Why a Shovel? And Other Dissonances

Guest Post by Matilda

I was a teacher, a new term started and I soon worked out that one of my class of six-year-olds, Ben, was from a Christian family. He was a chatty child and told me of church picnics and events, of the preacher he liked because he always brought a ventriloquist’s puppet teddy for children’s talks. (Cringe, cringe from me – it was called Brother Ted.) Ben said the name of his church. Google told me it was a Brethren Assembly, KJV-only church, and in pictures of the congregation, l saw that some of the older women wore hats that looked like ones my old grandma wore in the 1940s and 1950s. No one was smiling.

I was fundamentalist, mainstream Baptist, so not as dyed-in-the-wool fundy as Ben’s church obviously was. Looking back, my dissonances had begun partly through knowing young Ben, but it was years before I faced them, until finally, they got to be too many and too compelling for me to disregard any longer.

Over the coming months, having Ben in my class certainly brought some of them to the fore. The children were allowed to bring a new toy they’d had for their birthday. Ben brought a spaceship and explained it to me. He detached the capsule and said two astronauts were bringing a dead astronaut back to earth in it. When they got here, they’d bury the deceased spaceman in the ground and include a shovel. Naturally, I asked, ‘Why a shovel?’ and he said it was so that the man could dig himself out of his grave when Jesus came back and go to Heaven with him. (I still can’t pass a cemetery without smiling at the thought of all those graves with shovels in them, laid across deceased Christians’ chests. Maybe it’s true, God helps those who help themselves.)

One day he told me he’d learned the memory verse for Sunday School. From the Google pictures I’d seen, the Sunday School children all appeared to be under ten years old. Ben said they were going to stand out front next Sunday and say it to the adults with actions. Then they’d repeat it ten times so the adults learned it too. It was Romans 6:23, ‘The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.’ (I daren’t ask what the actions to Romans 6:23 were.) What a verse to be indoctrinating small children with.

One morning, Ben’s mother asked to speak to me to tell me Ben might be upset that week, his grandad had just died, and Ben had also seen a funeral group leaving a house in their street and asked about death. As I expected, Ben wanted to tell me about this. He said neither grandad, nor the deceased man in his street, went to church. He paused and then added, ‘But they were both kind, good people, so I think they’re in Heaven now.’

What a mash-up that poor child was being indoctrinated with. They were told every week that they must accept Jesus as their Saviour or they wouldn’t go to Heaven when they died. Or when you die, do you stay dead in the cemetery with your shovel till Jesus returns? Or does God let good people into Heaven the minute they pop their clogs, even if they didn’t go to church? Which is it?

I wonder what happened to Ben. I do hope his keen mind enabled him to figure it all out and escape that rigid Brethren upbringing. He’s not the only one, of course, confused by the dissonances, contradictions, and clear-as-mud commands of the Bible — lots of us were — until we finally made our escape. I hope so very much that Ben did too.

(He also told me one day of a disappointment. He’d been assigned the part of Jesus in a church drama about the call of Matthew. I said that was a very important part. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I wanted to be Matthew, the Snack Collector.’ I guess in that role, he hoped he’d be able to legitimately extort chocolate bars or Pringles from the others in the play!)

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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