Beyond Belief (37 page)
Authors: Cami Ostman
S
HORTLY AFTER MY RUN-IN
with Paul, I had a run-in with the head usher at our church.
My brothers, who were roughly my age, took great pride donning their wide-lapel suits and leading families through the hushed sanctuary to their pews. Like all the other girls, I volunteered in the church nursery, which was in the basement. But once the novelty of bottle-feeding and diaper-changing wore off, I decided I wanted to take a turn at ushering as well. I approached the head usher. Our exchange went something like this:
Me: “I’d like to usher.”
Head Usher: “Yes, well. All the ushers are male.”
Me: “My brothers are ushers.”
Head Usher: “Yes, well. They’re male.”
Me: “So I can’t do it?”
Head Usher: “All the ushers are male.”
Me: “I know.”
Head Usher: “You’re better off helping in the nursery.”
With a condescending pat on my shoulder, he walked away. End of conversation.
The entire dialogue was spoken through polite, albeit tight, smiles, mind you. But another log had been tossed onto the growing fire of my resentment. Sitting in the pews afterward, I looked around. The preacher was male. The deacons were male. The elders were male. None of those positions was open to women. During the offertory, I watched the deacons, so officious and self-important, march in unison to the altar to distribute the brass collection plates. I began to hate what they stood for.
I now read the Bible with a new awareness, stung by the anti-female sentiment in so many passages. A sampling:
1 Corinthians 14:34–35. 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.
That explained why women who volunteered in my church were relegated to the basement child care.
Genesis 3:16. Unto the woman he said, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”
That explained why the wives in my church seemed so listless and mute, forever deferring to their husbands.
Of course, all this sexism is rooted in Eve. The Bible establishes women’s second-rate status in chapter 2 of Genesis. Eve is an afterthought, created from Adam’s rib to become his “helpmeet.” In chapter 3, a snake tempts the weak-willed Eve with an irresistible apple, and therefore
all
female kind, from the first to the last, shall suffer her disobedience. Consider the injustice of this story. Then consider its absurdity. I mean really, people—a talking snake? If some dude told you that story today, you’d think he was nuts. There are many equally absurd moments in the Bible, and I find it stunning that otherwise lucid people would believe these stories, post-Enlightenment.
The apostles were male. Jesus Christ was male. God the Father is male. Even the Holy Ghost is presumed male, but how can a disembodied spirit be one sex or the other? It was a mystery to me. But hey, if the Bible says so, it must be true. Right?
In my teenage mind, the seeds of doubt kept growing.
I
WAS BROUGHT UP
fundamentalist. By that, I mean that I was made to believe that the Bible was the inerrant word of God. It was
all fact, all true. There was no innuendo or nuance. Jonah
was
swallowed by a whale. Balaam’s donkey
did
talk . . . as well as that damn snake in the Garden of Eden. When you’re six years old, the Bible is entertaining. Such imaginative morality plays! Good versus Evil! Magic tricks! All great material for Sunday School coloring books. But when you’re thirteen and starting to develop a healthy skepticism, the Bible becomes a natural target.
My family was Calvinist—that dour, hellfire-obsessed denomination embraced by the Puritans. I attended church twice on Sunday, catechism on Wednesday nights, and Calvinettes on Saturday mornings. I went to a private Christian grade school run by Calvinists. We were a tribe and socialized, almost exclusively, with other members of our tribe. We believed we were the chosen people, far superior to the idolatrous Catholics and the babbling Pentecostals. They weren’t going to heaven.
We
were. And we surely wouldn’t let them drag us to hell by associating with them.
At thirteen, I was a budding “women’s libber”—that most hated and denounced creature among conservative Christians—although I didn’t know it yet. There was no way I could talk about my growing skepticism with my mother. She was a firm believer in her secondary role, a woman who retreated into a wounded silence whenever my father barked at her for interrupting a slow-forming thought or suggesting he obey traffic signs.
My questing adolescent brain collided smack-dab with the biblical dictate of not questioning. “Our brains are too finite,” I was often told, “to understand God’s infinite wisdom.” In church we sang the nineteenth-century hymn “Trust and Obey,” whose refrain was “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.” I was not happy in Jesus.
T
HE LOGICAL CONCLUSION TO
my thirteen-year-old epiphany played out four years later, when, at seventeen, I committed the worst possible offense for a young Christian woman: I lost my virginity, that “most precious gift” that I was expected to pack away in mothballs for my future husband. While my parents were away on a mission trip, the woman staying with me witnessed my boyfriend climbing from my window at six in the morning.
Deuteronomy advocates stoning women to death for having premarital sex. I was sent to a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic instead.
At Escuela Caribe, where I spent my senior year of high school, I saw extreme examples of Christian sexism and hypocrisy. The Christian staff routinely brutalized students, and the housefather of my group home lorded his chosen-male position over us girls on a daily basis. It was during the year I spent at this isolated, miserable place that my resentment for Christianity and its practitioners fully blossomed. To survive, I played the part of the repentant teen, parroted their Jesus mumbo-jumbo, and got out as quickly as possible.
Twenty years later, I wrote about all this in a memoir,
Jesus Land
. Some folks are offended by the title. So be it. I meant it as a pointed reference to the fake, plastic atmosphere of a Disney theme park. A place where the surface is all pasted-on smiles and welcome mats, but the pith is a putrid hairball of oppression, exclusion, and malevolent superstition.
I also joined forces with other Escuela Caribe alumni to create a website warning parents away from the so-called Christian therapeutic boarding school, and convinced dozens of former students to complete surveys about their experiences. They wrote about the Christian staff slamming them into walls, whipping them with a leather strap until their skin broke, and molesting them while
they slept. As a result of our activism, enrollment dropped, and the school, which had been operating for forty years, charging a monthly tuition of $6,000 a month, closed. I’ll praise my alumni sistren and brethren for making this happen—not any god. God enables child abuse. To paraphrase Proverbs 13:24: “Spare the rod, spoil the child.”
Today the sight of any religious symbol—be it a twenty-four-karat gold pendant dangling from a woman’s neck in the shape of a cross or a Star of David; be it a turbaned cab driver or televised footage of a woman in a burka—makes me cringe. For me, these symbols signify all the things I was subjected to in my youth: ignorance; a sect that values superstitious dogma over basic human kindness; a system that believes I’m inferior because I don’t have a scrotum. The bile rises in my throat when I hear “Christianese,” that intellect-numbing vernacular riddled by
Jesus
this and that,
He
and
His
and
Him
and sporadic Bible verses. It brings me right back to that genteel sexism of my youth: All the ushers are male.
Ancient misogynists used the Bible to establish male domination, and today, Abrahamic religions oppress women on every continent. Why would any woman participate in her own subjugation by believing such crap?
Once in a while, people try to lure me back to Christianity. They’ll email me asserting that the Christians I knew in my youth weren’t “real” Christians and that they know other Christians who are the “real” Christians, and that I really should check them out before giving up on “God” altogether. I scoff. Yes, I do. I find this Christian compulsion to out-pious other Christians endlessly amusing. Furthermore, their threats of hellfire fall flat on my ears. I no longer believe in an afterlife. I believe I am like a zinnia, a plant
that sprouts, grows, blooms, then dies, and provides mulch for next year’s garden. My daughters will be so much freer than I was.
I never respond to these email pleas. I’ve wasted too much of my life to superstition. I just jab the delete key, sometimes with my middle finger.
End of conversation.
I
can’t recall his name—the small boy who severed the final strands of my faith—just a vague image of soft brown hair, pale velvety limbs, and trusting eyes. I was twenty-six, in the last stage of my PhD, which required a year-long internship at the University of Washington. In one of my rotations, at Children’s Hospital, interns provided mental health consultation for families of patients on the medical wards. The child was two, in the first phase of treatment for a spinal cord tumor that would leave him paraplegic even if the nightmare course of chemotherapy were successful. I don’t know how long he survived.
Maybe it was his eyes, or his inability to comprehend why he couldn’t walk anymore, or why people who looked kind kept hurting him. Maybe it was the unbearable tenderness of his parents, who simply wanted to take their child home and love him rather than
watch him suffer inexplicable months of “treatment”—for a long shot at extending his life. But something inside me broke.
For years I had been holding together the last remains of my evangelical Christian faith with duct tape and baling wire. As far back as grade school, I had struggled with the idea that my friend Kay, a Mormon-not-Christian, was going to be tortured in hell forever. I had inherited my own salvation. My father’s family of Italian immigrants had been saved from Catholicism by door-to-door Pentecostals. My sisters and brothers and I were raised in an independent Bible church. At the time, I didn’t even recognize Catholics as Christians. Dad’s childhood stint as an altar boy was a curiosity to us, almost as peculiar as Grandma’s stories about playing meat market with captured frogs next to
her
grandmother’s stone cottage in the hills above their village.
M
Y FAMILY HAD COME
far from Italy and Catholicism, and yet in some ways we were as culturally isolated as my grandmother had been in her small village. My sisters and brothers and I didn’t butcher the frogs we raised from pollywogs. But, like Grandma, we were taught that the Bible was the literally perfect word of God, a blueprint for this life and the next. Being Protestant, our church didn’t have altar boys, but it did have altar calls. With bowed heads the congregation listened to organ music as the pastor implored the unsaved among us to make our way to the front and confess our sins. I responded on more than one occasion, each time asking Jesus to be my savior, because, inherited or no, I never took my salvation for granted. I was acutely aware of my own imperfections, and hell, with its tortured hoards of burning souls, was a scary place.
Now, a decade later, having journeyed from my childhood
evangelical community in Arizona to attend Wheaton College of Billy Graham fame, then on to an ecumenical Christian commune for graduate school, and finally to Seattle, I was faced with hell in a different form. Each morning I pedaled my bicycle to the beautiful green campus of Children’s Hospital, then made my way through halls bright with art—fantastical animals and clowns, clusters of balloons, whimsical landscapes—to a pediatric oncology unit where children were suffering unto death. I walked past wards of kids with broken bones and babies with birth defects, past little wheelchairs or stretchers in the halls and elevators, past the occasional murmur of voices or muffled crying and soothing sounds—with huge heavy silences in between.