

The bass-voiced, solemn-faced preachers all says that Christianity is more than fire insurance, but I’ll be damned if they don’t use the eternal torment of Hell--and a shot at skipping it--as a selling point at every turn.

“Do you have a relationship with God? Are you ready? If you died this very minute, where would you go?”

“You with the heavy eyeliner, the black bondage pants and the heavy metal t-shirt, repent of your sins and come back next week in jeans and this hoodie with the youth group’s logo on it, only $25.”

“You in the low-cut blouse, stop tempting your Brothers in Christ to sinful thoughts. Cover yourself from neck to ankles and be forgiven for the sin of being a pretty girl.”

Your body is a temple; your body is a temptation. Your body is the place all sins originate, so divorce yourself from it as much as possible, praise Jesus.

It starts almost at birth and it never really ends. Even if you escape, drag yourself across the invisible border into a place where towns with populations under a thousand only have one church and no one defaces the highway with terrifying symbols of pre-medieval execution methods…even if you manage to run from the voices all around you telling you that you’re Lost, you’re a Sinner, you’re Backslidden, you’re Going To Hell...you’re not really safe. You can’t escape the voices in your head that tell you the exact same things.

So what if logic says it’s crazy? So what if every rational thought you have screams against the majority of what you’ve been taught since before you could talk? Those teachings took root long before some high school English teacher or college professor took pity and taught you to think, before some song on the radio ignited the tiny fire of rebellion that grew and eventually prompted you to run in the first place.

Your mama says rebellion is like witchcraft in the eyes of God. You shall not suffer a witch to live; it says so in the Bible.

Spend every day for the rest of your life telling yourself that God is love, that God forgives, that God shows mercy to His children. Read the Bible if you want to, highlight all those passages that prove your point. Live your life by day as if you believe it, but say your prayers at night the way you always have: searching frantically in your mind for that one damning little sin, some slip-up that you forgot to beg forgiveness for that’s going to plunge you into Hell if you die in your sleep.

Call home; listen to the voices of your past in a chorus of agreement.

“I’m praying for you, child,” says the elderly aunt before you hang up, every time. You feel her prayers; they prickle the back of your neck every time you pass a church, make you walk a little faster and keep your eyes to the ground.

And what if they’re right? That’s the question you can’t get away from, the one that logic can’t dispel because it’s not a logical adult asking it, but that scared, brow-beaten little girl in the itchy dress.

What if they’re right about everything?

You had a friend once, an anomaly living fun and fancy free among his religious brethren, a jolly-faced man you met at the community theatre who served on the deacon’s board at his church and went home every night to Jerry, his sweet-smiling house husband of more than a dozen years. They threw Christmas parties and pool parties, and welcomed you at the door with warmth and joy and homemade lemonade.

He used to joke that in Hell he’d be a VIP.

“When we all get there, you guys can just join me in my luxury condo, right beside the lake of fire.”

A small, sacrilegious voice inside you hopes that if they’re right, then he is, too.

#writing #writeblr #personal essay #christianity #bible belt #christian fundamentalism

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