Confessions of a Southern Baptist PK pt. I

Second posting.

I know I promised to analyze/respond to/vent about various expressions of conservative evangelical culture. Soon, soon. First, I figure I have some groundwork to cover yet in terms of who I am, what I believe, and how I use multivalent terms like evangelical or fundamentalist.

I mentioned last time that I am neither conservative nor evangelical, which is true. The truth, however, is that I used to be both conservative and evangelical--a Southern Baptist, to be exact.

From my birth (1975) until about, oh, high school, I was the son of a preacher man. My father was an ordained minister in the Southern Baptist denomination. He and my mother both held graduate degrees (a Master of Divinity and a Master of Religious Education, respectively) from Southern Baptist Seminaries. Of course, as a woman, my mother was ineligible to be ordained as a pastor in a Baptist church (a stance the SBC--Southern Baptist Convention--still holds along with various other conservative evangelical denominations).

I grew up going to church at least three times a week--once for Sunday morning worship (Sunday School then the service), once on Sunday evenings (with "Church Training"--sort of Sunday School at night--plus another service), and once on Wednesday evenings. These three meetings described the minimum. In practice, I went to church more often. As in: practically any time there was a church meeting or event where the pastor and his family were expected. Since my mother, like many pastor's wives, held multiple leadership positions in the church, both she and my father--and therefore my sister and I--spent much of our lives at the First Baptist Church of wherever-it-was-we-were-living.

In the course of my time going to church I successfully (and for the most part willingly) absorbed the basics of Southern Baptist theology: the existence and sovereignty of God, the sinfulness of humanity, the atoning sacrifice of Christ on the cross, the reality of a literal heaven and hell, the imminent return of Christ at the End of the World, and above all the need for individuals to "be saved"--which I understood to be a process of "making Jesus the boss of my life," accepting his gift of salvation while also committing my life to him.

This last item--How to Get To Heaven--understandably occupied a privileged position in the landscape of my childhood theology. Though my father was never much of a "fire and brimstone" preacher, Baptist culture takes advantage of multiple opportunities to saturate its members, and especially its young, with vivid descriptions of the Fire Below. Not for Baptists are the gentler, more existential hells of C.S. Lewis or Jean-Paul Sarte. Baptist Hell is shrieking, gnashing-of-teeth torment--forever.

"Have you ever burned your finger on a stovetop?" asked one Sunday School teacher I remember. The class, a handful of six-to-eight-year-olds, allowed that we had. "Well, imagine that pain all over your body, forever."

Now, I was a pretty imaginative child. I concluded that I'd rather not learn how accurate my mental movie was about that sensation. And this threat of Hell was ever-present. After all, we were reminded, we could die at any moment. Or--worse--Jesus could return, splitting the sky open and flooding the earth with the heavenly hosts. And you can be sure that, in either case, the first thing that would happen would be The Question: "Is your name in the Book of Life?" If you were saved, your name was there, and you'd get into heaven. If you weren't saved... well... "I"m sorry," (says God or Saint Peter or the Angel That Checks The Book of Life), "but your name isn't here. I'm afraid it's Hell for you."

In fairness, I should say that I remember spending at least as much time wondering what heaven would be like as I did fretting over the vision of maggots eating my living flesh for all eternity. If Hell was everything awful or painful I could imagine, heaven was everything enjoyable or exciting. I believe one early vision of mine pictured heaven as me, sitting among some puffy white clouds, playing with the "Power Droid" action figure from Star Wars that I had always wanted but never owned (see picture).













I mean, c'mon. Who wouldn't want to go?

In any case, Getting To Heaven was, I gathered, extremely important--the most important act I could possibly accomplish as an eight-year-old.

From a combination of explicit teaching and observation, I gathered that Getting To Heaven involved a number of specific steps. Step one, I had to "be saved." Here's how that worked: at the end of every worship service (and I mean every single one), Baptists have an "invitation" (what others call an "altar call"), during which the congregation sings a particular genre of hymn such as "Just As I Am" or "I Surrender All."

After a few verses, the pastor holds up his hands to indicate that the singing stops (though the piano continues to play softly underneath). He then asks everyone to close their eyes and bow their heads ("every head bowed, every eye closed" is the traditional formula) as he speculates that some right here in the audience may be feeling the Holy Spirit moving in them, speaking to them, urging them to make a decision for Christ. "As we sing the next verse, if you feel led, I encourage you to walk down the aisle and make that decision known." The singing starts, and you (if you want to be saved) walk down the aisle where the pastor--my father--leads you in a prayer where you ask Jesus to be your savior and lord.

Done. When I was eight.

Step two, as I understood it, involved waiting some indeterminate length of time (a few weeks, a few months) before walking down the aisle again to "rededicate" your life to Christ, a process that basically repeated Step one for good measure.

Step three was to be baptized, which of course Baptists do via full immersion in a miniature pool--kind of a spa, really--usually situated just behind and slightly above the choir. My father baptized me on Easter Sunday, 1984, in the First Baptist Church of Weleetka, OK.

Finished, right? I'm headed for that big Power Droid in the sky, right?

Well, not quite. You see, in the afterlife, I was taught, you're asked not one question but two. The first is "Is your name in the Book of Life." The second? "Whom did you bring with you?"

After salvation--evangelism.

More next posting,

JF