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Escaping Fundagelicalism
This Dark World: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost. By Carolyn Jensen Briggs.
Evangelical Christianity
in
Carolyn Jensen
Briggs, in her memoir This Dark World (
Set mostly in
Iowa and Arkansas, the memoir explores the pervasive malaise of a broken home,
a childhood left marked by a deeply loved, but generally absent, father; by a
persistent sibling rivalry with a cherished, but excruciatingly goddess-like
younger sister; and by an eventual gravitation toward the tenuously secure
world of the boyfriend-husband. Brigg’s
persistent cry through the early chapters is that life is too severe to bear
alone; that establishing one’s identity too extensive a journey to undertake
without a mentor, or at least without one who is genuine; that life as an elder
sibling in a broken home is inevitably overwhelmed with responsibilities that
have too early in life been set upon its back. She remarks, variously, "I always wanted to reinvent myself, but I
didn't have the necessary vision;" in meeting her future husband, "Save
me," and on discovering she was pregnant and, consequently, preparing
for marriage, she prays silently to her mother, "tell me what to
do." The memoir delineates these
themes as they fall in places like "Allendale,"
A child has a parallel in a new convert. Life as either child or new convert is simple, easy, uncomplicated; it is unaffected in its responses, whether they stretch between joy or sorrow. One sees this in children and appreciates their simplicity as something the adult has moved beyond. Something beyond the normal complication of adult life, something that both devalues and demeans an individual, occurs when the growing individual is kept a child. A person must grow up. The pain of wearing shoes one has outgrown must, at some point, be admitted, and the damage caused to one’s feet be evaluated. After years strapped about with the thin and cutting doctrinal measures of the fundamentalist churches that she and her husband attend, Briggs is brought to admit the increasing pain she feels as her spirit, intellect, and imagination begin to grow through their confines. Briggs's memoir is a measurement of the resulting damage and its causes. Among the causes is not only the Fundamentalist leader’s exploitation of her vulnerabilities, but also her own willingness to participate in that exploitation. Like any good, modern writer, Briggs describes without offering solutions, and resists banging on the noisy platitudes some might expect from a book about salvation. Yet in her frank exploration (which will discomfit some), she renders with small strokes all aspects of her journey; not a impressionistic canvas depicting the broad war, "spiritual versus carnal," she examines with careful realism everything exerting an influence on her path, including the sexual and the absence of the sexual.
Her prose paints the flatness of both the Midwestern landscape and the unrelentingly remarkable days among "the saints" of the churches. The spiritual awakening begins in her trailer home, where the new converts are elated to deliver to strangers what little hard-earned money her husband pounded out (his hands cracked from cold and construction work). Her spiritual journey continues in her home — no, a church-home — where Briggs's discontent increases through colorless years of a perpetually demeaning and intellectually stagnant existence; the memoir chronicles a building and collapse of a foundation — and perhaps the setting of yet another.
People who lived
in
Briggs, likewise, subjects their lives to close inspection and reveals their own, spiritual (and thus justified) games: the Tartuffe-like church-leader, "Phil," who infiltrates the Briggs's home, a "brother" who, with only the holiest of motives, plants a kiss on the sleeping Carolyn while her husband is out of the room. Or there is spiritual discipline: bruise marks on Briggs's eleven-month-old daughter, pounded there by a "brother" in a spirit of Christian love (the baby wouldn't lie still for a diaper changing). The elders in those churches were remarkably similar to the CEO in "The Truman Show" (and provided a similar world for their members): "I know you better than you know yourself." While seemingly an offer of salvation, the statement leads to captivity.
If the brothers and sisters had learning or intellect, they focused it; their knowledge was used in an adolescent insecurity to prove themselves right. They did not study to enable themselves to walk healingly among the aches of the world, or to make streams in other people's deserts: "Believers were intolerant of anything but our version of the truth. How many times I saw believers tighten their faces and close their minds to any variance from the norm. [. . .] We hated. We hated."
She grows tired
of "forced friendships [. . .], obligatory potlucks and fellowships, home
Bible studies. Many an evening I sat
across from a banal couple and realized that I had just spent two or three
hours of irreplaceable time making insipid and saccharine
conversation." Then she finds
silence. The pervasive noise of
prophecy, like a non-stop evangelical commercial that prohibits, even for a
moment, a thought of one's own, grows to a crescendo for Briggs. Increasingly aware of the spots on the church
ruler's holy robes and wearied by the sterility of her passionless marriage,
she heads for college. There she
increasingly thinks for herself and she begins to renew an acquaintance with
the spirit of a writer who, as a girl, lived within herself. Yet even here Briggs finds that those in the
university's writer's workshop were just as intolerant and closed-minded on
many issues as her "brothers and sisters" in the church. She escapes both groups by going to
This memoir, indeed, recalls a severe departure, as the subtitle indicates: “Salvation Found and Lost.” Its disagreement, however, is not — as many will suppose — with Christ. Briggs contends with matters of taste being viciously applied to the human spirit as matters of doctrine. C. S. Lewis, in writing to someone apparently dismayed by the same things Briggs presents, mentioned "the habit (of various Protestant sects) of plastering the landscape with religious slogans about the Blood of the Lamb [. . .]" Lewis's words might more easily define for the Evangelical reader the central difficulty in the memoir: "we agree with the doctrines they are advertising. What we disagree with is their taste. Well, let's go on disagreeing but don't let us judge."
The scenes Briggs draws for the reader are unblinking portraits of a whole being lost to the confines of fundamentalism. As Briggs told me, she did not endeavor to “proselytize for the other side.” The memoir ends at a point five years ago, and, thus, does not tell us where Briggs stands today on spiritual, intellectual, or other issues. Centrally, her story illustrates not Christian faith, but the systemic insufficiency of American Fundagelicalism to help Christians face the world's realities with their faith (something quite apart from hiding insecurely in their faith). Poignantly, but only after having left the artificial and shallow security of the church, Briggs recognizes the quotation on a postcard for what it is: not prophecy, not a message from God, but "a mass-produced card marketed to women at midlife." Its message? "It's never too late to be what you were meant to be."
KJ Gilchrist teaches English in Des Moines, Iowa and directs an international course, World War I and Modern Culture, in England, France, and Belgium.
To cite this review:
Gilchrist, KJ. "Escaping
Fundagelicalism." Rev. of This Dark World, by Carolyn S.
Briggs. Mars Hill Review. No. 20 (Spring 2002): 137-140.