mentioned the Muslims, or the Jews, or the theosophists, or the Buddhists, or those who worship America itself just as fervently as, for eight or a dozen nightmare years, the Germans worshipped Hitler.”
Right then was when the walkouts started. First just a few at the back, heads down and shoulders hunched (as if they had been spanked), then more and more. Reverend Jacobs seemed to take no notice.
“Some of these various sects and denominations are peaceful, but the largest of them—the most successful of them—have been built on the blood, bones, and screams of those who have the effrontery not to bow to their idea of God. The Romans fed Christians to the lions; the Christians dismembered those they deemed to be heretics or sorcerers or witches; Hitler sacrificed the Jews in their millions to the false god of racial purity. Millions have been burned, shot, hung, racked, poisoned, electrocuted, and torn to pieces by dogs . . . all in God’s name.”
My mother was sobbing audibly, but I didn’t look around at her. I couldn’t. I was frozen in place. By horror, yes, of course. I was only nine. But there was also a wild, inchoate exultation, a feeling that at last someone was telling me the exact unvarnished truth. Part of me hoped he would stop; most of me wished fiercely that he would go on, and I got my wish.
“Christ taught us to turn the other cheek and to love our enemies. We pay the concept lip service, but when most of us are struck, we try to pay back double. Christ drove the moneychangers from the temple, but we all know those quick-buck artists never stay away for long; if you’ve ever sat yourself down to a rousing game of church bingo or heard a radio preacher begging for money, you know exactly what I mean. Isaiah prophesied that the day would come when we’d beat our swords into plowshares, but all they’ve been beaten into in our current dark age is atomic bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles.”
Reggie Kelton stood up. He was as red as my brother Andy was pale. “You need to sit down, Reverend. You’re not yourself.”
Reverend Jacobs did not sit down.
“And what do we get for our faith? For the centuries we’ve given this church or that one our gifts of blood and treasure? The assurance that heaven is waiting for us at the end of it all, and when we get there, the punchline will be explained and we’ll say, ‘Oh yeah! Now I get it.’ That’s the big payoff. It’s dinned into our ears from our earliest days: heaven, heaven, heaven! We will see our lost children, our dear mothers will take us in their arms! That’s the carrot. The stick we’re beaten with is hell, hell, hell! A Sheol of eternal damnation and torment. We tell children as young as my dear lost son that they stand in danger of eternal fire if they steal a piece of penny candy or lie about how they got their new shoes wet.
“There’s no proof of these after-life destinations; no backbone of science; there is only the bald assurance, coupled with our powerful need to believe that it all makes sense. But as I stood in the back room of Peabody’s and looked down at the mangled remains of my boy, who wanted to go to Disneyland much more than he wanted to go to heaven, I had a revelation. Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so—pardon the pun—so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist.”
That was when Roy Easterbrook stood up in the rapidly emptying church. He was an unshaven hulk of a man who lived in a rusty little trailer park on the east side of town, close to the Freeport line. As a rule, he only came at Christmas, but today he’d made an exception.
“Rev’run,” he said. “I heard there was a bottle of hooch in the glovebox of your car. And Mert Peabody said when he bent over to work on your wife, she smelt like a barroom. So there’s your reason. There’s your sense of it. You ain’t got the spine to accept the will of God? Fine. But leave these other ones alone.” With that, Easterbrook turned and lumbered out.
It stopped Jacobs cold. He stood gripping