A Minister's Son: An Alcoholic's Memoir

By Mark Johnson

A Minister's Son is a personal account of one young man's coming to terms with his strict religious upbringing. Deciding in childhood to conceal misgivings about his inherited faith, the author relates how his adolescent doubts lead to a life of dishonesty and hypocrisy. There is inevitable tension in his relationship with his evangelical father, a minister, and deep internal conflict as the young man takes to the podium himself as a speaker in both religious and secular settings. Fear and rebellion are played out in his forbidden sexual relations with young women in his father's conservative church. The young man finds relief from his divided self in the dissolvent power of alcohol, leading to alcoholism and his eventual discovery of spiritual peace in recovery.

Set in Canada and spanning the 1960s to the present day, this uplifting memoir is unique in its exploration of the connections between fundamentalist religious cultures and addiction. It will be of interest to anyone who has had a troubled relationship with God, organized religion and/or alcohol

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098389512

Mark Johnson

Mark Johnson is a sportswriter and sports photographer. He has covered cycling and endurance sports as a writer and photographer since the 1980s. His work often focuses on the business of pro cyclinga topic that frequently intersects with the sport’s long history of doping. Along with U.S. publications like VeloNews and Road, his work is published in Cycling Weekly in the UK, Velo in France, Ride Cycling Review and CyclingNews in Australia as well as general-interest publications including the Wall Street Journal. 4655 published Johnson’s first book, Argyle Armada: Behind the Scenes of the Pro Cycling Life, for which Johnson was embedded for a year with the Garmin-Cervélo professional cycling team. A category II road cyclist, Mark has also bicycled across the United States twice and completed an Ironman triathlon. A graduate of the University of California, San Diego, the author also has an MA and PhD in English Literature from Boston University. His other passion is surfing, which he does frequently from the home he shares with his wife and two sons in Del Mar, California.

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Copyright 2021

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-1-09838-950-5 (softcover)

ISBN: 978-1-09838-951-2 (eBook)

for my parents:

David and Evelyn Johnson

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

One Isaac

Two Aunt Marjorie

Three The Drum

Four Chocolate

Five First Foray

Six Dirty Dancing

Seven I Have Sinned!

Eight Orangutang

Nine Ego Orgasm

Ten The Graduate

Eleven Schizoid College

Twelve Four Aces

Thirteen Forbidden Sex

Fourteen Showdown

Fifteen Atheist

Sixteen Drunkard

Seventeen The Cloud

Eighteen The Great Paradox

Acknowledgments

One day my good friends John Warren and Willy Perkins invited me to join a writer’s group called WIN (Write It Now) that met weekly in Ottawa. Members said I could write about anything I wanted, and the following pieces are what came bubbling up to the surface.

Along the way, I was encouraged to turn these short chapters into a little book. For this I am indebted to all the WIN members as well as Harold Byne, Dick Barton, Doug Small, Jan Scheeren, and especially my dear friend Lynn Belsey, and her dog Winston.

Comments? Please direct them to:

[e-mail]

One

Isaac

Well, when you come right down to it, the trouble mostly had to do with my own thinking.

My parents were no more to blame than anyone could be. Their conservative religious beliefs, which softened in later years, were initially inherited from their parents: fundamentalist convictions forged in the revival tent, Scopes trial, anti-modernist cauldron of the 1920s.

Born in that flagrant decade, and scarred by the Depression, my parents both came of age during the Second World War. My father was too young to enlist early in the war and worked as a teenager at Imperial Oil in Sarnia, Ontario, before hitchhiking to a bible-belt college in Arkansas to train for the ministry. My mother, a beauty, worked during the conflict as a telephone operator before being employed at a bomb-fuse factory: work she later regretted.

They married in 1947 and promptly moved all the way out to fog-bound, open-field Richmond, British Columbia, just south of Vancouver where my father became the minister of a small evangelical church. It was here that my brother and I were born and my mother’s lifelong struggle with depression first became pronounced. Then, in 1956, we moved across the country back to my parents’ Ontario, to the small village of Jordan in the middle of the Niagara Peninsula. My father became the minister of another, this time more conservative, evangelical church.

It was primarily in Jordan during the late 1950s where I first tried in a serious way to figure things out, and got into some difficulty.

The trouble mostly had to do with God.

You must understand that from the day I was two weeks old until well into my teens, I heard my father expound an unerring Arkansas bible from the pulpit twice on Sunday and at bible study during midweek. This was in addition to regular Sunday school sessions, annual summer bible camp, and that most cunning institution of forced labour indoctrination known as vacation bible school. We received daily biblical admonitions at home and as a family quoted scripture at the kitchen table.

When I was a child . . . I understood as a child, I thought as a child, and the effect of all this severe religiosity on my childish thinking was problematic, if not somewhat absurd. While we sang Jesus loves me and God sees the little sparrow fall, this was not the tender message I mostly internalized. I heard largely instead that God was to be greatly feared, that sin was ever present, that death could come unexpectedly, and that one’s hold on salvation was tenuous.

God seemed to be capricious and vengeful. I wondered about the children of the Canaanites and Amalekites who didn’t seem to have much of a chance.¹ That was ostensibly the case too for all those who didn’t accept the way of salvation as promulgated by our small church. Apparently, this included most of the people in the rest of the world outside, like little Patty down the street, who one day showed me her panties.

Killing all those animals to appease God seemed excessively cruel, as was the central and, to me, unintelligible notion of torturing and killing His own son to pay for sins we could easily fall into daily. As a child, who took things literally, it all seemed frightfully harsh and perilous. One day, I deliberately used the word damn in the schoolyard to impress a cute little church girl with my daring, and immediately felt I was lost forever. That was the kind of thinking I got into.

Looking back, I have come to the conclusion that although children lack the full capacity to weigh things in a detached manner and are inclined to accept as gospel what they are taught, especially in the absence of alternatives, they are still capable of feeling innately when something isn’t entirely right.

That was my situation, and I remember the childhood moment when I realized it. My brother and I were riding in the back seat of my father’s 1949 blue Dodge somewhere in Richmond. I was looking out the window at the passing scene when I suddenly realized something was unexplainably but seriously wrong; that what I was being told about God and His ways just didn’t make sense. But I was too young to be able to articulate what exactly made me feel so ill at ease. Only much later did I come to realize that these early childhood misgivings were the first seeds of genuine doubt.

At the time, however, and as a minister’s son, there were some serious implications to these misgivings. First of all, I couldn’t escape the realization that somehow I was questioning—nay, challenging—what my father was devoting his whole life to. And all boys want to please their fathers.

Second, because, as is the case with many young evangelicals, I tended to conflate my father with God, I couldn’t avoid the feeling that somehow I was also denying God. And in the list of cardinal sins that were committable, this was right at the top. It surely made me a most egregious sinner.

Perhaps the most serious mistake I made was not to talk to my parents about these troubling thoughts. That was because of another fear.

The evangelical denomination in which my father was a minister had its own version of excommunication for those who were in error. It was called