My Mother the Exvangelical

These days the exvangelicals get a great deal of attention, both from those who are glad they’re “ex-“, those who aren’t, and those who aren’t sure there is an “ex-” from Evangelicalism. I fall into the last group, and a big reason for that was my own mother. Since next Sunday is Mother’s Day, it’s a good time to tell this strange tale, and even though it was a long, long time ago, there are some lessons for us today.

My mother was born and raised in Central Arkansas, home of Bill Clinton’s Eucharistic Theology: It Depends on What ‘Is’ Is, in the years between the two World Wars. She was raised Southern Baptist. Her parents were serious Christians. That’s where the complications began: when she was in high school, her parents left the SBC and helped to start the Bethel Missionary Baptist Church in Morrilton. It was around that time when Ben Bogard, basically the leader of the Landmark Baptist movement and a family friend, debated Aimee Semple McPherson in the The McPherson-Bogard Debate. We’ll come back to that conflict later.

In any case World War II came, and everyone’s life was upended. She lived through the tragic death of her brother and working in the ordnance plant. All of that done she moved to Chicago where she lived with relatives and started a new life in the “city of big shoulders.” A new life was an understatement: she met and married my father and became a part of his family, one that was very different from the one she was raised in except for the Lodge. She settled down in the northern suburbs of Chicago, but as a Southerner the question of church always lurked in the back of her mind.

The Baptist split over slavery produced two wings with two different ideas of how to do church. There’e evidence that she tried a northern Baptist church but evidently this did not work out for her, my father or both. The Southern Baptists, who had up to this point stuck with the “gentleman’s agreement” of not starting churches in the North, broke that when their members starting migrating north to escape Southern poverty. In Chicago those churches would have been on the South Side but, as anyone familiar with the Windy City knows, those are two different worlds, and that wasn’t a world she wanted to go to.

Ultimately that problem would be solved when we left Chicago for Chattanooga, and four years later for Palm Beach. But the issue of church was unresolved. At this point a key character in the plot becomes important: my father’s mother. A New Orleans raised Episcopalian, she had already been the Episcopal Church’s missionary to a family of rude (and victorious) Northerners.  My mother thought highly of her, and as time passed her participation in Episcopal life–and her children’s also–became more consistent, especially when we arrived at one the church’s premier parishes: Bethesda-by-the-Sea.  Two years after we moved to Palm Beach she was confirmed along with my brother.

And as for me…the year after we moved, I received my divine encounter.  One of the first questions I asked in the wake of that was “Have I been baptised?”  The answer was no.  My brother was adopted, a process facilitated by my father’s brother-in-law, an OB-GYN in northern Virginia.  He was duly baptised at the time.  A little less than two years later my mother brought me into the world and it was rough on both of us; my health wasn’t the best for a long time afterwards.  Her excuse was that I was too sickly to be baptised, although it certainly was no rougher than getting a bath, and I had plenty of those.  It’s become evident that she, Baptistic at the core, disliked infant baptism and really didn’t want me to experience it.  She got her way; my baptism at Bethesda was a) believers’ baptism in act if not in form and b) private, something that was going out of fashion even in the Episcopal Church of the day.  With that out of the way, I was confirmed the year after they were.

Life at Bethesda should have been routine after all that.  But it wasn’t.  The first fracas was the dispute between the Vestry and St. Mary’s Guild, in which she was active, over the rummage sale in the parish hall.  I recount that in my piece A State of Being.  The end result was fabulous: the Church Mouse resale shop, which has become a Palm Beach institution.  But I think that my mother, wanting to leave church disputes in her Baptist past, was uncomfortable at the whole adventure.  It left an even sourer taste in my father’s mouth, which derailed any interest he might have had in church.

Under the surface there was something else that would come back to influence events in later years: the whole business of “eternal security,” or “once saved always saved.”  My mother was an adherent of that, but, in classic lex orandi lex credendi fashion, I was not, which I explain in What I Learned About Approaching God From the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.  I was blissfully unaware of her idea; I think that our rector may have had more insight into that, as I discuss in The Episcopal Snobs and the John Wayne Evangelicals.  She felt that I would come around on my own, but raise up a child in the way he should go…

But the biggest grenade in her foxhole was the upheval the Episcopal Church was undergoing in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Unlike the exvangelicals today, whose consumeristic mentality conditions them to expect everyone else to suit their purpose, my mother and her generation were more geared to a “get with the program” mindset, which may explain why the Episcopal Church of yore absorbed people like my mother with less angst than, say, the ACNA is experiencing these days.  To ruffle those feathers took some effort, but the Episcopal Church certainly rose to the occasion.  At the centre of the controversy was the Book of Common Prayer: Bethesda was experimenting with the aptly named “trial liturgies,” and my mother was unenthusiastic about all of them.  She didn’t have any use for WO either, which led to her souring on her favourite Rector at Bethesda, Robert Appleyard, who advocated for same as Bishop of Pittsburgh.

For her the controversies were cut short by back surgery and leaving Palm Beach, which shifted her focus elsewhere in life. Some of that focus fell on me: they sent me to an Episcopal school only to encounter The Man Who Facilitated My Exit from the Episcopal Church and convert to Roman Catholicism.  Neither of my parents liked this, but neither of them understood that the pre-Vatican II RCC they had encountered in places like Chicago and Guatemala wasn’t the same as the one I was received into.  But then their marriage blew up and, in the process, my mother’s last chance to become an active Episcopalian (or Anglican) came up.  A person who became very supportive of my mother through all of this was Father James Stoutsenberger, rector in Delray Beach.  He was in the process of transitioning to the “Continuing Churches.”  But although his prayer book was right his style was too Anglo-Catholic for her Baptistic taste. Had she swallowed her aversion to “formalism” the family’s subsequent course may have been very different.

The rest of the story played out in a different fashion. When I married a Pentecostal and joined her church, my mother went postal, a highly Baptistic thing to do. Although it cast a pall over our relationship for many years, the year before she went to meet God she joined our church, the end of a long and strange life journey.

So what can we learn from this saga?

• Evangelicalism is like the Hotel California: you can check in, but you can’t check out. It leaves such a deep impression on those who are products of “the system” that they never get past it and really grasp the “new” system they might embrace. They go through life with baggage they can’t get rid of; a humorous example of that can be seen in the seminary academics which revert to their old type hymnody when three sheets to the wind.
• One thing my mother wanted to do was to get away from the rigid dogmatism of her past. But she was basically a conservative person, even in an Episcopal context (as her position on the Prayer Book showed.) Today some who attempt the transition she did are not of like mind; their journey to places like the ACNA is in some ways an implicit exit strategy from real Christianity, which can have dangerous consequences for everyone.
• It’s possible for the Evangelical impulse to be transmitted to children even after the formal conversion. That was certainly the case for me, although I’ve come to realise that sorting all that out is a complicated business. I suspect that Anglican rectors are paying better attention to that kind of thing these days, but one never knows…
• I Wonder…How Many of these ACNA Exvangelicals Still Believe in Eternal Security? The Reformed may find this heartening, but even they should consider the consequences of combining an Arminian view of election with a Calvinistic view of perseverance.

Happy Mother’s Day.