After 50 Years, Still Recovering From My PTSD

December of 1971 was the time I completed my academic requirements to graduate several months early fromWheaton College. 50 years is a long time in looking back at that part of my journey - especially in trying to heal from the religious and theological abuse heaped upon my 21-year-old self from the "evangelical" movement as expressed by the school that prided itself as being the "Harvard" of such. I've come to realize in the passing years the damage wrought by what I now see as a form of Post Theological Salvation Disorder (or Delusion) - PTSD.

Wheaton College proclaimed its motto: For Christ and His Kingdom and even had that motto emblazoned on the military uniforms the male students were required to wear twice a week for drill while carrying a rifle, marching in formation, with spit-polished shoes and polished brass buttons. All of this during the years of increasing slaughter occurring in South East Asia in Vietnam and then Cambodia. Only a few of us were also gradually becoming aware as well of the "secret" bombing of Laos - although it was hardly a "secret" to those recipients of US-made cluster bombs which continue to wreak havoc and destruction still today as farmers plow their fields or children find unexploded metal devices which often explode destroying limbs and lives. 

The theology espoused by that evangelical movement was smug and self-assured: "we" - and I was raised to embrace it - knew who was "saved" and who was "lost".  Amazingly, the saved looked a lot like us: overwhelmingly white, middle class, good American citizens on a mission to "save" others by "sharing" the "good news" (the meaning behind the term evangelical) in a way that perpetuated the mythology of American (or Christian) Exceptionalism. 

So much of the theology I embraced came from a place of fear: if I didn't believe it, or practice it correctly, I was doomed to an "eternal lake of fire" (hell) by a God who "loved me". But, if I just believed the correct things and did the required acts (confession of sins, "acceptance" of Jesus as my "saviour" -note the old English spelling because of the King James version of the Bible made it the norm -, and baptism), I could be "assured" of my personal salvation and an eternity in heaven. "I've got a mansion just over the hilltop, in that bright land where we'll never grow old", we sang with pride and confidence in my formative years. 

Oh, but there were cracks widening within that smug assurance which grew wider, especially during my 3 1/2 years at that college. Maybe it was the Psychology professor who lamented the tendency of evangelicals' failure to understand and embrace ambiguity. Or definitely my Bible prof who rocked our compulsory chapel requirement when Dr. Webber preached my junior year about his experience of "the silence of God" which created a crisis-of-confidence among many students and caused a quite a few discussions on campus for at least the next week.

One of those cracks was initiated when I chose to become a Conscientious Objector when I registered for the military draft early in my freshman year only to discover that the college administration was loath to follow its own guidelines in allowing me to be excused from the mandatory US Army ROTC requirements. 

Another crack developed when I asked a fellow Black student to be my roommate and began to learn from him a very different perspective than my own upbringing. Then, between my junior and senior year, I signed up to go to Europe for the inaugural International Study Abroad program for Wheaton. Part of the 10-week experience included a visit to the Dachau Nazi concentration camp outside Munich. Although at that time it was easy for me to reject any association with Nazi horrors, it later became clearer to me how quickly one "righteous" group could turn on another and commit (or acquiesce to) unspeakable deeds. 31 years later, I would walk among the rusty ruins of Iraqi vehicles destroyed by US A-10 Warthog-fired depleted uranium bullets in the 1991 war and then visit a children's hospital in Basra to see Iraqi children dying of cancers most likely caused by exposure to radiation left by those weapons fired by my own nation's military. 

By the time of the fall of 1971, my senior year, I had recognized the "cracks" in my religious and theological beliefs had now become crevasses or even canyons. Thanks to my freshman Geology course, I learned much about glaciers, river erosion, and other acts of nature which radically change the surface of our planet. Looking back the past 50 years, it seems like it took me years to recover from that old self and my rigid beliefs - a change that sometimes now appears to be at a glacier's pace. 

I got an invitation to attend my 50th Wheaton College class of '72 reunion in the mail this week. I'd love to sit down with a few of those classmates and hear where their journeys had led them - but, having witnessed from afar the past 5 years how the evangelical movement embraced the Trumpian worldview, I'm not sure I want to subject myself to more theological trauma. If I go to the reunion, will there be buttons we can wear that proclaim, "I survived my years at Wheaton"?


To Begin a Day of Reckoning

 To Begin A Day Of Reckoning by Steve Clemens. May 5, 2021

In the wake of the guilty verdict for the slow-motion murder of George Floyd, voices around the nation have been raised for a day of reckoning and police accountability. Such a day and time, however, must begin at the top: the nation's top law enforcement building must be re-named.

J. Edgar Hoover embodied a pathological racism and his obsessive harassment of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements thoroughly disqualify him from having the FBI Building named after him. This is not a fashionable "cancel culture" whim; it is a necessary step in accountability and an end to the white-washing of the history of the US in the 1950s until present day.

Hoover specifically targeted Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, and countless others in making the FBI under his control one of the most lawless institutions (along with the CIA) disguised under the rubric of "national security". Hoover threatened to unleash secrets about various US Presidents in order to retain his authoritarian grip on power as the longest serving director of the FBI. 

If President Biden and/or Congress wish to end the era of police impunity, a clear signal they could send would be to remove the Hoover name from the building which should stand for justice. If not for the courage of the US Senate committee headed by Frank Church, we might never have known the lengths US government agencies went to in order to discredit both the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in this country - as well as the destabilization efforts for many progressive movements around the globe that threatened corporate profit-making. 

This should be a day of reckoning, repentance, and re-evaluation. This era of white supremacy, American imperialism, police impunity, and other symptoms of a system of domination must end and be replaced by a culture of hospitality, inclusion, and humility.