A Time to Laugh

1953(1)MercerStatementConcerningDismissal

Mercer sent this “Statement Concerning my Dismissal from Bob Jones University” to BJU Board of Trustees after his firing on June 15, 1953.

For those of you unfamiliar with BJU, the statement is a snoozer, so you can head over here. For those of you currently associated with BJU, you’ll dismiss it as some crackpot with an agenda who just needs to “shut up.” He even mentions that — that people wanted him to “crawl off into a hole after being fired.” So you can mosey over here.

But if you’ve ever found yourself on the other side of a BJU administrator’s desk feeling the ax hovering above your neck, the statement reads eerily prophetic.

The litany of accusations against him are mostly familiar. We’ve all been called the same whether in front of or behind our backs — “avowed enemy of the school,” unfaithful, inefficient, deceitful, “one of the greatest crooks in the history of the school,” demon-possessed, “the devil.” Mercer euphemizes the most intense accusation of homosexuality under the term “my moral character” — an accusation that still lingers in contemporary BJU histories (more on that later).

You’ll want to look at the list of BJU Board Members near the end. It’s at the very least intriguing. There’s Homer Rodeheaver and Jack Wyrtzen. There’s Mordecai Ham and Ernest Reveal. And you see some familiar fathers there. Look. There’s Ted Mercer’s dad, Jim. And John MacArthur, Sr. (father of the John MacArthur, Jr.). and William Piper (father of John Piper).

BJU apparently was undergoing an enormous faculty turnover in the 1952-53 school year — a movement that would only continue into the years to come. Mercer includes one letter of resignation in the end of his pamphlet from Karl E. Keefer. We who have been associated with BJU since 1952 don’t know Dr. Keefer. We do know his replacement very well — a 24-year-old Dwight Gustafson.

I’ve had a blog post about 1952-53 in my drafts folder for about a year. Really. I’ve been trying to get a bead on that time period for awhile. That same anxiety that we’re all feeling in the air right now in the US, I think people were feeling back then too. And the seeds of our own undoing were planted then. Here are some facts I’ve gathered:

• Thomas Nelson released its second edition of the Revised Standard Version in 1952, this time including the Old Testament. To religious conservatives, the translators were pretty sloppy, seeming to highlight contradictions between the Old and New Testaments.
• The first conservative evangelical Christian school started in 1952 down in Florida — Keswick Christian School. One of its alumni wrote about her experience in My Fundamentalist Education.
• In 1952 and 1953, the U.S. experienced an outbreak of 58,000 and 35,000 polio cases, respectively, up from a typical number of some 20,000 cases a year.
• President Eisenhower started the “Back to God” campaign.
• The Army-McCarthy hearings were just starting in 1953.
• The babies were still booming.
• I Love Lucy was in its second season.
• The Korean War continued as a hotter part of the ongoing Cold War.
• “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, thanks to the efforts of the Knights of Columbus, appealing to a newly-baptized Eisenhower.
• The Supreme Court heard Zorach v. Clauson, and released-time religious instruction diminished after that.
• Dr. Spock dominated the parenting-advice market.

And that’s the way it was . . . back in those blissful 1950s. When television couples slept in separate beds and the “coloreds” drank from separate drinking fountains and “fundamentalism” was not-yet-separated from “evangelicalism.”

This is the world in which Ted Mercer was writing.

They didn’t have blogs back in the day. They had speeches. They had theses. They had pamphlets. They had tracts. They had samizdat. To get to a lot of those documents you either have to choose a famous one — like I just did in that listing — or know how to operate a microfiche machine or just hang out in library archives. If you’re lucky, they are permanent — somewhere.

Blogs are more fleeting. There are more spelling errors, more goofy lolcat pictures, more viral videos. But they are more . . . present than any of the others. And more dangerous.

You probably don’t know who Ted Mercer is. The first time I heard about him was ~1993 when I was listening to my first graduate audition in the Division of Speech. A young man from Bryan College was applying for a graduate assistantship. And one of the senior, hoary-headed members of our faculty said to us all (something like), “Are we sure we should let him in? He is, after all, from Bryan.” Her words were pregnant with a mysterious and sinister meaning.

Now I was the youngest faculty member in this group. And . . . I’m a little bit clueless as I’ve said before. So, in typical fashion, I just asked earnestly, “What do you mean? What’s wrong with Bryan?” Another less-junior-than-I colleague nodded and agreed, “Yeah, I’d like to know too! I have no idea.” And the senior member just sighed and shook her head, disappointed with these children these days about how they know nothing of the past. . . . I think. I don’t know why she was sighing. But I never heard the details that day.

So I’m going to tell you the story. With the actual documents themselves. A friend just passed them along to me last night, and I stayed up too late reading them.

If Ted were alive today and had been fired from Bob Jones University, he’d have his own blog where he’d publish such things. But in 1953, all he had was a mimeograph machine and an address book. So let’s take a look. . . .

Disclaimer: It’s not about you. Or me. I wrote this and published it in advance a week ago. So any resonance you might see is simply providential, and I’m leaving it as it stands.

This is a representative anecdote demonstrating the larger problem I’m still dancing around.

I’ve got Asperger’s Syndrome. There. I said it.

And before you proceed to pat me on the head and tell me how wrong and deluded and silly I am, just stop. I’ve heard it all even if it’s not directed at me exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I seem too “normal” to you. You know people who really have it, and they are really, really weird (like that makes me feel better!). No Aspie goes into the Humanities anyway; they are all in the hard sciences. Mm-kay. As long as you’ve got it all figured out.

The fact is that you’re not in my head. The fact is that it looks different for women than men, different for adults than children. The fact is that a lot of women don’t figure this out until their forties. The fact is that we all learn to cope in time.

What is it anyway? Well, it’s a kind of high-functioning Autism. Yeah, I know. The big-A is rather scary. But while Auties have a lot of language difficulties, Aspies do pretty well with verbal communication. It’s nonverbal communication — social cues — that Aspies completely miss. With early intervention and good teachers, an Autistic child will “grow” to be classified as Asperger’s in adulthood. Some define Aspergers as an extreme male brain, so when a woman has it, it seems like she’s just more masculine in her read on social conventions.

It’s a spectrum, you see. Part of the neurological diversity that has always existed in the human condition. You might even be “on the spectrum.” Most creative people are.

Glenn Gould was an Aspie. Some think Thomas Jefferson was. Frasier Crane. Bill Gates. Dan Akyroyd. Nearly every character on The Big Bang Theory has some variation on Aspergers. Some even call it the “Mr. Spock” syndrome. Some think that all cats have Aspergers.

What does it all mean?

It means that if I’m having a conversation with you, I can look at you intently while you’re talking but once the conversation ball is in my court, I can’t make eye contact if my life depended on it. I really can’t think when I’m looking at you — too much data.

It means that at a party, I’ll probably be playing with some stim toy while everyone’s talking. I used to have a set of stim toys on my desk to play with during long conversations.

It means that if I have to host a party and you ask me what you can bring, I will blink and stare and really have no idea what to tell you.

It means I bite my lip a lot when I’m tense.

It means that while you’re talking, I will stare at your sweater (especially a Fair Isle or an Aran) and think about those stitches. I’m listening. Really. But knitting is so fascinating. It’s like something has to occupy that part of my brain while my ears are working too.

It means that while we’re talking on the phone, I’m playing cyber-solitaire.

It means I really, really hate the phone. Hate it. I’ll answer it if I have to, but I’d rather talk face-to-face or write you a note. And the poor back-and-forth-response-time of the cell phone drives me insane because I have trouble with the nonverbal cues anyway that tell me when it’s my turn to talk. Mess with that and I practically have to take a nap after a cell phone call.

It means I’m not good with apologies. Not that I don’t want to apologize. I just don’t pick up on the cues that I’m supposed to apologize. So I either over-apologize or never apologize.

It means that I feel what you’re feeling very deeply — to an almost uncomfortable and cloying level. Conventional wisdom says that Aspies don’t feel empathy. That’s actually being proven untrue. It’s that we feel such intense empathy that we get sensory overload and we shut down.

It means that if you ask me where the pot holders are in my kitchen, it would be easier for me to show you than tell you. It’s like the task skips the verbal part of brain. It goes right from my fingers to my brain and never hits my mouth. So it’s not that I don’t want to tell you. It’s not that I’m being proprietary or selfish. I just have a really hard time spitting it out.

It means I have a hard time asking for help.

It means that if I have to buy toothpaste for Grant, I’ll never buy the right brand even though he just told me the exact description 30 minutes earlier. I don’t get verbal instructions well at all.

It means that I don’t really do well with handling the finances. I have poor executive function.

It means that I think certain colors have a smell. To the point that I plan what soap I use based on what color I’m wearing.

It means I learned to swim from a book.

It means that I really don’t like fiction. I don’t know why either. But . . . I just don’t.

It means that I am intensely interested in a few things. Really. Obsessed even. Deeply. And I’ll voraciously read everything on that topic. Nothing can stop that interest until it just dies down. It will dissipate eventually. But if you happen to ask me a question about that interest, I’ll only tentatively begin to answer because . . . well, I scare people with the obsession. I sound more like Cliff Clavin than I want to admit.

It means that I learned to read at age two.

It means that my “playing” in childhood looked more like sorting.

It means I have an inordinate attachment to things. My Barbies. My Fisher Price toys.

It means I intellectualize everything.

It means that I’m regularly exhausted from intellectualizing every interaction. That’s a lot of study! And it wears me out.

It means that I could easily live in-between my own ears.

It means I over-react or under-react. I talk too loudly or too quietly. I gesture too little or too much. I don’t read the appropriate quantity and quality of nonverbals well.

It means that I’m sensitive. Over-sensitive even. But I have a hard time expressing it, so I work very, very hard at it until I can spit it out.

It means I have really awful handwriting. My signature has degenerated into a mess. My last name looks like “Iwug.”

It means that this is exactly why I chose “public speaking” to study because learning the social cues on an intellectual level might help me cope on a personal level. That’s actually pretty typical since Aspies over-intellectualize everything. That’s also that part of the living-between-my-own-ears problem.

It means that I am bent toward solitude.

It means I like you. A lot. But sometimes you might think my nonverbals are communicating the opposite.

It means that God has neurologically wired me to be a whistle-blower. Yes, it’s true. The great-Aspie-guru Tony Attwood has surmised that all whistle-blowers are on the spectrum. We aspire to adhere to a set of values, and when those values are missed, we are genuinely disturbed. Most “neuro-typicals” are more concerned with social ties than values, and so they will ignore value-infraction in order to “be with” others. Aspies don’t. The values are more important. So we speak out. And uh . . . well, you know the rest of the story.

It means I write paragraphs like that one above to over-explain everything. I talk about myself like a textbook. That’s weird! It’s a coping mechanism. I might talk about you like that, too, and get you really annoyed.

It means I can be pretty clueless. It means that Grant has to say, “Honey! No!!” Or “Hey — stop flailing.” or “Yo! I don’t want to hear any more about that.” Oh! Okay. Didn’t realize that.

Steve Brown challenges us to ask God to show us ourselves — kiss that demon on the lips! When I picked up Tony Attwood’s “bible” on Asperger’s syndrome this summer, I was reading about that “demon.” It was all written right there. In clinical language.

And writing this all out here like this is kissing that “demon.”

I’m not alone at least. My grandmother was probably an Aspie. Others in the family too. To the point that watching an extended family dinner is kind of . . . well, comical. We Aspies sit there while the neuro-typicals carry the conversation. There’s a lot of quiet staring and stimming. Until an interest is mentioned — religion, politics, knitting, dog breeds, or (heaven forbid you unwittingly mention this) rhetoric — and BOOM! We talk! With all the passion and intensity you’d see in the House of Commons. We argue. We gesture. We speak too loudly. We scare the typicals. And then we relax. It’s like touch football for us. Aaaaaahhhhh . . . so nice. What fun.

It means also that I’ve already jabbered on too long, and I’ve bored you to tears. Aspies don’t read the social cues to quit either. So I’ll save my larger point for another post.

But for now, I’ll say this — it all means that I need you. I do. Even though solitude is natural to me, even though I may seem to be saying “I want to be alone!” I still need you.

But it also means that you need me. Even if you don’t like me very much. I’m like the heel spur on the right heel (wing) of the Body. I’m there. I’m bone of your bone. And I’m the reminder that you have been neglecting your shoes, that you need to buy a custom orthotic, and you need to put your feet up at the end of the day. And surgery to remove me will only hurt your entire foot worse. . . . No, you have to learn to live with me because ignoring me makes your cortisol level rise to uncomfortable levels. Change your habits ’cause they are killing you — stop the power walking and take up swimming.

Aren’t you glad?

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

I Corinthians 12: 21-26

Our Evangelical foremothers in New York state were so moved by the Second Great Awakening but so tied to their family obligations that they translated the push for global missions into home missions. In 1833, Abigail Goodrich Whittelsey started Mother’s Magazine to encourage mothers in that calling — to win their children to Christ. The magazine warned about the dangers of corsets and birthday parties. Even sugary snacks were interpreted to be a religious choice.

By the Civil War, however, men had “professionalized” the magazine’s focus entirely, and the topics were more . . . well, bland. The copy was little more than sappy poetry and heavy-handed stories. The magazine changed its name after the turn of the 20th-century — to Family Circle.

From the winning the lost to the teaching the kids to rhyming the couplets to . . . well, “toning up your trouble spots.”

When I was young, I was taught that really committed Christians were all missionaries. You know the bargains thrown out from the pulpit, “If you really loved Jesus, you wouldn’t be afraid to go to Africa! You would tell God that you’d go anywhere for Him. After all He did for you!”

I heard the missionary stories. You know, about Amy Carmichael and her providentially brown eyes. Ti-Fam, Witch Doctor’s Daughter. Hudson Taylor. Ringu. The missionary stories were always the best ones — tailored to elementary school attention-spans. Brief, action-packed, with cliff-hangers at the end of every telling. The missionaries were bigger-than-life heroes. Wow! So exciting.

And we kids loved it when missionaries came to speak. Slides! We all liked slides! It was TV for church.

And then I met them. The missionaries. I studied them. They were so . . . vanilla. They were so unlike all those stories I’d heard. Granted, they were probably exhausted from deputation, irritated by the American materialism, and just plain peeved at having another annoying kid messing with their display. But I didn’t know if I could be one. Did I really love Jesus enough to leave everything and go to the bowels of the rain forest and eat bugs? Could I be as passive as they were?

I was actually a “summer missionary” for two summers. It was hard, fulfilling work. But was it my “calling”? I didn’t feel like I fit.

Then they changed it on me. No longer were we told to go on the mission field. Around high school and college, the plea changed from “missions” to “full-time Christian work.” “If you really loved Jesus, you’d devote your life to His service. You’d be a minister, a pastor’s wife, or a Christian school teacher.”

Huh. Now this seemed do-able. I could stay here. No bugs on the menu here.  I could devote my life to service here. I loved my Christian school teachers. I could do that. At college, I thought, “I could do this college teaching thing. I can see that. That would fit.”

And so I did. I devoted my life to that particular second blessing — to becoming a local “religious professional.”

Did you notice what happened with that change in appeal though? From global missions to national work. From taking the Gospel out there to helping us here within our own segregated Christian world. From the Universe to the Province. From the Great Commission to . . . well, a lesser commission.

You don’t hear the “full-time Christian service” message anymore — and it’s not just because I am no longer in “full-time Christian service.” I felt the change before we left. I don’t know when it got dropped precisely. But it sounds kind of quaint when I remember it here. Now the appeal for the really-committed is narrower-still. Instead of going out to the world or going out to the church-school, we don’t go out at all. We stay home. Well, women stay home. Men, you can do what you want; it doesn’t really matter as long as the Little Woman is where she belongs.

So we’ve individuated the second blessing even further. From the world to the city to the home.

Is that really what we want? It might seem like we’ve so diversified the “call” (i.e. the “pitch”) to include everyone — not just the “vanilla” missionaries or the talkative teacher-sorts — but every household and every family. But at what cost? Do we realized how we’re being absorbed into the Hegemon where our message of Christ becomes well . . . just about “toning up”?

That’s the sticker they robotically glue on the inside flyleaf of every book you buy at the BJU Campus Store. Even the Bibles!

That’s their litigious-ish way of washing their hands of your presumed offense at their dangerously idea-laden books.

So this is mine.

I’ve had another project brewing for some time. A project whose research got me so blue last May that I had to stop reading. I’m ready to start up again. And this is my sticker:

Disclaimer: I’m not talking about you. No, really. I’m not.

I’m talking about us. Which does include you. And me. And millions of other people who fall under the umbrella of Evangelicalism — from fundies to Pentecostals, from Calvinists to Arminians, from soul-patch-wearing-and-coffee-drinking types to their culotte-donning opposites.

But if you think I have you and yours in mind, you’re incorrect. I don’t. So forget the nitty-gritty you and think about the more abstract-and-one-contemporary-sliver-of-the-invisible-Church us. Or stop reading. That’s always an option.

In fact, this whole project could fall under the heading of “It’s Not About You.” So that we Evangelicals get so easily offended at point-blank critique or that we can think of one exception to the general rule or that we can turn every critique into a tu quoque fallacy . . . well, that is really proof of the problem.

But I’ll save that more for a later post.

Consider yourself warned.

I want to talk about DeWitt Jones. My teacher. My M.A. advisor. My boss for forever.

Now, I don’t know if Dr. Jones reads blogs. And I don’t want to embarrass him if he does. But I do need to gush a little. Not much. Just enough.

DeWitt Jones taught me how fun it is to read speeches by powerful dead white guys. And women. And live ones. And black ones too. He just liked civic discourse. He liked to watch how it changed stuff.

He taught me that Wade Hampton wasn’t just the name of a boulevard in Greenville.

He literally had a spring in his step the entire Reagan administration. Not because he voted for him (although he did). But because Reagan made it cool to teach speech again. Teaching Carter was such a drag with the sweaters and the fireplaces. ::yawn:: And the Malaise.

He told me that it would be good for me to study the early feminists even when some people violently scowled at the choice.

Now, DeWitt is no raving leftist in the politics department. Yes, he likes his NPR as much as the next academic. But Dr. Jones went to Louisiana to study American Public Address. He is Old School. Neo-Aristotelian. He got it hard core when studying dead white guys’ words wasn’t about the words at all. When context was king. Before all that new-fangled New Criticism messed us up (I say that good-naturedly since my academic path veered a different and “newer” direction after my M.A. with Dr. Jones).

And he distrusts political engagement. When our academic association (NCA) supported the ERA, he disengaged. He revoked his membership and never returned. His decision wouldn’t have been mine, but I understand it and respect it. He was consistent in his protests.

He showed me the Checkers speech for the first time. And explained why it was funny. . . . because of FDR’s Fala speech, of course.

And he loves FDR! But hates his policies.

Did you catch that? DeWitt Jones — that most Platonist of thinkers and most Aristotelian of critics and most sectarian of Christians and most conservative of ideologues — has enough generosity of spirit and mind to love a good speech when he hears it and still shudder at the ideology behind it.

That’s what you call a good egg.

I used to do an exercise in Freshman Speech when we’d talk about audience adaptation. I’d have a list of 5 speakers and 5 situations, and we’d imagine what would happen if . . . say, Oprah Winfrey spoke to a Kindergarten class. How would she adapt? What might she talk about? How would she speak differently than if she were talking to this college class?

The discussion was always profitable at BJU . . . until Bill Clinton became president. When I’d ask them what Bill Clinton would say if he came to talk to “this class,” they were stymied. They couldn’t fathom what this politician they detested could ever say to them.

I’m no Clinton fan, but I still find that odd. Are the boundaries between us that impermeable? Is there nothing that our political opponent could say to us as Americans that is of any value? Is being President that irrelevant?

And it doesn’t matter what the Democrats did or would do when G.W. Bush was president. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Every good fundamentalist knows that.

So it’s in the spirit of DeWitt Jones’ loving-the-speech-but hating-the-ideology that I’m going to offer some of my own discussion questions for Obama’s speech this Tuesday. The ed.gov‘s suggested discussion questions are lame, and others I’ve seen . . . well, they simply miss the mark. If I were conducting a college discussion, before viewing the speech I’d ask my students:

• What have you heard about this speech?
• Why do you think people find this controversial?
• What are the consequences of that controversy? Where would that leave political discourse and the civic sphere if we followed the trajectory of that controversy?

After the speech, I’d ask:

• What are your initial thoughts?
• What are his arguments? How does he support those arguments?
• How does he make those arguments “stick”?
• What cultural archetypes, assumptions, and themes does he build on?
• How does his character, knowledge, and judgment command (or not) respect?
• What is the President’s “second persona“? That is, what kind of person or student does he assume you — the implied auditor — to be? How do you judge that person? How do his words encourage you to be (or not) that person?
• Was he convincing? Why or why not?
• Who’s the actor in the President’s speech? And the act? The scene?  The purpose of the action? The agency? Which of those did the President emphasize and was does that say about his overall view of the world?
• What grade would you give the President? Why? If you were his speech teacher, what advice would you give him for next time?
• How did your expectations match or conflict with your actual impressions of the speech? What does that say about media coverage and its influence on civic discourse?

We’ll be watching the speech at home whether or not my son’s teacher decides to show it in school. It’s fine if she doesn’t; I really do understand. And my questions for him, to be honest, will be taken from those above. Why shouldn’t they be?

It’s not about politics per se. It’s about judgment. And there’s a long history in rhetorical scholarship about how to judge. Ancient rhetoric, after all, was simply the study of wisdom. And it’s when we’re exposed to those with whom we might disagree — those who are not-us (which includes everyone) — that we learn how to be wise.

Despite what all my argumentative opponents claim, I’m not really a capital-D Democrat. Not yet anyway. I would like to think I’m a little-d democrat. I do admire (d)emocracy. And I love when you can smell it.

You can’t smell (d)emocracy at the mall. You smell warm plastic and eye-burning cologne and fabric dye at the mall. You smell capitalism there.

You can’t smell (d)emocracy at work. That smells like white-out and burned popcorn — both smells of mistakes, one that’s covered up and one that can never be covered up. That’s the humdrum side of capitalism.

You can’t smell (d)emocracy at church. Sometimes you smell urinal cakes and Pine-Sol, Nilla wafers and Stouffer’s Lasagna. On a bad day, it smells no different than the mall. On a good day, you smell red grapes (in various states of fermentation) and good bread. It’s Love you smell, I think.

You can’t smell (d)emocracy at home. Home smells like pot roast and candles and laundry. That’s what life smells like. And love too. But less communal than church-on-a-good-day and more corporeal.

You can smell (d)emocracy at the public library. It smells like mildewed paper and ink. You smell it while you hear your neighbors clicking away at circa-1990s keyboards and watch your five-year-old sign his name on his first official document — a library card. It’s not the same smell at a college library. Most university libraries smell like fatigue and onions — at least on the grad side. The undergrad side smells like denim and Skittles. Except the BJU library. It smells like hair product and anxious pheromones.

You smell (d)emocracy at any downtown Fourth-of-July fireworks display. It smells like gun powder and sweated-off sunscreen. It’s not the same smell at the Disney Magic Kingdom fireworks. That’s churros.

You smell (d)emocracy at the St. Louis Zoo. It’s the only free city zoo I know, and it usually smells like the Ape House — close and poopy. That’s when you’ll hear elementary school field trip war stories from 40-somethings about the good ol’ days when there was no Plexiglas barrier between you and the chimps! There is the smell of asphalt and dried-up worms at the zoo. You smell that while all the giggling adults gather ’round the giraffes’ pen cheering the male on while he repeatedly attempts . . . aaaaannnnnddd again fails to make love to his captive and “arranged” giraffe wife. We all cluster together — whatever our rank or race or politics or faith — for no other reason than mammalian empathy and adolescent curiosity.

You smell (d)emocracy at interactive fountains in city parks. It smells like chlorine which protects us from too much (d)emocracy. We still share vastly different senses of propriety, different states of (un)dress, different linguistic norms, different levels of preparation, and different definitions of “swim diaper.” And that’s when I’m thankful for chlorine. But still we’re all there. All splashing. Laughing. Running. Falling.

You smell (d)emocracy on Election Day. It smells like stale coffee and damp donuts and wet shoes. November is the rainy season here in South Carolina, and there’s always an icy downpour that day. I never smelled (d)emocracy when I lived on the BJU campus and went to the 29614 pol. That just smelled like work — proper and sucked-in and rictus-ish. Like a girdle in a fluorescent-lighted dressing room. (d)emocracy out here in Taylors feels much more collarless and irritated and much less-white but still friendly. And honest. There’s more camaraderie here. We all wait together — the A-Ms vs. the N-Zs. Waiting for our sticker to prove we’ve done our civic duty.

You smell (d)emocracy at the DMV. It smells like carpet glue. There we all sit gripping our sweaty numbered paper slip until Patty or Selma reward us with their half-lidded attention. That u-shaped paper is our ticket to success if we just hold on to it tightly enough. We’re all the same there — a square unflattering picture, an organ donor, a corrective-lenses wearer. Just a person who can’t help herself by herself, seeking wallet-sized proof that she exists and can transport herself from Target to Ingles.

You smell (d)emocracy at the ER. It smells like worry and antimicrobial lotion soap. You race in with your healthy son to see your sick son, lugging your over-packed, fugly duffel and muttering something incomprehensible to the guy in scrubs. He presses a button and points and says a room number. You grab your boy’s hand and shuffle over, looking back at all the panicky boredom sitting behind you and pray they are all okay too. It’s not about health insurance there. Or what kind of car got you there. It’s just about getting help. Immediately.

You smell (d)emocracy in a public school kindergarten classroom. It smells like ketchup and peppermint puke powder and well-worn wooden play kitchens. It’s different than the petroleum-based play kitchen at Sunday School. This one’s more earthy and more mid-century and more open-ended. There are no licensing agreements on this toy. They don’t have paste jars anymore in Kindergarten. And they’ve given up on those terrible bignormous pencils. No Dick-and-Jane that I can see. No vinyl nap mats. No chalkboards. Those smells from my Kindergarten year are absent.

You don’t smell (d)emocracy in the car line at the end of the day. That smells like liberty and individualism and stay-at-home-mommyhood. Your own private smell — privileged somewhat because you can stay-at-home and you can afford to waste an hour a day just sitting and reading in solitude while your littlest naps in the seat behind you.

(d)emocracy smells human. . . . well, it smells like humans. When people interact with no merit, no class, no money, and no pretense but simply for the same purpose, there’s a smell. It’s not an entirely bad smell, but it’s out of our control. It just happens.

The smell still surprises me. I’m really not used to it because I’ve lived (and left) a life of separation from such things. Such human things. Maybe that’s why the smell is so strong.

But I like it.

What a strange bunch of contrasts.

We took my youngest to the hospital for grunting-while-breathing, and within 24-hours after the IV antibiotics he was playing “Punch Out” with the Get Well balloon my parents brought him.

That hospital trip — like any other, I’m sure — moved from soul-sucking boredom to tearful panic. And during that ebb and flow, I got two emails. One explained what a rapturous “blessing” it was that God took me away from BJU since I could no longer ruin young lives like I had so clearly done for years. :/ The other email described an actual blessing — how God is using Elise’s little cherry dress to show a young, nearly-forgotten girl how much He loved her.

A lengthy conversation with a young man wrestling with his fundamentalist upbringing made me realize that fundamentalism doesn’t teach progressive justification (like Roman Catholicism). Nor does it teach progressive sanctification (which it ironically calls “perfectionism). It teaches a kind of perpetual justification. That you have to continually beg for salvation or risk certain doom.

I found last year’s Opening Evangelistic Service from BJU. Go listen to it. It’s a perfect encapsulation of everything Grant and I stood up against and were forced to resign over. It’s all right there. Nothing’s changed. I’m told that the dorm room leaders had to do damage control for months after that sermon.

And while I was still reeling over that slipshod retelling of the Prodigal Son parable, an old friend pointed me to WorldMag’s recent podcast on the same parable — “Becoming the Third Brother.” Listen to Marvin Olasky’s description of the Elder Brother in the second part. Sound familiar?

Of course, BJU got a mention in Forbes list of best colleges based on student satisfaction. #279. North Greenville is #154 and has record enrollment this year in this economy! GQ listed BJU, too, but for a more dubious honor.

I found this little chestnut — Stuff Fundies Like. Every post is brilliant and therapeutic and hilarious. I bet you can’t read just one!

I made a Facebook quiz “How Fundamentalist Are You?” I’m told it’s too feminine, and that’s probably true. It has one (pretty negative) review. Check it out too.

I’m on my second read through Steve Brown’s Scandalous Freedom. Here are the most important chapters for recovering fundamentalists. Take a look. And if listening is more your cup of tea, here are the podcasts. Just listen to the first one, if nothing else.

Yes, Steve Brown is the hero to every one of us still struggling in recovery. And then he goes and does something like this and shoves us into joyful and raucous laughter!

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Steve Brown? You rock. Really. Thank you!