Tell Your Story Fall 2022 Writing Contest — Finalist

Inherited Depravity

My fall from grace was a leap and a free dive, long after dependency on stability, long before I believed in my own invincibility. The room of my ex-communication hearing reminded me of the Salem witch trials. I sat at one end of the circle, barely nineteen but with the fatigue of forty. All around were the elders of the church, all old white men who had already decided my fate. My trial was not an actual trial. I was merely being informed.

The elders did not hate me. The religion did not allow for love, so they did not love me, either. My attendance was not required. I wondered briefly why I bothered to show up. If I had wanted to say goodbye to any of the members, they would not have been these members. I had nothing to say, even. In hindsight, perhaps I was there as a show of courage. At nineteen, I thought I had it. It was really not giving a shit disguised as conviction.

The elders used to scare me. However, since childhood, I had learned the selection process. First, they had to be men who had shown up regularly. I never found any other criteria.

They were revered for whatever reason. They made decisions. They were prepared to shun me without knowing me. My crime against them had been lack of attendance. I was guilty. They knew nothing about the drugs, drinking, or sex that topped the list of unforgiveable sins, all of which I was also guilty. They saw my lack of attendance as proof of my backsliding. Unless I turned my life around, I would be cut off. I was to be ignored by members until I returned. This, supposedly, would teach me by way of shame to return to the flock.

This would be one group that would not praise my father, or at least not in this room. He was part of the problem. I had bad influences growing up — a father who also backslid, long before I was born. The other bad influence, I was told, was my intelligence. Interesting pairing, my father and my intelligence as bad influences. If I had a father who went to church and had been more stupid, perhaps I could have avoided this event altogether.

“The only thing I feel bad about is that my grandparents cannot understand and they will be hurt by this,” I confessed to these men.

“Also, your mother,” an elder named Luke added.

“This won’t shock her. I live with her.”

No one saw the humor.

“What about your salvation?” Luke asked. “It doesn’t concern you?”

“I no longer believe what you’re teaching here. I haven’t for a long time. These questions have no relevance to me anymore.”

Luke had tears in his eyes. “You sound like your friend, Andy, who you seem to be following.”

“It’s coincidental. I’m not following anyone.” I had to wonder, however, if any of them had heard the rumors about us — the miscarriage, in particular. “I can think for myself.”

“That is the downfall of many,” the elder named John said.

“Don’t bother with the verse to back that up. I already know it.” I kept a smile on my face. I did not want to argue with these men.

“You just stopped believing.”

“It was gradual.” I could not pinpoint a time when I stopped believing. I always sensed I was a fraud when I stepped into that towering hollow auditorium. I sensed everyone else was, too. That belief may have been influenced by my father’s cocaine-fueled speeches, one in particular, when I was his only captive on a long drive when I was thirteen years old.

“Everyone you meet is full of shit,” his philosophy began. “Whatever they say, whatever they preach, the opposite is what they’re trying to deny they’re actually doing, or believing.”

At thirteen, I didn’t see the wisdom in his premise, but later I would find at least that much to be true, if not overly cynical.

“All those church people are liars. They don’t really believe a word they’re telling you. They want to believe it so badly they have to enforce it on other people. That’s all religion is.”

Again, at thirteen, all I could do was listen and play with my seatbelt while waiting for his high to level out.

“One time this woman who wanted me to do her headshots for a religious TV show she was auditioning for, she was dressed for the part, so I did what she wanted, she looked all virginal and whatever. I was wondering why she needed these all of a sudden because most people who are trying to be actors have a variety of shots for different parts, but before she left, she asked if I did nudes. So, she takes off her clothes and turns into a total whore on camera, and that was fine, because you know, I’ll do whatever. But the next day she showed up again with her daughter who was about twelve and says she wants photos of the kid. And this kid strips naked and I’m thinking I’ll end up in jail so I tell her I’d rather not, and she tells me I can have her daughter for the entire afternoon if I want. Now that’s what people are like.”

No seatbelt buckle was interesting enough to keep me from processing that story. I hoped he wouldn’t tell me the conclusion. I had to interrupt. “Are we there yet?” I asked.

“Am I boring you? This is shit you need to know!” When trapped in a car with my drugged father, sometimes I could escape with my Walkman, which I did not have today. He respected the ritual of musical escapism. Otherwise, I had no option but to sit and listen while the topics became worse and worse, usually ending in one of his vaginology discourses, full of information about cataloging pussy that I would never need. Or, I could cry. He never knew what to do with a weeping person. Eventually, he would buy me ice cream and spend the rest of the trip glancing at me as if I were pointing a gun at him.

“Fine. More hypocrisy.”

“That’s more like it. Women are the worst, too. You can’t tell by looking. There was a waitress a couple of years ago who was all over me, acting innocent. She told me she only ever had sex once and she wasn’t sure they had actually done it. I fucked her and I could actually feel things crawling in her. Pissed me off. If she’d told me she was a fucking whore I would have used a rubber.”

“Yeah, what a fucking liar.”

“Don’t say ‘fuck’. You’ll get me in all kinds of trouble with your mother.”

He had likely infected my mother with hundreds of diseases over the years, but saying “fuck” would upset her. It was too much truth for my young brain. Meanwhile, he was speeding down the interstate trying to open a tiny vial of coke. He must have been coming down. There wasn’t enough coke left to subject me to another enthusiastic speech about evil women. Church people also filled me with stories of evil women — Jezebel, Lot’s daughters, Delilah, and even Eve, who never had a chance, and whose sin made childbirth painful. Somehow, I was judged as sinful if I had sex to get pregnant, and also sinful if I avoided childbirth. It was all because Eve chose the wrong snack. Nothing made sense.

Long before I was indoctrinated properly and learned how to respond to criticism of my faith — they called it apologetics — I had already decided how to handle most of it. Kids on the playground knew about religions. The Catholics had their own schools, making them the exotic kids we only knew if they were neighbors. Most of my school friends were Southern Baptists. They were the fun kids. The Methodists were more tolerant than the Southern Baptists. They tended to be slightly better off financially and socially. I was one of the Church of Christ kids, and there were two groups of those, the liberal and conservative. The liberal Church of Christ had a church bus and would allow instrumental music in the building for events like weddings. That was outrageous to my sect, the conservative Church of Christ, who would not fund buses or orphanages or hospitals or anything not expressly mentioned in the New Testament. Never would a musical instrument be played in the building, leaving us to our own untrained voices.

I heard, “Your church thinks it’s the only one going to heaven”, the most. It was true. That was exactly what my church believed. However, it was offensive, so we had to learn to deflect it. Not being a person who enjoyed confrontation, I would usually agree with the criticism and shrug it off.

The only kids more ostracized because of religion were the Church of God girls, because they had to wear dresses and when we were old enough to wear makeup, they remained unpainted.

My church group was small, and most of them were in different schools. We met when church met, and like the adults, we pretended we were ideal Christians when we were together. The fear of revealing our true natures may have been absorbed through our newborn skin in the hymns, prayers, and fire and brimstone preaching we were exposed to as babies. We already knew how to fake it by kindergarten.

In the earliest Sunday school classes, there were a dozen of us in a group. Andy, the hyper red-haired boy who kept us laughing soon became my project. When his mother was called in to calm him, I felt so sorry for him that I began to ask a lot of questions to divert the teacher from his misbehavior. Our earliest relationship was a mutual appreciation. He made me laugh. I delivered him from the punishment that followed his disruptive behavior.

We sat every Sunday morning facing a flannel board while the teacher told us stories, illustrated with white people in robes stuck to the board. We sang songs about Jesus loving children of all colors, a little light we had to let shine, and Zacchaeus, who was short, but still played a big enough role to get his own song. The message was not so subtle. We were insignificant but we had to accept it, put on a smile, and do as we were told.

My first argument with a Sunday school teacher was grammatical. Miss Laura had just applied the overused Jesus figure to the flannel board and began to talk about the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

“The plural of fish is fish,” I corrected her.

“Well, in the Bible, it’s fishes.”

“It’s a typo.”

“No, it’s the miracle of the loaves and fishes. That’s how it is said.”

“Maybe the person who translated it didn’t know the correct plural.” By the second grade, I was excellent at grammar and spelling. I was not giving up on this fight. On the other side of the table, Andy laughed and mouthed “poop”. The other kids sat up to enjoy the fight.

“It’s okay to say fishes in this story.”

“It’s wrong. If you’re going to say fishes, why not say loafs?”

“End of discussion. Let’s move on with the story.”

“They should change it. It’s a tiny change.”

“We don’t change the word of God.”

“Yeah, we do. There are different versions of the Bible. My mom has an American Standard version.”

“We use the King James Bible here. We don’t change it.”

Nothing changed at church, other than the oldest dying and leaving space on the green-cushioned pews. We, the young of the congregation, tried to rebel but in the end, we joined forces with the old. My strongest era of religious fervor was between the ages of ten and twelve. My fervor appeared to be great faith; it was actually desperate fear.

I was taught that I would emerge from baptism a clean, new person, transformed from shame to a strong, confident, soul with conviction of truth. At twelve, I walked down the aisle during the hymn after the short message of fire and brimstone and found out I had been taught wrong. I went under water full of expectation. I came up a very wet, shameful person. I felt no difference at all. The tears in my eyes were misunderstood by all who watched. I was not moved. I was not saved. I had believed a lie, and the letdown was depressing.

Church women waited to help me change into my dress after the baptism. I was congratulated and admonished to set a good example for my peers. I must have been an example. My baptism set off a series for the next two months of my group. The first to follow in my footsteps was Andy, who had waited for me outside the baptistry to congratulate me after I was baptized. I feared he would know I was a fraud. He did, but he was also a fraud, and we would discover that within a few years.

Despite my disappointment, I vowed to be a good Christian. I prayed. I stopped making excuses for absences. I read the Bible. I battled with my mother, who remained frustrated with my moods and fits of tears. What was wrong with me? No one knew. I didn’t know. I was accused of withholding information but the information was withheld from me, by me.

The goal of the church was to silence us, the young. It was foolproof. To admit our innate humanity, we had to admit sin. Any admission of sin required repentance. The only way out of the cycle was not to speak of our true natures. Slowly, we were all beginning to stifle ourselves, first with words, and then our thoughts. We looked at our future selves and could envision the perfect Christians we were supposed to become. But we did not recognize ourselves in these perfect Christians. My suicidal poetry was the last of my original voice, giving up, compromising with the unforgiving will of God.

The church crept into all parts of my life. Dancing was a sin and I worked in a dance studio. It did not matter that it was ballet, where I wasn’t likely to be churning or thrusting. The clothes themselves were considered indecent. I kept my job, but never performed in a recital. This was not a great sacrifice. I enjoyed the structure and meditation of the workout more than memorizing a performance. I prepared children for performances and managed the stage for recitals instead. I didn’t publicize my involvement in ballet at church.

Eventually, we were segregated by sex for Sunday school. Future roles were the main topics. We were taught by Christian women who were submissive to their husbands. We girls were taught to follow the examples of the few women in the Bible who were mentioned. Ruth, who declared her loyalty to her mother-in-law, and Lydia, who sold purple, which gave us a strange image of a woman carrying a tray of purple crayons from door-to-door, like cigarette girls from the 1920s. We assumed Lydia was meant to impress us with God’s will for women, so liberal as to allow her to earn a few dollars and build a part-time life for herself. Having been employed since age twelve, and having a mother who controlled my family’s finances, the story of Lydia had little relevance for me.

“Was it like Tupperware?” I asked once. “Because how much purple does a person need? No way was she living well selling purple without some other income.”

I got no answers. Sometimes the teachers listened, and then continued with the programming as if I hadn’t said anything.

The women tried to sell us on their happiness as submissive wives. They exalted the simple joys of domestic life revolving around a husband and children, free of financial obligations, and full of God’s approval. Coming from a home with no structure, a mother who was in charge of finances and major decisions, and a father whose occasional authority was akin to terrorism, I never bought the lifestyle as something to be taken seriously.

“You do everything he says?” I asked one of these women who agreed to teach us. “Everything? What kind of things are you talking about?”

She never stopped smiling. “It’s not like I’m taking orders, it’s just that he has the final say of what goes on. When things happen, what things happen, how things are done…he makes those decisions. I go along. It works better that way. Someone always has to be in charge.”

“But why does it always have to be the same person?”

“It’s God’s plan. Man is the head of the wife like Christ is the head of the church.”

“It just seems a little arbitrary.”

“Well, your house is different because your father is a non-believer.”

My father being a non-believer began to look like a benefit rather than a curse. The thought of my mother kowtowing to my father’s every wish made me sure I would run away from home, or kill myself, rather than live in that environment. My father in control of anything filled me with trepidation.

I managed to take Andy’s propaganda for the young men of the congregation and read it. He hadn’t read it, but he wasn’t alarmed when I read it to him. It was worded so as not to offend women who might read it, but it encouraged leadership with women and cooperation with men. Women wanted to be guided. Women needed to stay within their domain. Men needed to support the household with hard work. It was the recipe for the happy families of the fifties which drove men to alcoholism and women to pills. In the eighties, we weren’t all as easy to convince. Generation X had little supervision as children, but we had great opportunities to observe.

It became clear by the time I was seventeen that my arguments against the church outnumbered my reasons for staying. In fact, my only reason for staying was to give my mother a bit of happiness. It wasn’t worth it. My age group had been placed in another class, co-ed, with an elder in his early forties. I could not resist arguing with him.

“I give my wife some power to make choices. She can choose between Dole and Del Monte, for example.” He said these things with pride. I looked around and saw I was not the only girl, or boy, with raised eyebrows. “If you don’t want to submit to your husband, don’t get married.” He dismissed us with that remark and continued on with his tirade of power. Even when my mother and some other women of the church heard about his views and complained, nothing was done. Some elders agreed that his comments were extreme, even for the Church of Christ. However, I had already made up my mind to leave. I began skipping services more often. Andy had already been shunned, and he was happier. Life without an angry God keeping track of my mistakes was appealing.

In the room of my shunning announcement, in the basement of the church where I had been brainwashed throughout childhood, I was finally liberated by an unhappy group of old white men. Within twenty minutes of starting my trial, they were giving up.

“You’ll spend eternity in hell.” Luke said this as if he believed hell to be an actual location, like Arizona. Even then, I found this bizarre.

“My decision.”

A survey of the room revealed one of two emotions — pity or contempt. “You’re choosing eternal torment over obedience to a father who loves you.”

I doubted there was a person in the room, including myself that day, who knew what love was. My epiphany at the moment was clear, however: this was not love.

“Yes. That is what I choose.”

Thus, the shunning began. The announcement would be made Sunday morning, to the shame of my mother and siblings. I had turned my back on God, and now God would turn his back on me.

I noticed as I left the basement of the church how the bright summer sun and air, sweet with honeysuckle, warmed my liberated soul as never before.