Michael Pulley: Childhood fear of hellfire put to bed after conversation about birds

I've joined a Facebook group called Recovering Evangelicals. The members sometimes share humorous accounts of their evangelical pasts, able now to look back, seeing the website as a means to recount a once-real past that now exists only in memory. I've never posted there, but here's a piece of my past.

A loud evangelist hit our church each year and bivouacked for a week while we, the faithful, watched his show. Every year a different holy troubadour scared the dickens out of me as he brayed about hellfire, making me shiver with fright. Lots of children were afraid of clowns. I was afraid of preachers who scared little children on purpose.

I sat there like watching a beheading; the theological niceties escaped me. Once, my mild-mannered parents told me not to worry so much about the pulpit mayhem. Which helped, somewhat.

Every year my parents invited the evangelist and our pastor over for one of my mother’s famous meals, renowned throughout the church. For days she worried and futzed over preparations, which always paid rich dividends — she was a superb cook.

I was the ecclesiastical advance man assigned to cleansing the house of all iniquities, replacing Life and Look magazines with the latest Billy Graham publications. But mostly I removed my father’s ashtrays, pretending he wasn’t a two-pack-a-day Lucky Strike man even though everyone in town, including the pastor, knew he was. Before the meal while Dad and I sat with the dignitaries in the living room, he twirled a book of matches in his hand, saying an occasional “Is that so?” to the ministerial pontifications. I sometimes wondered if he might implode.

One year during the after-dessert coffee and after the evangelist said he had been to Cleveland, Ohio, my mother, blurted, “The Indians!”

“Pardon?” he asked.

“Our Kansas City A’s beat them three in a row last month. In Cleveland.”

My mother listened to the Kansas City Athletics each summer day and could spout batting averages, American League standing and team rosters like a pro.

“And the Baltimore Orioles are in KC now,” she said. “We beat them last night!”

The evangelist lamely tried matching her baseball knowledge, but by the end of dessert, he’d been trounced, left helplessly dangling, defeated. I worried my mother had overstepped.

While leaving, looking out the window, he noticed our grape arbor. “Impressive,” he said.

My mother waved a dismissive hand. “They’re not much this year.”

“Why’s that?”

“Oh, the Baltimore Orioles ate nearly all of them.”

“The Baltimore Orioles?” he asked, staring out the window. “They came here?”

“Oh, yes. Wiped out most of the crop.”

My father and I smiled at each other, knowingly. We knew the guy pictured the entire team — not the birds — standing in their road uniforms eating the life out of our grapes.

“Well, my gracious,” the humbled man said, walking out of the house, a bit shorter than I’d remembered earlier.

After they left, on the porch my father fired up a Lucky. “The Baltimore Orioles,” I said, snickering, as we shared the comic moment. “May I tell Mom first?”

“She’ll love it,” he said, inhaling pleasantly.

And she did. She laughed then whispered, “That evangelist wasn’t too smart.”

Atta girl, Mom! After that, those evangelists scared me less and less. In fact, they got tamer every year. And dumber. That's about the time I started learning how to survive ministerial shenanigans that wage power over unsuspecting souls. Today I wonder how many loud preachers even know a St. Louis Cardinal from a Baltimore Oriole. Both birds, aren't they?

Michael Pulley lives in Springfield. He can be reached at mpulley634@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Fire and brimstone preacher no match for baseball and birds