Three Steps Part 5: The Second Step

Original post is here. This is continued from Three Steps Part 4: Feminism and Fellowship.

The second half of the 1970s was a time of growing tension in American society, and in my family.  We had had the first real economic crisis since the Great Depression, and people were jumpy.  Instead of blaming the changing economy, they blamed the scapegoat du jour, feminism.  Feminism took the hit for two trends that had been actually going on for most of the 20th Century.  One of them was the return of the largest number of women to the workforce since WWII.  While it was true that feminism encouraged women who wished to work to pursue their dreams, the majority were motivated by the economy.  For every woman who went to work to to fulfill her potential there were 20 who did it to put food on the table for their families.

The more serious issue in the opinion of our neighbors that feminism was blamed for was the rising divorce rates.  I can remember riding the bus to school and all the other kids were talking about how their parents were getting divorced or had gotten divorced.  They thought we had the only parents in the neighborhood who were still together.  I couldn’t bring myself to tell them that our parents were actually already on their second marriage.  They had divorced a decade earlier to beat the rush.

The real culprit was a bad model for marriage.  Marriages made in the early 20th Century were encouraged to follow an occupational model where marriage was viewed as a job with fixed rules that could not be deviated from.  This meant that nothing could be changed if the marriage wasn’t working by those fixed rules.  Worse, it encouraged cheating on a spouse by equating it with what was considered the relatively minor offense of cheating on your employer.  Consequently there was an epidemic of unhappy marriages, and the divorce rate had climbing steadily since the late 1950s before starting to climb steeply in the late 1960s.  The saying, “Marry in haste, repent at leisure” was painfully true for far too many people.

Feminists pushed a partnership model of marriage, where each spouse was an equal partner able to renegotiate when things weren’t working out so as to prevent getting a divorce.  It also equated cheating on a spouse with the more socially serious offense of cheating on a partner instead of cheating your boss.  Starting in the late 1960s more marriages have followed this model, and consequently the divorce rates would decline dramatically in the years to come.  But in the late 1970s things had never looked scarier to people who valued traditional marriage.

I don’t know which of these pressures was getting under my adoptive mother’s skin and turning her into a vindictive jerk, but something was.  She didn’t like it when the sour economy which forced her to go back to work, even though she had worked until we moved to Birmingham only a few years before.  She didn’t like it that her second marriage had deteriorated even further, judging from the fact that my adoptive father’s coworkers had pity-dumped a multi-year stash of Playboy back issues on him that he had to hide in the basement.  She didn’t like it that her hair had started to turn grey, which she was camouflaging with the new “frosted highlights” treatment.  She didn’t like it that I was getting positive attention from being in the gifted program; she let everyone know that even if I was smart I would never amount to anything.  She didn’t like it that I was starting to ask questions.  She took all her myriad dislikes for everything else and focused them on one target — me.

Honestly, I found life bewildering at that point.  I was old enough that my reason was starting to kick into gear.  I could figure out logic puzzles, but the real world didn’t make much sense.  And I dearly wanted it to make sense in such a way where everybody agreed with everybody else and people really loved me.  But in the real world the arguments only increased and my mother’s abuse only grew more overt.

Well gosh darn it, I was going to try anyway.  Both my gifted class and my church taught that reason could and should be used to make the world better, so I was going to use it.  But it was hard to reconcile reason and misogyny, especially the virulent misogyny of my adoptive mother, who made Southern men of the 1970s look like die-hard feminists in comparison.

For instance, there was the whole question of women’s role in society.   My adoptive mother staunchly defended the natural inferiority of women, and more importantly the natural superiority of white women who believed in the natural inferiority of women over those women of any race who did not believe any such thing.  This gave her a moderately high position in the hierarchy from which to look down upon others without having the responsibility that went from being at the top of the heap.  It was important to her that I uphold the anti-feminist party line.  I could not.  Much as I wanted to please her, I could not believe in something so — dumb.  I mean, if God intended women to be less intelligent than men, why didn’t He make high IQ a sex-linked trait?  But He didn’t.  Therefore, He must have meant women to use the gifts He gave them.  Including the gifts He gave me.  Including my analytical mind.  Which, when I did use, people accused me of not being the kind of girl God wanted me to be.

I was only a kid, and the stress was wearing me down.  Finally, one Sunday morning after some especially vicious remarks on the way to church I could stand it no longer.  I did something I hadn’t done since I was very little.  I prayed to God.  Not only that, for the first time in my life I prayed to God for a sign.  I had always thought that was selfish, but I was desperate to clear up the confusion.

Imagine my surprise when I got one.

It was the Sunday before Easter, which is Palm Sunday.  Palm Sunday, for those who haven’t been to church in a while was when Jesus led a parade of his followers into Jerusalem in the hopes of making radical changes in the Establishment, hopes which were to be completely dashed by the Old Guard.  It was also the first sermon by our brand new preacher, and the first chance for most folks to meet him.

The church was packed with listeners curious to hear the new preacher.  He began by saying that he knew everyone expected to hear him speak of Big Things, but he wasn’t going to do that today.  There was a minor, not really important, matter that had somehow been allowed to get out of hand which had to be addressed first.  That matter was the status of women.

He said it seemed like the women of the church, and some of the men, weren’t reading their Bibles correctly.  They were focusing on the words of Jesus, but when it came to women the words of Jesus were less important than the words of Paul.  Paul had the final say on matters.

I wasn’t sure who this “Paul” fellow was.  I knew the Apostles and the Old Testament figures, but I hadn’t heard much of this guy.  And how could anybody’s words be more important than the words of Jesus?  I thought we were the followers in Jesus Christ, not somebody else.

Now, this Paul fellow was a Christian leader who came along after Jesus was dead and started organizing Jesus’ followers.  He wrote letters telling the other Christian leaders how they were supposed to interpret Jesus.  I wondered how those other Christian leaders who had actually met Jesus felt about that.

Paul had strong ideas about women’s place in the church.  Ideas like:

 Women should remain silent in the churches, They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.

And:

Likewise, I want women to adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly and discreetly, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garments, but rather by means of good works, as is proper for women making a claim to godliness. A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.

We were told that this was obviously the way Jesus wanted things to be, even though it contradicted things Jesus himself had said.  We were told that this was the way the church was going to be run from now on.  We were told that women should show their assent to the new order by not dressing up for Easter next Sunday.

I sat there in shock.  It was…

It was…

It was the biggest load of malarkey I had ever heard in my life.  I felt astounded to hear such hogwash being spoken seriously and terribly embarrassed on behalf of this grown man that he was being heard saying something so foolish in public.

I thought somebody was going to stand up and call him out for having his first sermon say such crazy and divisive things, but while I could sense the consternation nobody said anything. Now, my adoptive mom didn’t sew, but I knew there were ladies who had been working on their dresses for weeks. It was a mean thing to publicly denigrate their work right before they even got to finish it. It was crass and bullying. I decided then and there the God I believed in was not mean, crass, or bullying, and anyone who said He was had just blown his credibility with me.

My adoptive mother was proudly, almost combatively, anti-crafty, so I didn’t have a dog in this fight.  But I knew there were ladies for whom new clothes on Easter were important, some for showing off, but others got into the whole “rebirth and renewal” aspect.  I had also figured out that the church ladies who sewed were proxies for the church ladies who did the other jobs the congregation needed to have done, the ladies who organized the Sunday School, organized the Fellowship Hall, dusted the sanctuary, and ran the office. These were the women whose work was the real draw to come to the church who were being belittled by proxy.

I wondered what would happen if those women stopped coming?

In my naiveté I expected that even if the women didn’t confront this new preacher directly, their menfolk would have some strong words with him after the service about insulting their womenfolk from the pulpit.  Dumb old me didn’t realize that the men’s desire to send this very message was what got the guy hired.  I would learn that lesson over time, but not that day.

That day, as I sat listening to this man stand at the pulpit and speak the most idiotic drivel I had ever heard, I had a more important lesson to learn.  He stood at the pulpit like he was some kind of authority, like he had a right to be there, but his words were not true message that Jesus had brought to Earth and died for.  Even though he looked the part, acted the part, and no one openly questioned his right to the part, I knew he was a false prophet.  That day I learned to never, EVER accept authority without question.  It didn’t matter what position he held, it mattered that his words and deeds were in keeping with that position.  And if they weren’t, he had no business being there.

My shock started to fade, to be replaced by an urge to giggle.  Not just giggle, but to guffaw with a transcendent sense of — joy.  I mean, yeah, it was awful that he was up there saying this nonsense, but, as a girl named Sarah would realize in a movie that was to come out ten years later, “You have no power over me.”

Never again would I accept without question anyone’s authority over me.  I was liberated!  I walked out of church that day feeling blessed and euphoric in my power to do what Southern Baptists were supposed to do and decide for myself what God’s words meant to me.

And that was good, because things were about to get very strange.

Coming: Three Steps Part 6: The New Guy [Edit: This was never completed.]

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Three Steps Part 4: Feminism and Fellowship

Original post here.  This is continued from Three Steps Part 3: The First Step. This was about 1975.

So what do you do when it seems like your birth parents, your adoptive family and your church tell you that you, the individual person, are worthless? You start looking for other ways to make progress.  In the 1970s there was another way that had made astounding progress in recent years, and that was through collective action and identification with a movement.  Perhaps that could work for me.  If I was not allowed to help myself as an individual, perhaps I could work for the advancement of a group that would benefit me in the long run, such as feminism.

By the mid-1970s my family was settling in to a new life in Birmingham and it seemed like my country was settling in to a new life as well, one that seemed sincerely interested in using reason and compassion to fix the errors of the past.  Progress had been made on ending racial and gender discrimination, and more progress was coming.  These developments were hailed as Good Things by our leaders and in the press.  There were a few people grumbling about the changes in private conversations and letters to the editor, but never in public.  It didn’t seem important.

School started to become interesting when they decided to start one of those newfangled “gifted” programs.  I was ostracized by my peers for reasons I did not understand (high IQ and trauma), classes were deadly dull, and I had stopped paying attention and just sat there reading whatever I had checked out of the library.  My reading teacher fought to get me tested for the program even though my grades were poor because I was reading a different book every day.  The tests revealed that I was gifted, and I was put into the new class on probation over the strenuous objections of the principal, who apparently thought being bored in his classrooms was somehow inherently immoral.

I learned the two most important things I would learn in elementary school about that time, and oddly enough both of them were taught to me by male military veterans.  The first lesson was taught to me by my new gifted-ed teacher, a 50s-era Army veteran who had used his benefits to earn a Master’s in Psychology.  He taught me that the things which made me look at the world so differently than everyone else and isolated me from my classmates were matters of psychology, not moral failings on my part.  They were in the process of being named, studied, and understood.  I took a great deal of comfort from this fact.  In the lifetimes of my adoptive parents and grandparents these same types of researchers had worked diligently to eradicate so many of the great plagues that had swept over mankind, like smallpox and polio.  Surely they would be no less diligent in finding productive ways to deal with depression and anxiety.

The second lesson came from my new P.E. coach, a Vietnam-era Navy veteran who had been stationed in San Francisco and learned about yoga and meditation while he was there.  I don’t think the school approved of such things, but he would mix in as much yoga and meditation as he could with the soccer and gym hockey.  He taught us meditative breathing, and practicing that form of stress relief helped keep me from cracking under the stress.

Meanwhile I was noticing some discrepancies at church.  People talked about gender equality in church, but like the Queen’s jam in Alice in Wonderland, it was always equality tomorrow, never equality today.  Women would be allowed to preach any day now, but somehow never today or any other day on the schedule calendar.

By now I had noticed that most people didn’t come to hear the preacher speak in the first place, they came to take part in the activities going on in the Fellowship Hall.  These activities were organized by the church ladies.  Therefore the big draw at the church was the work of the women, not the work of the all-male clergy.  Yet, when the preacher called out the names of the notable members who had helped the church at the beginning of the service and asked them to stand and be recognized he only called on men.  After they were honored there would be a general platitude about the “wonderful work done by the ladies of the church”, but no women would  be named and recognized, and no individual woman’s work would be  held up for commendation.

There were also definite differences between “women’s work” and “men’s work”.  Women in the church cooked, cleaned, decorated, organized events, and took care of children.  Men in the church wrote and administrated.  Even at that age I knew that my God-given gift was writing.  There was no place for a women writer at my church, even with a gift coming from God.  God had not seen fit to gift me with any talent at all for cleaning, decorating, organizing or anything else which women were allowed to do.  In fifty years I have picked up some very slight skills along those lines, but nothing that will ever approach my ability to string words together.  So if God truly meant for men and women to occupy different spheres, why had He given me a gift that did not fit in with my gender?  It didn’t make any sense.  Either God had made a mistake, or the church had.  The latter seemed far more likely.

Meanwhile our preacher was getting ready to retire.  A new minister had been found by the steering committee, and exciting new things were being planned by the church organizers.  Maybe it would finally be the day for that equality jam.

I had a lot to learn.

Three Steps Out the Church Door: Leaving the Southern Baptist Church – Introduction

Three Steps Part 1: Recollection, Remembrance, and Discovery

Three Steps Part 2: That Old Time Liberal Religion

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Three Steps Part 3: The First Step

Original post here.  This is continued from Three Steps Part 2: That Old Time Liberal Religion. This happened about 1974.

And he walks with me and he talks with me
And he tells me I am his own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
 
None other has ever known.

1974 A few months before we had moved from Vicksburg to Birmingham, from a small ranch house to a split-level ranch house, from a traditional elementary school to an “open format” elementary school, from the big Southern Baptist church in a small town to a big Southern Baptist church in the suburbs of a city.  The least turbulent transition was the church.  There was a distinct change in decor — the Vicksburg church had a huge mural of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden behind the baptismal font, quite unusual for a Protestant church but very welcome for wandering eyes to rest on.  The suburban church had varnished pine boards, with nothing for a bored child to do but resist the urge to count them, for once they were counted, what else was there to do?  Fortunately there wasn’t much boredom at that time, as the services were very similar.  There was an emphasis on free will and God’s love to provide an answer to all our problems, on God’s expectation that we would stand on our own feet, work together, and get things done.  The ideal relationship with God was the one described in the song above, although the song itself wouldn’t be composed for almost another decade.  With intellect, love, and will-power, any problem could be solved.  I had just turned eight; and I believed, I believed, I believed.

But church wasn’t only the calmest place in my life, it was the most intellectually stimulating.  School was deadly dull, and there was no other place around me where people were having interesting, open-ended discussions about life’s problems.  In the early 70s there were a ton of problems to discuss, and many people were getting all gloomy about them.  But not the church, which was a haven of optimism and reason.

When we joined a few months ago, the preacher had welcomed us individually, shook my hand, and told me that if I had any problems I could come see him.  When I felt comfortable there, I took him at his word. I must have just turned eight.  My sister and I had been dropped off there for some children’s function, and I found the opportunity to speak to the minister alone in the sanctuary.  I told him that Mom and Dad were doing things to us that they shouldn’t, and, maybe, he could talk to them and make them stop? The preacher thought for a moment and then asked if my father sang in the choir.  Yes, he did.  He asked if my mother was the treasurer of the PTA.  Yes, she was.

He did not ask why I had requested an intervention.

Then he kindly explained things to me.  He explained that since my parents were members of the church in good standing, they couldn’t possibly be doing anything wrong, especially not to their own children.  If I thought that members of the church in good standing were doing something wrong, there could only be one explanation.  Somehow I had become possessed by Satan, and Satan was inside me making me believe lies about my parents that could not possibly be true.  Then he prayed to Satan to leave my body and stop plaguing my thoughts with such lies, and sent me on my way.

I was dumbfounded.  I may have just turned eight, but even then I knew the only thing I was possessed by was the good sense to realize how ridiculous the preacher sounded.  It was without question the single stupidest thing I had ever heard in my life, either in stories or in real life.  But if he took it seriously, then that could only mean — dangerous things. I remember staring at the thumbs of his clasped hands in shock, not daring to look him in the face.  Then my mind started to work.

This was a modern, liberal church in the early 1970s and he’s threatening me with Satan.  I don’t think half the congregation even believes in Satan!  It’s not a serious topic of conversation in or out of sermons.  Here people talk about using love to solve real problems, they don’t threaten people asking for help with stuff that belongs in old movies.  It’s like be threatened with leeches or water torture or — or footbinding or some other bit of antique nonsense.

But if there were even a tiny minority out there who actually believed such things, then I could never, ever tell anyone about my own spiritual experiences.  I had never told anyone about talking to God because I had never met anyone who would have a positive reaction to the news.  The negative reactions would fall into two camps, the ones who would want me shipped off to a loony bin and the ones who would want me burned at the stake.  Of the two I figured I could talk my way out of the loony bin easier than I could talk my way off a burning stake.  I seriously thought the latter camp only existed in old books, but apparently I was wrong.

That hurt.  I’d been looking forward to talking to someone about it someday.

Obviously I couldn’t talk to any spiritual ministers about anything else going on in my life.  And I had made a mistake not waiting until I knew someone long enough for them to trust me before asking them for help.  Next time I would wait longer.

That was what went through my conscious mind at the time.  For over 40 years whenever I consciously remembered it, that is all I thought about, that and the image of the thumbs of his clasped hands.  It was not until I finally committed to writing about it after years of dithering that I realized my subconscious had ruminated on it for a long time, and reached conclusions that I did not fully realize were connected to this memory.

In my subconscious I realized other things as well.  I realized that my parents could do anything they wanted to my little sister and I and no one would rescue us.  According to the preacher, they weren’t the only ones.  Any “member of the church in good standing” could do anything they wanted to us and if my parents didn’t stop them no one would.  That meant no one would protect me not only from my father but from any man at church who wanted to abuse me in any way.  It meant that the church would attract abusers who wanted to be “members in good standing” for the cover it provided for their abuse.

But it’s church, right?  There can’t be many abusers there.  At the time I believed that.  I didn’t have any evidence of any other abusers — other than the preacher’s disturbing response.

Time would prove me wrong.  The evidence would mount.  And I would have a hard time feeling safe in a church ever again.

Meanwhile I had a decision to make.  I was being abused at home, and apparently the larger community in the form of the my community’s spiritual leader thought that my abuse was the right and proper way of the world.  Where did that leave me?  At this point there were two things I could believe.  Either 1) there was something wrong with me that made people think they could get away with treating me like shit, or 2) the whole damn system was screwed.  I’ll take Door #1, Monty.

I can hear the chorus now.  “You just wanted to be a special snowflake!”  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I knew that what distinguished the scapegoat from the rest of the herd was the mark that others placed on it.  If I could figure out where the scapegoat’s mark was on me, I could wash it off and vanish into the crowd. If #1 was correct, that meant I could someday escape.  If #2 was correct I could never escape an entire world that saw all children as suitable playthings for monsters.  I originally chose to believe #1 not out of shame, despair, or any perverse pride; but out of a desperate, desperate hope.  In time that hope would fade, and despair would take it’s place.  In even more time I would realize that what I had refused to believe was true.  The whole damn system was screwed and no one was doing anything to fix it.

And then I would begin to get angry.

But I was eight and still in the grip of Persephone’s cruelest demon, hope.

(It would be 41 years later before my husband pointed out the most disturbing part of that conversation:  the preacher did not stutter or fumble his words.  To the veteran schoolteacher that meant only one thing — he’d had plenty of practice on other girls and boys.)

Three Steps Out the Church Door: Leaving the Southern Baptist Church – Introduction

Three Steps Part 1: Recollection, Remembrance, and Discovery

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Three Steps Part 2: That Old Time Liberal Religion

Original post here.  Continued from Three Steps Part 1: Recollection, Remembrance, and Discovery. This took place between the late 1960s – early 1970s.

Give me that old time religion,
Give me that old time religion,
It’s good enough for me. 

The church that I was brought up in no longer exists.  The buildings still stand, I could lead you inside and give you detailed tours.  They still have the same name, and are still used by an entity that calls itself Southern Baptist.  But how they define themselves is completely different.  The Southern Baptist Church I grew up in was proudly liberal.  At that time God was thought to be too big for the human mind to define, and any attempt to limit God’s nature beyond the broad outlines set out by Jesus was thought to be dubious.  The important part of the Bible was the Gospel, everything else was just there to provide context.  Homosexuality was not an issue.  Abortion was a medical procedure that was best avoided, but sometimes necessary.  My husband remembers a local Southern Baptist church holding a divorce ceremony for a couple who had married there.  I remember my church kindergarten teachers using a crystal ball in class.  And a book written at the time by a woman Southern Baptist theologian celebrated the ordination of women, which was just around the corner.

We never turned that corner.  We turned back instead.  But how did we reach that enlightened position in the first place?

I was taught in church that the bedrock foundation of our Southern Baptist faith was “soul competency.”  God created everything, including each and every one of us, and gave each and every one of us the ability, the permission, and the responsibility to develop a personal and unique relationship with God based on both our personal experience and our own reading and interpretation of the Bible.  God would hold each of us personally accountable for our actions when we met Him before the Throne, and we better be ready.  There would be no one else to hide behind, and we couldn’t use anyone else’s interpretation as a shield to cover our theological nakedness.  However, the same God that made us also made us competent to do the job.  We were God’s children, and we were up to this task.

Soul competency was popularized in the Southern Baptist faith by E.Y. Mullins in 1908.  Here is the Reverend John Dee explaining it:

To me it means that the individual Christian is unassailable in her interpretation of Scripture and in her own understanding of God’s will for her life. It means that when someone says, “This is what the Bible means to me,” I cannot tell her she is wrong. I can merely say that her understanding is meaningless for me. Only the preacher’s understanding of Scripture is expected to be generally meaningful for the whole community, and it is up to each individual to decide whether the preachers’ words are useful or not. Soul competency means to me that anything I understand to bring me closer to God is true and cannot be taken away from me, because my life is unique and there is a way of understanding Scripture which is unique to me. Soul competency means to me that I find truth when I am furthest removed from distractions and contingencies of people and things and authorities- again, when truth takes forms which are unique to me and my understanding of the Bible.

In his book The American Religion, Harold Bloom argues that this belief in soul competency aligns the Old School Southern Baptists with the earliest Christians, the Gnostics, in their belief that the close, personal relationship with God is inviolable.  As a young mystic who already had a close, personal relationship with God, I had no problems with that at the time or since then.

Soul competency led directly to another core Southern Baptist belief, the priesthood of the believer.  All who believed in God stood equally before God.  Some might be more learned or more gifted, but no one stood higher than any other.  In practice this meant that as long as you founded your beliefs on your understanding of the Bible, no other Christian could tell you that you were wrong.

As competent priests who took charge of our own souls, there was one doctrine we were strongly against — predestination.  Our fate, like our relationship with God, was subject to change at our own hands depending on what we did.  If we didn’t like our fate, we could walk with God and talk with God and take it up with God directly.  And then we could go out in the world and do something about it.  Calvinist predestination was roundly mocked as foolishness.

The great virtue of soul competency is that it inoculates against atheism.  If you are taught that the Bible is the only place where one looks for God, then when you realize the Bible is a collection of old books of questionable value in today’s world you have no fallback position and become a skeptic by default.  If there is another place where you are taught to look for God the break is not as traumatic.

But how did this play out in my head?  Well, here’s an example.  The year must have been about 1972.  I was around six or seven, and my family was attending Sunday Service at Bowmar Baptist Church in Vicksburg, MS.  The preacher was telling the story of Moses, and how as a youth Moses had killed another man in a fit of rage.  The preacher said that the young man thought he was alone, but God was there.  It got me to thinking:  was God also young at that time?  It would fit, the God of the Old Testament was certainly more hot-tempered and less mature than the God of the New Testament.  Perhaps the entire Bible could be read as God’s coming-of-age story, as He grew into a more responsible deity.  I hadn’t heard anyone mention that idea before, and I knew some would object to it.  But I was just as competent to interpret the Bible as they were.  I would hold on to that thought until I was old enough to discuss it with other believers in a thoughtful, non-judgmental place.

I never found that place in the Southern Baptist church.  By the time I was old enough to discuss theology they had changed beyond recognition.  I was able to eventually find a thoughtful non-judgmental place to discuss theology with other worshipers, but that would have to wait many decades until I found the Unitarian Universalist Church.

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There was one other thing we learned in church.  This being the ’60s and early ’70s we all got a good dose of anti-communism.  It was considered your patriotic duty to preach anti-communism everywhere, including the pulpit.  We were taught that communism was evil for three reasons:

1)  Communists told people what they had to believe, instead of letting people make up their own minds,

2)  Communists punished people who questioned them and did not believe what they were told to believe, and

3)  Communists rewrote their own history to erase any evidence that disagreed with them.  That one seriously freaked me out as an adopted child, probably because it had been done to me personally.  (Although why it was acceptable when done to me and not acceptable when done by communists was a question I never found the nerve to ask.)

Keep those three things in the back of your mind; we’ll return to them later.

Three Steps Out the Church Door: Leaving the Southern Baptist Church – Introduction

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Three Steps Part 1: Recollection, Remembrance, and Discovery

These events takes place in the late 1960s – 1970.  Original post here.  It has been edited slightly to reflect updated information. Continued from Three Steps Out The Church Door: Leaving the Southern Baptist Church – Introduction.

Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world
Red, brown, yellow, black and white
They are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world. 

In trying to write down my memories, I find that the earliest part of the story has changed the most.  There is what I recalled, what I remembered, and what I later found out about.

I recall only scattered memories of the late 1960s from around 2 1/2 years (when my adoptive sister was brought home) to 3 1/2 years, leading up to a moment a few months before my fourth birthday when I realized I was recalling more details, and would in general recall things from then on.

I later found out I had a rotten start.  I was adopted at birth by an unrelated couple looking for a baby to save their second failed marriage (each) and give them social credits.  My adoptive mother had been rejected as an adoptive parent in her first marriage, and it took three years for my adoptive parents to pass a home study before adopting me (average time is three – six months).

Apparently she couldn’t handle a baby.  I found out later she’d bitten and pinched me when I cried, and her own mother had moved in and actually taken care me until her death when I was around three.  I don’t recall any of that, but found out about it later.  The only thing I recall of Granny is going to see her as she lay dying in the hospital, and looking at a figure under an oxygen tent.

After that Mom took a low-level clerical job, even though we were debt free and fairly well off, so she would require a maid to look after my adoptive baby sister and me during the day. Dorothy was efficient, but neither she nor Mom was into cuddling or other shows of affection.

What do I remember?  I remember being very unhappy and not knowing why.  I remember being alone almost all the time.  My working class parents bought me the toys they thought were appropriate, but made no attempt to learn anything about early childhood development except through hearsay.  This made their purchases somewhat scattershot and focused on what was cheap and trendy.  It also meant no puzzles until much later, few manipulatives, and never, ever any of those nasty building blocks.  There were dolls, but dolls always upset me.  I didn’t know how to play with them except to treat them the way I was treated, and I didn’t want to do that to anything.  I didn’t tell anyone, but I never saw a doll without wanting to cry my eyes out until I was over 30.

(When I was older my adoptive mother complained that I had loved her completely and we had been perfectly happy until I turned two when I suddenly hated her, and she still had no idea why.  You see what I mean about her knowledge of childhood development.)

(And that didn’t gel with the later information I found out about her abusing me as an infant.)

Dad had a traveling job, and was only home on weekends.  Mom worked during the day, and Dorothy was busy with my baby sister and cleaning the house.  We weren’t allowed outside to play much.  As for entertainment, video games didn’t exist yet, and only my parents were allowed to touch the TV.

Of course there was another player in this drama — me.  Although I am a Myers-Briggs INFJ with the ability to read emotions, from an early age I repressed my empathy because the emotions I was picking up were too awful.  I still to this day have trouble picking them up.  From early on I tried to function as an INTP.  I got pretty good at it, and had everyone convinced I was an INTP for decades. I got very good at looking at the world as if I were an INTP, which meant I devoted my time to trying to 1) concentrate, 2) sift through large amounts of data, 3) notice discrepancies, and 4) solve puzzles.

I spent most of my preschool years alone in my room with nothing that really engaged my mind.  I had a lot of mind to engage and not much inside it at the time.  But being highly intelligent and not yet literate, I found it easy to concentrate on a single thought until I fell into a trance and entered an altered state of consciousness.  Through trance I met other beings and saw things that did not exist in the here-and-now.  It’s incredibly hard to do that now because there are so many thoughts in my head that I have to shut down, but back then it was relatively easy.

I didn’t tell anyone.  I didn’t have the vocabulary and nobody cared enough to ask me what I had done that day.  Nothing was broken, so nothing got their attention.  I recall one time when I tried to make them realize how unhappy I was.  We were going somewhere, and I slipped unto the floor of the back seat of the car (seat-belts were optional and infant car seats were nonexistent) and began pulling the hair out of my head in huge chunks, hoping they would ask me why.  They didn’t.  They just yelled at me for making a mess.  The hair never grew back, and I have an elongated forehead to this day.  But it convinced me of the futility of self-mutilation as an attention-getting ploy, which kept me out of a world of trouble in my teenage years, so it was a win in the long run.

Anyhow, thanks to my mystical experiences I was not as lonely as I could have been, and I became a lifelong theist.  Those experiences would become a great source of comfort to me growing up and provide a solid foundation for my religious education.

Three Steps Part 2: That Old Time Liberal Religion

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