JESUS NATION SEX REBEL, mini-chapter 28

28. REBELLION

He could still feel her hand. It had controlled the way he’d experienced the burning. He wondered what it would look like if it were preserved in stone: a fossil laid down by God as He designed creation through time as well as space.

Adam Smith was an Old Age Creationist, not a Young Age Creationist. Young Age Creationists believed God literally created the world ten thousand years ago in six days, while Adam believed that the Intelligent Designer had taken His time, in the order detailed in the Bible, but not in the actual time-span of six days, which in Adam’s belief system was symbolic of ages.

Every now and then his belief system came under attack, and he had to beat back another onslaught from a fresh batch of Young Age Creationists.

There was one such going on now. An alarming number of his students were challenging him. It was unbelievable how the Far Right could pick fights all the time.

Back in the previous century Pat Robertson had said, speaking as a Pentecostal Christian, on his TV program, the 700 Club: "You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can love the people who hold false opinions but I don't have to be nice to them."

Those days the evangelicals felt persecuted from all sides. The same Pat Robertson said then: “Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.”

But these days the evangelicals were on top, so they didn’t need to fight anyone except themselves. The rumor about Pat Robertson’s penis was such an internecine fight, and had become the subject of a court case. On the Internet, chat rooms were abuzz with even stronger rumors: sodomy, polygamy, child molestation, even bestiality.

The morality spokesman William Bennett, who earlier in his life had been unmasked as an addictive gambler, was accused of being a polygamist, as was the former radio personality and drug addict, Rush Limbaugh. Gary Bauer, a very Christian man who had once run for president and was considering another run, was accused of sodomy. Dr. James Dobson of “Focus on the Family” was accused of having had intimate congress with an animal, though his accusers could not agree on whether the beast was a dog or a sheep, or whether the Reverend Jerry Falwell had been holding the animal during the act, or whether the “shadowy second person” was a farmhand who had initiated Dr. Dobson into this horrible practice.

Rumors swirled about the leading evangelists, dead or alive, fanned by gossip instigated by bloggers, like Christian Controversy.

Strange how these rumors were mostly about sexual transgressions. Sex was still a currency of the society, even though it had come under the strict regulations of the Bureau of Behavior Design and Management. These sexual rumors were akin to the slanders about decadent priests in the Catholic Church before the French Revolution.

One evangelist had not been accused of sexual transgressions yet. He was a new mega-church preacher, Jeremiah Luther. His followers had taken to scourging themselves, like the Catholics of old. It made good television: Jeremiah Luther in his free-flowing beard encouraging his followers to beat out the devil inside them, and the blood flowing from the breasts of his followers, as they scratched at themselves, with special Luther-branded finger guards. Fingertips of steel rending the flesh -- not too deep so as to cause big wounds, just deep enough to create lots of camera-ready blood.

Adam looked at the Beloved’s breasts in her photograph, and wondered what they would look like with streaks of blood criss-crossing their girth. He recalled her nipples pricking through the fabric of her dress. He asked himself: what kind of a woman went braless to a burning at the stake? His kind of woman?

He looked at her limp hand, and imagined it clenched around his sex.

His own hand moved. His forefinger flicked forward.

Send.