Being “Saved” By The Baptists

Early in my Junior year of high school, my mom decided to move back “home” to West Virginia. Well, it was still home for her, at least, but after a decade in Florida it was no longer home for me; I felt terribly out of place. I was a strange and lonely kid who read too much and thought too much, and was stuck in the most awkward time of my life. So, when an older cousin asked me to join her church youth group, I did, hoping to find a place to fit in.

I guess I did fit in, for a while. I developed a crush on one of the boys at church and everyone was just so nice. The other kids had all been saved and baptized and the whole congregation seemed so excited about it when a newly saved soul headed up the aisle to pledge their heart to Jeebus. I wanted everyone to like me, so I decided to do it too. That was a very pleasant time for a shy gal in need of approval. Everyone hugged me, smiled at me, told me what a wonderful child I was. A dream come true for one sorely lacking in self esteem!

A few weeks later I had my baptismal ceremony and it was actually quite an uplifting experience. I had that mystical ‘god’ feeling that you read about; I honestly thought I felt surrounded by god’s presence! (As it turns out, a short time later I found I got that same feeling at large rock concerts where the crowd is intensely emotional and focused on the performer.) Everyone continued to heap attention upon me for about the next week, until the next big thing came along – Revival!

If you’ve never been to a Baptist revival, it is truly something to behold. Guest preachers come from far away, having prepared their best, loudest, most intense fire-and-brimstone sermons. It can go on for several weeks, with different speeches throughout the week. (If you have a morbid curiosity and a high BS tolerance, you should try one sometime, if only for reference.) Our regular pastor was not an intense man, normally. He much preferred the “god is love” kind of sermon, and I suppose, so did his flock. When I attended, the morning service was fairly normal, and I suspected nothing. The evening service though, was horrifying… it was entirely too much for a sixteen year old, and I thought I would be sick before the night was over.

Revival was everything you’ve ever seen on TV, and perhaps more. Lakes of fire, eternal suffering and pain, demons, and so on. I hated every second of it. I had been to church before, and I knew that bad people went to hell, but this…this was way beyond some mild-mannered concept of detention or maybe jail. The fear and hate I felt in the room was so diametrically different from the happy glow I had felt in that very same room just one week before that I couldn’t begin to understand it. How could this be the same god? How could a loving god hold you in his hand and protect you in one moment and then decide to torture you forever in the next moment? And for what? As far as I could tell, nearly everything was sinful, and you had to live in fear all of the time in order to keep right with this monster.

That was the last time I ever went to that church or willingly went to any church. Fortunately my mom didn’t seem to mind. She was mostly a Christmas and Easter kind of Christian anyway. A few months later we wound up back in Florida – which turned out to be more “home” for both of us than mom had realized – so I didn’t have to deal very long with the guilt my cousin or my former friends tried to heap upon me.

It took me a long time to figure out what I was going to do with all of those contradictions about the Baptist god. I continued to read too much and think too much, of course. In time I realized that there was so much more that I couldn’t reconcile, and that it just didn’t seem realistic to believe that Christians had the answers. It took me even longer to figure out that nobody else had the answers either. Today I still can’t be positive of what the answer is, but I finally feel that I have a pretty good idea what it is not.

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