I finished your book Deer Hunting with Jesus last night. It had so many insights into many questions I have about the people who surround me, my fellow Oklahomans and family. I came across a passage I really identified with:
Only another liberal raised in a fundamentalist clan can understand what a strange, sometimes downright hellish circumstance it is -- how such a family can despise everything you believe in, see you as a humanist instrument of Satan, yet still love you and be right there for you when your back goes out or a divorce shatters your life. How they can never fail to invite you to the family's Thanksgiving dinner.
It must be plain that I do not find much conversational fat to chew around the Thanksgiving table. Politically and spiritually, my family and I may be said to be dire enemies. Love and loathing coexist. There is talk but no communication. At times it seems we are speaking to one another through an unearthly veil, wherein each party knows it is speaking to an alien. This is the sound of mutually incomprehensible worlds hurtling toward destiny, passing with great psychological friction, obvious to all yet acknowledged by none.
Here's another passage from your book:
After a lifetime of identity conflict, I have come to accept that these are my people -- by blood, even if not politically or spiritually ... I cannot escape their pathos.
I couldn't have expressed this weird reality any better myself. I'm from a fundamental, evangelical family, the only one to stray from the path of righteousness to that of free thought. I went to a Christian college in Oklahoma. Oddly, it was the religion and philosophy professors that kick-started me into thinking for myself. The professors and a couple of radical kids challenged me to explore what I really believed, rather than regurgitating what my parents had taught me.
Always a reader, I started reading everything I could about different religions. Things changed for me drastically after that. Drastically and uncomfortably, I might add. Once you climb out of the box, there's no going back inside. It's been hard on my family to accept that I'm no longer "saved" or whatever it is they believe about me. I haven't been able to go as far as my husband, who is an atheist. I've found a liberal church with like-minded people who spend their time following Jesus rather than worshipping Christ, and are involved with the social gospel. I feel accepted there, but as you said in your book, it can be very lonely at Thanksgiving! When I get together with my family, we talk but don't communicate. I know they think I'm as strange as a two-headed calf. They love me, but I'll always be an oddity.
Like you, it's been nice to find there are others out there who have had similar experiences. When you talked about fearing the Rapture had happened, I knew exactly what you meant. That happened to me when I was in elementary school! I was terrified. So much of that feels like child abuse now. I'm determined my kids don't have any of those same experiences.
Anyway, I wanted to write and tell you how much I enjoyed your book.
Jana
Oklahoma City
