I had my first drink of beer at a Cincinnati Reds game when I was six years old. It was the summer of 1985, and my great-aunt Corinne, then in her 60s, convinced my parents to let her take me on a rust-belt road trip. First, we took the Amtrak from Texas to West Virginia, where her adult son, my second-cousin Bruce, took me hiking up the Appalachians. To celebrate my first time seeing mountains, he handed me a kid-sized wad of Red Man chewing tobacco, and I pretended to know what to do with it. Did I mention I was six?
The next night, great-aunt Corinne took second-cousin Bruce and me to watch Pete Rose’s Cincinnati Reds host the Pittsburgh Pirates. Rose was my favorite player, and that was the year he broke Ty Cobb’s record to become baseball’s all-time hits leader. According to federal investigators, it was also the year that Rose (who somehow played for and head-coached the Reds) decided it might be fun to place illegal bets on Reds’ games.
I decided to take a little gamble of my own that night. Around the sixth inning, great-aunt Corinne ordered two pints of something called Old Milwaukee. When the vendor handed her the plastic souvenir cups, I asked her what was in them. “It’s beer,” she said. In shock, I froze. A stiff Ohio wind would’ve knocked me over like a cardboard cutout. I was a Bible Belt kid; I had never even seen beer before, much less watch a trusted adult drink some. “Can I try?” I asked. She hesitated until second-cousin Bruce chimed in, “Let the boy have a swig; he handled that Red Man like a champ!” I grinned with pride.
Great-aunt Corinne handed me the cup, and I took a sip. It was disgusting. I wanted more chewing tobacco just to get the beer taste out of my mouth. Thanks to great-aunt Corinne, I grew up thinking all beer tasted like Old Milwaukee, a belief that served me well through my adolescence in the deep South. It’s much easier to be a Bible-thumper when you’re fairly certain the key ingredient in beer is watered down battery acid.
In high school, I tried really hard to be a good Christian who was committed to sobriety, sexual purity, and spending Saturday nights at home, ironing my Sunday clothes. I was the boy every dad hoped his daughter would date; that’s the reason so few girls ever wanted to date me. Ok, it was among the reasons.
When I was 20 and in college, I learned a few things about my childhood religion, like how Jesus drank real wine and how there’s an entire book in the Bible dedicated to great sex. Sardonic professors of philosophy and religion informed lecture halls packed with impressionable young minds that the Bible was no different from every other ancient holy book: it was written by men who employed archaic conceptions of god to help people make sense of their existence and to ease their fears of mortality with promises of paradise in the afterlife. The Bible, they said, is a highly edited, poorly translated collection of ancient myths, and its historical plausibility is on par with the latest Star Wars flick.
Upon learning that the book I had given my entire life to was basic fiction, my initial reaction, naturally, was “Wait…why am I still a virgin?” I no longer believed in the God of the Bible, but I was also really mad at Him for keeping me “pure” all those years for no good reason. So, after spending my teens telling everybody why they should believe in the Bible, I spent much of my 20s telling people why they shouldn’t.
It’s patriarchal and violent.
It contradicts itself.
It’s pro-slavery and anti-gay.
It’s poorly translated and deeply flawed.
One night in my late 20s, I was invited to something called Theology on Tap, which was advertised as a public forum for believers and skeptics to engage in meaningful conversation but actually was just an excuse for young Christians to get drunk together. The same shock that froze me twenty years earlier at Riverfront Stadium came over me again; I had never seen Christians drinking alcohol in the same room together. Somebody handed me something called a Boulevard Wheat from the local microbrewery, and let me tell you – it was nothing like the Old Milwaukee my great-aunt Corinne gave me. It was sublime.
As I sat at the bar pondering what other wonders I’d missed out on thanks to this God I no longer believed in, the event emcee introduced two men to the crowd. One fellow appeared to be in his fifties and wore glasses, penny-loafers, and a sweater-vest. He could have been forty, but the sweater-vest added at least ten years. He was cleanly shaven, and his thinning hair was parted neatly down one side.
The other guy was basically the Christian version of Ryan Gosling: young and handsome with messy blonde hair, a five o’clock shadow, and biceps as big as my thighs. Standing next to each other, they looked like the old “Mac vs. PC” commercials, where the cool kid makes fun of dorks who still use Windows, so when the emcee announced that they would be debating theology, I actually felt sorry for Mr. Sweater-vest. Nothing he could possibly say that night would be enough to overcome the obvious appeal of Mr. Biceps.
The debate began with the emcee asking both presenters to describe, in the simplest, most succinct way possible, why they identify as Christians instead of something else. Mr. Biceps went first, and after starting with a joke that really wasn’t funny but everybody laughed because we all wanted him to like us, he meandered through an endless series of dry, academic treatises. Claiming to make an airtight case for the Christian faith, he used words like antinomianism, penal substitution, and hypostatic union. Thirty minutes later, he was still going strong, but the room was lost. Mr. Biceps had done the impossible; he made a bar full of young people sick of looking at him.
I was about to head home when the emcee mercifully called time-of-death on the neverending lecture and asked Mr. Sweater-vest the same question, “Why are you a Christian, instead of something else?” Looking up at the ceiling, he fidgeted with his shirt collar and took a deep breath; quietly, he told us a story.
There once was a boy who had everything but felt he had nothing.
He deeply resented his father for never giving him what he deserved.
So one day the boy looked his dad in the eye and said,
“You’re dead to me, a**hole!” and he left his father’s house.
The room fell silent. No one could believe Mr. Sweater-vest said a**hole at Theology on Tap. Then, with the entire bar in the palm of his hand, he kept going:
At last, the boy was free from his father; that was all he ever wanted.
But to his dismay, the deep, empty feeling remained.
One dreadful day it hit him: “Oh no. Maybe I’m the problem.
Dad gave me everything and all he asked of me was love.”
Bankrupt and alone, the boy went home, trembling with fear.
As he walked slowly, shamefully up the path toward the house,
he saw his father running toward him with a crazed look in his eyes.
He’s finally going to give me what I deserve,” the boy thought.
And he braced himself for a beating.
But all the boy got was a kiss, new clothes, and a party.
Mr. Sweater-vest handed the microphone back to the emcee. In forty seconds, he did what Mr. Biceps failed to do in forty minutes; he explained the whole Bible with one simple story. Obviously, it wasn’t his original material – Jesus told the Prodigal story (without the a-word, of course) two thousand years before – but later that night, Mr. Sweater-vest explained how he was actually the boy in the story. Somehow, an ancient Jewish rabbi told a story starring Mr. Sweater-vest two thousand years before sweater-vests even existed.
Sitting in that bar, I knew I was the boy, too. My whole life, I had it all – good health, loving family, plenty of food, clean water, shelter, education, Red Man Chew – and for years I’d behaved like a spoiled little brat. Although I had everything, I always felt entitled to a little something more, kind of like Pete Rose in 1985.
Later that night, Mr. Sweater-vest said something else I’ll never forget. “Most of you were raised to read the Bible like it’s a textbook for the most important class of your life,” he said. “And at the end of this class, you’ve been told there will be a pass/fail test on the material this book covers. If that’s how you’re reading the Bible, you still haven’t learned to read it. It’s a love story; not a textbook!”
It took a few years for me to figure out what Mr. Sweater-vest shook loose in my heart that night, but I see it so clearly now. All my life, I thought the Bible was disappointing because my expectations of it were too high. Now I see that, whenever the Bible has disappointed me, it’s because my expectations have been far too low.
