In but not of

Our main public library has a fantastic playroom in the children’s section, and not a trip to the library can pass without a stop, a session with the train table (because, as I keep telling you, we have NO train toys at home. Not one.), prayers that there will be no crying when we must leave the train table (because, as I keep telling you, there are NOT several yards of track and a few trains at our house. At all.), and me grabbing a book - any halfway-interesting-looking book - off the “New Releases” shelf before we’re closed up inside, so I’m not ready to leave in 158 seconds.

Yesterday, I grabbed In the World But Not Of It: One Family’s Militant Faith and the History of Fundamentalism in America  by Brett Grainger, who has worked as a journalist, radio producer and an editor at Sojourners. I read about half of it there in the playroom and finished it when I got home (it’s 151 pages)

The word “militant” in the title is unfortunate because it gives the wrong impression about Grainger’s accounting of his own family. It implies negativity, and Grainger really conveys no such thing in the book. Even his criticisms are cushioned by empathy and an appreciation for the integrity of his family’s response to the world.

In short, Grainger came from a family of Plymouth Bretheren. Born and raised in Ontario, his paternal grandfather was a preacher who ran into problems when he, in the late 80’s rejected the Brethren’s traditional reluctance to engage in End-Time dating, determining that the Rapture would, indeed, occuron a particular date. The book begins with an account of his grandparents’ day of waiting for the Rapture and intersperses the family narrative with, as the subtitle indicates, a broader history of fundamentalism in North America.

The family material is the strongest - really beautifully written, honest and sympathetic. The history is helpful, especially three sections that cover, briefly but succinctly, the history of Biblical literalism, dispensationalism and the fundamentalist understanding of being saved. If you want a primer on the trajectory of post-Reformation thinking on these things, this is a helpful one.

I thought the last part of the book was weaker than the first - he moves away from the family material and does the obligatory stops at HolyLand USA in Orlando and the Creation Museum in Kentucky. (With an error regarding the former though - in which he says that the Holy Land Experience was purchased by TBN, which is correct, but that TBN is Pat Robertson’s, which, of course, it isn’t.)

(A couple of fun facts I learned - Welch’s Grape Juice was invented expressly for use in Communion services in teetotaling congregations.  Also, the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis included an enormous replication of Jerusalem, which included 1,000 inhabitants imported for the occasion. When we were in St. Louis a couple of years ago, we went to and enjoyed this exhibit on the Fair, and I don’t recall seeing anything about Jerusalem in St. Louis, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.  You can see a postcard of “Arab stone-cutters” on the site here. )

But Grainger’s descriptions of life with the Brethren, their theology and spirituality, as well as his honest descriptions of the impact of one generation’s single-mindedness on the next, are incisive and often moving. I’ll leave you with a sample, in which he describes a believer’s relationship with his Bible:

Not a day passed when they did not search the Scriptures for comfort or correction. The Word waited on the nightstand. It stared down from bookcases and dozed in glove compartments. Women carried a small, tidy volume in their purses. The men’s were considerably larger. A believer’s Bible was expected to age at roughly the same pace as his body. Elderly brothers carried copies that were battered and falling to pieces, with sagging spines and missing pages. Such Bibles were highly prized. They marked a man well acquainted with the Word. ..

Such drills were like weight training. You started at the lowest level — ‘Jesus wept,’ ‘Search the Scriptures’ — and slowly increased your load until you could bench-press entire chapters. After years of training, the memory became toned and responsive. A believer could fieldstrip a Bible and put it back together blindfolded with one arm tied behind his back. When that day came, you woke up and realized you didn’t need the book; the Word lived inside you.