Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--And How I Learned to Love Women Read Online Free PDF Page B

so well.
    Susan took grim satisfaction at the looming damnation of just about everyone but us. Debby wept and redoubled her efforts. Priscilla got nervous and threw up. I hid.
    If my sisters ever had doubts about their faith, I never knew, at least when I was very young. And of course Mom had no doubts. Only Dad had doubts. We knew about those because Mom told us.
    Mom never said what they were about, just that “Fran questioned everything that year,” and “Your father’s faith is not as strong as mine,” long pause, a slight shake of the head, “Poor Fran.” Sigh.
    All Dad ever said about his doubts was “I wrestled before the Lord while walking back and forth in the hayloft of Chalet Bijou in Champéry, for many days and nights on end. I was ready to give it all up. I questioned everything!”
    Maybe my bad leg was God’s punishment of Dad. Mom
never said this, but somehow I got that idea. This made sense to me when I was a young child. It is an idea that still makes sense to some evangelical readers who stumble on my novels like Zermatt or my “anti-Christian” op-eds. From time-to-time they write to me that they expect me to drop dead, literally, as soon as God catches up on his work.
    One thing they hate about Zermatt is that the missionary father loses his faith. They don’t like the sex either, but it is the threat of losing one’s faith that seems to infuriate them. If life can’t be tied up in a neat package, if you let those doubts begin to gnaw at your guts, where will it end?
    It is no coincidence that about 99 percent of evangelical books are written to help people order their lives according to an invisible world when everything in the visible world is challenging faith. The title of almost every evangelical book could be “How to Keep Your Faith in Spite of . . .” fill in the blank, college, art, science, philosophy, sex, temptation, literature, media, TV, movies, your homosexual tendencies, your heterosexual tendencies . . . in other words, every breath you take.
     
    Each night, Mom read me Bible stories. Lots of the ones I liked best—the juicy killing, adultery, death, and revenge ones—were filled with people suddenly getting leprosy, being plagued by worms that ate them from the inside out, and other usually fatal problems under the general heading of being “struck down by God” and/or “chastised.” This happened for reasons related to not believing right, especially not having enough faith, or the right kind of faith, or maybe they had lots of faith but it was in bad theology, or led to worshipping various false gods, or they married people who worshipped false gods, or sinned by worshipping our God, the One True
Reformed Calvinist God, but did it wrong the way Cain did when he came to God with unclean hands bearing vegetables and fruit when a lamb was required. Or maybe they forgot to do what God said to do and didn’t kill every man, woman, and child of some wicked peoples he had expressly told them to exterminate, including the cattle and household pets.
    God would sometimes punish the sinner by striking down an innocent bystander—though since all people are fallen under Adam’s curse, no one is really innocent—for instance, King David, whose lust-child was killed by God as a way to send David a stern warning. David mourned for a while, and then he took a bath and wrote a psalm about it. So maybe I was lucky because Dad questioned God and I only lost the use of one leg. Anyway, the paralysis felled me when I was two, either as a warning to Dad, a preemptive punishment, or a test of my parent’s faith.
    I was incredibly fortunate that the Swiss doctor Mom took me to in Monthey—the town at the base of the mountain below Champéry—didn’t kill me. This “polio specialist” talked Mom into allowing him to replace some of my spinal fluid with a “special serum” he made from tapping the spinal fluid of chimpanzees. The doctor had the chimps locked in a lab in the