Written by MFA@CIIS candidate, Nathan Dean Talamantez.
The two books I’ve written, Sacred Fool and The Texifornia Border, have followed a single thread: Self-healing. But while writing them I felt like a burn victim being manually exfoliated. I was often reminded of the quote by psychologist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl: “What is to give light must endure burning.” But the Spring semester of 2021 promised something new.
I’d just finished prying my psyche apart penning my graduate project and looked forward to falling in love with cicadas or comets, something requiring a low emotional commitment that might earn me a small financial advance. Then the Capitol riots happened, and my experiences — my past — convicted me into the fray.
It was not because I am a veteran that the storming of The U.S. Capitol upset me but because I recognized the insurrectionists — although not individually. Many wore ‘Grunt’ clothing identifying themselves as ex-military, warpaint inspired by Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, and carried Christian flags.
One of the first to enter the Capitol, Michael Sparks, posted to Facebook: “Trump will be your president four more years in Jesus’ name.” The Washington Post published an article: “Some Capitol Rioters Believed They Answered God’s Call, Not Just Trump’s.” The piece collected testimonials from Evangelical Christians who claimed that God had called them to action. Nonbelievers puzzled at how Evangelical Christianity had reached from Christ’s lips to the Capitol steps while I possessed a grim comprehension. I intuited that my past contained something vital about how the Right-Wing Fundamentalist movement had evolved to this point; just what, I had yet to decode.
See, my experience is as a South Texan writer raised within the vanguard of the Modern Evangelical Christian movement. I received my first Bible before my first birthday and a new one every Christmas since. My mother keeps a contract I signed as a child committing me to wait for my family outside the gates of heaven and a second contract promising my virginity to my wife.
I remember one time, after church on a Sunday afternoon, my family gathered around our bubble-screened television to rewatch Braveheart and my father leaned in, telling me, “If anyone ever threatens or disrespects you, I don’t care what your teacher says, you have my permission to hit them.”
While his statement opposed the advice Christ gave in Matthew 5:39: “But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also,” it liberated me to envision myself as William Wallace: a poised lion waiting for an oppressor to maim. Self-aggrandizing visualizations like these shelter Right-Wing insurrectionists from recognizing their chilling similarity to Islamic extremists waging global jihad; we simply tune into different propaganda.
For four decades, Evangelicals have consumed conditioning that prioritizes unity and power above the principles of Jesus. Today, their ethics are antipathetic, eroded roughly to the sentiment expressed by Dallas Baptist Megachurch Pastor, Robert Jeffress: “I don’t want some meek and mild leader or somebody who’s going to turn the other cheek. I’ve said I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation.”
I can explain this, but, of course, explanations alone do nothing. As an author, I need to show you compellingly. Thus began my Spring semester: full of conviction, with zero direction.
I sought an entry point through research. Then I encountered Professor Bart Ehrman’s book, Forged: Writing in the Name of God — Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. I became bothered, or, as my graduate MFA workshop cohort might correct, angry.
To label Ehrman simply as a subject matter expert would be misleading. He wrote the college textbook on The New Testament, three of them, and thirty other books on the subject. So it is with high authority that Ehrman claims many books within the New Testament canon are forgeries, writing of the pseudonymous authors, “They had a truth to convey, and they were happy to lie in order to proclaim it.”
I felt that these ancient forgers had personally lied to me in a very fundamental way. How dare they? The continuance of these scriptures’ presence was a problem that begged to be fixed. I would fix it, or so went my thinking.
It would be quite an undertaking. I purchased and erected three felt boards and lined them with notecards linked by red string. These boards occupied the background of all my Zoom conferences. Friends asked politely what expertise I had for such an endeavor. Well, I didn’t read ancient Greek or Coptic. But I am an incessant reader. I wormed my way through piles of literature until my prose felt educated and sharp. Eventually, I was churning out well-researched essays about how the Evangelical movement had gone astray.
Weekly, I read these essays to my cohort of California Bay Area artists who politely listened and nodded along, although their glaze betrayed that they were not enjoying the narrow zone of my scholarship. Not having my upbringing, they had no frame of reference. But I told myself not to care. They were not my target audience. My work was meant to speak to Evangelical Christians. So I persevered until a member of my group had the bravery to stop me.
Joan asked, “What is it about lies and forgeries in the Bible that makes you angry? That’s the question I’m interested in.” And suddenly, I realized that I was, too.
Joan’s question reminded me of something the writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez said during an interview with The Paris Review. He admitted that all of the magical worlds he wrote were only ever created to entertain his friends, including his landmark novel, 100 Years of Solitude.
Likewise, my cohort were my friends, and I decided that I wanted to entertain them. I also wanted to explore Joan’s question. So, I wrote a short, humorous story about a six-year-old me living in mortal terror of losing his soul. The tale was true and illuminated how The Bible had become so sacrosanct to me. It was also a memory I was grateful to understand better.
I resolved to write more stories like it.
Soon, my upbringing became an episodic series of misadventures braided with more scholarly essays. My stories recall how Evangelical Christianity affected my young reality; then, research essays explore my adult journey towards spiritual freedom.
My cohort began to enjoy both components of the ensuing essays, and I began to aspire to the grandiose: could my work have crossover appeal? Could it serve as an explanation to the unindoctrinated and a light to those staggered by what Evangelical Christianity has become?
Out of this aspiration grew the skeleton of my third book, tentatively titled Fundamentally Wounded. I view it as completing a trilogy, the widest section of a triangle pointing towards healing.
Perhaps my fourth book can be about something less volatile like meteors or polar bears. If I know my audience, Fundamentally Wounded will inspire anger like Bart Ehrman’s books sparked within me. Growth is painful, so painful that gatekeepers of orthodoxy often accuse it of being inflammatory. So I want my book to inspire the grace due to every individual tackling the conundrum of being human. I want to meet Evangelicals where their experiences are and help ask big questions, such as Do Contemporary Evangelical values reflect the teachings of Christ? Is the Bible moral? Is the Judaic God logical or emotion-driven? And does questioning these things condemn me to hell?
Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned this semester is that healing often feels like enduring fire.
Nathan Dean Talamantez is a student in the MFA program at CIIS. His new book Sacred Fool, is available anywhere books are sold. Dean recommends Indie Bound, who distributes through and supports local bookstores.
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