the way they do for a reason, my cross-cultural workbook explained. Once you understand the reason, you’ll no longer be surprised or upset by a particular behaviour. I was afraid to offend my new home with my Yankee laughter, so I took everything I saw very seriously. At the same time, I also wondered how the workbook would have described my Baptist family to a foreigner. Parents torture their queer kids for a reason. Once you understand the reason, you’ll no longer be surprised or upset.
We returned to my Soviet-era apartment and drank two bottles of wine and, since there was no internet, talked well into the night. Each sip of wine was holy foot water. But before long I started picturing her, the babusya I’d seen in the cathedral, bending low to the ground, her knees sinking to the floor. Even as I turned from the sight of her warped back to laugh with Amber I knew she would haunt me. I completed her gesture in my mind, watched her lips kiss the shallow pool. The same thrill always passes through me whenever I see faith made physical.
In my travels through Europe I’d studied rounded stones where people pressed their hands to a spot rumoured to have been touched by a saint. In my childhood it had been a King James Bible worn from devout study, the red knees of a congregant who’d spent all night praying for a lost soul. Many nights after hours of prayer I’d surveyed with pride my own carpet-burned knees, twin pointillist paintings for God. But I had nothing to show for all those hours now, the marks never permanent, no longer visible to the naked eye. Only a bitterness now that began to rise with the wine from my empty stomach and yes, that little thrill as I pictured this stranger exhibiting the faith I’d once known. I envied and resented that woman, just as I envied and resented Amber, who would soon leave the Church on her own terms, a gradual, progressive awakening displacing her faith as she and her queer friends fought for their lives in Arkansas. I’ve often wondered what kind of person I might be had I not lost my faith in one blow, how it would feel to have the option of leaving my faith, though the question flirts with another I once asked myself after my first sexual experience, a rape: What would it feel like not to lose something while crossing into a new territory?
Her lips kissing the medicinal water, suddenly young again, illnesses cured. In my first year of college, while still searching for a cure for my homosexuality, I’d jumped into a nearly frozen lake and convinced myself that my body’s euphoria was a sign of approval from a God who’d taken note of my sacrifice. I’d got the idea from reading Puritan diary entries in an American Literature class. The Puritans, those colonial precursors to present-day American evangelicals, always so interested in subjective religious experience, saw signs of God’s approval and disapproval in almost every part of their lives. If the weather was bad for crops, they prayed and fasted on account of their presumed sins. If someone died, God was likely teaching them a lesson. Much has been exaggerated in their history, since not all Puritans were so consistently dour or uniform in their beliefs as popular imagination would have us believe, but when I read one of their diaries, say of Jonathan Edwards or David Brainerd, I see the germ of my own experiences with faith. After I’d written my first book and moved on to writing a novel about the Puritans, I discovered a volume of Edwards’ sermons in my father’s office: another sign. When I questioned him about it, we bonded in a way we hadn’t in years. We both wished to study the origins of our religious experiences, though for vastly different reasons: he, in order to channel the fear of hellfire Edwards famously inspired in his most popular sermon; I, to write my own cross-cultural handbook of sorts, a novel that would, I hoped, answer the question as to what America’s obsession with religion and sexuality was all about.
From Edwards I leapt to David Brainerd’s diaries, leaving my father, who would have found the man’s longing for God a bit excessive, to his own studies. ‘I remember, then, as I was walking in a dark thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to open to the view and apprehension of my soul.’ I like picturing this lonely man, this missionary in an unfamiliar territory, wandering the forest at dusk in search of God’s love. His search is absurd, of course; he’s mistaking shadows for reality, though in truth the lion’s share of my frustration, after reading dozens of his entries, is how predictable any faith narrative becomes when you’re watching someone practise a faith that no longer holds sway over you. These men are always searching, always wandering, always undeserving. Then comes the moment of beauty and light. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
From an atheist’s perspective, any act of faith can seem an imprisonment. Only those who have already lived behind those bars know that the opposite could just as easily be true, that faith may in fact save you from a more profound imprisonment. Much as I love my new freedom, I can find it vexing and alienating, too confusing, with too much emphasis on the individual at the expense of others. I find myself longing for the easy faith of my childhood. Unlike Amber, I don’t know what it is to learn to love freedom by degrees. I was thrown into it, just as many young queer people of faith were thrown into it against their will, yet unlike the well-adjusted queer Christians I’ve met, I don’t feel like banging on the church’s door to demand re-entry and reform. The last time I attended my father’s church I had to rush to the bathroom to prevent a panic attack. I hated how physically weak it made me, the way I had to squat on the toilet seat so no one would see me, knees trembling. Even in the midst of conversion therapy I’d never betrayed such a moment of weakness. I hadn’t been weak when it really mattered, and I’m still proud of that. I’d gotten out by being strong. But freedom has made me weak. I’ve tasted the air outside, and going back inside for even a second feels claustrophobic. My friend Ashley, who shares a fundamentalist background (many of my close friends belong to this club), refers to church claustrophobia as the Sue Bridehead effect, referencing a character in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure made famous for embracing religious orthodoxy after a lifetime of freethinking. For the majority of the novel, Sue the freethinker is irresistible and alive; at the end of the novel, Sue the saint is off-putting and tragic. Ashley and I both fear an ending like Sue’s – to be suddenly reeled back to fundamentalism after too much freedom. So we remain outside, spellbound by the physical acts of faith we see in the world around us, compelled to draw nearer despite our phantom pain.
Recently, my mother has begun phoning me to talk about her own pain. This pain consumes most of her day and, as a preacher’s wife who often misses Sunday services on account of this, causes her a great deal of stress. Fibromyalgia leads people to experience pain more intensely than others, and anyone unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with this condition must contend with a public that often considers it junk science. My father’s congregants haven’t always believed that her pain is real. Many still don’t.
‘How do I make them believe me when they haven’t felt the pain themselves?’ she says. The question is free of any irony. She really wants to know why a faith community might be incapable of believing in something outside of their own lives.
As my Puritan novel progresses, I tell my father of a recent trip I took to Stockbridge, Massachusetts to do research. My father and I share few interests, so early Church history has become our conversational sweet spot. I tell him of the churches visited, the eighteenth-century houses. But my language is too academic for him. He’s drifting from our talk. Mine is the language of a person no longer living his faith. I don’t mention my husband, Shahab, to him, or the night the two of us spent in an inn converted from an old Shaker mill overlooking a creek, or the happiness we felt as we sat beside the water the next morning in the flimsy plastic chairs that almost tipped over, alive and healthy and relatively young. I don’t tell him that sitting there beside my husband was like church for me, that our partnership has been act of faith that continues to challenge and astound and enrich my life. He’d find all of these details incompatible with the image of the boy he raised. He’d tell me he’d pray for me. If I told him how much it hurts to hold back the details of my life from him, he’d never recognise my pain as real. So after a long silence he asks if I’ve found a church. He asks it in the same tone he used years ago when wanting to know if I had enough money to get by. He asks me this question as if he isn’t the one most responsible for the loss of my faith, as if he’d never inflicted any damage, because, according to him, he was trying to protect me from sin and death. It’s the same voice I hear after a book talk when a well-meaning Christian asks,
