My Mother, Part II

Yes, that is me, as a baby

My grandfather, my mother’s father, was a both a sharecropper while my mother was growing up, and a Missionary Baptist preacher, like his father, my great-grandfather. So it goes without saying that I was raised an evangelical christian. That meant I lived somewhat in terror. I responded to the ‘call to the alter’, was baptized at 12 years old, and spent time every Saturday and Sunday in church. My father was raised a (sort of) Presbyterian, which, according to my raising, was dubious, like every denomination other than baptists. But I also could see that my mother’s adherence to the strict, scary doctrine of the ‘lake of fire’ for unbelievers, did not match her life or behavior. Nor did it match the behavior of virtually everyone in the church. If you thought all of these people around you who aren’t in your church (or even are) were going to burn in a lake of fire forever if they didn’t believe, wouldn’t you be out of your mind? Think if you knew with absolute certainty that a complete stranger was going to die a fiery death in the next hour unless they did some simple thing. Wouldn’t you spend every last minute begging, pleading with them to do that simple thing? And if you didn’t, wouldn’t you be a really bad person? The cognitive dissonance was for me unbelievable. So I concluded that my mother, like every person in my church because they were all good decent people, didn’t really believe. Otherwise, why wasn’t their hair on fire about this? Only the corner preachers made any sense to me from then on. Except I wasn’t one of them. My grandpa did believe, ferociously, and he preached everywhere he went and all of the time I knew him. I get that. My mother, not so much. But that is yet another thing I admire about her. She made me go to Sunday school and church and I grew up in the church. But once I was 14 or 15, no more forcing. She almost never mentioned my loss of faith.