Read Online America Unzipped by Brian Alexander - Free Book Online Page B

of Christ believers and not on Catholics or Presbyterians? How has the church evolved into that? What does it mean if one of your daughters is mentally retarded for no apparent reason? Surely God’s mercy has to be broader and more complex than he could ever have imagined.
    So one day Joe Beam stood up in front of a Church of Christ gathering and said, “I’m submitting to you, my brothers and sisters, and I hope you’ll prayerfully consider it, that any individual who’s been baptized ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus,’ based on his faith, is a child of God. What I’m saying is there’s a lot of people in this religious world who’ve submitted to baptism in the name of the Lord Jesus based on their faith who accomplished remission of sins whether they realized it or not.”
    Joe Beam did not feel like a heretic but he was called one, and the experience of being called one raised even more questions until one day he began to feel unhitched from the very thing on which he had constructed his life. Preaching no longer made sense. So he started building houses. He nearly went bankrupt.
    You know where this is going, don’t you? It’s an old story in fundamentalism, especially among preachers. There is the defeated walk through the doors of a saloon, the women you find there, the divorce from your true love. One day you realize you are truly a fallen man. Joe spent three years in Satan’s icy grip, a period he calls his “drinkin’ and druggin’” phase. He became a regular at strip clubs, a pathetic figure telling jokes to the girls at night, working on a paving crew for a relative during the day, and aside from hell itself, there isn’t anything quite as hot as laying asphalt during a southern summer. The drinkin’ and druggin’, the porn, the strippers. They all congealed into one giant sin until God finally figured Joe had had enough. One night he almost killed himself in a car and he could have killed other people, too, if not for God’s guiding hand, and when he woke up in a hospital he did not even know where he was exactly until an old friend said, “What the hell are you doing?”
    Joe Beam got mighty humble after that, crawled back to his wife, begged for forgiveness, and tried to make a new start. By some miracle, the grace of God, or maybe just because he was lucky enough to know a woman like Alice, she took him back and he became a different human being because he had just experienced the power and glory of redemption. When Joe Beam tells this story to somebody who asks him about the power of redemption, somebody who wants to know if maybe this is what his mission is all about, he thinks of Alice and tears up and his chin quivers, and Joe Beam is not even a crying sort of man.
    This can seem like the Jimmy Swaggart moment, the Jim Bakker moment, the Ted Haggard moment, the tearful confession, the verbal prostration, the forgiveness and salvation. I won’t blame you if you’re skeptical, if you think Joe Beam’s watery eyes are just a way of saying, “Look at me! I am you! God loves me! He’ll do it for you, too, no matter what you’ve done. Pull back from the brink. There’s a home for you here.”
    Listening to him, though, I have my doubts Joe Beam is any Jimmy Swaggart. Sure, he uses the shtick, but he also says he learned a few things out there in the wilderness of sin. The awful fact is, Joe
liked
some of the strippers. He
liked
bedding different people. He
liked
sex, and the view he got of sex outside that stained-glass tower sure was a lot more interesting than the view inside it.
    He returned home to Alice understanding that sex, even sinful sex that made you feel guilty later, could be fun. As he and Alice worked on their reborn life together, they thought they might be able to help others avoid their pain by having that kind of sex in their marriages. He and Alice reasoned that