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Sometimes the choice is difficult, but that’s why God rewards us. Good-and-evil, we’re taught in Chapel and Bible class and every other class, is simple. versus the U.S.S.R., Republicans versus Democrats, those who believe the unborn have souls from the first moment a sperm cell fertilizes an egg versus those who believe God’s chosen nation had somehow unpardonably wronged black people. We’re 15 years old, knowing little to nothing of the world, Reagan years blending to the first President Bush, the fall of the Berlin Wall, all the world we do know cast as spiritual war between God and the Devil, including the U.S.A. The trick comes from the other side, from how little I can actually remember of all I loved of my time with such dear sweet friends. I wouldn’t live forever, but there was so much left. There was all of it before me, and because it lasted as it did – it took forever to make it through an hour-long class when I was hot and bored and my pimples both shamed me and hurt – the rest of my life spanned on ahead without end. When the world was newer to me, so was all that any moment brought me, for time had much more to mark. The report documents victims who spoke out about what happened to them being called “instruments of Satan,” being shamed by male church leaders – most Baptist churches shun the notion of female leaders – and referred to as “Potiphar’s wives,” alluding to an Old Testament Biblical character who makes a false allegation of rape, as deviants “just as reprehensible as sex criminals.”īob Gray, from the 1989 Trinity Christian Academy yearbook In 2022, the Southern Baptist Convention releases a nearly 300 page report it had kept secret, including more than 700 entries for pastors and church personnel accused of sexual abuse. A decade later, Tom Messer tells me about the “20 or 30 or 40 victims, however many there were,” says such matters are best dealt with in the church, for the church is a family, and accuses “the media” of an “ambush.” When I ask Messer if he thinks he should have contacted authorities, instead of working on a deal to protect Gray, he ends our discussion. Bob Gray will die in jail awaiting trial. When Gray comes back to Jacksonville, old and frail, in 2006, a small group of victims have decided they’ll be silent no longer. My friend Scott is convinced the boy’s “demon possessed,” says he must be to breathe the way he does, but I just feel sorry for him.įrom the 1988 Trinity Christian Academy yearbook There’s an obese boy who calls himself a redneck and says things like “Fuck Christ,” then chortles idiotically in his throat.
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Now that we’re adolescents, we’re told we probably can’t beat him at all. I met up with the Devil and we had a little talk. “Down by the river, I took a little walk. Even that earliest Sunday School chant made him magnetic in its very defiance. Preachers and teachers keep telling us how alluring the Devil is. My mother had wanted me to become a preacher. When Patti signs my yearbook, she writes, “♥ ya” and “Metal Rulz!” Jennifer writes, “Thanx for the Anthrax tape. There’s a longing for my missing mother in my attraction to rebellious Trinity girls. There’s an answer here we must explore.” I want to find that door with Jennifer, to explore that graveyard with Patti. I know somewhere there’s a hidden door. He’s what somebody said about the poet Lord Byron, that he’s “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” He wants to make boys grow their hair long, wear leather jackets and hightop Converse shoes, curse at their parents, listen to Metal Church songs like “Watch the Children Pray.” Sometimes we hear more about the Devil than we do about Jesus. When she saw what she had done, / She gave her father 41.”įundamentalist Christianity is fascinated with the Devil. Teachers don’t know there’s a band called Lizzy Borden who set to music the old jump rope chant – “Lizzie Borden took an axe, / gave her mother 40 whacks. “Stairway to Heaven” came out before we were born, though hearing the song played backward to reveal Robert Plant singing “Here’s to my sweet Satan” and “His path makes me sad” gives me the creeps. Not that we believe it: what the songs supposedly say backward, how listening to bands like The Eagles could make us kill our parents. The few people I really like in ninth grade are smarter kids who all listen to the Devil’s music.
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From the 1972 Trinity Christian Academy yearbook