Transcendent Kingdom(26)

Like the children’s church pastor, P.T. talked a lot about sin, but he wasn’t partial to puppets. He paid little attention to me and interpreted Scripture as he saw fit.

He said, “If girls only knew what boys think about when they wear those low-cut things and those high-cut things, they wouldn’t wear them anymore.”

He said, “There are a lot of people out there who’ve never heard the Gospel, and they’re just busy walking in sin until we spread the good news.”

He said, “God glories in our commitment to him. Remember, he is our bridegroom and we are his bride. We must be faithful to none other.”

P.T. was forever smirking and drumming his fingers on the lip of the table as he talked. He was the kind of youth pastor who wanted to make God hip in a way that almost felt exclusionary. His wasn’t the God of bookworms and science geeks. He was the God of punk rock. P.T. liked wearing a shirt that proclaimed JESUS FREAK across the front. The word “freak” written there next to “Jesus” was purposefully combative, incongruous, as if to shout, “This isn’t your mother’s Christianity.” If Jesus was a club, P.T. and other youth pastors like him were the bouncers.

    One day Nana called bullshit on an exclusionary God. He raised his hand, and P.T. paused his drumming, tilted his seat back. “Shoot, bro,” he said.

“So what if there’s a tiny village somewhere in Africa that is so incredibly remote that no one has found it yet, which means no Christians have been able to go there as missionaries and spread the Gospel, right? Are all of those villagers going to Hell, even though there’s no way that they could have heard about Jesus?”

P.T.’s smirk set in and his eyes narrowed at Nana a bit. “God would have made a way for them to hear the good news,” he said.

“Okay, but hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically, dude? Yeah, they’re going to Hell.”

I was shocked by this answer, by the smugly satisfied way in which P.T. had consigned an entire helpless village of Africans to eternal damnation without so much as a blink. He didn’t spend even the length of an exhale thinking about Nana’s question, working on a way out. He didn’t say, for example, that God doesn’t deal in hypotheticals, a perfectly reasonable answer to a not entirely reasonable question. His willingness to play into Nana’s game was itself a sign that he saw God as a kind of prize that only some were good enough to win. It was like he wanted Hell for those villagers, like he believed there were people for whom Hell is a given, deserved.

    And the part that bothered me most was that I couldn’t shake the feeling that the people P.T. believed deserved Hell were people who looked like Nana and me. I was seven, but I wasn’t stupid. I had seen the pamphlets that proclaimed the great need for missionaries in various other countries. The children in those pamphlets, their distended bellies, the flies buzzing around their eyes, their soiled clothing, they were all the same deep, dark brown as me. I already understood the spectacle of poverty, the competing impulses to help and to look away that such images spurred, but I understood, too, that poverty was not a black and brown phenomenon. I had seen the way the kids at school who came from the trailer park walked around, their short fuses sparked by a careless word about their tight shoes or “flooding” pants, and I had seen the rotted-out barns and farmhouses off the back roads in the Podunk towns just minutes outside my city. “Don’t let our car break down in this dirty village,” my mother would pray in Twi whenever we passed through one of these towns. She used the word akuraase, the same word she would use for a village in Ghana, but I had already been conditioned to see America as somehow elevated in relation to the rest of the world, and so I was convinced that an Alabama village couldn’t be an akuraase in the same way that a Ghanaian village could. Years after P.T.’s remarks I started to see the ridiculousness of that idea, the idea of a refined and elevated American poverty that implies a base, subhuman third world. The belief in this subhumanity was what made those posters and infomercials so effective, no different really from the commercials for animal shelters, the people in these infomercials no better than dogs. P.T.’s unconsidered answer was no doubt just a careless thought from a man who was not accustomed to thinking too deeply about why he held fast to his faith, but for me, that day, his words set that very kind of thinking into motion.

    I watched P.T. set his chair legs back down on the ground and continue his teaching, being careful not to let his eyes fall on Nana. Across the room, Nana also had a smug look on his face. He didn’t go to youth services much after that.





20




        Dear God,

    Buzz says that Christianity is a cult except that it started so long ago that people didn’t know what cults were yet. He said we’re smarter now than we were back then. Is that true?

    Dear God,

    Would you show me that you’re real?





21





My apartment smelled like oil, like pepper, like rice and plantains. I set my bag down in the entryway and rushed to the kitchen to find a sight as familiar to me as my own body: my mother cooking.

“You’re up,” I said, and immediately regretted the choked excitement in my voice. I didn’t want to frighten her. I’d seen videos of cornered black mambas, striking before slipping away, faster than a blink. Was my mother capable of the same?