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I Was A Teenage Fundamentalist“So today at school, Mom, I was telling Jacobabout Adam and Eve, and he was rolling around onthe ground laughing.”Twelve-year-old Stephen and I are in the car,heading home for dinner. It’s a great time to talkabout our day. Lately, he’s been telling his grade sevenbuddies stories from the Old Testament.“Jacob goes, ‘So they eat from the Tree ofKnowledge, and the best they can do is figure outthey’re naked? They get knowledge of clothes??’”Stevie is just as irreverent as Jacob – that peoplewould actually take this “Bible stuff” as literal truth is acompletely foreign concept to him. And yet, I still havea guilty twinge at all this mirth at the Bible’s expense.I know that no bolt of lightning will slice through theroof of the car to smite us, but it’s still weird for menot to treat the Bible as a – no, THE Holy Book –the literal Word Of God. I grew up with literal Biblebelievers, went to school with them, hung out at theiryouth groups. I was a teenage fundamentalist – or atleast doing my best to play the part.Kelowna, BC, is a pocket of religiosity in anincreasingly secular Canada. The churches are big,especially the evangelical ones. In my teenage years,the late 1970s, Kelowna was smaller, more remote, lesssophisticated. It was a bit like the town in the movieFootloose, where youth weren’t allowed to dance, soCatherine Novaksome of them snuck out to do more risky things, likedrink in the bush. As an insecure, bookish teenage girl,I knew I didn’t want to go to those parties. Why standby a smoky fire in the cold, just to get drunk, throw up,ride in a pickup truck with a driver almost as drunk asyou are, and risk ending up in the hospital, where mymom (the emergency nurse) would probably disownme? Or risk getting arrested and fingerprinted by mydad the cop? Let’s not even entertain the thought thatI might end up dead, or worse – pregnant. So if I wereto have any social life at all I should probably hang outwith those nice kids, the Christians.My best friend, Lori, beat me to Christianity bya few weeks when we were both fourteen. She hadgone with her mother to a Pentecostal women’s dinnerand came home speaking in tongues. Church wassuddenly the best place ever, particularly the YoungPeople’s group, which had older teenagers and reallynice leaders who treated you like a real person andlistened to what you had to say. What’s more, Jesuswas real and Lori had given her heart to Him.When Lori asked me if I would come with herto the Presbyterian Young People’s, I was happy togo along. Bible study was actually a natural fit for abook reader like me; we looked in-depth at individualverses, like, “If I have the tongue of men and angels,but have not love, I am nothing”. We sang songs likePeaceful, Easy Feeling, only the words were changedto be more Christian. We had intense conversationsabout the nature of evil. Christianity was actuallygetting me to think. I have the Presbyterian Church tothank for that. It’s a good thing, too, because the coolchurch was one of the big evangelical churches downthe road, and things were a little different there.At the cool church, they showed films about theRapture, and how scary it would be to be left behindwhile the plague of locusts rained down on apartmentsand cars. Kids from the cool church played Led Zeppelinsongs backwards so we could hear Robert Plant sing“my sweet Satan” and be thrillingly horrified. At thecool church, they lifted their hands and spoke in tonguesafter just about every song. The cool church had aboutseventy teenagers in their youth group, and concerts,and really good looking guys. And those really goodlooking guys hugged everybody, even me.I tried being baptized in the Holy Spirit, but hewas stingy with me – my speaking-in-tongues attemptsjust came out like “Hey, Shondala shondala”. I felt8May 2013 - The Canadian Friend