Evangelical Anxiety by Charles Marsh

Author:Charles Marsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

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On a summer afternoon in 1994, a thirty-six-year-old anxious riddle of a man got on the couch and begin talking.

“What do I talk about?” I asked.

“Whatever you want,” Lieber said.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“Pretty much,” he said.

You might say an evangelical childhood brings certain advantages to the work. I’d learned early on to share my faith with anyone interested (or not), to offer an account, on demand, of my spiritual life. When you give your testimony, you are free to talk about anything. Intimate matters that came between you and God, whatever weighed you down. Your troubles, trials, and secret sins, the things that kept you from being all you could be in Jesus. I confessed to a room of well-fed Baptists that I had found a centerfold in the woods behind our house and looked at it—there always seemed to be porn in the woods.* I confessed to this and more, and sometimes, because I lacked a dynamic testimony, I made things up. Analysis felt like a very long testimonial minus the amens and praise Jesuses.

I told Lieber I wanted to talk about heaven. An image came to me from Jesus camp. I couldn’t remember which camp. Jesus camps loomed over every sad body of water between Picayune and Dothan, and I’d passed summers at so many. It might have been the retreat on the Gulf, or the ranch in the east Mississippi lake country, or a weekend bivouac on the banks of the Tombigbee River. But I recalled vividly how on an afternoon swim I had positioned myself underwater by the ladder, with goggles and snorkel, and watched the older girls lapping in the deep end overhead. How their bodies flashed like pearls. How I followed their motions back and forth in the aqueous light. I was hard enough to hold a tray of oysters, but no one could see me underwater—no one paid attention to me. I was the preacher’s kid splashing around in his own little world. Later that evening at the worship service, I sat in a folding chair and listened to my father deliver one of his powerful sermons, and through a window open to the fragrant night I watched the last light of day smear the sky like lipstick.

During another session, I steer my thoughts once again to the Gulf. Calm waters lather the shore. The sky shines radiant and blue. I truck to the crest of a dune and lie motionless on my back. I think at first it’s a sea bird’s caw, but soon recognize a familiar song. From the campgrounds, the girls walk, arms linked, toward the beach. “Two men walking up a hill, one disappears and one left standing still,” they sing. “I wish we’d all been ready.”

I turn to watch the girls moving slowly across a warm tongue of sand in their cutoff jeans and tank tops and hum along to this sweet dreamy ballad of guns and war and total global apocalypse. “There’s no time to change your mind, you’ve been left behind.

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