When I travel, one of the categories of people I meet are Evangelical Escapees. Sam fits in that category. He grew up in central Ohio in a family that was in Church twice on Sunday, Wednesday, and his teens youth group on Friday put him in Church at least four days per week. Three times a year, the big Church had a weeklong salvation event. In the summer, the whole family traveled around the south. His father was teaching and preaching at Camp Meetings.
Sam, of course, had no choice about attending any or all of these services. For him, childhood was managing boredom attending events he had no interest in. He was interested in science. His dad was a high school principal for a day job, but Sam was walled off from advanced studies because he had so many commitments outside school. “I never had time to really do homework. I did okay in school, but I wasn’t like the kids who took advanced classes.”
Sam left home after high school and eventually became a professional mountain bike racer. He married a researcher with a PhD in bioinformatics who got a job at French pharmaceutical company. Sam opened a bike shop in Paris. He has a clientele of amateur athletes and some professionals on the French national team. He is a perfectionist who does bike fitting for people who want top performance.
Sam is in his early fifties, tall, thin and fit. He is a strong rider who is very much part of the cycling community in Paris. He speaks French with an American accent. He has a strong voice and speaks slowly. When I have heard him speak to clients, I can understand him a lot better than the native French speakers he is interacting with.
Sam says his parents really lived the faith they proclaimed. His problem was with nearly everyone else in his Church life. He learned racial epithets at Church before he heard them in “the world.” And in the kind of Church he grew up in, Creation Science, the arrogant lunacy of asserting the earth is 6,000 years old was the only science.
Better than Brainwashing--a convoy leaving Camp Adder, Iraq.
Sam is very far from his childhood: physically, spiritually, culturally, but not as far as a soldier I served with in Iraq. David heard me arguing with some Creationists in the mess hall before we deployed. He came up to me later and asked, “Can you really be a believer and not believe all that [Creationist] shit?” He had been told the opposite all through his childhood. He enlisted because he wanted to get away from home and Church, but he could not to a secular college. So, he turned 18 and headed for Iraq. War was better than brainwashing. And after deployment he went to college with the GI Bill.
David went back to his childhood hometown after serving in the Army, but got the secular education he wanted. Sam keeps in touch with his family, but is happily staying quite far from home.
