For those who are recent readers I offer this reprint from late last year. It still sums up how I feel:
Been talking to a kid who can’t escape the scary Jesus of his childhood. It was obvious to me that the terrible Jesus, the Jesus of the Revelation, owned John body and soul. John had run from scary Jesus his whole life, and never realized he ran right into His suffocating arms. I have felt those same arms, and having purchased my freedom at the cost of respect and professional reputation, I am adamant to stay free.
All this pathology related to Jesus probably seems odd to those outside our context. We live in the Bible Belt. It is a region dominated by the specter of Jesus. His shadow stretches across our southern states and into our institutions: church, school, civic organizations, even factories and business offices. Buttons, plaques, bumper stickers, auto decals, calendars, tee shirts, and business names intone the name of the odd Galilean whose memory, like a Protestant bogey man, is still used by denizens of the Bible Belt to frighten children into obedience and women into submission.
In a two square mile area around my home are more than a dozen churches: Nazarene, Independent Fundamentalist Baptist, Lutheran, Anglican, Charismatic, Pentecostal Holiness, and Presbyterian. Extend the boundary to seven miles and there are nearly 100 churches, three Christian bookstores, a half dozen independent ministries, and thousands of suburban crackers who drive SUV’s, attend megachurches, call on the name of Jesus, and take their kids to soccer. It is hell in the middle of Oklahoma.
Common sense should lead us to safer states. We heretics have our own list of safe havens, oases of sanity where the happy pagans outnumber the Ned Flanders clones and their bitter, driven wives. Places like Seattle, Portland, Santa Fe, Pasadena, San Diego, and Denver are transformed in our sanctified imaginations into secular sanctuaries, a photographic negative of the biblical sanctum sanctorum, cities where the long arms of Jesus cannot encircle us in the guise of His servants. It is a myth, of course, but it comforts us in the moments when we allow ourselves to daydream about leaving Oklahoma.
Our grandparents left this place once. They moved to California in the 1930’s to escape the Dust Bowl. They took their apocalyptic religion with them. Enclaves still exist in California: Bakersfield and Covina are full of our fundamentalist relatives. Would that they had stayed. They moved back en masse immediately before and after the War, and it took them less than fifty years to make Oklahoma a dust bowl again.
