Jackie had Bible studies in her trailer most evenings, and they became charismatic prayer sessions. I was convinced that Jesus would be returning any day now and taking us all up in the Rapture.1 I was certain of it. I walked around looking up at the clouds and wondering when I would see His face. What would it look like? How would it be that he would be seen everywhere at the same time? I hadn’t made it to physics in high school… perhaps if I had, I’d understand a bit more how that would work, I thought.
Over the next few years as I bounced back and forth between Oklahoma and South Carolina I was in and out of cults, sects, and churches of fairly extreme varieties. I spent two weeks with the Children of God, also known as the “Family International” near Pike’s Peak in.2 I fled that cult one morning by walking miles down an icy road, before catching a ride into the safety of Colorado Springs where I caught a bus home. But no doubt my time at Joseph S. Carroll’s Evangelical Institute (EI) in Greenville, South Carolina took the cake.
The EI was just down the road from Bob Jones University, the institution of higher learning affectionately referred to by the locals as “the Bijoux.” I went to work at EI in early 1972 and was housed with an elderly couple who were really lovely people. They had no children of their own, and immediately adopted me with all the love, concern, and controlling behavior any good Fundamentalist Christian couple would demonstrate toward their own child.
Perhaps it was because I was still in the process of coming down off what had essentially been a prolonged LSD trip from 1970–1971. Perhaps because I was a recent convert to Christianity trying to hard not to think of songs from George Harrison’s Radha Krsna Temple album (which my friends and I used to listen to as we tripped) that I couldn’t help obsessing on them.3 As George Lakoff reminds us, and as anyone who has had the experience of trying not to think of an elephant will know, all anyone in such a situation can do is think of an elephant.
In any case I began obsessing on the songs to the “foreign deities” and found it distressing. When I mentioned this problem to members of the EI, I was referred to the Reverend himself who informed me that I was possessed by demons and he made an appointment with me for the exorcism. I was alarmed but he reassured me that demon possession wasn’t a really big deal, and mumbled something about it being no more problematic than “a common cold.”
That Sunday we met in his office and the exorcism began, with Carroll and other elders laying hands on me and commanding the demons to leave me in the name of Jesus. Nothing happened.
“I don’t think there’s anything there,” I said, more than a little flummoxed.
“The demon of lies!” the Reverend cried out, and they once again laid hands on me and commanded the demons to leave in the name of Jesus.
After a while they decided that my case was graver than they’d first believed and that it would be necessary to set another time for a more serious bit of work on my demons. I agreed, and returned to the house where I was staying, packed my backpack, and left.
I caught a Greyhound bus to Sumter, where I’d been baptized at the age of twelve as a Presbyterian, and met with the family minister there. After I told him the story, he stood up and said, “Well, they’re probably right, you know.” His demeanor changed from a kind, ministerial expression of concern to one of righteous godly wrath as he confronted the devil himself.
“If you were really a Christian, you wouldn’t appear here with long hair! You clearly don’t have the Light of Christ in you! Get out you hypocrite!”
As he shouted this he pushed me toward the door of his office and I left, bewildered, stumbling into the darkness outside.
I took a Greyhound bus back to Oklahoma and all along the road home I read a book on demon possession, a sort of “how-to-manual” for self-exorcism, just in case. And I tried to figure out my next steps.
It was my second foray that year into fundamentalist cults, and I stayed a little closer to home for the rest of the year. Fortunately, after a time my head began to clear and I went back to church with normal, slightly more down-to-earth fundamentalists. By now the Pentecostal Holiness and the Southern Baptists around the family in Oklahoma seemed quite liberated and friendly by comparison with the folks I’d been hanging out with in South Carolina.
I count myself fortunate for passing through most available phases of Bible Belt religion rather quickly. In Oklahoma I only briefly attended Tyler Assembly of God Church before I became a member of the First Baptist Church of Madill and, in addition, attended various non-denominational Evangelical churches. By the time I was coming to question most of the religion around me I had been sprinkled Presbyterian, baptized in the Spirit in the Pentecostal Church, and immersed in the First Baptist Church of Madill, Oklahoma. Through it all ran the thread of apocalyptic faith and a set of values that didn’t square well with the world in which I lived—nor, strangely enough, with the churches I attended.
No one around me seemed to notice that latter fact. I lived in the region of the “Christian nation” with the densest population of “Bible-believing Christians” and it seemed that no one around me knew anything about the Bible. Somehow it eluded everyone that Jesus, were he alive at that time, would have been wearing his customary sandals, long hair and robe, and would have been out there with the hippies protesting the war in Vietnam. Somehow the Christians I knew didn’t get what Jesus was saying when he stated “If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me” (Matthew 19:21). They seemed not to have read the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, or at least they had missed Acts 2:44–45: “And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need.”
But that wasn’t all. There were the other passages, powerfully impacting me but apparently ignored by my fellow Christians, passages such as the one in which Jesus rebuked a man for calling him “Master” because, as he said, “Call no man ‘master’ for you have only one Master in heaven.” Then there were the many contradictions and problematic questions that people seemed not to notice, contradictions too many to note here, but which began to gnaw at my faith. To those around me it would have been blasphemy to have stated the obvious: that Jesus and his followers were anti-imperialist anarcho-communist revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the established order and set up a completely different way of life in the Israel of their time. It would have been blasphemy, and I would have been locked up in a mental institution anywhere in the region for stating the obvious. There was, it seemed to me, something seriously wrong with the people around me—or was it me?
During that time I was told the GED test was being offered at job training center where I was studying small engine mechanics, and on a whim I decided to take it. Two weeks later the guidance counselor called me into his office to give me the news. He said my scores indicated that I must have studied hard for the exam, and he congratulated me. I was shocked. I didn’t know that you were supposed to study for the test. He said I’d done particularly well in reading and writing, and he asked me if I really wanted to be a mechanic, after all. I said no, that I really wanted to be a writer. He encouraged me to go to college.
In the fall of 1973 I started my first semester of college at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant. I was the only “Jesus freak” on campus, and two or three years older than the other incoming freshmen, but I didn’t care. I was there to learn and grow and find answers to the many questions I had about life.
The following summer of 1974 my friend from Dallas, James Elaine, invited me to join him and his church group on a study program for Christian