I Want to Be Left Behind

Those who encouraged Peterson to see “the divine everywhere I looked” enter the story seamlessly. Jessie, a vivacious makeup artist and gardener in the Ozarks, had “Loretta Young lips.... Her high heels did not even sink in the mud.” The second wife of Peterson’s fundamentalist grandfather, Jessie also had an environmentalist’s take on praising God. “Jessie told me that God was in her garden and by tending her green world she was being a faithful servant,” Peterson recalls. Jessie also held some earthy views on redemption. “Most evil is ... forgetting ’bout anybody but yourself,” Jessie chastises Peterson for a transgression, even as she plunges into a river.. She pronounces, “Looks like you need some savin’.... [F]loat.”

With every move brought on by her father’s postings, bridges emerge. Peterson meets Pastor Joe – “more a man of spirit than religion – a mystic,” whose outspoken, ex-parole officer wife denies a biblical basis for the Rapture and teaches Peterson that “The Rapture was possible right here on earth. There are so many reasons to be left behind.” A literature teacher encourages Peterson to find links between Old Testament miracles of nature – a burning bush, whirlwinds – and writers who “looked for miracles and divine handiwork in the natural world.”

Peterson reflects anew on her father’s belief that “trees are God’s creation,” and their care his stewardship. “The spiritual solace that I sought in nature and my family found in religion might be much the same,” she realizes. Buoyed by the revelation, she brings elements from home – a love of gardening, folksy writing style – with her to a job at The New Yorker.

Not all co-workers appreciate it, and the liberal snobbery of some is as dogmatic as the family bias she runs from. Peterson’s experiences there make a good case for liberals to examine their attitudes, something she does, too – in an enlightening and funny comparison between fundamentalists and her adopted family, environmentalists. Both camps, she writes, are “Enraptured by doom... Holier than Thou... [and use] Blame, shame, [and] judgment.”

But how much should be generalized from Peterson’s experience? Her family’s frequent moves (making them “too cosmopolitan” for one Georgia community), careers with secular organizations, and their willingness to expose Peterson to folks like Pastor Joe suggest her parents might be fundamentalist outliers. (On a visit to New York at a time when few Southern Baptist churches were integrated, Peterson’s mother boldly drags her to an all-black Harlem Baptist church. Whereas Peterson is convinced that young black men there cast them a menacing eye, her mother makes lifelong friends.)

Today, Peterson and her family tend to check religion at the door when they meet yet share a handful of basic convictions – embrace life, be true to your morals, live passionately – that should probably be Scripture for all of us.

Sarah More McCann teaches religion and social justice at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Minneapolis.

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