A Time to Laugh

I’m such a dork. No, really. I am. If you haven’t figured that out already. It’s okay because my parents — as lovely and as lovable as they are — are dorks too. So I come by it honestly. And they love me.

Maybe everybody’s a dork and only a few of us admit it and embrace it. . . . Yeah, that’s the one I’m going with.

I found some more proof of my dorkitude today although, to be honest, it was Junior High and everybody’s a dork in Junior High.

I found the signatures on the inside fly-leaf of my Bible.

Now, in 1980, this was the thing to do if you were a fundamentalist child (a.k.a. dork). A famous preacher/speaker came to your church (probably also a dork) and you race up afterward (very dorkily) to get his signature in your Bible.

I loved this little Bible. It was my 12th birthday present from my parents. It was red and had a snap cover. Cambridge. KJV, of course. I didn’t have a Scofield (new or old), but my parents did. Frankly, my parents had every translation known to the English and French and Polish world, but that’s why I love them too!

So look.

Stop laughing at my dorky stickers. Stickers were soooooooo I.T. in 1980. They had whole sticker stores in the mall. And that pizza one was scratch-n-sniff!

And the second page:

First, isn’t my mother’s handwriting lovely? Dad’s is too. Steve and I must be a throw-back to some primitive inscrutable scrawl.

Notice all the women I got too! Yeah for me. My silent-but-rebel mom probably encouraged that. Or my loud-and-rebel dad. Or both. My parents are gems.

But look at the first signature I got up there at the top — Beneth Peters Jones. I remember when I got that signature. She was promoting her (then) new book Beauty and the Best at a neighboring church, and, of course, I bought a copy! I remember the sweater I was wearing. I loved that sweater. It was pink fair isle that I got at American Eagle which was really cool back then (read: dorky) and not slutty like it is now (read: cool). Also let me say that while that particular sweater is long-gone, I now know exactly how they are knitted (in the round from the top down) and where you can find the math to make your own (Elizabeth Zimmerman) and that kids in British Isles learn to knit such things as they are walking around (because they have this belt that they can shove one needle in). But I’ve never actually knitted one (DORK!).

I was elated that I got her autograph that day! Really elated. She said something very polite — and she is an extremely gracious and hospitable lady — about it being new and how she liked the snap covers and all that. Bless her. Bless her for being so much a gentlewoman to a dorky 12-year-old.

Weird. All that she and I would share in the years to come but could never predict at that precise moment of my fawning dorkitude and her polite conversation. That my husband and I would travel with her husband and her to Mexico for 10 days (we were the singing side-kicks). That she would barely pass my grad project because she was uncomfortable with the topic (feminism!). That I, like her, would have a first born who was born still. And the rest, of course. . . . All the rest.

Look at those names. If those were the celebrities in my Junior High life, is it any wonder I became who I was? Several names are my pastors. Most of the others are evangelists or just guest speakers.

I got out my High School Bible too. We wear out our Bibles quickly in fundamentalism! It was smaller and not as fine but still KJV (my college Bible was so small that I had to hold it up right next to my nose to read it and it was NASV). It does have my Wordless Book bookmarks still in it because I was a CEF missionary for two summers, and I was prepared (kinda dorky). It has no signatures. I s’pose I had figured out it was a dorky thing to do.

Except for one thing is exactly the same and in the exactly same place — across from Genesis 1. From my Junior High Bible:

and in my High School Bible:

I remember why I wrote it the first time. I was told to! And I can probably take you right back there on 11-mile and Schoenherr and show you exactly where I was sitting in the front row (DORK!). Why did I think it was so important that I transferred that alone from one Bible to the next? I really don’t remember.

I’m glad that my High School self caught my Junior High mistake of “conversation” instead of “conservation” in that First Law. Whew!

Now, I know why these where there in that place — because I was a reared a Creationist through and through. Heck — I still have my Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter upstairs, the text that is most often referenced for its fallacies. I remember Science class in 7th grade. Most of our time was spent being told how wrong Carl Sagan got it on Nova the night before. It was our assignment to watch him and to deconstruct him the next day. None of us in that class will ever forget when Andrea Cloud unwittingly said the exact. wrong. thing. in response to Miss Westray’s question: “Miss Cloud. Do you agree with Mr. Sagan when he said that the Earth is billions and billions of years old?” To which Andrea shrugged, “Well, yeah. He’s on TV. So he must be right.” Oooooooh! We all felt her pain.

But I got this in Sunday School, not in Christian Day School. And uh . . . it’s curious.

The first law of thermodynamics is actually:

Energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but it can neither be created nor destroyed.

Seriously, why did my teacher leave out the first part? She got it from her pastor/husband, I’m sure. Why drop that?

And the second law of thermodynamics has to do with entropy and is best summarized as:

It is impossible for there to exist any process whose only effect is to transfer energy from a system at a low temperature to one at a higher temperature. In other words, heat flows downhill.

Creationists reason from that that everything tends toward disorder and randomness, and, thus, evolution defies that law. I’ll let the believing scientists deconstruct the fallacies in that Creationist criticism. I don’t really much care about the Science per se.

I care more about how that idea of the inevitability of disorder affects and infects the conservative Evangelical ideology. Everything and anything — if left alone — will deconstruct into chaos. At least that’s what I was taught. Work hard — very hard — and you can resist the inevitable decay. Effort can trump entropy. And if it doesn’t, if you fail, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough or right enough.

And if we get it wrong in our hoist-them-on-their-own-petard mudball we lob at Science, how could it possibly be correct in our misunderstood application of this 2nd law to the Christian life? We are so infected with this same effort-can-trump-entropy trope. We actually believe past generations’ goofs are a result of their not working hard enough or smart enough or biblical enough.

We think we’re better. But we’re just as big a dorks as we always were. Just with more and more appeals to misunderstood laws, more and more effort, more and more rigidity, more and more illusions that our way is “biblical.” So the Law of Thermodorknamics could be:

The amount of effort is directly proportional to the dorky destructiveness of that effort.

In other words, what’s your justification for this project?

Conservative Evangelicalism was a political movement with religious muscle (not a religious movement with political consequences). Of course, we can’t know for another few years or so, but it seems that when one of our (supposed) own occupied the White House and bankrupted our moral resources, the movement died.

Now there is a vacuum. Some of us have absconded for a still-ersatz Evangelical Left. Some still straddle the line as libertarians. Those who have stayed in the Religious Right continue to beat the same war drum of fear and pain. Not only is it not working, it’s hurting those that are least able to speak for themselves.

I believe that we’re at a crossroads. We’re either going to circle the wagons and continue to brandish our tomahawks at imaginary monsters while our children quietly leave us and/or the Faith (since we’ve so adeptly quilted our beliefs with our politics, rejecting the one clearly means they will have to leave the other). Or we’ll stop and try a new way. Still the Gospel way, of course, but one that isn’t stuck in the grooves we’ve worn into the prairie mud.

I don’t know what that new way looks like. I want to imagine several alternatives. But not until I understand how we got here. How I got here as a daughter of conservative Evangelicalism.

So many of my Gen-X peers have left fundamentalism. Many of the Boomers still remain (changing their name to “biblicist” or some other essentialized term) or still defend the movement from the outside. The Gen-Yers are about to leave in droves. Those of us who have left too often believe the myth that we learned in fundamentalism that the real difference between them and us is music (“worship style”) or dress or even theology, only to embrace a nearly identical ethic within neo-evangelicalism that is as fearful, as striving, as sectarian, and as contradictory.

If we really want to leave behind the excesses of fundamentalism, we have to more clearly identify what those excesses are. We can’t believe the characterization we grew up hearing. We need to look at this from a different angle, and we need to start at the beginning.

Now I don’t plan on continuing this in any orderly fashion. I have to write it out, and as an “independent scholar,” in a motley fashion. With little snips of information here. Puking up thoughts I’ve digested there. It won’t be pretty, so consider yourself warned.

I’ve gathered my texts and I’m beginning to see some themes rising to the surface. The general research areas will be:

• While the term “fundamentalist” and the movement fundamentalism has fallen into disrepute and disrepair, the rhetorical form of fundamentalism is alive and well. In other words, romantic sectarianism continues. Nothing’s changed. Oh sure, some may drink alcohol or have hip music, but the rhetoric of the Christian life is identical to the BJU expression of romantic separation.
• Essentializing terms such as “biblicist,” “biblical,” “Bible-based,” “Christ-centered,” “Gospel-centered,” “Sacred,” even “Reformed” still identify and divide and perpetuate the same drama of romantic tragedy as did the essentializing term of “fundamentalism.”
• Even while criticizing Keswick/Dispensational/Pentecostal versions of soteriology, conservative Evangelicals reserve this identical containment drama for their prescriptive discourses  for women and children. While they make fun of “decisionism” or “easy-believe-ism,” they perpetuate it in a “hard believe-ism.”
• In discourses for women, complementarianism — a theological reaction to the political threat of feminism — articulates a “second blessing” for believing women urging them to simply fulfill their “role” (a relatively recent and hardening term) as women. The exact same theologians that have rejected Keswick theology for themselves endorse it for their women. The complementarian Danvers Statement has risen to the level of a Confession.
• In discourses for parenting, punitive parenting — another theological reaction to some political threat but I’m not sure what exactly yet — has elevated spanking to a “conduit” or “means of grace” for children raised in the Faith. In other words, spanking has become not simply one tool among many, but a biblical command or, worse yet, a sacrament.
• I plan on researching the last 50 years of marriage and parenting advice in conservative Evangelicalism. On the face of it, it seems everything changed in 1970 when James Dobson published Dare to Discipline and Jay Adams published Competent to Counsel. The former was a psychologist talking in theological terms, and the latter was a rhetorician (!!) talking against psychological terms. Both were clear separatists — each shunning worldliness and pagan ways. Dobson is a Nazarene and Adams a Presbyterian (ARP), so a theological contrast appears more stark than it really is. Dobson gets so much attention due to his political aspirations, and Adams gets virtually no attention outside of a particular sliver of conservative Reformed Protestantism. But when it all comes out in the wash, they are virtually identical in their expressions (and their “descendants’ expressions) of Christian living.

I welcome any observations, contributions, criticisms, hunches, or disagreements. Save your ad hominem attacks for your own blog, forum, or dinner table, however. I’ve heard it all before anyway. It’s all old news.

Snow days are great. You get to spend the whole day with your favorite sweetie and your brood! The outdoors are so bright that you need to shade your eyes from the glare. All the winter greyness is covered with a beautiful sparkling and pristine blanket straight from Heaven. It’s the meterological version of Grace.

When I found myself a newly minted stay-at-home-mom, I didn’t really feel any different than I did as a work-outside-the-home-mom. I had been completely oblivious to the political Mommy Wars that had been going on for a decade. When other stay-at-home-moms heard about my perceived “career change,” I was startled by their gushing as if now I had fulfilled my true and perfect destiny as a woman.

Huh? . . . I was fulfilled before. I’ll be fulfilled here too.

Getting my sea legs in my new occupation hasn’t changed this perpetual what-the-heck-are-you-talking-about expression on my face. I read the mommy books, and I end up throwing them across the room. The persistent theme is that if you’re truly a saved woman, you’ll stay at home. Wait a second! I thought I heard growing up that if I was really a committed Christian, I’d go to the mission field in the jungles of Africa. Have we changed the terms of the Second Blessing all of sudden? How come I didn’t get the memo?

Yes, I’m a stay-at-home mommy. Yes, I’m content as a stay-at-home mommy. This wasn’t my “choice” per se. But I’m not clammoring to get a job either. I like it. But I liked it before when I worked outside the home. That was bliss. I nursed my boys to sleep every afternoon. I ate lunch with them everyday. . . . Am I terrifically content? Or is the way we talk about womanhood and the Christian family just pretty lousy?

I was venting about this with my better-half several weeks ago. He said, “No, no. For you, this stay-at-home-mom thing is like a snow day. You wake up and realize that you get to stay at home! It’s a gift!!”

And sure that carries with it a different wardrobe, a different routine, a different set of expectations. It’s new. But it’s good. But before was good too.

It’s all good.