Me and Young Goodman Brown
How Hawthorne foreshadowed the SBC Apocalypse
The breaking loose of all hell
I was 16 and near the end of my junior year in high school when the bomb went off — my Spanish teacher was arrested in a motel room with our school’s star basketball player.
It was the 1970’s. She was married and white. He was, 17, black, and locally famous as our team climbed ever closer to the state championship in our division. We were a mid-sized school in rural southern Virginia — half white, half black, overwhelmingly poor, and nearly 100 percent Christian.
And we had been set on fire.
My teacher briefly went to jail for “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” (In those days laws did not protect boys from sexual abuse.) It turned out she had only paid the motel for one occupant, not two, which prompted the manager to call the police. She was subsequently banned from the county.
But that was far from the end of it. There were cops crawling around and wild rumors. Whispers said that she wasn’t the only teacher involved with a student. The whispers named names and several other young female teachers suddenly resigned for unspoken reasons. A mini scandal erupted when the mother of another prominent player on the team complained that the cops had come into her home and interrogated her son while she was not present.
Nothing more was ever confirmed, at least not to me. My only first-hand evidence in the ensuing conflagration came one late spring day in Journalism class. We were waiting for the teacher to arrive when I overheard several sophomore cheerleaders sitting near me talking about how they had taken showers in a (male) coach’s motel room after an away game.
They knew me as a quiet kid who wouldn’t talk, and they were right. I had thought I knew them too.
But I was wrong.
A crisis of the spirit
I was not a religious child. We were a military family, having lived around the globe. But of course, I knew the basics — God = good, Satan = bad, and God will send you to heaven or hell when you die.
That part didn’t bother me. What threw me into crisis was the rest of what I knew, or rather thought I knew, that turned out to be a lie.
There were only three students in the advanced Spanish class. With the teacher, we had become a tight little group of four. I thought I knew her.
But I didn’t.
Basically, I was naive. We were a friendly, neighborly school. The bullying and meanness of our current era was less common in that time. But there was a whole other reality going on behind a curtain that I didn’t even know was there.
Young Goodman Brown
I met him in English class. It turned out I was not alone in my frightening peek behind an invisible curtain. Goodman Brown, a puritan in the colonial era, had had a very similar experience.
He thought he knew his community. He thought he knew his church, his pastor, his neighbors and his wife. Then overnight he found out something terrible.
He really didn’t know them at all.
There was an invisible curtain, that opened only in the dark, where another reality existed. Satan explained it to him:
“There,” resumed the sable form, “are all whom ye have reverenced from youth. Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness and prayerful aspirations heavenward. Yet here are they all in my worshipping assembly. This night it shall be granted to you to know their secret deeds.”
I had made myself read The Scarlet Letter because it was assigned. I never really identified with Hester Prynne. But I devoured Young Goodman Brown. I got him. He let me know I was not alone in this experience. It was something that happened to him too, not just to me.
This was the way of the world. Nathaniel Hawthorne had brought it out into the light.
Good and evil
I never forgot the stories of Young Goodman Brown and other Christians immortalized in literature. As I grew older, I understood them more deeply. They spoke of the indifference of both good and evil to religion and the hubris of our attempt to fit them into narrow theological boxes.
It was these stories that helped me find my way back out of religion after three years in the Southern Baptist Convention’s “Baptist Student Union” at my university.
I was a poor fit in the BSU, whose other members had grown up in SBC churches. They were uninterested in any reflection on morality in literature or anywhere else outside the Bible. Any mention of lessons from history, other cultures, other parts of the world, stories, folklore, etc. were met with confused expressions.
“Why does any of that matter?”
Their Baptist morality was a simplistic, black and white model informed exclusively by evangelical teachings and the narrow experience of rural, small-town USA. In the complexities of the modern world, it looked to me like a house of cards.
Queue the wind.
A crumbled foundation
In Young Goodman Brown, published in 1835, Nathaniel Hawthorne foreshadowed the SBC of May 2022.
All the evil deeds of the church’s leaders were revealed overnight.
They had reached the end of the yellow brick road and the man behind the curtain was caught with his pants down. The SBC had lied and conspired for decades to protect a ring of pedophiles and sex offenders. And a lot of its churches were awash in evil.
Satan told a single truth to Goodman Brown and from the realization of that one prophetic declaration, multiple theological planks of the entire SBC denomination have now cracked:
- Churches are not special. They contain just as much good and evil as any other human institution, whether Jesus abides there or not.
- Baptist churches are not immune to the Catholics’ sex abuse. SBC “correct” theology provided no immunity to sexual predation in its denomination.
- Bible verses are not magical incantations. Belief in them did not save their ministers, their leaders, or their congregations from evil. For God is not obligated to obey the Bible’s commands or fulfill its promises, regardless of whether he personally wrote it or not.
A shattered political shibboleth
The Christian god was a welcome and regular presence in my public high school.
Evangelical devotions were read over the intercom every Friday morning. (This was somehow legal because a student group did it instead of staff.) We were led in evangelical protestant prayers before football games, and maybe before assemblies and other sporting events (I don’t remember those clearly.) Except for a few Jehovah’s Witnesses, I can’t think of anyone who wasn’t in church — most often a Baptist church — every Sunday.
But despite this …
- Boys impregnated so many girls that some classes had to arrange childcare for their senior picnic.
- There were parties with alcohol.
- The student smoking areas outside the back doors often smelled of marijuana.
- The Lord’s name could be heard taken in vain every day.
- And, oh, some of the adults were running a secret pedophile ring.
Who wore it better?
I have always been grateful to my school and have attended some of my class reunions. No one talked about the scandal. I sometimes wonder whether the current SBC apocalypse nevertheless brings it back to mind for some of us who were there.
I still have my Spanish teacher’s note to me in my junior yearbook, signed shortly before her arrest. I also keep a copy of Young Goodman Brown on my bookshelf. I consider them equal parts of the same valuable lesson.
Well not entirely equal. My school handled it better than the Baptists. For the school, at least, didn’t blame and shame the kids.
