Andrew Himes

Kinyarwanda: Forgiveness is Freedom

2011-12-06T15:54:03-05:00

Kinyarwanda: Forgiveness is Freedom, a new movie from talented African American director Alrick Brown, is not a movie about genocide, though it is set in Rwandan during the 100 days in 1994 during which over 1,000,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutus in an internecine bloodbath.

Instead, Kinyawanda is a story of the healing power of forgiveness and compassion, and the miraculous capacity of faith to transform intractable conflict into peace and hope. In particular, although the Rwandan genocide was marked by the murderous actions of so-called Christians, including many in the Catholic hierarchy, Kinyarwanda tells of a friendship between a Muslim mullah and a Catholic priest who collaborated to rescue thousands of Tutsis threatened by Hutu gangs. Although it takes place in the past, the film looks forward to a future in which all Rwandans are a diverse and healthy community in a unified democracy.

I was born in 1950, immediately after World War II in which over 60 million died worldwide, and after the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died. So I grew up in a world that had recently experienced death and destruction on an historically unprecedented scale. The earth's population was traumatized by those events. In my own family, the trauma revealed itself by the way my parents were shut down emotionally: they never spoke about the horrors of the war, but rather wanted to remember the war simply as a positive, heroic, and victorious struggle for freedom and democracy.

When I was a teenager, I grew up with the backdrop of the horrors of the war in Vietnam, which was accompanied by the carpet-bombing of Vietnamese villages and jungles by American bombers and the wholesale slaughter of civilians. By the time I was in high school, I had started to develop a loathing of war and violence of all sorts. I was the product of a Christian family. My dad was a fundamentalist Baptist preacher, and my mom was a daughter of John R. Rice, famous evangelist and editor of the influential Sword of the Lord newspaper. I struggled with a fundamental contradiction. I saw Jesus as someone who had preached, taught, and practiced a philosophy of nonviolence governed by love and compassion. And yet my own Christian family seemed to support and justify great violence and bloodshed, even against innocent civilians, when that violence was commnitted in service to a greater moral purpose.

One night at the dinner table, I asked why it had been necessary to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. My dad reacted with defensiveness and anger. He explained that the A-bomb allowed the US to end the war faster with fewer American casualties.

Later, when I read Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, I asked my dad about the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and many other German cities that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German civilians. Dad explained that innocent people die in a war, and it was unfortunate yet necessary for victory.

The problem, of course, with any general account of the consequences of war, or discussion of the statistics of horror, or the data of mass murder, is that war and genocide are easily sanitized. We easily avoid or forget the personal, human dimension of any event involving massive bloodshed.

Kinarwanda reminds us of the deep spiritual wounds inflicted on individuals human beings by their experience of violent conflict, but it also offers a haunting reminder of the power of love, faith, and forgiveness to heal our woundedness. As the Kanyarwanda web site recounts:

The Mufti of Rwanda, the most respected Muslim leader in the country, issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims from participating in the killing of the Tutsi. As the country became a slaughterhouse, mosques became places of refuge where Muslims and Christians, Hutus and Tutsis came together to protect each other. Kanyarwanda is based on true accounts from survivors who took refuge at the Grand Mosque of Kigali and the madrassa of Nyanza. It recounts how the Imams opened the doors of the mosques to give refuge to the Tutsi and those Hutu who refused to participate in the killing.

The theme of Kinyarwanda is not violence, savagery, death, and despair, although all of these are portrayed in stark terms. Rather, the film's theme is our surprising human capacity to reach out to each other across the boundaries of blood and belief, kinship and catastrophe, to find hope in our common humanity. The moral center of the film is expressed by actor Cassandra Freeman, who plays Lt. Rose, a Rwanda Army officer who helped to end the genocide and then presided over a re-education camp for Hutu soldiers who had taken part in massacres of Tutsis and who were seeking a way to return to citizenship in a united and democratic Rwanda.

To her audience of murderers, Lt. Rose says:

Forgiveness is not the suppression of anger. Forgiveness is asking for a miracle, the ability to see through someone's mistakes to the truth that lies within all of our hearts. Forgiveness is not always easy. At times it is more painful than the wound we suffered. And yet it is more painful than the wound that was inflicted. Attack thoughts towards others are attack thoughts toward ourselves. The first step in forgiveness is the willingness to forgive. So why am I talking to you about forgiveness? You are the ones who committed the crime. You are the ones people have anger and hatred and bitterness towards. You are the ones who have caused great suffering and pain. I talk to you about forgiveness because you, more than anyone else, must understand what it means to forgive you. You must understand the pain and suffering you have caused so many. You must take full responsibility for what you have done, and repent.

On the basis of full disclosure and moral clarity, Kinyarwanda is saying, we can arrive at a new truth. Enabled by compassion, we can take a new path in human history. On hearing the true stories of others, we can forgive them. On disclosing our own crimes and failures, we can be forgiven. By acknowledging the painful truths of the past, we can reconcile with our enemies and repair our broken society. We can create a new future, unbound from the past.

Kinyarwanda opens December 2 in theaters in Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Washington.

In Seattle, the film is part of the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center's African American Film Festival. Read the schedule and buy advance tickets from the SIFF Cinema Box Office at the Uptown Theater.

On the Death of My Mother and the Nature of Love

2011-10-20T10:05:15-04:00

On Tuesday afternoon, October 4, 2011, my sister Faith called from Chattanooga and said, "Mom's gone." I heard a rushing sound in my ears and my heart thumped and I said the most profound thing I could think of, which was, "Oh my." Then I leaned against the wall as Faith told me the details--our 86-year-old Mom was walking down the hall when she just fell down and was gone that fast, likely it was her heart that gave out--and Faith and I cried together for a minute before she hung up to call our siblings.

I had a concrete mixer full of contradictory emotions. Deep sadness, compassion for my sister who had cared for my mom and bore the brunt of her sickness and old age, and genuine relief that Mom's struggle was over. Most of my life I've had a challenging relationship with my mom, and I never knew quite what to do with her. She could be funny and charming one minute and aggressively opinionated and insensitive the next. On one memorable occasion, my fundamentalist mom decided that my vegetarian daughter was disobeying the will of God by refusing to eat meat, so she pulled out her Bible to quote verse after verse, beginning with the story of Cain and Abel, purporting to show that God loved meat eaters and expected every human to eschew vegetarianism.

Mom sometimes seemed sad or depressed, yet rarely allowed her deepest feelings to show. When first married, she had claimed she wanted an even dozen children of her own, and she went on to have five children altogether. She had many friends whom she loved and who loved her, yet she had difficulty creating warm and affectionate relationships with her own children and grandchildren. So over my whole life she's been a mystery to me. Only within the past few years have I begun to gain some insight into what made her tick--and to see her in a more compassionate light.

My favorite photo of Mom is one I found used as an illustration in a book written and published in 1940 by my famous fundamentalist granddad, John R. Rice. The book is titled "Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers," and for better or worse it is probably the most well-known of his several dozen books and pamphlets. If you only knew him through this book you might think of him as somewhat crotchety or misogynistic towards women. In reality, however, he was surrounded by women whom he adored -- his wife and six daughters -- and who loved and cherished him in their turn. In the book, a photo of my beautiful, smiling mom -- at the age of 14 -- is used to illustrate the proper hair length and style for God-fearing fundamentalist females: waist-long, uncut, braided and piled atop her head. That was still her hair length and style when she died at the age of 86.

She had a delightful and funny side. When she was younger she loved to play games and sports of all kinds -- tennis, softball, skating, bowling and volleyball. At the age of 70 she challenged me to a yoyo contest and then asked me to give her a juggling lesson.

But she also carried a deep sadness. I sometimes found her sitting by herself with an expression of unutterable sorrow or exhaustion on her face. When I asked her what she was thinking she would just say, "Oh, nothing." Behind her silence, however, lay some painful secrets from her past that helped to explain her present sadness. To hear her stories of distress, I had to encourage her to speak and then listen deeply.

I was born in Wheaton, Illinois, but when I was six months old our family moved to Kansas. There, my dad was the pastor of a string of poor, small-town Baptist churches. My dad's salary was way less than needed to support his family of six and the church-folk on occasional Sunday evenings supplemented our income by contributing a box of canned goods for the pastor's family. At one point we had no money to pay the water bill. My mom was so ashamed of our poverty that she waited until dark, crept next door and filled a bucket with water from the spigot on the side of our neighbors' house.

Two years ago at Christmas we were reminiscing about the hardships of those Kansas days when my mom suddenly told a story she had never shared before. Less than 18 months after we moved to Kansas, Mom gave birth to my little brother John. She was still in her 20s but already had four children, the oldest of whom was under the age of six. "Then I was pregnant again with my fifth baby," said my mom. "I was sick a great deal for the first four months, but I so wanted to have that baby. And then one night I lost it. The baby was stillborn. We had no money to pay for a doctor to come or for me to go to a hospital and no money for a grave. So I wrapped that little body in a blanket and gave it to your father."

My dad, she told me with tears coursing down her face, took the baby out into the backyard and buried it in a makeshift grave next to our ramshackle garage.

Our family soon moved back to Wheaton, Illinois, and through the next several years as I attended grade school my mom was often sick and confined to her bed. Years later I learned that she had three more miscarriages, spent months in bed trying to save her pregnancies and then lost baby after baby. The next several decades were full of hard work for others and little time for herself. In later life when my dad had Alzheimer's she almost killed herself being his full-time caretaker.

The year after Dad's death in 2002, my mom came to visit me in Seattle. The day she arrived I took her to a fundraising party for a nonprofit organization I volunteered for. At the party I introduced her to my friends Cambrea and Robin, a lesbian couple who had been in a committed relationship for over a decade. Robin had been trying to have a baby for years, and four months previously she had finally gotten pregnant. But earlier on the day she met my mom, Robin had a miscarriage. Robin and Cambrea were both devastated. The three women -- Cambrea, Robin and my mom -- sat on the couch talking softly, holding hands and crying together.

I realize now that during that evening on the couch my mom wasn't trying to save, judge, convince, condemn or convert anyone. Instead, she was just a woman who understood suffering, who loved Robin and Cambrea and shared their loss and sorrow. And ever since, both Cambrea and Robin have felt a powerful bond with my mom.

That's the image of Mom that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. She was a woman who bore up through terrible pain, who was damaged by that pain and lived through it. Her heart was broken by her losses. But her broken heart opened to learn a deep compassion and love for others.

At the end of her life, I know she was comforted by that love, and by the faith that carried her through the misfortunes of her life and gave her hope and joy in her darkest hours. I am convinced that along with the three heartbroken women sitting on that couch years ago, there was a fourth, unseen presence -- Jesus, who had promised my mom, "I will never leave you nor forsake you."

My mom would have expressed it in the words of her favorite gospel song:

Why should I feel discouraged, why should the shadows come?

Why should my heart be lonely, and long for heaven and home?

When Jesus is my portion, a constant friend is he.

His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.

Emerging from Fundamentalism

2011-10-05T18:11:32-04:00

September 29th, 2011 was the 77th anniversary of the founding of the Sword of the Lord newspaper in Dallas, Texas in 1934. The Sword, founded by my granddad, John R. Rice, became the most influential fundamentalist publication of the 20th century. In addition to editing the Sworduntil his death in 1980, John R. Rice preached thousands of sermons, wrote scores of books, and mentored hundreds of younger preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham.

Granddad went at his task with single-mindedness, discipline, certainty of results, and a conviction that he was divinely blessed. He brooked no opposition. He seldom entertained or expressed any doubts about his course.

I was the first of his grandsons. I was his first male descendant, and the third eldest of all his grandchildren. Early in my life, I felt a powerful expectation from my grandmother, my parents, and other relatives that I would follow in his footsteps and inherit his mantle of ministry, his passion for preaching and for soul winning. As I became a teenager and started having notions of my own, I inevitably came into conflict with my grandfather's notions of right and wrong, of morality and mission.

There were two problems, really.

First, more than anyone else in our family, more perhaps than any of his daughters--my aunts and my mother--and more than any of my cousins or siblings, I inherited some of my grandfather's strongest personal characteristics. I had an innate and overweening self-confidence. I was perfectly certain that when I expressed an opinion it was the right one. If you disagreed with me it was probably because I needed to explain a little more to you, or you hadn't yet thought things through, or you needed to get some clarity or do some studying or pray about it to let my God set you straight.

Second, Granddad presented his way of looking at things as a package. I knew that I was expected to agree with each judgment or opinion he expressed, from the proper length of my hair to the correct interpretation of any single verse in the Bible. I was expected to agree with him about the need to resist the desegregation of schools and other public institutions in the South. I was expected to support the war in Vietnam as a holy crusade against communism. I was expected to disapprove--with him--of the public company that Billy Graham kept with those whom my grandfather termed liberals or modernists.

I don't remember any doubt Granddad ever expressed, at least in my presence, or any need to get anybody else's point of view--other than God's--before he made a decision. But as a teenager in the early 60s, I began to have my own doubts. First about various small matters, and then about larger ones. I began to interrogate my ideological and theological inheritance.

When two black children tried to integrate my 8th-grade classroom and were met with a hate-filled mob of my fellow students, I began to perceive that black people in my small southern town of Millington, Tennessee were victims of a cruel and historic racial injustice. Then I began to question everything else I had been taught about history or politics or minor details of daily life.

I suspected that Martin Luther King, Jr. might not truly be an agent of communism and an evil troublemaker and infidel, after all. I wondered whether a deck of fifty-two playing cards was truly an excrescence of evil. I questioned whether the Bible was inerrant because it had been literally dictated by God. I began to ask whether women should be allowed to cut their hair or wear pants rather than skirts. I wondered whether going to a theater to watch a movie was truly a sin against God as I had been taught. I asked whether going to a high school dance would deliver me into the hands of the Devil.

When I came home from high school each afternoon to watch as CBS's Walter Cronkite reported on yet another day's casualties in Vietnam--10 or 20 more US soldiers killed in yet another ambush, another hundred or more Vietcong soldiers or civilian sympathizers killed in yet another US airstrike--I started to question all of my grandfather's theological, and political assumptions. Soon I determined that the war in Vietnam was immoral, a criminal enterprise, and a genocidal abomination, and that I was obligated to protest the war.

By the time I was 17, I could no longer believe in my grandfather's God, and I had become my grandfather's self-righteous critic. I suddenly found that I was bound by no constraints whatsoever. I could begin to seriously regard the thoughts of Sartre and Lincoln, Baruch Spinoza and Germaine Greer, Malcolm X and Karl Marx, Joseph Conrad and Joseph Heller. I entertained the illusion that I was free of my grandfather altogether - free of his religion, free of his politics, free of his culture, free of his belief in God, and free, almost, of my family.

Decades later, paradoxically, it was my grandfather's compassion that has drawn me back to a more generous reconsideration of him. As a child, I remember when I was privileged to stay overnight with my grandparents and then to get up and have breakfast with Granddad and Gram early in the morning. After breakfast we had family devotions. Every morning, he prayed that God would bless, keep and protect scores of people, naming them by name, praying for them individually and in detail. He prayed for preachers and missionaries, friends and family members scattered across the world. As he prayed he wept tears of joy and sorrow, leaving me amazed by the depth and power of his emotions.

I always had a feeling that he cared for us as individuals because we were an expression of his love for the whole world, rather than the other way around. He was most interested in finding new souls to win, new targets to reach. He was always interested in selling another ten thousand subscriptions to the Sword of the Lord, printing another million copies of his Bible tract What Must I Do to be Saved? in yet another language, opening yet another letter from someone thanking him for a sermon he'd printed in the Sword and reporting that they had just gotten saved and were now headed for heaven.

He kept careful track of the number of souls he had won to Jesus, the number of letters he'd received from people who said they'd gotten saved while reading a copy of the Sword of the Lord or one of his Bible tracts--28,250 such letters between 1934 and his death in 1980. The statistics mattered a great deal to him as an index of how he was doing with his mission of saving the world.

My grandfather's religion was no academic religion, no intellectual exercise in theology or disputation--though he was a theologian who engaged in many polemics about dogma, faith, and belief. He was driven by a profound compassion for the masses of frail, flawed, lost human beings. His was a religion of the heart and the soul, a religion of the poor and the humble, the brokenhearted and the lost. And he was a preacher because he loved his fellow humans.

As I was growing up, I heard my grandfather preach hundreds of sermons, and each of them was a string of stories--one story or parable or illustration after another. As he preached, he recited poetry, recited long passages of scripture, sang scraps of hymns, and talked to people alive and dead, from his wife sitting in the front pew to his own long-gone mother looking down on him from heaven. In every sermon, he broke into tears a half dozen times as he spoke of his passion for winning lost souls to Jesus.

Over 30 years after his death, my grandfather's compassion is what links me to him. It pulls me back into communion with the man who more than anyone else shaped me into who I am. My grandfather's love for poor lost souls, his desire to find a true religion of the heart, is what gives me hope as I move beyond his narrow fundamentalism toward a larger vision of the kingdom of God.

Andrew Himes is the author of the new book, 'The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family.'

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Photo by Tom Kilpatrick

Taking My Grandmother into My Heart

2011-06-29T12:32:33-04:00

I was born into a prominent fundamentalist family in 1950 and then grew up in the midst of cultural turmoil and massive social change. My granddad was John R. Rice, famous evangelist and editor of the influential Sword of the Lord newspaper, and my grandmother was Lloys Cooke Rice.

I looked up to my granddad and loved him more than I could say, but he lived on a different plane of existence from the one I inhabited. He wasn't just my granddad; he was also smart, famous, funny, powerful and deeply respected. I was at least a little afraid of him, and his approval of me was clearly conditional on my obedience and agreement. My grandmother was different.

Gram, as I called her, had a perpetually joyful spirit. She greeted everyone she met with compassion and cheerful affection. I always knew that no matter what I did, no matter how I looked or whatever opinion I expressed, she would always be my Gram. In my heart, I knew I would always be her favorite grandchild, even though she had 28 other grandchildren who would say the same about themselves!

As a young person in the 1960s and '70s, I became active in the Southern civil rights movement and the movement against the Vietnam War. I lost the faith of my childhood. I came to think of Christianity as the religion of hypocrites, and of Christians as people deaf to racial injustice and supporters of a senseless and criminal war. I hated the evil I saw in the world, and I thought of Christians as part of the problem rather than the solution.

I was deeply estranged from my family for years, and I mourned the loss of our close ties, especially the distance between my grandmother and me. Through all my years of difficult struggle with my family, Gram displayed nothing but acceptance and uncritical regard for me. She was a key reason I returned to Murfreesboro, Tenn., every Christmas season of my life no matter where I lived or what I was up to.

For me, Gram's death in 1989 was a profound shock. I traveled to her funeral in Tennessee from my home in Seattle in a state of numb disbelief. More than a thousand people showed up at the church, and I am convinced that every one of them sincerely believed she was the best friend they had.

When I got on the plane to fly back to Seattle after the service, I began to cry, and I cried all the way home. The stewards and my fellow passengers kept looking at me with concern. They offered me tissues and glasses of water and extra packages of peanuts, and they must have been convinced I was going through a mental breakdown or profound existential crisis. When I got home I continued to cry for days, huge wracking sobs that struck me at the most embarrassing moments -- while sitting in meetings, ordering coffee or buying groceries.

When I finally calmed down and was able to reflect, I realized that my Gram was the only person in my life who had truly loved me unconditionally. She was the only one who had never condemned me, never argued with me, never judged me.

The harshest criticism I remember getting from Gram had come at Christmas time in 1977. At the time, I was a revolutionary communist working as a welder in a steel fabrication shop in Birmingham, Ala., and doing my best to overthrow the imperialist bourgeoisie. My hair was ragged, my jeans had holes in the knees, and I made a point of not shining my shoes in the belief that shoeshine was a bourgeois affectation. My grandmother gently pulled me into a private corner and said, "Andy, I hope you'll consider polishing your shoes. I'm fearful that someone who doesn't know you as well as I do might see your shoes and unfairly judge that you are not the kind, intelligent and good-hearted gentleman I know you to be." My grandmother was no one to trifle with, so I went off and shined my shoes.

As a child, I had taken Jesus into my heart. At the age of 39, after my Gram's funeral, I took my grandmother into my heart. What would my life be like if I started trying to show other people the same unconditional love she showed me? What if I acted that way toward my family members, my daughter, my friends? What if I acted that way toward fellow employees, toward neighbors, toward total strangers?

I began a series of experiments to transform my relationships with everybody in my life. The idea of God was way too big for me to consider at the time, so I set out to embody Gram's love in my life.

Quite frankly, I still find this an incredibly hard thing to do. I found that my feelings and behavior often don't match up. For example, I didn't like or love either of my parents very much after struggling with them for a quarter century. I am sure they thought I was a pretty big jerk in addition to being a world-class prodigal son. However, they were getting old themselves and soon needed a lot of help from me. Figuring out how I could treat them as if I loved them, with all the respect and affection they were due, was a hard struggle. Eventually, I began to feel that maybe I did love them after all, a little bit, and my emotions began to conform to my actions.

In its simplest and most elemental form, the energy that drove the development of fundamentalism was at the heart of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. A scribe asked Jesus the fundamental question: "What commandment is the foremost of all?" His response was: "The foremost is, 'Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."

Jesus made it clear that love and justice are closely tied, and that true religion is naturally the friend of justice rather than its enemy. His words read carefully and in context explain that the test of whether I am following these two commandments is not whether I am experiencing the proper emotions, not whether I feel good about my neighbor, or like my neighbor, or even know my neighbor. The true test is whether I allow the spirit of God to transform me and to transform how I act toward my neighbor.

My grandmother lives on, loving me still, carried in my heart.

Andrew Himes is the author of the new book, 'The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family.'

Redefining Christian Fundamentalism: Following the Example and Teachings of Jesus

2011-05-15T10:07:20-04:00

On Sunday, Oct. 6, 1963, I was a skinny, 13-year-old white kid with glasses. My dad pastored a fundamentalist Baptist church just north of Memphis, and my granddad, John R. Rice, was the dean of fundamentalists in the 20th century. He not only founded The Sword of the Lord newspaper in Texas in 1935, he also personally mentored and influenced many well-known fundamentalist preachers such as Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, and he laid the ideological basis for the modern Religious Right.

As on every other Sunday morning, I sat in the sanctuary of our church. Sunlight streamed through the side windows and glanced off the simple wooden pews. Our congregation of just over 100 settled in by singing the opening verse to "Amazing Grace."

Just three weeks earlier a bomber had killed four little girls at a black Baptist church in Birmingham, Ala., and earlier that summer civil rights leader Medgar Evers had been slain. Yet, I was oblivious to the civil rights movement sweeping the South. No one in my family or church had even mentioned those tragedies. This Sunday morning, however, reality would intrude. A black sailor from the Memphis Naval Air Station walked in the front door of the church with his three white friends. All four wore their dress blue uniforms.

My dad's conducting of the music began to falter as some stopped singing. The sailors ignored the shocked stares and urgent whispers of the congregation, and sat down in our midst. Within minutes, most folks walked out of the church building, led by every member of the board of deacons and all their family members. The next day, my dad met with the black sailor and asked him not to disturb us again.

That day marked the beginning of my slide toward rage and apostasy. By high school, I concluded that there was no God and I hated everything my family and Christianity stood for. Christianity was for hypocrites, racists and warmongers.

I believed my family's brand of religion had little in common with Jesus' teachings about loving your neighbor, serving the poor and seeking peace. While still in high school, I began marching in civil rights demonstrations and protesting the war in Vietnam. Within a few more years I slid all the way to another extreme and called myself an atheist and communist, little realizing I had simply taken a small ideological step to adopt an equal and opposite fundamentalism, intolerant of dissent and similarly polarizing in its philosophy.

John R. Rice preached around the world and published more than 60 books and pamphlets in more than 200 million copies. As his oldest grandson, I was expected to follow in the footsteps of my dad and inherit the mantle of my famous grandfather. Instead, I spent my 20s doing my utmost to overthrow the imperialist bourgeoisie. Now in my 60s, I'm consoled by George Bernard Shaw, who famously paraphrased François Guizot: "Not to be a communist at 20 is proof you have no heart; to be one at 30 is proof you have no brain."

In 1980, my grandfather died. That same year Jerry Falwell led the Moral Majority to help elect Ronald Reagan. At my grandfather's funeral, three weeks before Reagan's inauguration, Falwell preached the sermon. Afterwards, at the family dinner, an anonymous and well-intentioned schemer -- probably one of my aunts -- thoughtfully placed my name tag next to Jerry Falwell's in a vain hope that Jerry might influence my return to the fold. I listened to Jerry explain how God had helped him to bring about Reagan's election, but Jerry failed to convert me.

That same year, I quit my factory job, left the proletarian revolution behind and began a decades-long journey to recover my life -- and to uncover my fundamentalist roots. I wanted to understand the forces that had shaped me and conditioned my family's religion. My book The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family is the result of that long and strange journey -- a work of both history and memoir.

The story of Southern fundamentalism -- and my family -- begins with a mass migration from Europe. Hundreds of thousands of Scots-Irish came to America in the 18th century, bringing with them an individualistic spirit, a stern form of Calvinism, a fierce love of freedom, and a hatred of oppression. They settled along the Southern coast and in Appalachia, provided the backbone of the Revolutionary Army, and then moved on to settle the South. They generally defended slavery, yet also gave the nation its most ardent abolitionists.

They suffered the terrible defeat and trauma of the Civil War, but then clung to a rigid, literalist religion that justified the continued exploitation and oppression of blacks. My great-great-grandfather was a slave-owning Presbyterian and Confederate cavalry officer. My great-grandfather was a Baptist preacher, a Ku Klux Klansman, and a one-term Texas State Senator. My grandfather was the fundamentalist leader who provided a bridge from that past to the modern world.

By the end of his life, my granddad turned his focus to what Jesus said were the true fundamentals of faith: loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself. Jesus viewed his own ministry on earth as a call to radical compassion: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me," said Jesus, "because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

Now I find I am once again willing to describe myself as a fundamentalist, for the first time in almost 50 years. As I try to follow the example and most fundamental teachings of Jesus, I come to better understand my grandfather's motivations, his own all too human attempts to follow Jesus. I find myself having more compassion for my neighbor, and slower to condemn those who don't understand the world exactly as I do.

Following Jesus requires more than right belief. It requires right practice: placing Christ's incarnation of love and justice at the center of your life and practice. Fundamentalism that recalls the unearned grace proclaimed by Jesus will be open-hearted, generous, kind, and hopeful, and will seek the Kindom (my intentional spelling) of God on earth.

Andrew Himes is the author of the new book, 'The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family'.