young drunk driver who, like many others, had spent the evening at the bar. My father and his younger brother Robert found my grandfather in a ditch, his bloodstained cap still on his head.
In the trial after my grandfather was killed, a priest who’d been seen helping wash the blood from the accused’s vehicle took the stand and swore that the man, a Catholic, had been in church. The Catholic judge and jury acquitted the man who’d killed my grandfather. The word of a priest was sacred, undisputed. Never mind other eyewitness accounts and forensic evidence that proved his guilt.
Those centuries of barely slumbering hatred for Catholics and their presumed willingness to do anything, forgive anything, just for a contribution to the church, were roused, and my father vowed to kill the man. My grandmother talked him out of it. In a second trial, the family was granted a small sum of money in recompense for my grandfather’s life and blood. “He could have at least said he was sorry,” my grandmother said.
The young man died not long after, in a car accident. My grandmother said to his mother, “You see, God is getting even.”
His teenage sister, who had been in the car with him and had asked, “Did we hit that man?” became a nun.
Throughout his lifetime, my father was fairly certain that the Catholic Church was the Antichrist, a sentiment that had been passed down through the ages starting 500 years before with Martin Luther, the priest-turned-founder of Lutheranism, but was validated for him when a Catholic priest protected a murderer.
He’d hoped to travel and to continue doing engineering or mechanical work. But then he became responsible for the family’s 140-acre farm and nursery business, and so he remained and made certain his thirteen-year-old sister, also named Viola, went to high school.
Several years later, at a local dance, this dutiful Lutheran man met my mother, a Catholic woman who once considered becoming a nun. We were all aware of the irony of her going on to give birth to eleven children.
My parents were caught between my shotgun-toting, get-the- goddamned-hell-off-my-property, devoutly Catholic maternal grandfather, and the foot-stamping fury of my paternal grandmother, who often repeated the story of Martin Luther crawling on his knees to the Vatican. To hear Grandma tell it, you would think she’d been there.
At first, my parents devised their own Catholic/Lutheran compromise. Wanda, the oldest of my ten siblings, was baptized in the Catholic Church and had Catholic godparents. But my mother became more and more disenchanted with Catholicism, and the next three children—Jim, Ed, and Mary—were baptized Lutheran.
My mother grew up in an age when mass was still said in Latin, and Catholic doctrine taught that after death, the dead person remained in purgatory until thirty masses were said on his or her behalf. Those masses needed to be paid for by the family, and if a family was too poor, purgatory lasted longer, no matter the deceased’s spiritual merit. This offended my mother.
Seeking answers to age-old questions such as “Who was God?” and “What did God want from us?” my mother set out on a quest to find the one, true path to God. Since both my mother and my father felt like outsiders in many respects they were drawn to non-mainstream Christianity: preachers who simultaneously told them that they were special and had been chosen but reminded them that they were sinners and worms. No religious movement was too fringe for them to consider. My older siblings recalled attending a Baptist church for a while, going to tent revivals farther afield, and studying with a small group of local Jehovah’s Witnesses.
My mother gave birth to ten children within eleven years. As she was stuck at home, she listened to the radio while she warmed baby bottles on the stove, rolled out homemade dumplings on the kitchen table, canned tomatoes and beets, and pushed clothes through the wringer washer then hung them on the wash line. The radio evangelists provided her with adult company during the day and reassured her that God was out there, and He had a plan for her.
Radio evangelists were charismatic preachers who encouraged people to leave their ancestral denominations and follow them to salvation. In the late 1950s, both of my parents felt an affinity for the radio evangelist Herbert Armstrong, the founder of the Worldwide Church of God. Armstrong offered explanations for why bad things happened, why mankind existed, as well as provided an overall master plan and purpose of life that entailed God’s chosen people—the church members.
As a young man, Herbert Armstrong had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. He’d studied Mein Kampf as well as L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, the basis of Scientology. When Armstrong’s wife became involved with the Seventh-Day Adventists, he began reexamining the Bible and was later ordained as a minister in that church. He was eventually kicked out, though he maintained he left of his own volition, and created the Radio Church of God, which later became the Worldwide Church of God.
Armstrong claimed that he could trace his own genealogy back to Edward I of England, and through the British royal genealogy, back to King Heremon of Ireland, who had married Queen Teia Tephi, daughter of Zedekiah. Though Armstrong’s bloodline to Zedekiah was never substantiated, we unquestioningly accepted the church’s version of history. British Israelism was a cornerstone of the church and cemented our sense of being God’s chosen. I strongly identified with those lost tribes, in exile, at least spiritually, in Indiana. I didn’t realize at the time, nor for a long time, that the ancient Israelites were alive and well and spread throughout the world. They were called Jews.
Armstrong’s radio program, The World Tomorrow, named after the theme of the 1939 World’s Fair held in New York, was devoted to analyzing “today’s news with the prophecies of the WORLD TOMORROW!” In other words, End Times prophecies. My parents tuned in and listened to Armstrong’s bombastic broadcasts like this one from the 1950s:
You and your family are seated around the dining table. Your RADIO is tuned in to your regular entertainment program. Suddenly a great Voice thunders forth from your radio, ‘This is GOD SPEAKING! I interrupt your program to bring you a STARTLING DECLARATION OF WORLD-SHAKING MAGNITUDE! I come to announce the imminent arrival of a TERRIBLY DESTRUCTIVE WORLDWIDE UPHEAVAL of nature! OF EARTH! OF SKY! Yes, even of the WATERS! It is TIME YOU WAKE UP to the fact that you and your nation, the nations of the world and their leaders have sinned!
Having lived through the Depression and witnessed World War II and the first atomic bomb, the end of the world seemed entirely plausible, even imminent, to many Americans, including my parents.
Herbert Armstrong culled doctrine from his former church, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the British Israelism Movement, as well as the Mormons. These were all religious groups that stemmed from nineteenth-century America and were led by charismatic men with a vision of a more “authentic” Christianity. Free magazines and pamphlets were given out explaining the Worldwide Church of God’s doctrine. This appealed to my mother, who was wholly incapable of turning down anything she didn’t have to pay for and never left a restaurant without pocketing condiment packets, straws, and a fistful of half-and-half containers.
“Should Christians Celebrate BIRTHDAYS?” (No.) “Is it a SIN to Have INSURANCE?” (No insurance can replace faith.) These were just a couple of the topics covered in the freebies, liberally punctuated with exclamation marks and capital letters to convey urgency. Eventually, my parents mailed away for the church’s Ambassador College Bible Correspondence Courses and, when we were all in bed, they sat in the kitchen and studied together.
They created a new bond over the material they were learning, a bond that overcame the gulf that separated them as Catholic and Lutheran. The correspondence course was practically like higher education, which neither had had access to before. It required them to read and think and study. “Why Study the Bible?” was one of the courses, as well as “Here’s the Good News . . . MESSAGE sent from Heaven.” By the time I was born, my parents were well on their way to being baptized in this new faith.
The church’s booklet Pagan Holidays—or God’s Holy Days—Which?, and others like The Plain Truth about Christmas and The Plain Truth about Easter, explained that all true Christians should eschew Christmas, Easter, and Valentine’s Day, as they were steeped in paganism. Instead, like Christians had done until the fourth century, we