How I Got Religion, And Then Lost It
Meeting My Match - Ken
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I continued such thinking for a further while, and it came to pass that I had a rerun of my conversation with Jim. But this time, Ken was with us.
I had been a fundamentalist for six years, and I had spent that whole time examining and re-examining my beliefs. As I had learned about first one and then another intellectual argument against them, I had added to their defenses, taking care as well as I could that they remained coherent. God was surely mysterious, but He could never be illogical; of that I was confident. He could be apparently illogical, perhaps, given the limits of human understanding, but never really actually illogical. Fundamentalism had its paradoxes, but thought I had resolved them.
I now believed that my brothers and sisters in the church needed to repent for many sins, but I thought we were still the one and only true church. Perhaps I would be called to lead the church to a new understanding of its true mission; perhaps I would not. That was up to God, and he had not let me know one way or the other. But there was still, I was sure, only one way to be saved, and that was our way, which we understood was based on a plain acceptance of the plain language of Scripture.
So I tried to tell Ken, as I had tried to tell Jim.
Ken took no more personal offense than Jim had, but he could hardly conceal his contempt for my shallowness. He had had many more than six years to examine his beliefs. He proceeded to compare them, with mine; and, he compared his and Jim's lives with mine, as measured by conformity with the Great Commandment.
Later that night, walking home, I wept, not yet in defeat, but in shame.
By chance, a few days later I was having to find a new place to live. I mentioned this to Ken during my next visit, and he offered to let me rent a camping trailer he had parked in his back yard. I thus became, unofficially, one of his boys.2
The intellectual scaffolding I had erected to support my faith was meaningless. However necessary I thought it was to believe the Bible in its entirety, and to believe in the necessity of obedience to its every mandate, I had nothing with which to show these supposed infidels that they were the ones out of God's favor.
I thought I had plucked the beam out of my own eye, with Ken's assistance, and I had felt much better for it. I could feel justified in criticizing my brothers and sisters for failing to see the light that I had seen. But I could also see how morally naked I was, compared with this man who saw no need to believe that Genesis was history, that the Gospels were biography, or that Acts was journalism.
Next: The Break
Notes:
2 Yes, many people suspected Ken of having other than an altruistic interest in adolescent males. Every bit of evidence that I ever saw solidly contradicted those suspicions. As far as I could tell, he had no sex life, or else he kept it thoroughly hidden.
