Welcome to the Funhouse

“And the fallen angels just laughed”

                                                                                               —Ray Wylie Hubbard

 

Welcome to the new-super-happy-funtime section of Calliope Crashes! I’m Shawn, and I’ll be your Revelator. Please keep your arms and legs inside the website at all times.

I had the unique experience of growing up in an Evangelical home and church as both Evangelicals and the culture underwent cataclysmic changes. I was there, man, and lived it all.

These essays will seek to make sense of that experience and how it altered my life and America. What a long, strange trip it’s been. I have no interest in trying to convince you of anything. Perhaps you’ll learn more about a religion that seems utterly baffling to many; perhaps you can trace the twisted trail that lead to our present moment; perhaps you’ll join many of my family and friends in wishing me well in the torments of hell. No matter. I’m just ready to have my say.

So let’s get started with an essay that first appeared in Helix magazine to get our bearings and check out the vibe. Baptist was the flavor of my Evangelical sundae.¹ Enjoy.

On Being Baptist: A Primer and Treatise in which We Learn of Our Lowly State and the Means of Our Salvation, Translated from the Original Aramaic with Shaft Reference Included

I. God: The I Am is a complicated man. And he is a man; just so we’re clear. From his mighty beard to his pedicured feet inside the very expensive sandals Jesus created for him on Father’s Day. The Holy Spirit just gave him one of those sappy Hallmark cards, because that’s how the Spirit blows. Got that right, says Jesus. If we weren’t one and the same, mutters the Spirit. That’s how the trinity works. It saves us getting into the whole communicatio idiomatum and filioque thing. And if you don’t think Baptists know those sorts of minutiae, let me just say I had a Greek concordance of the Bible when I was fifteen. So the I Am is a bad mother—Shut Your Mouth!—I’m just talkin’ ‘bout Yahweh—Then We Can Dig It!

The story of Job² provides all the information required to get a handle on Baptists and their God. First there’s lots of stuff, which the righteous get as a result of their devotion and goodness. Then all the stuff gets taken, and that seems a bit worrisome, but that’s just a trial so your testimonial at church will sound better and make everyone jealous. Then Job’s friends show up and speculate on what horrible deed caused all this suffering, which is what potluck dinners and prayer circles accomplish. Then Job gets all his stuff back, which is the real take-away. You can tell the story any way you like, and make it as gruesome and horrific as you like, but the stuff better show up in the end along with the people you don’t care for gnashing their teeth.

The big over-the-top-special-effects scene is supposed to occur when I Am finally shows up to do some explaining, but God told Job squat from the whirlwind. Other than demonstrating a yoga-envying ability to pat his awesome self on the back, the Divine offered less solace than convenience store beer. The entire point of the Almighty’s harangue appears to boil down (Sorry about that Job. And don’t pick those, they’ll get infected) to this: Good God I made an amazing world for everyone to enjoy. Given that your time here amounts to a grain of sand on a vast expanse of shore, and may I say, wow, the beach and wave thing, I really outdid myself there, you might as well revel in it. You’re welcome. The Holy One did everything but give himself a rap handle and pour one out for his homies for pity’s sake.

And if your house collapses and your family and assets blow away, well you still have Leviathan, and the stars, and beauty, and the awesomely awesome I Am. You didn’t think you deserved those other things to begin with, did you? You didn’t think you determined who gets blessed and why and what all that means in the end? You didn’t honestly think any of it meant anything, especially in terms of your value in the scheme of my perfectly wrought handiwork? Get over yourself, Job. My ego doesn’t leave room for anyone else’s.

One morning you will realize: All you get is everything. You just have to remember that it’s yours but never yours, so as you slowly begin to lose more and more of it, never on your schedule, you will cherish the moment the entire universe danced only for you. But the music is so, so heartbreakingly brief.

And that realization will mean you are no longer a Baptist. Which is another sort of heartbreak. Damn God, you.

II. Technical Specs: As you can imagine from the name, there’s a whole lot of energy and time spent on the baptizing. First of all, you better be getting yourself immersed. All the way down under the water to represent your death to sin and then back up and resurrected with Christ.

We didn’t go in for the sprinkling business because that wasn’t the way John the Baptist rolled; how we knew that was never made quite clear. And you had to have your own moral understanding to leave the road to perdition. Baptism was a decision you made by your lonesome if you wanted to avoid the fiery pits. The Age of Accountability the pastor declared it in somber tones. So no infant baptism either: that didn’t count. If you found the true path later you had to have immersion do-overs.

Whether you could get yourself into Heaven without the full dip generated endless hours of controversy and debate. My father was soft on the necessity of baptism in extreme circumstances which nearly gave my grandmother the vapors. He always tied her up in knots with the Thief-on-the-Cross-Conundrum. All theological certainties have a Conundrum.

“Jesus said the thief on the cross was headed to Paradise,” my father opened.

“Well,” said my grandmother, worrying it over. Then a spark in her eyes. “It began raining before Jesus died, so that served as a sort of baptism.” Cotton Mather had nothing on Grandma.

“But that’s just sprinkling, not immersion,” countered Dad.

“Well . . . “ and she left it at that.

Maybe he was Lutheran I wanted to chime in, but you had to pick your moments in such titanic matters. And they were titanic matters; no amount of description can ever convey the breathtaking weight of conversations where your soul literally hung in the balance, where the parsing of a word or meaning of a verse of scripture stood between you and eternal bliss or everlasting torment.

That constant intensity exhilarated and then drained you as the simplest decisions turned into impenetrable moral thickets. You may finally extricate yourself from that wilderness, as I did, but you can never be sure if the view affords you a glimpse of bliss or damnation.

III. Bringing in the Sheaves: At the Baptist college I attended, we would visit nursing homes on the weekend and practice our preaching. Most of us adhered to the traditional “three points and a poem” format of a classic Baptist sermon. We weren’t very good, and the audience wasn’t very conscious.

My friend Tom imagined himself in the groove one Sunday when the Old Dude at the very front began chanting in a low, scratchy voice, growing ever louder, “Shut up . . . shut up . . . shut up!” Undaunted, Tom pressed onward so that some might be saved. Equally undaunted, the Old Dude rummaged around in his robe, pulled out a harmonica, and began to offer a musical rebuttal. Tom acquiesced. Theology has no means to justify the ways of God to men in the face of a wily Old Dude with a harmonica. Amen.

IV. Sex: Please.

V. Vices: A lighter branded you as suspect to any Baptist worth his King James Version. Because really, other than smoking and setting houses on fire to incinerate the family inside just for kicks, what did you need a lighter for anyway? If you wanted to light something righteous like a candle or the water heater, you reached for the box of safety matches next to the paprika in the spice cabinet. They had SAFETY written on the box in case you felt tempted to go astray. Lighters should have had Iniquity Equipment inscribed on them as far as we were concerned.

Naturally I pined for one. Especially a Zippo. Oh that beautiful metallic sound they made opening, like a vault door to the land of pleasure. And the definitive closing click, signaling the party was over. The glamour of a seasoned pro twirling one absentmindedly while he drank some exotic cocktail. I once suggested Bloody Marys for everyone after church one evening and was interrogated the rest of the night to learn in what seedy environment I had acquired such knowledge. I was eight.

But the absolute, most breathtaking moments of the Zippo Lifestyle occurred in any movie when the dashing hero brandished his gleaming beauty to light the femme fatale’s cigarette, or a weary soldier lit one up, because he had ‘em, in his foxhole. Zippo understands this. Their website notes that a Zippo has appeared in over 2,000 films.

Of all the breaks with my past, purchasing a Zippo seems the most decadent. On Father’s Day I went to one of those stores that I don’t feel quite manly enough to remain in for long.  Brass telescopes, magnifying glasses, ashtrays made of a stone so masculine it probably mines itself. When people get their heads bashed in by an ashtray in a mystery novel, I nod knowingly; you could hold off a brigade with one.

I asked the man at the counter to show me some lighters arrayed in a glass case. He had a beard trimmed so perfectly it looked like a CG effect.  It was an Ur beard that other beards aspired to approach. But I had come to the right beard. He told me to forget about the fancy torch lighters I see young guys with as they light a cigar and then presumably go burn a village to the ground.

You want a Zippo he said and produced one from his pocket. Don’t pay attention to the punks that tell you it takes too long to use, he advised me. What are they in such a hurry for anyway? And then in a wonderful moment I never expected, he told me the sound of the Zippo and the smell of the wick igniting always reminded him of his father. His eyes moistened, but the glorious radiance of the beard soon got things back under control.

So I bought one, and he showed me how to fill it, which was another delight, the smell of butane filling the air, and how to keep it clean, and to never get rid of it because all it ever needs is a new flint or wick now and then.

I will probably never light a cigarette for a beautiful starlet or fire up my own as bullets whiz overhead, but having the tool to do so makes me feel confident and prepared.

VI. Mass Transit: Sitting at lunch one day, I saw some tweens pile out of a van that looked like it ran on faith and vast quantities of gasoline. The side of the van read, “First Church of God,” as though the Almighty had offered an endorsement. Everyone was boisterous and appeared headed for some sort of camp/athletic/biblical endeavor.

My own youth included many such vans. Generally we left at dawn with our Bibles and pillows in tow. We took turns sleeping on each other’s laps: third base for a Baptist. All the girls had stunning complexions and amazing bodies, and I would later learn were pretty horny from talking about not having sex all the time.

The annual trip to camp two states away involved a big, used, school bus with a lifetime guarantee to break down on any trip over an hour. My father still wonders why he allowed us to step inside Christine’s plus-size sister, let alone ride hundreds of miles on her. Everyone that drove the bus had to know the intricacies of her sinister engine. Each driver would sport a grease stain on his head after wrestling around under the hood by the side of the road. If we had been Catholic the stains would have resembled Mary or a saint as a reward for their labors, but we didn’t go in for that sort of nonsense; we had our own patented nonsense to indulge. I assume all those poor men took vacation time to drive that beast and wage battle without the benefit of swearing.

When people wonder what the attractions of a fundamentalist upbringing could possibly entail, look no further than the holy road trip. The sight of any church van sparks only the best of memories for me. No matter how lowly at school, no matter how hopeless or outcast, there was room in the van for you.

A trip to our church camp required six weeks of prior perfect attendance, and even the most reprobate of our friends would summon up the moral fortitude to qualify for that ride. Then they would repent and weep around the fire on the last night of camp before returning home to hunker down for some serious catch-up sinning.

As I watched the van leave the Wendy’s parking lot, I knew the best of times awaited them. Later in life they would have doubts and reservations, and many would leave for a myriad of reasons. But today offered only the open road and each other and Eden.

VII. Righteous: The various manifestations of Christianity in America generally boil down to this: A concern for how I behave toward others or a concern with how others are behaving. Baptists are so very concerned with how others are behaving.

People mistakenly assume that teasing out the specks in others’ eyes while ignoring the planks in their own involves hypocrisy and the harboring of dark secrets. But the fact of the matter is the plank causes you to miss the party. You never recognize your own greatness; you never behold the subtle beauty of those around you; you become oblivious to the grace of a thousand gestures of kindness each day; you have no gratitude for the constant and overwhelming light this world shines upon you just because. Just Because brothers and sisters.

Embracing Just Because requires faith, and Kierkegaard recognized as much when he posited his Leap of Faith into the abyss of transcendence. But for Kierkegaard that move to divinity had to be fought within as we struggle to overcome our reluctance in regards to ourselves. Baptists fear to leap because they will have to shed the preoccupation with what everyone else is up to. It’s like living your entire life with your back to the Grand Canyon to make sure no one is trying to steal your car. All so you can congratulate yourself for your diligence on the lonely ride home.

VIII. The End: When I went to church camp, we would sometimes watch a movie called A Thief in the Night. It concerned the Rapture, the belief that authentic Christians would ascend straight to heaven before the terror of the Tribulation and Armageddon occurred. All those fakey Christians and heathens would be left to suffer and wouldn’t they be sorry and think of the mess to clean up what with all those car crashes as our righteous Ford slammed into some poor miscreant’s Chevy. Sad really. But we wouldn’t be there to see it unless God allowed us to enjoy it all from our skybox view, which we all secretly hoped was the case.

The most chilling scene in Thief takes place right after the Rapture. A montage of showers running and mowers idling and phones dangling drives home the point that all the good people are gone, and you better hope you are one of them because chaos will soon descend. And in all honesty, your angelic quarterback is ascending to eternal bliss while the Oakland Raiders remain completely intact, just to name one of the lesser trials awaiting the unchosen.

The belief the world can end at any moment with the disposition of your soul decided can take the starch right out of the present. Sure it’s fun guessing who will be Left Behind, but even the enjoyment goes out of that once you consider your own sketchy record on doing unto others and the whole coveting issue. And let’s not even get into the lust in your heart stricture because it just makes you dwell on your unbridled passion for Elisabeth Shue in The Karate Kid which you just calmed down from when Adventures in Babysitting nearly unraveled 2000 years of Christendom for you. Honestly, coming home to an unexpectedly empty house produced feelings of terror, but you weren’t really all that surprised you didn’t make the Jesus All-Stars. Soon Alice Cooper and you would be doing unspeakable things for a loaf of bread.

While a conviction your generation presides over the last days can make one feel oh so special, as Frank Kermode points out in A Sense of an Ending, it utterly poisons our ability to make the present more habitable. The point of watching a Thief in the Night and studying the Book of Revelation (written by John “J.J. Abrams” of Patmos) was to get yourself and those you loved in a right relationship with The Hammer.  Presumably this meant behaving kindly toward the rest of humanity and working to alleviate the suffering of the present. But what often happened instead was a sense of smug superiority as you dwelt in the knowledge your spiritual Powerball ticket would come up a winner. So why bother with this tiresome, sin-addled world with its inconvenient problems?

As Stephen Pinker documented in The Better Angels of our Nature, violence has taken an amazing descent around the world. The incidence of murder in the United States has reached all-time lows. But you would never believe such facts against the backdrop of the constant magnification of every tragic occurrence and the resulting hysteria that demands an escalation of arms and security. The narrative that society will soon disintegrate, with danger lurking around every corner (usually with a black or brown face), continually wins out over actual reality.

People that have embraced a dystopian future of any stripe must maintain that story at all costs. They reject every sign that contradicts their outlook. Such people have always existed, but when they begin to infiltrate the highest levels of politics, religion, and business, bad things start to happen for everyone.

Because despite all the rhetoric about restoring this virtue or repairing that wrong, such people need America to fail to validate the future they have constructed and cling to for solace. No matter how rich they become, there is a law or tax or person waiting to take it all away; no matter how beneficial a policy, some insidious, hidden intent lurks behind it; no matter how tightly they rig the system in their favor, they are the victims of injustice.³

You must simply tell such people no. Thank you for your amusing tale of impending apocalypse, but we choose to believe in a brighter tomorrow, fashioned from our own story of hope. We choose to look at the problems looming before us so we can discover solutions not excuses. We will reach out and let go so others can find inclusion and contribute to our communities. When we suffer disappointment, we will adjust and forge a new path. That’s a future worth walking towards; that’s a future to make the present full of light; that’s a future just as tenuous as your dark predictions, but it is predicated on the soaring of imagination and not the failure of it. Selah.

 

 

1. That’s the kind of dazzling wordplay you can look forward to each week. For our slower brethren: Sundae. Sunday. Religion. You would have gotten there, bless your heart.
2. For those heathens and Catholics that have never read the Bible, the Book of Job appears in the Old Testament, or what I presume most members of the Trump administration simply call “The Jew Bible.” The premise of the book is a cosmic bar bet in which God tells Satan that Job is an exemplary human. Satan points out that anyone can be good when they have all the riches imaginable and don’t have to pay taxes. God agrees to unleash the cruelest suffering on Job to prove his point: Job will continue to act righteously despite all the heartache. It’s a lot like theological bear-baiting, but even more inhumane, so try not to think about it too much.
3. I’ll pause as you gasp in amazement at how precisely I just glossed our last election.