By T W Ladd 11/30/20

Search Me

            When I went up to the altar and knelt down, when the deacon asked me if I wanted forgiveness for my sins, did I really think about any of my sins? No.

            Just what did I think I was doing? Was it about death? The Old Man Sunday had died. My dad’s favorite Aunt Jean had died around that time. Was I hoping to avoid death, leaping into eternal life? Maybe.

            It was around this same point in my life when I was using my mom’s Oil of Olay. Hadn’t the commercials convinced me that wrinkles were really just bad planning?

            I know I also thought it would be stupid to die and go to hell. It would be like the guy with the time-bomb strapped to his chest in the public service announcement who refused to do anything about his high blood pressure.

            It’s easier to say what I wasn’t doing. I wasn’t trying to get some one-on-one time with Jesus. Harold Bloom said American Christianity was all about being alone in the Garden with Jesus, an essentially Romantic idea. A kind of church for one. Not technically a solipsism because it was you and your God.

            So much of the evidence has vanished when it comes to our own pasts. None of the witnesses are all that trustworthy. Memory makes for poor testimony, but it’s the best I have, minus a time-machine. I know I won’t solve all of the mysteries of my earlier self. I’ve already said I don’t know why I never gave my pony a better name than an adjective that could only be applied to the poor beast ironically – which is an awful kind of name.

            When I try to reflect objectively, it seems to me that the whole asking Jesus into my heart was really about joining the adults. It was the antithesis of an individual action. It was a ceding of self, a loss of freedom. A melting into, a fusion with the collective. It was completely un-Romantic.

            It could be that someone like Harold Bloom would focus on the voluntary aspect of making a profession of faith, the willing into belief. Wasn’t that the kind of thing Fichte could get behind? Claiming impossibilities to be reality, that goes even farther than Wordsworth could in “Tintern Abbey” that the real is something we “half create,” and half “perceive.” We make it half-true by believing in it. But Wordsworth thought nature was the “anchor of all [his] purest thoughts.” Nature provided Wordsworth with at least half the words that proceeded from the mouth of God. It was his partial scripture. The other half you had to create through reason.

            And for us Baptists? Was believing even important? Wordsworth had beliefs about nature. But the Baptist didn’t really need to believe anything. She just needed to say she believed. She needed to say it to the others in her church. “Help thou mine unbelief.” (Mark 9:24) There was no metric of adequate belief for us Baptists. Just keep coming to church and no one would ever question your faith. “Without faith it is impossible to please God.” (Hebrews 11:6) And the writer goes on to clarify, “for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” It’s the diligence of seeking that is the evidence of one’s belief. It takes effort, it takes work. “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar?” (James 2:19)

            What we never heard in church: someone saying, “I used to think I believed but then I realized that I was just faking it. Now I really believe.”
            Well, there was Fred Hughes. Fred was two years older than me and lived about two miles north of us. His ears were set very low on his skull. He had severely sloping shoulders. It seemed like there for a few years, every six months or so, and he would get born again. But he never claimed that he thought he was a believer before. He claimed that he had always been insincere before. This time was real. Before it couldn’t have been because he had always gone back to his sins. So he said. One time he went forward in church to the podium and told the preacher that he had been “high on pot for ten years.” Tears streamed down is agonized face. He and some of the others of us went away to an overnight church camp. It was there that I pointed out to him that his ten-year high required him to have started smoking marijuana at the tender age of six. He wasn’t happy with that. In fact, he completely lost his shit and started screaming in my face as I lay on one of the bunk beds. Several of the other boys dragged him off me.

            We all knew that Fred, an only child with elderly parents, had emotional issues. He was the kind of kid about whom your grandmother might have said, “That boy ain’t quite right.” He was the exception that proved the rule.

            “Cor meum tibi offero, Domine, prompte et sincere.” These are John Calvin’s words: “I offer my heart to you, O Lord, promptly and sincerely.”

            There isn’t an Evangelical alive who thinks the person doing the offering doesn’t know if he or she is giving his or her heart sincerely. You know. You are either telling the truth or you are lying. You can’t lie to yourself. As an Evangelical, you know your own heart. Fundamentalist Christians don’t believe an id. There’s no part of your mind removed from your conscious reflection, out of the reach of your deliberate thoughts. We knew the passages that ask the divine, “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts.” (Psalm 139:23) We read such verses, but we didn’t put much pressure on them. “Who can detect his own errors? Cleanse me from my hidden faults.” (Psalm 19:12)

Was anyone in my church ever concerned with secret sins? I never saw any evidence of that. I never saw adults saying things like, “I’m not sure about this matter. Perhaps my secret sins are blinding me. I’ll have to pray about it.” I saw a lot of people acting like they knew right from wrong, and they knew when others were in the wrong. There wasn’t even a great deal of apologizing. I don’t recall too many people saying, “I’m sorry for what I did to you. I was wrong.” If you’ve been washed in the blood of the Lamb, if you’re a new creation, if you’re filled with the Spirit and have God searching your inmost thoughts, you don’t really need a lot of critical introspection. “The Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” (Romans 8:26) The Holy Spirit prays for us in terms too deep for human words.

So, what is there for us to worry about?

For the fundamentalist, salvation can’t be lost. Once you say you’ve decided to follow Jesus, like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, all you need to do is keep going, keep moving forward. What you think about Jesus is pretty immaterial. What you understand is even less of an issue. You only need the faith of a child. It’s not like you’re being asked to solve Fermat’s last theorem or find the Higgs’ boson. You’re being asked to say something, to identify yourself. No one asks you to put salvation or propitiation of sin into your own words before a council that then passes judgment on the correctness of your words. You aren’t required to describe a process or explain the Trinity. Call upon the name of the Lord! It’s that easy!

Rather than as you to explain what you believe, the Evangelicals want to know if you will recite the club motto with them.

Because it was never about believing. It was about belonging.

The Evangelical Christian isn’t alone with her thoughts. She’s not near the ruins of Tintern Abbey, contemplating the meaning of it all. It’s not a eureka moment. Or a series of such moments– not really, because it isn’t about understanding an idea that you can articulate, a complex idea like a recipe or set of instructions. It’s a simply urge to act. It’s joining a group, it’s submitting to a creed. The loss of independence is the price you pay for the comfort of being a member of a community.

In an Arminian Christian will tell you that you can lose your salvation. You can give your life over to Jesus, only to later fall from grace. If you die in such a state, you will be condemned to an eternity in hell. All of the Baptists I knew believed in “once saved, always saved,” a Calvinist position. Falling from grace for them was an impossibility. None of them would have questioned the sincerity of a child. None of them would have asked a person professing to have faith in the risen Christ, “But do you sincerely believe? How do you know that you sincerely believe?”

For the Evangelical, there was no such thing as self-delusion when it came to one’s own beliefs about Jesus. If you believed, it was by necessity sufficient belief. You can’t question your own sincerity. To do that would be a sign of mental illness, insanity. That’s the only way they could account for a person like Fred Hughes. He must have had some kind of brain defect or spiritual retardation, surely.

“Worry is a sin,” Baptists love to say, even though you won’t find those words in the Bible. “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” (2Timothy 1:7) Sound mind in the Greek is sophronismos. Sanae mentis, in Latin. Of sound mind. Many translations of the Bible render the word as sobriety, but that has a much more limited scope than the Greek. It certainly doesn’t mean to be free of intoxication. It’s about a mind that is healthy.

In the time of St. Augustine of Hippo, a Christian put off baptism until the end of life. This was a clear attempt to deal with idea of becoming a Christian. The sense was that the redeemed person ought to be ontologically different from the unredeemed sinner. I mean, if being a Christian was something real that mattered, then obviously the life of the Christian would be distinguishable from the life of the ordinary sinner.

This was another way of dealing with the problem of how much belief is sufficient? Not only, Do you believe? But, Do you believe intensely? And how intensely was intense enough?

In the Early Christian Church, prior to the First Council of Nicaea, the practice was almost the direct opposite of these fundamentalist Baptists. Rather than seeing conversion as a discrete event, they saw it as a process over time. Often this was a period of two or three years between the time a person declared commitment to becoming a Christian and eventual Baptism. According to Robin Lane Fox, one had to be an apprentice Christian for what we would consider a rather lengthy stretch of time: two to three years – certainly not an overnight thing, though exceptions could be made in extreme situations. The catechumens could worship in the church but they did so separately and were kept from the eucharist. Full Christians kept on an eye on their behavior. If a catechumen slipped up, he or she could be demoted to the level of a “hearer.”

The process was part of the attraction of the Church, Lane Fox thinks. The difficulty and the investment of time gave the novices a greater sense of solidarity.

The process also demonstrates that not all Christians saw knowing your own heart as a simple either/or. Christians of the time of Origen and St. Augustine would have been very puzzled by people who were both impulsive and transparent. They probably would have thought such a thing was possible with a rare miracle, but it wouldn’t be commonplace.

So, I’ll ask you, when I was ten years old and kneeling at that altar, was I being sincere?       
  

By T W Ladd
Part whatever we’re up to now. 11/12/20

The Horse You Rode In On

            My brother worked for Old Man Sunday for almost a year. He went up the road a quarter of a mile and took care of the sheep. There was also a cow. Gladys. And there were four ponies. Saving up his dollar a day, my brother’s goal kept changing. He thought of buying his own TV. Or maybe a minibike. I think it was my dad’s suggestion that he consider a horse. Somehow, I must have missed that conversation. I don’t remember how it came about that he was going to save up and buy a horse. It’s likely I just didn’t think it would happen for a while. But Bret’s pile of George Washingtons kept getting thicker. Months later he had a hundred and fifty one-dollar bills. Dad said we were ready to start shopping. He had talked to a guy who knew a fellow.

            I thought that if we were going to buy a horse that I wanted in on it. So I kicked in my whole piggy bank – all twelve dollars of it. Bret thanked me. It may have been his politest moment in his life. Then he said that twelve dollars would make me the owner of at least the tail.

            My brother was ten. I was seven. Together we came up with half of the price of our Appaloosa mare. Dad paid for the other half. He also paid for the fence. We had to help with that. We boarded Pepper in Old Man Sunday’s barn that winter, for a small fee. I still remember the first time Bret was bucked off. He went flying over the horse’s head and landed face first in a snowdrift.

            And that was how I got hooked on horses.

            Over the next eighteen months or so we stretched a lot of fence, barbed wire, on our twelve acres. A lot of fence from my perspective as a kid. It’s a pretty neat thing to watch the fencing cable get pulled tight while someone is cranking the come-along – not me. I wasn’t strong enough or it was considered unsafe for me to do that first year.

            Bret and I twisted on a lot of the wire pieces that hold the fence to the post. And we tied a lot of slips of white rag to the fence – this was so Pepper would see the fence. Horses have to get used to seeing some things. This was one of the things Dad had read about in one of his horse magazines or books. He did a fair bit of reading that year about caring for a horse. He took the responsibility of training a horse very seriously. It was all a new adventure for him, too. He had grown up in the city and never had any experiences of horse riding. But he had worked with training bird dogs to hunt, and I’m sure that was what convinced him it wouldn’t be impossible for him to break a horse to saddle and bridle.

            And then Old Man Sunday succumbed to his age and emphysema. All the property and livestock would be auctioned off. I wanted one of the ponies – red-brown and white pinto. He would let me sit on him while Bret fed the sheep and other animals. I’d gotten to like the sweet boy.

            There were four of them and they were all severely neglected – at first I had no idea just how severe. What did I know? I was just a kid and these were really the first horses I’d ever seen.

Nothing had been done with their hooves in it don’t know how long. It was completely criminal and deeply cruel – it’s the kind of thing that makes you start to favor men being horsewhipped. The winter I was nine, I learned about a foundered horse, and about severely damaged hooves.

            The pony’s name was Frisky. That’s what Old Man Sunday had told me. We all thought this was a horrible name for a pony. I knew then that it was a word that got laughs on Happy Days. Even though it suggested cat food, we didn’t think it was right to change his name. I have no idea why. This probably owes something to my dad’s time training dogs. You just don’t change a dog’s name. If that wasn’t the reason, then I really can’t explain this mystery. It strikes me as useful to reflect on the problems we can’t resolve in our own autobiographies. The more we meditate on some questions, the less satisfying any possible answer becomes. Hadn’t I named about a dozen cats, came up with band names, superhero names, spaceship names, names for secret clubs and clandestine societies? But I couldn’t even come up with a nickname for my pony?

            Does that reveal something about me? Should I see that as an indictment against my character? Maybe I should. Be that as it may, I refuse to use the name Frisky any further. Although I never changed his name while he lived, I’m changing his name now. The other name just seems too insulting. From here on, I’ll refer to him as Ricky and Good Ole Rick.

            Part of me has to wonder, Was I guilty of any crime against this pinto pony? Maybe it haunts me that begging my dad to buy the pony was my own wicked cruelty. Even though Ricky’s hooves were not as bad as the other three ponies, they were more curved than elves’ shoes. They suggested sleigh runners. The pony’s front ankles were badly displaced. Instead of walking on his “toe,” he was walking on what would be for us the back of the wrist. The rear hooves were in better shape. But the ferrier examined Ricky and said the case wasn’t completely hopeless. He didn’t sound very convincing.

            Yay! I had my pony!

            But –

Did I ever stop to think that maybe the horse was in too much pain? My dad did. I didn’t trust his opinion. The other three ponies had been sold to the slaughterhouse for dogfood and glue. No one was going to put Ricky down!

            Even if that was better for him.

            The digit that a horse puts its weight on – the tip of it – is called the coffin bone. Sometimes with founder the coffin bone will pierce through the bottom of the hoof. That hadn’t happened yet with Ricky. But his coffin bone was rotated, the tip upward. This stretches the tendon at the back of the hoof. There is another problem with the coffin being rotated. It causes inflammation in the laminar tissue. Eventually, the blood flow to the laminae can be cut off. This will create other problems and, of course, more pain for the animal. The coffin bone itself can shrink – gets its blood from the laminae. I’m not sure that was what happened to Ricky. The front of his hooves was not wrinkled and cracking like I’ve seen in many cases. But his weight was always placed farther back on the heel than it should have been. My dad worked very hard with the farrier to remedy the problem but it never resolved. The back hooves returned to normal, but the front never did.

            He lived for another nine years. He should have been shod. That may have corrected the problem almost totally. I’ve talked to vets since then. I’ve obsessed over it. Agonized. . .

            That year, the same year I was in Cub Scouts, the year before band, from the end of 1979, I spent a lot of time with my pony. I became very accustomed to using the curry comb, so much I had dreams of combing out horses. My dad took care of the hoof trimming after he learned how from the farrier, but I was supposed to do the daily cleaning of the hooves with a pick. I also gave Ricky his daily dose of minerals the vet had recommended. You scooped the powder into a pail with a little oats and molasses. Ricky loved the stuff. Actually, the daily treat was how I got the pony to agree to be tied up so I could pull up a hoof at a time and work on it, runt that I was.

            Ricky and Pepper got to be good friends. You could tell they bonded. There was no riding Ricky away from Pepper. I could ride him and follow Brent on Pepper, but he absolutely refused to venture off on his own.

            And I did ride him. If Pepper (and sometimes neighbor kids on horses) wanted to gallop and Brent gave her the OK, Ricky would run his heart out to keep up with them.

            My dad made us ride as much as we could through the fields for the sake of Ricky being footsore. Our gravel roads were mainly clay but there was enough gravel on the cement-hard clay to cause problems for the pony. And there was a good route we liked to take through the woods and a gravel pit – the road there was very sandy, part of it was even like a dune.
            I rode a lot the two summers when I was ten and eleven. I didn’t have a saddle. I can’t imagine letting my boys when they were nine or ten bounce around bareback on a trotting pony! But I did it countless hours. I fell off numerous times without too much injury. I recall one time in particular when I flew off and landed on my back in a field of Queen Anne’s Lace.

            In the late summer of 1981, just before school started, just before we started going to the Christian school (student body, under sixty kids), I fell off Ricky. It was almost exactly half way through our ride. We liked to take the horses down this huge hill – we’d been down it a number of times. It would have made a great toboggan run, it was that long and steep. We were nuts. And it was all loose, fine, sand – the kind of thing guys like to go up with their motorcycles. My brother and the two boys we were riding with got ahead of me. Thinking back on it, I can’t figure out how I ever managed to stay on that pony with no saddle. The others had saddles. I squeezed with my legs and held onto the main for dear life. Down a sixty-foot drop. If Ricky had put his head down I would have fallen under him. Somehow, I made all the way to the bottom every time – including the last time I pulled it off.

            But then I fell at the bottom of the hill. Just before it flattened out, Ricky took off at a fast trot. But when he hit the hard clay, he made a hard right. He zigged, I zagged. I fell forward and the palm of my left hand hit the hard ground. I broke the wrist in one place and fractured it bade on the opposite wrist bone. I think the radius had the break and the ulna had the fracture. However, it was, it was the worst pain I’d ever experienced – so far as I could remember. And I’ve never felt anything that bad since. I thought I was going to throw up. Everything went white. I nearly passed out but never did. I definitely had to sit down. I didn’t ride Ricky home. We got over to our friend Matt’s house – one of the boys we were riding with – and called my dad. Brent led Ricky home. I went in the truck. He didn’t think it was broken though. Or he didn’t want to believe it was broken. He’d broken bones before and knew that a cast is no fun. He knew I was in pain. After all, he was the one who so many times had said sprains could be as painful as a broken bone.

            We waited the weekend for the swelling to go down – even if I needed a cast, Dad said, we’d have to wait for the swelling to go down. The next Monday we went to the hospital and got X-rays. Sure enough, a clear break.

            Ha! I was getting a cast! People could sign it! (I’m not sure why that was important.) I was vindicated. My brother couldn’t say I was being a baby, now. I don’t remember if he had said anything like that, but I’d lived adventurously. I’d broken bones, brother!  

            I bring up the hours I spent with my pony to underscore a point: in 1979 and 80, I wasn’t a fanatical believer. I was a lot more like one of those kids in an After School Special than I care to admit.

            My daily thoughts did not turn to God or the Devil. I certainly had never heard of Roe v. Wade. I’d heard of Jimmy Carter’s “windfall profits.” They made me think of windmills. I thought about the hostages in Iran more than church – my whole class at school had discussions about the hostages. Who doesn’t remember the failed rescue attempt and the helicopter that crashed into the supply plane? That was probably the first time I heard and remember the word “abort.”

I had not heard that Jesus was coming back to earth, but I knew Skylab was going to fall ahead of schedule. My mom was the elementary librarian at the public school, even though she had no college education. She was the one who told me about an art contest for kids. You had to make a picture of the Voyager 1 satellite (I didn’t win). I still remember seeing the pictures it sent back of Jupiter’s Giant Red Spot and then later Saturn’s rings. My dad called me into the room when the Jupiter images came on TV. He kept commenting on what a marvel it was that the images were beamed back to Earth from Jupiter, which is about 500 million miles away.

“The Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun!” I chirped. I learned that fact in third grade and never forgot it.

We saw these fabulous images of Jupiter early in 1979. About nine months later we got even more stunning shots of Saturn, its many moons and mesmerizing rings. Dad and I tuned in for that too. I don’t remember my brother being very interested but I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I was imaging going there. I didn’t learn that Jupiter’s gravity was 8 times that of Earth until I was in fifth grade, so in my mind I was in my rocket and on my way to explore the Red Spot, buddy!

(Yes, I realize that’s incorrect about Jupiter’s gravity – the gravity there is only about 2.5 times Earth’s, but there’s still no surface to stand on with gas giants. But somehow, I got the idea that Jupiter’s gravity was eight times stronger than Earth’s when I was in Mrs. Brennenstuhl’s class. It was not her fault. Another kid and I were looking at an encyclopedia.)

11/19/20

By T W Ladd

It Didn’t Seem Nearly So Crazy At The Time

In 1980 I had no idea just how far down the fundamentalist rabbit-hole I was heading. How could I? I was ten-year-old living in rural Michigan. I went to public school. We went to church probably three weeks out of the month. My favorite things were riding my pony or my bike. Star Wars and Thundarr the Barbarian were good, but my brother and I were really into Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. I had seen every episode of Gilligan’s Island so many times I lost count. I’d never read more than a verse at a time of the Bible. I do remember being very impressed with Franco Zeffirelli’s blue-eyed Jesus, but, hey, I was even more impressed with the Six Million Dollar Man. This was all very typical for a white male in Anywhere, USA. It was about to become very atypical. See, we had been only sporadically attending our local Bible church when a new pastor came along. This was one Robert Lee Beck, born in Vina, Alabama, 1926. (No, his middle name was not an accident. The South shall rise again.) During the Great Depression, his parents moved to Detroit with the hope of finding work.

Bob Beck was a bookish child and did well enough in middle school to qualify to enter Detroit Cass Tech, a public school of distinction, located near Downtown Detroit. I don’t know what the demographics of his classes were, but in 1930 Detroit was about 92% white. And that percentage barely went down by 1940. In World War Two he joined the Navy, having been in the ROTC program in high school. I don’t know if he saw any combat then, but he would be called up again during the Korean War. He said he served on a supply ship in the Pacific.

His time in the Navy gave him a Bachelor’s degree. And at some point he got a master’s in education from the very fine University of Indiana at Bloomington. My guess is that he got the master’s after attending Bob Jones, Sr’s college, which had moved to its Greenville, South Carolina home in 1947 because of growing enrollment, thanks to the GI Bill. Yes, folks, socialism helped fund this stuff! When he was in his forties, a surgeon at the Veteran’s hospital implanted a pig valve in his heart. The final years of his life were spent in a Veteran’s hospital. Does that mean at any time he regretted being a member of The John Birch Society? I doubt it. Just as he didn’t have any qualms about accepting government cheese or any other benefits, state or federal, he might qualify for with his family of eight children and stay-at-home wife.

In 1950, Bob Beck was ordained at Temple Baptist Church in Detroit. I believe he was ordained by one J. Frank Norris. This was the same man who had been called The Texas Tornado. According to David Stokes, Norris was indicted four times by a county grand jury: once for perjury, twice for arson, and once for murder.

In 1926 Norris shot and killed an unarmed man who had come to his church office. The coincidence of this being the same year that Bob Beck was born attracts my brain. I can imagine a very melodramatic made-for-TV movie in which Norris murders a man on the very night Beck is born. Lots of lightning and thunder. Rain coming down in sheets. But in mundane reality, baby Bob was born in April. And Norris fired three shots into D. Elliott Chipps one hot July afternoon. Time Magazine did a story on the crime. The trial that has been called one of the most famous of that decade in Texas. The New York Times covered the trial as well.

There was more than a little of Elmer Gantry (1927) in Norris, the barnstorming radio preacher and pastor of multiple churches. He lived in Texas the whole time he was working as a preacher in Detroit’s Temple Baptist Church. He would fly up for the weekend in his own small plane. He did this from 1935 to 1950. This was a man who got a bachelor’s from Baylor and then a master’s in theology from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary – but then he went on to get into feuds with both institutions. Norris seems like the kind of person who invited irreconcilable differences everywhere he went. Even his friends couldn’t always avoid conflict with him. Any bridge he could burn down in a big way was a cause for celebration. “Come Out From Among Them!” could have been his war cry. And he would have been the sort to have a war cry, despite the man never serving in the military. But he was God’s soldier, the war he fought was against the forces of Satan. He claimed that Baylor was teaching Darwinian evolution. Evolution in the time of the Scopes Monkey Trial had become widely regarded among fundamentalists as a satanic teaching. His beef with the Southern Baptist Seminary was with their “modernist” tendencies – which likely meant they were marginally influenced by contemporary trends in biblical scholarship.

The “literal” reading of the Bible was in full swing!

On his radio show in the 1920s, Norris openly backed the Klan – it would not be an unreasonable conclusion that the gun-toting preacher was an active member of the KKK. He was vociferously anti-Catholic. The wonder isn’t that Norris shot a man to death. It’s that he didn’t shoot more. Or wasn’t himself shot. I don’t know anything about his court case, but it strikes me as a screaming injustice that he got off on a claim of self-defense. There was after all no weapon found on or near the body of Mr. Chipps. People across the country were riveted by this story. Would a Texas preacher get sent to the electric chair?

Such was the man who presided over my pastor’s ordination. Norris, who had also been born in Alabama, must have been something of a hero to young Robert Lee Beck.       

When You Put It That Way

Robert Lee Beck was 54 years old in 1980. A tall man, six-two in his leather Oxford wingtips – the only kind of shoes I ever saw him in. He also always had on either dress slacks or sometimes dark olive chinos, which also had a crease over the knee. Six days a week at least he wore a tie – it was always a full Windsor knot. (His son Jimmy once told me the half Windsor was for liberals.) When the whole church went camping, he would sit around the campfire with either the sleeves of his Oxford shirt rolled up, or maybe he’d take the shirt off and sit around in an undershirt covering his generous paunch. No dungarees, as he called jeans, for him. James Dean, after all, was no Christian gentleman.

Pastor Beck was an odd-looking bird. His nose was very long and a little pointed on a very long face. His was a massive head. He kept his hair as short as Navy regulations required at all times. He had a nice round bald spot in the back like a medieval friar. His ears were also enormous and the tips ever so slightly pointed and tipped outward. Since I was a big fan of the Salem’s Lot miniseries with David Soul, I saw a resemblance to the show’s hairless vampire monster. It was very Nosferatu. It didn’t help his appearance any that he had dark wiry hairs growing out of his ears – a sight I don’t recall often seeing since, especially not in persons under that age of a hundred.

But Pastor Shotts, though large, socially awkward and physically unappealing was a very gentle man. He was warm and kind. I liked him. His homeliness made have been part of his charm. He wasn’t macho, talking about sports or hunting or monster trucks. He was quick to smile or laugh – he had a comically loud laugh. In fact, his whole brood had the same odd, boisterous laugh, mouth wide open, head tipped back. Where others might simply exhale a little sharply to express amusement, the Beck clan would give a blast on their hilarity horn. As a kid, I found it equal parts annoying and amusing. I know a number of the tight-lipped Michiganders thought of the Beck as arch, fake, insincere – I heard them called such things many times in the years we were together. Bit I got close to them. I don’t think they were phony. They were simply more demonstrative when it came to humor. Out of that whole tribe, I don’t think I ever saw one of them truly angry. They were not the kind to scowl and shout, pointing a finger, making threats. That was foreign to their temperaments.

In one of his sermons you were likely to hear an anecdote about Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. (He had accepted the common misconception that Michelangelo painted the ceiling while lying on his back.) Or he would site statistics on how many times the average heart would beat over a lifetime. He loved odd facts. In one sermon he went through a litany of facts about salmon spawning. He idiosyncratically pronounced the L in salmon, too. Still, he was one of the first intellectuals I met. He would talk about etymology in his sermons. He liked to do what he called word studies. He was the one who suggested to my dad that he get a Strong’s concordance because of its Hebrew and Greek apparatus. I don’t believe he ever studied Latin but he would at least refer to it when talking about the roots of words. I didn’t know anyone else who talked about foreign languages at all. This was a real novelty for me. I wasn’t a big reader but I loved words and dictionaries.
             Pastor Beck loved tales of survival in harsh conditions. I recall several stories about Shackleton’s exploration of Antarctica. Beck was a sucker for any of that overcoming adversity crap. Anything that was like the Donner Party with a happy ending. He loved Corrie ten Boom’s book The Hiding Place. There was definitely something sentimental about his mind. On the one hand he was like a Hallmark Holiday Special. On the other he was quoting “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” He frequently told the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man from the Gospel of Luke:

             The rich man died and awoke in hell. “And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.”

Pastor Beck reading those words in his resonant bass voice, so full of conviction, made me almost feel the flames and picture the pain and suffering of the damned. The rich man only wanted a drop of water to ease his suffering. But even that was impossible.

This didn’t strike me as an unfair punishment, grossly unequal to the crime. Hell had it’s own rules, I suppose I thought. I don’t know. All of the adults in the room accepted these things. This wasn’t my first time hearing about hell. It had to be real, right? Black holes were real, and they didn’t make any sense. Hell was just like that. It didn’t make a lot of sense but the main thing was just that you didn’t want to go there.

I don’t remember what sermon Pastor Beck preached the first time I heard him. Maybe it was the Lazarus sermon. Maybe that was when my brother and I went forward after the sermon during the altar call. If you haven’t experienced an altar call, you really should. You’re missing out. The piano and the organ play, the people sing something like “Just as I am without One Plea,” a hymn from the 1860s. The plunking piano and the humming Hammond organ, the anemic effort of the singing are all part of the tragicomedy. The comedy is the corny amateurism and poor musicianship. It’s a grandma and grandpa mouthing the words. The song leader at the pulpit waving his hands in a bizarre attempt to keep the tempo.  The tragedy is that the gates of hell are And in between the melody phrases is the most important part: the pastor intones an almost broken invitation to come forward and give your heart and your life to Jesus. “If you were to die tonight, do you know where you’d spend eternity? Will it be in paradise with the poor man Lazarus, or will it be in the fiery torment of hell with the rich man? This will be most important decision of your life – of your entire existence!”

            These words can’t be uttered in a perfunctory way. The preacher’s voice has to ache with the intensity of this moment’s gravity. This is more urgent than CPR for the drowning. This is eternal life we’re talking about. Will you be washed in the blood of the Lamb? Or will you enter everlasting hellfire?

            Choose! Don’t be a fool!

I was not made of such stern stuff at ten that I was able to resist that kind of emotional manipulation. What fool wants to spend eternity burning in hell? That’s a no-brainer. So we went forward, Bret and I. I believe he went first. It may have been one of the few times when needed a cue from my brother, who was three years older. We knelt on the green carpeted steps of the podium in that windowless church – a pole barn with paneled walls – and deacons read to us the “Romans’ Road.” I still remember Deacon Burkhardt kneeling beside me, his farmer’s hand gently on my back, mumbling in my ear. He went through the series of six short verses in Paul’s Epistle to the Church at Rome: We’re all sinners. The wages of sin is death. Jesus died for our sins. Confess that you’re a sinner and declare that Jesus is Lord.

            Boom, you’re a Christian!

I’ve known a lot of people who have gone forward at an altar call and said all the words only to go about their lives with no lasting effect. That was not the case with my brother and I. We were definitely changed. That decision changed us. It changed me. Not in the way that my mom and dad had hoped – especially my mom. But it opened up new possibilities for me. I wouldn’t be who I am today, even if I no longer think of myself as a Christian. How I see the world would be so very different. I never would have gone through so many labyrinths of elaborate horrors – imaginary landscapes, visions of Armageddon, fears and reassurances of the Rapture, a sense of calling and mission (to what I wasn’t ever sure, but I knew that God had something planned for my life). Where would I be without my fascination with the USSR? I suppose some of it would still be there, but it wouldn’t have felt so personal. I used to have a National Geographic map of the Soviet Union on my wall. My dad asked me why I would have a map of that Godless country up. My mom was also popping her head into my room at that moment and without missing a beat said, “Well, he’s praying for them.”

Did I pray for the Russians? I don’t specifically remember doing that. I remember imaging myself stuck in frozen Russia. I pictured being a prisoner in one of the Gulag cells, starved and beaten like Haralan Popov or Richard Wurmbrand, both of whom were obsessively discussed in the fundamentalist Baptist circles I moved in.

And this was no accident. After the service where my brother and I went forward, Pastor Shotts approached us and grilled us if we had really asked Jesus into our hearts, or were we just going through the motions to please the adults. I’d never encountered a question like that. I recall mumbling something about really believing – visions of damnation still filling my head. The Pastor Shotts said one of the strangest things I’ve ever heard anyone say to me. “Would you be willing to die for your belief in Jesus? Because some day you may be forced to choose. Would you deny Christ?”

Your savior or your life? The gun is held to your head. What would you do? The pastor would often refer to stories of Christians in China who were asked if they were Christians. When they said yes, they were shot. Bang! You’re dead.

I assured him that I would not deny Christ. I, ten-year-old snot-nosed asthmatic weighing all of fifty-something pounds, was willing to forfeit my life for my beliefs. Or words to that effect. Pastor Shotts smiled and laughed and said he believed I would. Then he put one of his giant paws on my boney little shoulder and asked if he could say a prayer, into which he immediately launched.

I was left wondering who would hold a gun to my head and make me quit Jesus.

Who Wanted The Viper?

I had been forced to choose before. One Christmas time, while riding in the car with my mom and brother, my mom said, apropos of what I have no idea, “It’s either Jesus or Santa. It can’t be both. But if you want to go to heaven, it’s gotta be Jesus.”

I remember being viscerally startled at that. As far as memories that stand out, memories of ideas that I found utterly offensive, of ideas that seemed shockingly wrong, ideas that were not just inconvenient but part of an existential threat, having to choose between Santa or Jesus was one of the most salient of my pretty comfortably dull life.

When did this happen? How old was I? I can’t be sure. It had to be after the year when we stood in line at the Santa Train to meet the big guy himself. Now that is a really early memory and very very sketchy memory.

My dad worked for Grand Trunk Railroad. I think that Santa was only there for friends and family of employees. I think you needed a ticket. I’m assuming here based on memories. It seems like when we finally did get up to the fat man in red that I was terrified of him and wanted no part of sitting on his lap.

I wonder if that was before or after my brother told me point blank, “Santa’s dead.” I went into a fit of hysterics. We were in our bunk beds. Mine was on top. I have no idea why I had to sleep on the top bunk. Wasn’t I afraid of falling down the ladder? I don’t remember being afraid of that. I remember loving the climb. I’m surprised I didn’t fall when I had to climb down in the early hours to pee. That never happened.

But I distinctly remember Bret laughingly tell me Santa was dead. He died a long time ago, you baby! That kind of thing. No, no! That’s not true. Oh, yes, it is true and so forth.

            I bawled that “He’ll come back to life for me!”

            I had powers over death, I guess. What was this? 1974, maybe? I can’t be sure of the sequence of events with these dim, early recollections. I do know we were in the first house I lived in, beside the freeway on the end of a dead-end street. I-94 was about a hundred yards away. Trucks roared by at all hours. Sometimes an 18-wheeler would have a blow out that sounded like a canon going off. That would wake everyone in the house. If I woke up, I’d watch the headlights circle around the edge of the ceiling. First one way and then darting back in the opposite direction. And then a vehicle would come from the other direction and light would ride around the reverse of the first. If light could go backward, maybe time could too. Maybe the dead could rise again. Maybe we just had to want it bad enough.

            I don’t know what I really thought about death before I was five or six. I know at sometime around that age I wanted to be an artist. I liked to draw and color. I had gotten pretty good at it early on since I’d broken my leg when I was two. The six weeks I spent in traction were filled with coloring and doodles. When other kids in kindergarten were drawing stick figures, I was drawing entire scenes. That’s what happens when you spend a lot of time at something. It was early exposure, not precociousness.

Big Deal, So We Didn’t Have Cable!

So we were an average American family in my earliest memories. I don’t remember anything about the Vietnam War or Nixon’s problems with Watergate. The first political thing I can recall was wanting Ford to win in ’76. But that was because of the cars and trucks. My parents supported Carter. Nixon was a crook, my dad said. We had tried to see Santa one year but couldn’t or I was too afraid when we did see him. And then my mother dropped a bomb and said I had to choose Jesus or Santa. In my memory of her saying that, I know what car I’m in and what street we’re on in Battle Creek. We’re heading up Emmett St., crossing the river and about to turn onto Wagner Drive. It was winter and snowy. I’m not sure if that’s true.

            Important events happen in our lives when we’re young and we don’t make notes. We don’t check the calendar. Hell, that’s true of adults as well.

            And even though church was not a huge thing in our lives, I remember one time my mom telling me and my brother that we had to be baptized to go to heaven. She repeated this in front of my dad and he indeed verified the accuracy of the statement. That’s the way it went. Like when someone from personnel tells you you have to sign your W-2. We were not a family of Bible thumpers. We didn’t pray before meals or bedtime. I recall saying the Now I lay me down to sleep rhyme, but I can’t even be sure how I learned that. I’ll also take the opportunity to point out that it was a terrifying little ditty. I didn’t want to think about dying in my sleep! What kids ever died in their sleep? I had never heard of any of my friends from kindergarten croaking before morning. Some sicko came up with those verses. (I really don’t think SIDS counts here. Babies can’t pray that the Lord take their souls.)
            Religion really wasn’t that big of a deal in our lives in 1980. Other than Bjorn Borg winning at Wimbledon and the US hockey team defeating the Soviets at Lake Placid, the really deal was our horse, Pepper.

            When we left the edge of I-94 and moved to a dirt road in Barry County, we got, free of charge, a load of deerflies – something totally new to me, the little bastards – and a nosey neighbor by the name of Mr. Sunday. Norm Sunday owned the cornfield we bought and built a house on. He was about 70 but to me he was about the oldest looking person I’d ever gotten up close to. Varicose veins zig-zagged over his cheeks like red snakes or lightning bolts. He always wore a beaten up, gray fedora. I’m convinced he slept in the thing. The day we looked at the property, my dad, brother and I piled into the cab of his rusted-out Jeep Cherokee truck. We rode out into the pasture in low gear. It was a hot hot day in June. Gnats harassed us and the old man babbled on about property lines, smoking his cigarillo.

He had retired from the real estate business some years before. He didn’t know anything about farming but had decided to buy a house with a barn and several outbuildings. Then he bought himself exactly one hundred sheep. What made him go all biblical? Why did he want suddenly to turn into a good shepherd? Some mysteries will never be solved. I can only say that he was a life-long bachelor and a confirmed hoarder. He would hit auctions and buy cheap sets of plates and dishes. Instead of washing dishes, he’d open his window and toss the plate outside. Onto the porch. Maybe on the grass.

I remember one frigid winter day stepping inside the old man’s dirty house. We were waiting for him to get my brother’s dollar. That’s what he was paid to toss out the bales of hay, the cobs of corn, and fill up the water troughs. The kitchen was nothing but a mess. Every inch. The oven door was open and the room was overheated. I don’t think his furnace worked. It was up to the oven to warm the hundred-year-old farm house. My brother pointed to the calendar. It was one of those ones with an overlay sheet of cellophane. The women were in dresses, you lifted it and they were nude.
            He usually had one ewe living in his house with him. He claimed it was because she was sick but my dad assumed it was because he basically thought of the sheep as pets. He had no interest in sheering them. Most of them were loaded down with sheep shit that had dried onto their wool. When they jogged it would clatter like beads.

            He didn’t keep the rams from the ewes so they were lambing all months of the year and even in the dead of winter. I’ll never forget going into the dark barn. A single lightbulb on the wall providing illumination. A lamb lay dead on the filthy straw. The amniotic fluid froze it to the floor. Its mother stood over it, blinking stupidly, steam puffing out of her huge nostrils. She had a lamb that had lived she was ignoring. It was under a heat lamp but the mother had to herded back into her pen so the lamb could nurse. The gate for the makeshift pen was a door – an actual house door off the hinges, lying horizontally.

            It was a terrible scene. My dad was disgusted by the waste and pointlessness of it all. Sheep aren’t pets.

            My brother worked for Old Man Sunday for almost a year. He went up the road a quarter of a mile and took care of the sheep. There was also a cow. Gladys. And there were four ponies. Saving up his dollar a day, my brother’s goal kept changing. He thought of buying his own TV. Or maybe a minibike. I think it was my dad’s suggestion that he consider a horse. Somehow, I must have missed that conversation. I don’t remember how it came about that he was going to save up and buy a horse. It’s likely I just didn’t think it would happen for a while. But Brett’s pile of George Washingtons kept getting thicker. Months later he had a hundred and fifty one-dollar bills. Dad said we were ready to start shopping. He had talked to a guy who knew a fellow.

            I thought that if we were going to buy a horse that I wanted in on it. So I kicked in my whole piggy bank – all twelve dollars. Bret thanked me. It may have been his politest moment in his life. Then he said that twelve dollars would make me the owner of at least the tail.

Installment Number 3. 

By T W Ladd 11/15/2020

I had been forced to choose before. One Christmas time, while riding in the car with my mom and brother, my mom said, apropos of what I have no idea, “It’s either Jesus or Santa. It can’t be both. But if you want to go to heaven, it’s gotta be Jesus.”

I remember being viscerally startled at that. As far as memories that stand out, memories of ideas that I found utterly offensive, of ideas that seemed shockingly wrong, ideas that were not just inconvenient but part of an existential threat, having to choose between Santa or Jesus was one of the most salient of my pretty comfortably dull life.

When did this happen? How old was I? I can’t be sure. It had to be after the year when we stood in line at the Santa Train to meet the big guy himself. Now that is a really early memory and very very sketchy memory.

My dad worked for Grand Trunk Railroad. I think that Santa was only there for friends and family of employees. I think you needed a ticket. I’m assuming here based on memories. It seems like when we finally did get up to the fat man in red that I was terrified of him and wanted no part of sitting on his lap.

I wonder if that was before or after my brother told me point blank, “Santa’s dead.” I went into a fit of hysterics. We were in our bunk beds. Mine was on top. I have no idea why I had to sleep on the top bunk. Wasn’t I afraid of falling down the ladder? I don’t remember being afraid of that. I remember loving the climb. I’m surprised I didn’t fall when I had to climb down in the early hours to pee. That never happened.

But I distinctly remember Chuck laughingly tell me Santa was dead. He died a long time ago, you baby! That kind of thing. No, no! That’s not true. Oh, yes it is true and so forth. Through lots of snot I bawled that “He’ll come back to life for me!”

I had powers over death, I guess. What was this? 1974, maybe? I can’t be sure of the sequence of events with these dim, early recollections. I do know we were in the first house I lived in, beside the freeway on the end of a dead end street. I-94 was about a hundred yards away. Trucks roared by at all hours. Sometimes an 18-wheeler would have a blow out that sounded like a canon going off. That would wake everyone in the house. If I woke up I’d watch the headlights go around the edge of the ceiling. First one way and then dart back in the opposite direction. And then a vehicle would come from the other direction and light would ride around the reverse of the first. If light could go backward, maybe time could too. Maybe the dead could rise again. Maybe we just had to want it bad enough.

Installment Number 2.

By T W Ladd 11/14/2020 

Robert Lee Shotts was 54 years old in 1980. A tall man, six-two in his leather Oxford wingtips — the only kind of shoes I ever saw him in. He also always had on either dress slacks or sometimes dark olive chinos, which also had a crease over the knee. Six days a week at least he wore a tie — it was always a full Windsor knot. (His son Jimmy once told me the half Windsor was for liberals.) When the whole church went camping he would sit around the campfire with either the sleeves of his Oxford shirt rolled up, or maybe he’d take the shirt off and sit around in an undershirt covering his generous paunch. No dungarees, as he called jeans, for him. James Dean, after all, was no Christian gentleman. 

Pastor Shotts was an odd looking bird. His nose was very long and a little pointed on a very long face. His was a massive head. He kept his hair as short as Navy regulations required at all times. He had a nice round bald spot in the back like a medieval friar. His ears were also enormous and the tips ever so slightly pointed and tipped outward. Since I was a big fan of the Salem’s Lot miniseries with David Soul, I saw a resemblance to the show’s hairless vampire monster. It was very Nosferatu. It didn’t help his appearance any that he had dark wiry hairs growing out of his ears — a sight I don’t recall often seeing since, especially not in persons under that age of a hundred. 

But Pastor Shotts, though large, socially awkward and physically unappealing was a very gentle man. He was warm and kind. I liked him. He wasn’t macho, talking about sports or hunting or monster trucks. He was quick to smile or laugh — he had a comically loud laugh. In fact, his whole brood had the same odd, boisterous laugh, mouth wide open, head tipped back. Where others might simply exhale a little sharply to express amusement, the Shotts clan would give a blast on their hilarity horn. As a kid, I found it equal parts annoying and amusing. 

In one of his sermons you were likely to hear an anecdote about Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. (He had accepted the common misconception that Michelangelo painted the ceiling while lying on his back.) Or he would site statistics on how many times the average heart would beat over a lifetime. He loved odd facts. And he loved tales of survival in harsh conditions. I recall several stories about Shackleton’s exploration of Antarctica. Shotts was a sucker for any of that overcoming adversity crap. Anything that was like the Donner Party with a happy ending. He loved Corrie ten Boom’s book The Hiding Place.  There was definitely something sentimental about his mind. On the one hand he was like a Hallmark Holiday Special. On the other he was quoting “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” He frequently told the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man from the Gospel of Luke:

The rich man died and awoke in hell. “And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.” 

Pastor Shotts reading those words in his resonant bass voice, so full of conviction, made me see the flames and picture the pain and suffering of the damned. The rich man only wanted one drop of water to ease his suffering. But even that was impossible. 

This didn’t strike me as an unfair punishment. Hell had it’s own rules, I suppose I thought. I don’t know. All of the adults in the room accepted these things. This wasn’t my first time hearing about hell. It had to be real, right? Black holes were real, and they didn’t make any sense. Hell was just like that. It didn’t make a lot of sense but the main thing was just that you didn’t want to go there. 

I don’t remember what sermon Pastor Shotts preached the first time I heard him. Maybe it was the Lazarus sermon. Maybe that was when my brother and I went forward after the sermon during the altar call. If you haven’t experienced an altar call, you really should. You’re missing out. The piano and the organ play, the people sing something like “Just as I am without One Plea,” a hymn from the 1860s. The plunking piano and the humming Hammond organ, the anemic effort of the singing are all part of the tragicomedy. And in between the melody phrases is the most important part: the pastor intones an almost broken invitation to come forward and give your heart and your life to Jesus. “If you were to die tonight, do you know where you’d spend eternity? Will it be in paradise with the poor man Lazarus, or will it be in the fiery torment of hell with the rich man? This will be most important decision of your life — of your entire existence!” 

I was not made of such stern stuff at ten that I was able to resist that kind of emotional manipulation. What fool wants to spend eternity burning in hell? That’s a no-brainer. 

So we went forward, Chuck and I. I believe he went first. It may have been one of the few times when needed a cue from my brother, who was three years older. We knelt on the green carpeted steps of the podium in that windowless church — a pole barn with paneled walls — and deacons read to us the “Romans Road.” I still remember Deacon Burkhardt kneeling beside me, his farmer’s hand gently on my back, mumbling in my ear. He went through the series of six short verses in Paul’s Epistle to the Church at Rome: We’re all sinners. The wages of sins is death. Jesus died for our sins. Confess that you’re a sinner and declare that Jesus is Lord.

Boom, you’re a Christian! 

I’ve known a lot of people who have gone forward at an altar call and said all the words only to go about their lives with no lasting effect. That was not the case with my brother and I. We were definitely changed. That decision changed us. It changed me. Not in the way that my mom and dad had hoped — especially my mom. But it opened up new possibilities for me. I wouldn’t be who I am today, even if I no longer think of myself as a Christian. How I see the world would be so very different. I never would have gone through so many labyrinths of elaborate horrors — imaginary landscapes, visions of Armageddon, fears and reassurances of the Rapture, a sense of calling and mission (to what I wasn’t ever sure, but I knew that God had something planned for my life). Where would I be without my fascination with the USSR? I suppose some of it would still be there, but it wouldn’t have felt so personal. I used to have a National Geographic map of the Soviet Union on my wall. My dad asked me why I would have a map of that Godless country up. My mom was also popping her head into my room at that moment and without missing a beat said, “Well, he’s praying for them.” 

Did I pray for the Russians? I don’t remember doing that. I remember imaging myself stuck in frozen Russia. I pictured being a prisoner in one of the Gulag cells, starved and beaten like Haralan Popov or Richard Wurmbrand, both of whom were obsessively discussed in the fundamentalist Baptist circles I moved in. 

And this was no accident. After the service where my brother and I went forward, Pastor Shotts approached us and grilled us if we had really asked Jesus into our hearts, or were we just going through the motions to please the adults. I’d never encountered a question like that. I recall mumbling something about really believing — visions of damnation still filling my head. The Pastor Shotts said one of the strangest things I’ve ever heard anyone say to me. “Would you be willing to die for your belief in Jesus? Because some day you may be forced to choose. Would you deny Christ?” 

Your savior or your life? The gun is held to your head. What would you do? 

I assured him that I would not deny Christ. I, ten-year-old asthmatic weighing all of fifty-something pounds, was willing to forfeit my life for my belief. Or words to that effect. Pastor Shotts smiled and laughed and said he believed I would. Then he put one of his giant paws on my boney little shoulder and asked if he could say a prayer, into which he immediately launched. 

I was left wondering who would ask me to give up Jesus or die.  

by T W Ladd 11/13/2020

In 1980 I had no idea just how far down the fundamentalist rabbit-hole I was heading. How could I? I was ten-year-old living in rural Michigan. I went to public school. We went to church probably three weeks out of the month. My favorite things were riding my pony or my bike. Star Wars and Thundarr the Barbarian were good, but my brother and I were really into Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. I had seen every episode of Gilligan’s Island so many times I lost count. I’d never read more than a verse at a time of the Bible. I do remember being very impressed with Franco Zeffirelli’s blue-eyed Jesus, but, hey, I was even more impressed with the Six Million Dollar Man.

This was all very typical for a white male in Anywhere, USA. It was about to become very atypical. See, we had been only sporadically attending our local Bible church when a new pastor came along. This was one Robert Lee Shotts, born in Vina, Alabama, 1926. (No, his middle name was not an accident. The South shall rise again.) During the Great Depression, his parents moved to Detroit with the hope of finding work.

Bob Shotts was a bookish child and did well enough in middle school to qualify to enter Detroit Cass Tech, a public school of distinction, located near Downtown Detroit. I don’t know what the demographics of his classes were, but in 1930 Detroit was about 92% white. And that percentage barely went down by 1940. In World War Two he joined the Navy, having been in the ROTC program in high school. I don’t know if he saw any combat then, but he would be called up again during the Korean War.

His time in the Navy gave him a Bachelor’s degree. And at some point he got a master’s in education from the very fine University of Indiana at Bloomington. My guess is that he got the master’s after attending Bob Jones, Sr’s college, which moved to its Greenville, South Carolina home in 1947 because of growing enrollment, thanks to the GI Bill. Yes, folks, socialism helped fund this stuff. When he was in his forties, a surgeon at the Veteran’s hospital implanted a pig valve in his heart. The final years of his life were spent in a Veteran’s hospital. Does that mean at any time he regretted being a member of The John Birch Society? I doubt it. Just as he didn’t have any qualms about accepting Government Cheese or any other benefits, state or federal, he might qualify for with his family of eight children and stay-at-home wife.

In 1950, Bob Shotts was ordained at Temple Baptist Church in Detroit. I believe he was ordained by one J. Frank Norris. This was the same man who had been called The Texas Tornado. According to David Stokes, Norris was indicted four times by a county grand jury: once for perjury, twice for arson, and once for murder.

In 1926 Norris shot and killed an unarmed man who had come to his church office. The coincidence of this being the same year that Bob Shotts was born attracts my brain. I can imagine a very melodramatic made-for-TV movie in which Norris murders a man on the very night Bob Shotts is born. Lots of lightning and thunder. Rain coming down in sheets. But in mundane reality, baby Bob was born in April. And Norris fired three shots into D. Elliott Chipps one hot July afternoon. Time Magazine did a story on the crime. The trial that has been called one of the most famous of that decade in Texas. The New York Times covered the trial as well.

There was more than a little of Elmer Gantry (1927) in Norris, the barnstorming radio preacher and pastor of multiple churches. He lived in Texas the whole time he was working as a preacher in Detroit’s Temple Baptist Church. He would fly up for the weekend in his own small plane. He did this from 1935 to 1950. This was a man who got a bachelor’s from Baylor and then a master’s in theology from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary — but then he went on to get into feuds with both institutions. Norris seems like the kind of person who invited irreconcilable differences. Any bridge he could burn down in a big way was a cause for celebration. “Come Out From Among Them!” could have been his war cry. And he would have been the sort to have a war cry, despite the man never even serving in the military. But he was God’s soldier, the war he fought was against the forces of Satan. He claimed that Baylor was teaching Darwinian evolution. His beef with the Southern Baptist Seminary was with their “modernist” tendencies — which likely meant they were marginally influenced by contemporary trends in biblical scholarship.

On his radio show in the 1920s, Norris openly backed the Klan. He was vociferously anti-Catholic. The wonder isn’t that Norris shot a man to death. It’s that he didn’t shoot more. Or wasn’t himself shot. I don’t know anything about his court case, but it strikes me as a screaming injustice that he got off on a claim of self-defense. There was after all no weapon found on or near the body of Mr. Chipps.

Such was the man who presided over my pastor’s ordination. Norris, who had also been born in Alabama, must have been something of a hero to young Robert Lee Shotts.