Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [38]
It was only years later that I found out William P. Markham had been a functionary in a tent revival show in his youth, a religious circus of sorts that toured the Deep South fleecing suckers who felt in need of salvation. Markham had been a child healer and an infant prodigy who knew how to fire up a crowd of religious enthusiasts the way a pyro knew how to fire up a warehouse.
In his teens, he left his uncle’s revival group under cloudy circumstances and attended UCLA on a scholarship that was later discovered to have belonged to another student. He majored in economics there and at times alluded to spending his middle years drifting from town to town working elaborate con games. He also alluded to living off a succession of wealthy widows. Why these confessions should have endeared him to his followers baffled me, for even as a child I believed they were closer to the bone of his character than the charade he put on as a saint.
The religion’s primary textbook was penned by Markham: Dreams of the Afterlife with the Lord Jesus Christ. Even as an old man, long after the church’s demise, my father could, and frequently did, quote long passages verbatim from this tome.
Members of the Sixth Element of the Saints of Christ were encouraged to be model citizens. We talked about the devil, but the evil in people’s hearts was implied more than spelled out, as was the end product of that evil, which of course included punishment after death, punishment that we as adherents of the real truth would not suffer.
Just as we were destined for a heaven beyond comprehension if we conscientiously followed William P. Markham’s interpretation of the Bible and obeyed his tenets, everybody else on earth was headed for hell, of which there were, according to Markham, twenty-seven degrees. My father harped on the twenty-seven degrees endlessly and believed Catholics and Democrats would occupy the lowest rungs in Hades.
In many ways, ours had been the most comfortable view of the universe possible. We were God’s chosen. The elite of the elite. We were going to embrace everlasting life and grace. Nobody else was. Imagine a world of billions where only a few hundred are destined to escape the fires of hell. Later I realized virtually no religion was immune from the conceit that they had The Truth and no one else did.
My father often announced his belief that only a few dozen true believers would end up in heaven with us. I never could figure out why he wanted heaven to be so exclusive. Sounded boring as hell.
Typically, we spent two or three hours a day in prayer meetings, although at times of church or world crisis a decree from Markham might double or treble that. One hour before breakfast; Bible lessons after school; a prayer meeting each evening. Saturdays and Wednesdays were relegated to recruitment. Until I was twelve, I followed either my father or my mother as they went door-to-door or positioned themselves in some public place where they could proselytize. Virtually nobody but the dimwits, the mentally ill, or people trying to convert us to their religion stopped to listen.
Even though they were almost 100 percent ineffectual, our annual hours on the streets were pie-charted and color-coded on a wall near the front door and were a source of great pride and discussion among the members.
This ritual, done without complaint or question by all the followers of Markham, annoyed and humiliated me more than anything else. What particularly galled me were the jeers, whispered criticisms, sour looks, and outright squabbles with other street Bible scholars, of which there seemed a limitless supply. My father loved debate, and the arguments pitched him into his element.
My mother’s good looks were a net for the weak and profligate, the lustful and fallen, the needy and the spiritually barren—usually geeky males who would attend one or two of our services and then, when my mother no longer showed any interest in them, would vanish forever. Shy by nature, I never got