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| Rich Hite |
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Westfield, Massachusetts, 1679
…coming to Northampton, I heard Mr. Mather the first time that, that in the world ye shall have trouble, but in Christ ye may have & shall have peace, which incouraged me for a while. But afterwards his preaching did not please me but I thot I would keep my hopes. And the Lord visiting me with sickness that I was neer death, yet I thot I was well enough prepared for death & was not willing to hear to the Contrary: But the Lord in great mercy was pleased not to take me away in that Condition. But remaining still Confident of my good Estat, I, as I was on atime into the meadow to work, thot nothing should dash my hopes thereof. But presently the thought of [blank] who murdered himselfe Coming into my mind, I for a while much wondered at it. But my thots soon running thus, What if God should leave me? Then I should do so. & the temptation came so hardupon me that God would leave me, & I should certainly dy such a death; be guilty of mine own Blood, & be damned irreconcilably, that I was not able to go on to my business; but returning home, the temptation prevaild more, & more upon me, & I was filled with horrour of Conscience, the Lord did so manifest his wrath & displeasure against me: & my Sins were like mountains ready to sink me down into Hell every moment. & not being able to sleep, was forced to rise up at midnight & Call up my Father in law, who hearing how it was with me, & that I feared I had sinned the unpardonable Sin; & that there were no Hopes of mercy, gave me good Counsell, & prayed with me. & after having some abatement I returned home, & remain’d in that Condition: But the Lord after awile was pleased to abate the temptaion, & his wrath a little. & I fell to reading & praying in Secret; being incouraged to look to Jesus Christ for mercy. But Mr. Mathers Ministry was like daggers in my heart. For when I was labouring to lay hold on Christ, as I thot, by Faith, it did so rip up my State in such a way as dashed my hopes …1
The preceding excerpt is from a statement was made in 1679 by John Ingersoll (1626-1684), by then a resident of Westfield, Massachusetts, and one of the founders of Westfield’s Puritan church. Ingersoll’s public recitation of a religious experience, concluding with his eventual belief in his own salvation, fulfilled the Puritan requirement for church membership. By the time he delivered it, Ingersoll had resided in New England for nearly thirty years and had achieved respectability in his community. Considering the context in which it was delivered, Ingersoll’s formal religious deposition appears remarkable for the emotional turmoil and spiritual struggles it reveals ─ or was it so remarkable? Perhaps Ingersoll was unique in his willingness to go public with his private spiritual upheavals, even well into his middle age, although some of his contemporaries may have privately shared many of his apprehensions.
The “Mr. Mather” referenced in the text is not Increase Mather or his son, Cotton, but Eleazer Mather (1637-1669), a brother of Increase. Eleazer Mather’s pastorate of the Northampton, Massachusetts church overlapped John Ingersoll’s residence there, and this fact contributed significantly to the latter’s emotional anguish over his spiritual predicament. It is Ingersoll’s tormented uncertainty over salvation that allows me to view him over three hundred years later as a kindred spirit, because there was a time in my own life when I experienced a similar spiritual struggle. For me, this crisis came much earlier in life than it did for him. Ingersoll was probably in his thirties when he contemplated suicide. My own most intense period of religious anxiety occurred when I was going through puberty ─ and like John Ingersoll, I had my own “Eleazer Mather.”
John Ingersoll came through his spiritual crisis with his beliefs intact, convinced of his soul’s salvation; at least, that is what he publicly proclaimed. I took a far different path. More than thirty years after my own struggle, I am a Atheist. Notions about the soul and salvation went the way of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny long ago for me. Nonetheless, my youthful period as a “true believer” remains vivid in my memory. Strange as it may sound, during much of that period I was convinced that, in the eyes of God, I was no better than Charles Manson.2
One might ask why an eleven-year-old child would view himself in the same moral category as Charles Manson. The answer to that bizarre juxtaposition lies in the teachings of the Eleazer Mather from my youth ─ a widow who taught the Sunday school classes for Grades 4-6 in the Presbyterian Church that my family attended. I feel confident in saying that most adults who knew me at that time regarded me as a well-behaved child; I had no reason to believe that I was anything other than a good kid for the most part. But this teacher completely transmogrified my self-perception. I was small for my age, and like all boys in that situation, I was frequently bullied. I never took revenge on any of the bullies, other than in my mind. In my fantasy world, which may or may not be common for bullied children (I have never asked others), I often wrought terrible vengeance on my tormentors ─ even to the point of murdering them. I felt that as long as I did not act on these impulses (read “did not give in to temptation”) I was all right. But my Sunday school teacher taught us that in the eyes of God, an evil idea is just as sinful as, and is in fact no different than, an evil act. Suddenly, in my childish mind, I was a serial killer ─ one damned as thoroughly as Charles Manson.
One may wonder why I did not discuss my fears with my parents. As fate would have it, their final separation occurred the same year I came under the tutelage of this teacher, a separation I knew would eventually lead to divorce. My parents had broken the sacred vow “’till death do us part” and thus, they too were irrevocably damned. In terms of their offering succor to my soul’s salvation, they had no credibility. Furthermore, I could do nothing to save them. The only thing left for me was to attempt to save myself. But I had no concept of how to control my impure thoughts, and as I entered puberty, the fear of eternal damnation continued to rage unabated. I was outgrowing the murder fantasies by that time, but having already committed them in thought, my soul remained tainted. Those fantasies, in any event, were being replaced by other sins. My growing attraction to girls was an abomination - one I would surely suffer hellfire for. Sex within marriage was not a sin, but I was not married, so to think of sex with a girl who was not my wife was just as evil as actually having sex out of wedlock. As much as possible, I suppressed these urges, even to the point of covering my eyes if other boys showed me photos from magazines such as Playboy or Penthouse. This round of repression did not lessen until doubts about my faith began forming during my freshman year of high school. At first, the doubts left me terror-stricken ─ they were, after all, new sins. For additional brownie points with God, I joined the church, but in the final analysis, I was sure that the Almighty knew my heart, and thus condemned me despite my outward expressions of piety. My powers of reason were strong for my age and they tugged me in two vastly different directions. On one hand, they led me to question the idea that a virgin had given birth to a child and that a corpse had risen from its grave. At the same time, they instilled in me a fear that if an all-powerful God could read the doubts in my mind, I was irrevocably damned despite the fact that I had never actually committed murder or slept with a girl. In the distorted logic of my youthful mind, I had killed more people and had more sexual experiences than Charles Manson ever dreamed of. I was just as guilty as Manson.
Gradually, the skeptical side of my analytical mind took control, particularly when I enrolled in college and was exposed to a far more cosmopolitan environment than I had ever experienced before. The fear of divine reprisal slowly faded away. What also faded was the memory of irrevocable loss, a chance for spiritual salvation that my Sunday school teacher had offered me just as I was entering puberty, that is, until I read a news story about a child who actually did what I had contemplated, though for a far different reason.
The article was not long — just a small item buried on the third or fourth page of USA Today sometime late in 1992 or early in 1993. To this day, I am not sure why it caught my attention. But once it did, it awakened a memory that had slept in my subconscious for nearly twenty years.
The story was, indeed, a tragic one. A six-year old girl had committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a train. Still, I am sure that this strange event did not leave a lasting impression on many of its readers. After all, suicides occur every day. Young children die tragically every day. I, like most Americans, have grown numb to such stories. But this particular one stayed with me because this little girl took her own life for a very specific reason.
The child’s mother was dying of cancer. That, too, is a tragedy, but like the others, it is an everyday occurrence. Well-meaning relatives had taken it upon themselves to comfort the grieving child any way they could. Over and over again, she was told that her mother was going to go to heaven and become an angel. After a time, she began saying that she wanted to be an angel like her mother. Apparently, no one took her seriously, until it was too late. The last person to see her alive heard her say that she wanted to be in heaven waiting for her mother when she got there. The next day, the child was dead.
I was thirty-one years old when I read this article. The memory it awakened dated back to when I was eleven — a time when I contemplated a similar act of self-destruction. The previous two years had been difficult for me: my parents separated when I was nine and my grandfather died when I was ten. But despite all this, I really had no desire to die. There was certainly enough happiness in my life to make it worth living. But something my Sunday school teacher taught me made me feel that there was an urgent need for me to go ahead and end my life.
This same teacher who had convinced me that I was as depraved as a serial killer had offered me what seemed a certain method for avoiding the flames of hell. One of the things she mentioned in class was that twelve was the age of accountability for one’s sins. God did not hold children under twelve responsible for their sins, she said. It was only when children reached the age of twelve that they would suffer consequences for their sins.
I was a naive but thoughtful child, and I doubt that any of the other children in the class thought enough about what the teacher had told us to reach the particular conclusion I did. It was obvious - the only way one could be assured of avoiding hell was to die before the age of twelve. I had less than a year to elude that terrible fate.
Obviously, I did not follow through with this idea, but at the time, I gave considerable attention to this ironclad proposition. I read through various entries in my beloved World Book encyclopedias to figure out the most painless way to commit suicide. I never went as far as teetering on the precipice of a bridge, or holding a gun to my head, but I definitely puzzled through the entire matter. In the end, I suppose I lacked the tender hopes or the blind ambition necessary to take my own life; this, it seems to me, is what drove the six-year old girl to kill herself. In matters such as this hesitation might be a virtue. Yet, there were times after my twelfth birthday when I quietly bemoaned the fact that I had forsaken the only sure method to escape eternity in hell.
Today, I am a humanist as well as an Atheist. Religion is not a factor in my life. I can honestly say, however, that my lack of belief does not stem from the incident I just described. In fact, after my early teens, I completely forgot this dilemma — that is, until I read that USA Today article in the early 1990s. By the time I read it, I had not taken religion seriously for more than a decade. But until that memory resurfaced, I was non-committal on the issue of whether I would acquiesce in raising my children as Christians, if I ever had any children. I now know that I would not do so under any circumstances.
I know that many people who are non-believers or who are merely lukewarm about religion feel that religious training is essential to give children a solid grounding in ethics and morality. Others think it is necessary to avoid conflict with extended family members or the community they live in. I must appeal to these people to reexamine their views of this matter. It is true that most religious faiths share many of the values that humanists hold. I have never met an Atheist, a humanist, or a Christian who would say that murder is right. But many mainstream religions also teach that homosexuals are evil, a position no committed humanist I know would ever espouse. This is just one example. It is impossible for parents to know exactly what their children are being taught in Sunday school. I certainly never told my parents about my eleven-year old religious rationale for contemplating suicide. Even in sermons, when parents are with their children and hear everything their children hear, they cannot know exactly how their children are interpreting what the minister is saying. It is, in my opinion, the responsibility of all humanist parents to provide their children with a solid grounding in ethics. It is far too easy to dump that responsibility off on a church—and in some cases, that route might lead innocence into calamity.
I do not assume that all churches have Sunday school teachers like the one I knew. I am sure, however, that I am not the only child who was exposed to such a destructive “Fountain of Wisdom.”
The voice of this Presbyterian matriarch is silent now. Her teachings will not disturb any more young minds. She died in 1998, aged 95, after spending several years in a nursing home. Others had already assumed her duties of expounding the word of God to elementary school students. I have no doubt that some of her successors learned from her and I can only hope that they are not repeating the messages she conveyed. I have removed myself from that community now so I no longer know its inner workings.
Another voice, silent much longer, is that of John Ingersoll. Yet more than three centuries after his death, his words touched me in a way that I never imagined possible. Reading them for the first time was a chilling experience, for two reasons: I recognized a mind akin to my own in some ways, despite the fact that I resolved my spiritual dilemma far differently than he did; and, I realized how much his religious turmoil and resolution directly impacted my own life. John Ingersoll fathered fifteen children and undoubtedly has tens of thousands of living descendants today. One of his sons, Thomas Ingersoll, was born in Westfield in 1668, after his “Northampton crisis”. Through Thomas, I am a ninth generation descendant of John Ingersoll. Had he “murdered himselfe,” as he contemplated, I never would have existed.
Voices from the past like John Ingersoll’s have taught me that emotional turmoil over religion is not a new phenomenon. It is not possible to know if he and others like him would have lived happier lives without religion. My own memories do make it possible for me to know that my life is better without it. I do not mean to imply that feelings of guilt and shame cannot play a positive role in society. People wrong each other every day. If they felt no guilt, there would be no reason for them to try to improve their behavior in the future. It is, however, impossible for me to believe that a well-ordered society based on ethical training and respect for the rights of others is unattainable without fear of supernatural reprisals. It is also impossible for me to believe that adolescents going through the normal urges of puberty should fear the same punishment as a serial killer. A moral or religious code that places such people on the same level does not create the kind of culture I wish to live in. Yet, as an adolescent, I believed firmly that I was destined for the same afterlife that awaited Charles Manson. I cannot think of any way that this experience helped me develop into a responsible adult and a productive member of society. I feel that I have developed in that way and there are numerous experiences I can cite that helped me along that path. However, the Sunday school teacher I learned from during puberty was not one of them.
Rest in peace, John Ingersoll. |