Breaking Away

All of these memoirists tried, like Beck, to practice what they had been taught, attempting to make the religion their own. This earnestness creates some comic moments. In My Fundamentalist Education, Rosen remembers that her fundamentalist school urged her to share her faith with others. She innocently attempted to convert her neighbors, two Catholic girls, as they played with Barbies and argued about whether Ken and Skipper could sleep in the same bed. As a first-year student at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Sweeney took a class called Evangelism 101, and he tried to practice what the instructors preached. He went out into the streets to speak the truth of his faith to as many people as possible.

I witnessed to everybody, it seemed, and couldn't save a single soul. From the drunks at night on Rush Street:

"Watch you talkin' bout? I luhhv Jee-sus!" to the manager at Mr. G's, the hamburger joint parodied by John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd on "Saturday Night Live": "Never mind! Keep moving! Next!" I witnessed on the train, on the bus, on the street, and in a cab. I was like a character in a Dr. Seuss story: Will you witness on the train? Will you witness on the bus? Will you witness on the street? You must, you must!

Rosen's and Sweeney's stories share this lighthearted poking fun at their early selves and the sense that the religion pressed on them was endearing. Castro's and Beck's stories, on the other hand, are marked by episodes of abuse and long periods of darkness.

In The Truth Book, Castro tells of how she spent her early childhood trying to do everything right. Born to a Jehovah's Witnesses family, she went door to door handing out tracts, spent her Sundays at the Kingdom Hall, and believed without a shadow of a doubt that those outside of the kingdom were damned. Castro's mother, who was also trying to do things right, married a man in the church who was much admired by others. He had served at the Watchtower headquarters in Brooklyn, he was devout, and on the surface he was a good Jehovah's Witness. But not long into the marriage, this man's abuse of Castro, her younger brother, and their mother intensified. Castro's story is dominated by this abuse to the extent that it darkens nearly everything she says about the Jehovah's Witnesses and her early faith.

For all of the authors a time came when they tested their own experience against their religion's claims. Gradually they realized that fundamentalist religion had failed them. It could not speak to or explain their experiences. It could not answer their questions. This moment was perhaps most distinct for Castro. She was 14 and had been living with her abusive stepfather for two years. She had been completely encapsulated by the ideology of those around her, and she had cut off communication with her biological father because he smoked and was no longer a Jehovah's Witness. Her mother and stepfather made it clear that the father was evil. Meanwhile, the stepfather was beating Joy, her mother, and her brother and laying down bizarre and intricate rules for the family. If they were eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, for example, he insisted that he get two, the mother one, Joy half and Joy's brother one-quarter. The abuse was intense and ongoing, and Castro describes it in harrowing detail.

One day a girl at school who had gradually befriended Castro and whom Castro had very slowly and carefully told of the abuse said, "Get out of there." When Castro told her she had nowhere to go, the girl asked about her biological father.

"No. . . . He's disfellowshipped."

"Dis-whatted?" the girl asked.

"It's like being excommunicated. He sinned and wasn't repentant. We have to shun him."

"What did he do?"

"He smokes cigarettes."

The girl indignantly and vulgarly expressed her disgust. "What kind of a god gives more of a sh -- about smoking than somebody who whales on little kids?" Castro had never put it to herself this way.

"Look," the girl said, "If you ever want help getting out of that f---hole, let me know."

After that conversation Castro began trying to reunite with her father. It was the beginning of her distance from the Jehovah's Witnesses as well, but for a long time she was able to follow her courageous path out of abuse only by convincing herself that her biological father would still let her attend Kingdom Hall services.

For most of the memoirists, a period of cognitive dissonance followed the realization that they could not bring together their experience with the religious tenets they had been taught. For Sweeney, crucial moments of understanding came while he was serving as a missionary in the Philippines and began to see missionary work from the standpoint of the missionized. He saw how arrogant and naive his own assumptions were and how subtly and graciously he and his fellow missionaries were rejected. This only deepened the questions growing in his own mind, questions about a multitude of claims he had always accepted about the Bible, history, and the future.