But my father couldn’t really do that anymore. His judgment had been so severely called into question by the church that he had seemed unwilling to trust himself—or my mother—ever since. Instead he listened and followed the recommendations of his fellow elders, even when they were contrary to his instincts. Most of these new rules had no specific foundation in Scripture—just a reference to a broad passage calling believers to abstain from all appearance of evil. When Sam and Steve learned that Grace was using her required twenty-minute work break to explore the area around her downtown office building, they prompted my father to forbid it. He did. The appearance of evil. She began spending those breaks sitting on the couch in the twelfth-floor bathroom. When Grace asked to take our brothers to a park to climb trees, our father forbade that, too—not just on that day, but ever. That Grace would request such a silly thing was taken as evidence that her heart wasn’t in the right place. The appearance of evil. When our father instructed Grace to choose a degree other than art, Sam and Steve advised him that he hadn’t gone far enough—that her options should be limited to the study of nursing or computers only. The fact that both of those studies were anathema to my sister was almost the point. In the words and actions of these men I could not help but see that, above all else, their desire was to break her spirit. Any comfort she found in her old ways—exploring and adventuring, even within the extreme confines of our sheltered lives—had to be taken from her. It was as if that phone call from Lindsey had given them an excuse to impose upon Grace every unreasonable limit they could dream up in order to quench her spirit. It was as if they were saying, “You see what happens when you let a young woman have her way?”
Still, I understood that Grace wasn’t perfect, and that my father was trying to help her to grow—to learn to discipline herself and her mind, and to see that necessary courses of action aren’t always fun or enjoyable. Sometimes, you just had to do what you were told. Bekah and I had learned these lessons when we were young, and our lives had become much more pleasant as a result. In learning to conquer our wayward emotions, we had found peace, and I tried to encourage Grace to seek it, as well. As much as I disagreed with so many of the elders’ decisions, I still believed that submitting to God meant submitting to church leaders, and I sent her quotes about the importance of training our hearts and minds to yield to them. Just by virtue of their authority over us, I fell back into the position that they were right, that our doubts were wrong, and that any disagreements we had were the rebellious impulses of disobedient children. How dare we think that we knew better than the leaders God had set over us? I wanted to yield, and I chided myself for any thought that contradicted the church.
* * *
“I just don’t understand this, Mom!” She and I were in the kitchen getting things ready for dinner. A month had passed since Lindsey’s call to my sister, and Grace and I hadn’t exchanged a word with her since. I had asked repeatedly for permission to apologize, to explain that our sudden disappearance hadn’t been a choice to punish Lindsey for the understandable outrage she’d unleashed on my sister, but because the elders had decided it was best. With increasing anger at my persistence, my father refused. Echoing the other elders, he insisted that Lindsey deserved neither explanation nor apology: she was no concern of ours except inasmuch as she had an interest in the Bible and our doctrines. “We’ve put Lindsey in an impossible situation!” I told my mother. “We’ve almost completely cut off her interactions with church members because she isn’t baptized—but we’ve also told Justin that if he’s ruling well his own house, he’ll be keeping Lindsey from having relationships with friends or family outside the church, too! She’s just supposed to stay at home all the time and only have her husband and toddler around? Steve would never have accepted that kind of treatment if we’d done it to his wife when he first came here!”
My mother was quiet. I could feel myself spinning out of control, despair and bile rising in my chest, but I couldn’t stop myself from continuing. “What are we doing? There is nothing Scriptural about what’s going on here! The elders act as if their judgment is infallible and they refuse to listen to anyone else—even when they’re directly violating the commandments! All the verses about being of one mind mean nothing to them! The women are angry and spiteful and always finding reasons to be offended!” I was crying now, filled with a desperation so choking I could hardly breathe. I quoted the verses I knew my mother already knew. She’d turned to them often over the past year, trying to maintain hope that her situation would improve. My heart twisted into a knot of despair knowing that the past year had been so much worse for her. I was only a witness to the cruel treatment of the elders and other members. She was their primary target. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. In lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another.
Mercy. Humility. Meekness. Compassion. Where were they among this church body?
Almost as soon as the thought formed in my mind, another took its place:
I sounded like C.G.
* * *
The Fourth of July arrived. We’d stopped celebrating American Independence after the September 11 attacks—dispositive evidence that our nation was fully and finally doomed—but we still got the day off from work. Grace and I had volunteered to spend some of ours painting the basement walls in the home of our friend Jayme, a new church member, so we changed into old clothes after the noontime pickets. We headed out into the afternoon heat, across the street, down the path of stone steps that led through the shade of my aunt’s front yard and then my brother’s, and into the dark house that sat three doors west of ours. The basement’s dim lighting felt especially depressing after the blinding sun outside. We lined the floor by the walls with garbage bags, and I poured white paint into an empty cottage cheese carton that Grace held out to me. Neither of us spoke. I connected a portable speaker to my phone—the new album by Blind Pilot, another of C.G.’s recommendations—and pressed play.
Grace had misjudged again, and she’d received an ultimatum from the elders: one more wrong move and she would be excluded from the church. This time, my sister’s crime had been failing to turn Justin in for reaching out to her. He’d used Twitter to send her a private message asking how to fix the situation his family was in. Justin and Lindsey seemed baffled by and resentful of the isolation that the church had imposed upon them—an obvious and entirely reasonable response, as I’d argued to my mother just days before. Instead of reporting Justin’s message to the elders, Grace had sent a brief response explaining that she couldn’t talk to them, and to please just talk with our parents. He’d followed up with an email, and Grace had called him to repeat the same message: Talk to my parents.
After a couple of guilt-filled days, she’d turned herself in.
The elders considered Grace’s actions depraved enough to warrant abridging the biblically mandated disciplinary process, jumping directly to the final step before exclusion. And just as with our cousin, they’d made the decision without even meeting with the rest of the church. I knew that Grace should have reported Justin without hesitation, the way the rest of us had learned to do—for they watch for your soul—but in answering her mistake with more clear violations of Scripture, the elders continued to abuse the authority of their office. I had no idea if anyone else felt the same, because addressing grievances with other members—instead of one’s elder—was not permitted.
I stared intently at the basement wall as I moved the brush over the deep purple stripes we were meant to cover. I watched the bristles leave their trails of white, but no matter how thickly I coated the brush or how many times I went over it—again and again and again—the darkness was still visible underneath. My mind spun through its familiar circuits, the same objections and doubts that had been brewing for ov
er a year, grasping for something that would return order to the chaos. The futility of it all had been a heaviness in my mind for months, but it had taken on a physical dimension now, and it was suffocating—the dank chill of the basement and the shadows cast in the dim light and the impossible melancholy of the notes seeping out of the stereo. The weight of my arm and of the paintbrush seemed to grow with each stroke until I could hardly bring myself to lift them. An insurmountable burden.
I had never seen a member of my immediate family subjected to church discipline before, but it wasn’t special family ties that made the situation untenable. It was the fact that for the first time in my life, the accused were people I lived with and knew most intimately. I had direct, firsthand knowledge of their daily lives and habits, and I knew that the judgments leveled by the elders were wrong. They were wrong about my mother. They were wrong about my sister. And I strongly suspected they’d been wrong about my cousin, too. I could not acquiesce to their conclusions the way I’d done with so many others before. I could no longer blindly trust the judgment of these men.
My arm continued to drag the paintbrush up and down, but my pulse and thoughts were racing. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. I couldn’t believe how our love within the church had been warped beyond recognition by the elders’ unscriptural will to punish. By their implacable demands for unquestioning obedience. By their pernicious need for superiority and control. They had developed a toxic sense of certainty in their own righteousness, seizing for themselves the role of the ultimate arbiter of divine truth—and they now seemed willing to lay waste to anyone who disagreed with them. It was a heinous arrogance and sinfulness that could not be denied.
And in a moment of horrifying clarity, I finally saw what had eluded me for so long:
We had all been behaving in the exact same way toward outsiders.
It was as if we were finally doing to ourselves what we had been doing to others—for over twenty years.
My eyes widened and my face flushed hot, overtaken by panic and shame and regret and humiliation in the split second it took my mind to find a way to make sense of the chaos that the church had become:
What if we’re wrong? What if this isn’t The Place led by God Himself? What if we’re just people?
And I felt sure that it was all true.
I crossed a chasm in that split second, pursuing a thought my mind had never truly imagined and now could never take back. With stark clarity I understood that whether the church was wrong or right, I was a monster. If we were wrong, then I had spent every day of my life industriously sowing doom, discord, and rage to so many—not at the behest of God, but of my grandfather. I had wasted my life only to fill others’ with pain and misery. And if the church was right? Then asking those questions and even beginning to consider their implications was an unforgivable betrayal of everyone I had ever loved and the ideals I’d dedicated my life to defending. In my mind, I was a betrayer already. I thought of my mother, and the guilt was crippling. I didn’t deserve to be part of this body of believers. The Lord was done with me—an Esau, after all. Already condemned. Overwhelmed by a sudden pressing need to leave that instant, every part of my body hummed with a single vicious accusation: You don’t belong.
My eyes squeezed shut, my whole face twisting instantly into desperate sobs that I tried to suffocate by cutting off the air to my lungs. In the span of a few seconds, my world had disintegrated, slipping through my fingers like so much sand. I turned to put the paintbrush down and go home to pack—there was nothing beyond packing—but I stopped short at the sight of my sister. Her back was to me as she worked the paint, shoulders hunched and limbs moving as if through quicksand—a visible reminder that she had been trudging through the same quagmire of depression, confusion, and despair that I had.
How could I leave without explaining to her?
How could I ever explain this to her?
Still sobbing, I turned back to the wall, and dipped my brush in the paint again. I was dizzy. Needed to calm down. Needed to think this through. My mind reached for solid ground, a way to explain to myself and my sister why I was suddenly doubting the church itself—the only truth we’d ever known. What did I know for sure?
The lying and Photoshopping were clearly wrong. Lying lips are abomination to the Lord: but they that deal truly are his delight.
The prolonged isolation and lack of grace toward perceived offenders were clearly wrong. Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness. Justin. Lindsey. Grace. My mother. My cousin. These situations were egregious, ongoing, and the list kept growing.
The endless proliferation of extra-biblical rules. Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it.
The exclusion of most church members from the decision-making process, and the inability to speak freely with non-elders. Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.
My heart hammered, full of terror at the seditious thoughts taking hold in my mind—would God snuff me out this very moment?—but I was growing bolder. I fought to stop myself from reverting to the mindset that had kept me from these questions all my life: certainty that the church was The Truth, and that I was a child, and that for me to challenge or contradict their established wisdom was nothing more than a tantrum.
I had to keep going.
I thought again of the arguments C.G. had made about our lack of compassion, gentleness, humility. How had I so easily dismissed him? How could I have missed what had been staring me in the face for over a year?
And most important: If the church was wrong about all those things, what else were we wrong about?
The question felt like an iron key sliding into the lock of a long-sealed door. I could almost hear it swinging open on hinges groaning with age, unleashing a surge of memories buried inside—as if they had been deliberately locked away so as to cause no disturbance. They flashed through my mind one after another:
• A pointed Twitter exchange with a Jewish blogger called David Abitbol: I was defending Westboro’s call for the government to designate homosexuality a capital crime, in accordance with Levitical law—DEATH PENALTY FOR FAGS. David was an Orthodox Jew, and surprised me by quoting Jesus: He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. I had seen this as a general call to humility, and I couldn’t believe I had never connected that Jesus was specifically arguing against the death penalty. I was mortified. When I approached my mother, she doubled down. She repeated verses that seemed to support our position, but never answered what Jesus had said. Her stridency took me aback, and I walked away shaken. It was the first time I was consciously aware of inconsistency in our doctrine, but I was certain this sign was unscriptural. I had quietly stopped holding it—and put an end to my arguments with David—but this was a relatively small point of theology. I had set it aside, immediately and instinctively suppressing the memory.
• A conversation with my mother during a walk to an evening picket: Why did we have a sign declaring FAGS CAN’T REPENT? Couldn’t God give repentance to anyone He chose? Isn’t it misleading and dishonest to say otherwise? Again, she seemed not to hear me, repeating the verses we used to justify the sign, but not addressing the contradictory verses I had quoted. And again, I’d been afraid to pursue the objection—who did I think I was?—but I had stopped holding this sign, too.
• A Bible reading with my grandfather one summer afternoon: Gramps was making lunch in the church kitchen, and I’d walked in with some papers my mom had sent me across the block to deliver. “What’s that Matthew 5 say about divorce, love bug?” he asked me, pointing to the collection of super-large-print Bibles and concordances always stacked on the counter. I’d plucked one up and sat down and sta
rted to read to him, eventually coming to a perplexing phrase: pray for them which despitefully use you. We had been earnestly praying for the destruction of our enemies for years by then—but if that was right for us to do, what did this verse mean? My grandfather paused: “Well … it doesn’t say to pray for their good.” In the context of Jesus’s command to love your enemies, this argument made no sense. When I asked my father about it that evening and told him what Gramps had said, my father skeptically confirmed what I’d known was true: “That’s clearly not what that means. It does mean to pray for their good.” I was relieved to hear my father say so—but now that I’d resolved the immediate controversy in my thoughts, the contradiction flitted out of my mind like a butterfly, never to return again. Why had I never pursued it?
And with that, the most powerful partition in my mind—the one that had kept me from seeing the most grievous contradiction of all—dissolved.
We had been claiming to love thy neighbor all my life. We claimed we were the only ones who truly cared about anyone else. “We’re the only ones that love these fags!” Gramps would say in his Mississippi drawl.
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