Vacation Bible School, Judaism, and Bacon
My Journey From the Baptist Church to Judaism
I am a Jew by choice.
I was raised a Southern Baptist. My identity now is firmly fixed as a Jew, but for better or worse, part of me was formed by the Baptist church of my childhood.
Our town was exceptionally liberal-minded when it came to religion: There was the First Baptist Church, the Second Baptist Church, and the Methodists, who were a little high class for us, if you ask me.
It is said, and as far as I can tell, it’s true, that there is no town with only one Baptist church. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, there’ll be a disagreement, and some of the congregation will up and leave and start a new church.
Of course, the same story is told about Jews.
This is the way it goes: A man is stranded on a deserted island. When he is rescued, he has built two large synagogues, and, of course, he is asked why. He answers “One is the synagogue I attend and the other is the one I wouldn’t step foot in.”
I’ve often been asked if my childhood church taught anti-Semitism, and I have to say it never did. There were no Jews around, so the subject just didn’t come up.
Before the exodus of Italians from New York and New Jersey to my little town when I was a teenager, there were very few Catholics, either. We were taught anti-Catholicism in a genial, non-personal way. There was nothing wrong with Catholic people, themselves, but the pope was the anti-Christ. And there was some doubt thrown on the celibacy of nuns and priests: Where, my Sunday School teacher asked, did we think all those babies came from in the Catholic orphanages?
My father, who had been a popular high school coach in his first profession, was called on several times by the fathers of young men who were pining to marry a Catholic girl (usually Italian, see above.) My father would give the talk about how this just wasn’t right. Actually, I only heard tell, I never got to hear the talk: I would love to know the reasons he gave.
Much later, near the end of his life, I learned that as a young man stationed in San Diego right after World War II, he had fallen in love with a Mexican girl. From his talk in his last days, it seems she was vivacious and quite the dancer. Apparently, a bunch of his buddies approached the chaplain, who had a little talk with him, explaining that it would be much the same as marrying what was politely called then, a colored girl. He didn’t marry her and went to college on the GI bill, meeting a girl from a background a great deal like his, my mother. Thus, his expertise in marrying outside your caste.
My brothers seemed to have a fondness for Italian girls, and some of them married several. (Not all at once, of course.) My father seemed over the whole Catholic problem by then, and was very fond of his daughters-in-law. (The Webb side of the family seems to go in for multiple marriages, more so than the general public. I believe I have one aunt and one uncle on my father’s side who have each been married at least seven times.)
One of my brothers took his children to an evangelical church on Sundays.
I believe it was a matter of business contacts. I came to visit with my three children, who were invited to go to church with their cousins. Services were held in a big, fancy building with big screens and bands and all kinds of things no one had heard tell of in my childhood. And the kindly preacher spoke and told a story from the Old Testament, and, according to my incredulous offspring, he said, “You have to remember, Jews were little, bitty people, not even five feet tall.”
That’s not anti-Semitism to my mind. It’s just ignorance.
When I was a young attorney, a colleague got drunk at an office party, and discussed my marriage, saying “Her husband must have a penis a foot long for her to abandon her people like that.”
That is anti-Semitism.
The Southern Baptist church I grew up in is not the one that is around today. It’s moved hard right and political.
The organization even adopted a declaration that women should “submit” to their husbands. That’s when Jimmy Carter left for a different Baptist church. If you make someone as sweet-tempered as Jimmy Carter angry, I’ll just call it: You’re wrong.
Like many Southern children, I remember Vacation Bible School as one of the highlight of our summers.
For two weeks, we attended each day. The absolute highlight was the snack served in the middle of the morning. Everyone I have ever spoken to from any part of the South remembers the same offering: a paper cup of Kool-Aid and two packaged cookies. No seconds on either. We had much better snacks at home, so I don’t know why we craved those so much that the wilder boys would tussle to be near the front of the line.
Once, as a special treat, a missionary couple came to visit us and we made booklets for them to take back to the jungle in Africa where they saved savage souls. (I was dying to be a missionary. That was the most dangerous, and therefore, exciting, thing I could imagine.)
We worked hard cutting pieces of colored construction paper and stapling them together in a particular order. The poor African children couldn’t read, we were told, so they were given these booklets to remember this story: First piece, black: “My heart was black as sin”; Second piece, red: “My savior washed me in his blood”; Third piece, white: “Now my heart is white as snow.”
We were very proud of our work. One of my friend’s fathers, however, pointed out that the children themselves were black and that they had probably never seen snow. We felt a little downcast after that.
Maybe that was when I first began to doubt my church.
Like many other sensitive children, it was probably the Buddhist children in hell that got me in the end. All the Buddhist children all over the world were going to hell, because they had not been saved. And when I got to the Pearly Gates, it would be on my soul, because I hadn’t saved them. I worried about it at night for a long, long time, before deciding that I just couldn’t respect a God who would eternally torture Buddhist children because of my failings.
I realize that my understanding of that religion was that of a child.
I missed some important things. I have friends who grew to adulthood in the church, and they are thoughtful, sophisticated people. Heck, I even have friends who became Baptist ministers and are aware of the average height of Jews, and aren’t condescending to people of other religions on other continents.
But I have found my spiritual home, and it not there. One day, I’ll talk about how I chose it.
In the meantime, I’ll tell you how my staunchly Southern Baptist mother handled the Jewish question.
The first time I brought home the man who was to become my husband and the father of my children, my mother greeted us, worried: “Keith,” she said. “I just don’t know what Jewish people eat. You tell me what it is, and I’ll go to the store and get it.”
Keith, the secular Jew and jokester that he was, said “Bacon. We eat a lot of bacon,” and forever after, she served him a lot of bacon and the two of them became very good friends.
They are both gone, now, and neither of them were alive when I converted to Judaism. I can’t imagine what they’d say, but whatever it would be, I’d love to hear it.
Cynthia Webb, author of No Daughter of the South, has had a checkered past full of interesting and unlikely jobs. Now she is a happy educator. She explores the implications of being a queer Jewish Southerner-in-exile and everything else that comes up in this strange world here.
