The God Gap
My wife Kathleen and I went to at a small Baptist church in northern Vermont for a funeral. The only evangelical Christians we know had lost a twenty-one year old son to cancer.
This is what I understand about evangelical belief: The bible is infallible (so, for example, the world was actually created in six days). The only way to be saved (afterlife guaranteed) is through belief in Jesus Christ. Other religions do not qualify. A belief in Jesus Christ is something that each individual must accept through conversion (being born again). Each believer must proselytize the Word so that the rest of us, lost and sinful from birth (Psalm 51:5), can be saved.
Coming from downtown Boston in our aging Subaru with Massachusetts plates, we were unlikely to be mistaken for fellow congregants. I was in a dark suit, white shirt, sober tie. Kathleen — pretty much the equivalent. Despite the occasion, most everyone else appeared much more casual. Overdressed, we stood out.
Our son James went to school in Vermont with an older brother of Luke, the boy who died. James never left, and now owns a shotgun for skeet shooting, but mostly he’s a car guy. For several years he raced stock cars. He has owned several large diesel pickups, a motorcycle, an ATV, and a classic 1972 Ford LTD (which he bought and sold before he had a driver’s license — don’t ask). Until recently he worked as a big rig driver transporting an 80-ton car hauler on a route through northern New York and New England.
James’s pursuit of a country life, removed from his citified upbringing, led him to a friendship with Luke’s family — land-poor parents with five sons working a sizeable beef and dairy farm while also holding outside jobs, all less than 50 miles from the Canadian border. They practically adopted him, even though the last thing they needed was a sixth teenage boy going through their refrigerator.
We met at a graduation cookout, pretty certain that we seemed as different to them as they to us. Our religious persuasion falls somewhere between lapsed and never was. Then there’s the other shoe waiting to drop — religious conviction these days is frequently tied to political identity. The tendency of evangelical Christians to vote overwhelmingly Republican has been dubbed the “God gap.”
Evangelicals have been a prominent Republican voting bloc since at least 1973, the year of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v Wade. Despite Jimmy Carter’s status as a born again Christian, support for the GOP expanded considerably throughout the 1970s. Today, evangelicals are focused on gay and transgender rights, religious education, support for Israel, immigration, the role of science in society, the death penalty and, most recently, critical race theory. We cautiously avoided any topic that might relate to religion, politics, or current affairs.
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The following summer brought Luke to Boston for a backstage internship at Shakespeare on the Common. It was a good fit for a boy with an aptitude for mechanical and electrical work who also loved the theater, and gave us a chance to repay his family’s hospitality. We didn’t know whether he shared the strong religious beliefs his parents already had at his age when they met at Bob Jones University, and we didn’t try to find out. What we did notice, despite his cheerful nature, was an obvious limp and some pain in his right knee. Still, every afternoon without complaining he made the twenty minute walk from our house to the Parkman Bandstand, and the return trip after each night’s performance. It was his first time in a city of any size, but by the time his twin brother Daniel came to visit, he acted the tour guide with nonchalance (although he did manage to get them lost, something his delighted family did not let him forget).
Luke’s knee did not improve. That fall a biopsy uncovered a malignant tumor. There was some limited insurance available through his dad’s job at Cabot Creameries, the farmers’ cooperative that spans Vermont and Maine. After numerous applications and casting about, Luke was admitted to a clinical trial at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. This required regular trips to Boston.
Our two families settled into a routine. His mother, sometimes both parents, would drive him down the evening before his early morning appointments. Luke slept on a couch in our den while one or both parents occupied James’ old room. We ate dinner around our kitchen table and watched Jeopardy. Luke was competitive. Team Boston did pretty well in predictable old-school categories; Vermont dominated with pop culture, mechanical sciences, math, and movies, not to mention animal husbandry. To our over-educated chagrin, dictionary questions were a toss-up.
During this time the country was mired in the 2016 campaign, then the election, and finally the inauguration of Donald Trump the following January. We went to Washington for the Women’s March. We didn’t talk about that and we didn’t follow our usual habit of switching to the news on the nights they stayed with us. We talked about Vermont, family, farming, school plays, and summer theater. Luke was often in high spirits. Sometimes too high.
After the clinical trial, the family retreated to Vermont to await results. These were inconclusive. Luke didn’t improve, but also seemed no worse. That summer he directed a production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at The Vermont Children’s Theater located near the family farm. Kathleen went to observe middle schoolers, and even younger actors, excited by the big kid in charge, infected by his enthusiasm. Later that year he qualified for another trial, this time at Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire. This trial was unsuccessful. The cancer metastasized. Radiation and chemotherapy followed. He stabilized, but wasn’t in remission. Walking, even standing, became increasingly painful.
In the summer of 2018 Luke was admitted into yet a third clinical trial, and he returned to the Farber. This one involved immunotherapy, the removal, treatment and reinjection of T cells (white blood cells) over a month-long period. The process compromises the immune system, requiring him to remain close to the hospital. So Luke came back to stay with us, this time for a prescribed month of recovery.
Luke had shared a dream with his mother. He wanted to go to Hollywood and see movies made, so during this period Kathleen made a call to the Massachusetts Film Office. An X-Men prequel, The New Mutants, was being filmed at the Medfield State Hospital, an abandoned mental treatment facility, suitably creepy and run down. He loved it. The cast and crew, veterans of previous visits by The Make A Wish Foundation, invited him on the set while they were shooting, took him backstage for the editing process, and treated him to lunch with the company. He came back with a New Mutants nylon jacket, walking on air. Two days later fatigue set in, and he could barely get up or talk.
During the next pause I finagled an afternoon sailboat ride in Boston Harbor from a neighbor. Luke was happy and relaxed that day, but I could see it didn’t measure up to The New Mutants. It went on like that for the month, ups and downs. After the trial, he went back to Vermont. Follow-up testing was scheduled for the next few months.
Luke’s illness gradually became a part of our lives. Still, we compartmentalized. We were wary of our differences, didn’t speak about our friends and neighbors involved in political causes or writing projects. And we didn’t think it was up to us to reveal details about Luke and his troubles. We protected ourselves by being a little bit removed.
Luke and his mother resumed spending nights with us before his early morning clinical tests. On one occasion we had invited Marianne Leone (probably best known for her role in The Sopranos) to read excerpts and discuss the book she had written about the loss of a child: Knowing Jesse: A Mother's Story of Grief, Grace, and Everyday Bliss. She brought along her husband, the actor Chris Cooper, and we had perhaps twenty bookish types and writers in our living room. I was uneasy. We were mixing two very different types of company, and the book’s subject was awfully close to home. During drinks before the reading, Luke’s mother buttonholed Chris Cooper who, it turned out, grew up on his father’s cattle ranch outside of Leavenworth, Kansas. The rest of us were not qualified to join them in discussing the differences between cattle in Kansas and Vermont, but everyone had a fine time. Luke’s mom took a selfie with Chris Cooper, and still asks occasionally if we know any more movie stars.
The pattern continued. Clinical trials, tests, setbacks. Finally, with or without drugs, the pain in Luke’s knee became unbearable. He decided to have his leg amputated. Then he backed out. Then he went through with it. In late November, full of foreboding, we drove up to have Sunday lunch with him at the 99 Restaurant near his church. James joined us. We found Luke in a genuinely good mood. He’d taken control. He was free of pain. He was proud. He was doing physical therapy. He was on crutches, but soon he’d be fitted for a prosthetic. He loaded up on a Bacon Cheeseburger with all the fixings, followed by something called the Towering Midnight Fudge Cake. He told amputee jokes.
More test results after the leg was removed. No remission. He stayed home. The intermittent news we received was vague, unhelpful. In late spring we made a trip to the farm under the pretext that we’d been visiting James. Luke was in a chair in a corner of the kitchen with a blanket over his leg. It seemed he’d been in that spot all winter. At one point he called Daniel down from their room upstairs and spoke quietly in his ear. Daniel nodded and ran out. It seemed from their whispering that we should leave, we were intruding. After a few minutes Daniel came running back with a large container of strawberries from the garden. Luke wants you to have these. At exactly the same instant they broke into laughter.
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As Luke went downhill, so did the country. There’s surely an undeniable God gap in this country — the serious chasm between Christian principles and Donald Trump. At times, when Luke was doing well, in good spirits, we thought maybe we were wasting an opportunity to get into it, have a conversation, gain some understanding. But when we were together it didn’t seem important. How could it matter, in the unspoken shortness of time?
Picture now a late September in northern Vermont. Hillsides still green, foliage on full display. Sunny days followed by long cool nights. Again we drove to the farm, this time for the wedding of one of Luke’s brothers. On the upper meadow, hay bales were arranged in rows for seating. A floral trellis served as an altar. In the distance, a line of ridge tops receded from view, each one further away and paler than the one before. Behind us, a white canopy pitched over makeshift tables and chairs, grills fired up, sideboards of food and drink.
Luke was off to one side in a wheelchair, hunched over, the blanket in his lap, eyes on the ground. We hadn’t seen him in months, and now he was an old man. My first thought was inane — how’d they get him over the stone wall and up here through the meadow? But then immediately I pictured four brothers taking turns, carrying the fifth. We went over to say hello and he nodded silently. And my second thought — he knows he’ll never have this. I don’t remember what I said that last time, before we returned to our hay bale.
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At the funeral service Luke’s mom told us she had wanted to have him a lot longer, but the Lord had a different plan. For my part (lost and sinful) I’m thinking, seriously, a young boy attacked by his own body, that’s a plan? I suppose there’s some comfort in believing things happen “for a reason.” But I’m persuaded by Joni Mitchell. There’s comfort in melancholy.
The funeral service was a crash course in evangelical fervor. We sat in the middle of the back row. The church was an auditorium style room, carpeted, blond wood, a dais for the preacher and a jumbo screen raised behind him on a slight downward tilt. The preacher referred to Luke only in passing, instead concentrating heavily on what we had to do to save our souls. He delivered a stemwinder. Good acts won’t save you. Being “nice” won’t save you. Kindness, charity, generosity, honesty, love, whatever you think you’re doing right won’t save you. Only accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior will save you. Was I only imagining his eyes never left mine? Afterward, Kathleen leaned over and, as she has so often, took away my doubt. “Tell me he wasn’t looking at us the whole time.”
The God gap has been rationalized repeatedly: God, after all, works in mysterious ways, and there is no evil that can compare with the centerpiece of Christian Right politics — abortion. Or: hate the sin but love (and vote for) the sinner. Or: if good acts won’t save you, doesn’t it follow that bad acts won’t condemn a true believer? Or: who are we to cast the first stone? Who are we to judge?
In my eighth decade, a twenty year old boy showed me courage in the face of a relentless disease and inevitable death. We learned afterwards that Luke told his mother not to worry, not to grieve. He told her he knew what was in store, he was ok with it. If God works in mysterious ways, Luke’s death is entirely too mysterious for me. Can anyone explain, when you’ve just spent the winter with one leg removed, and it may be your last, taking so much pleasure in passing out fresh strawberries?
Andrew Grainger is a retired Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court. He has been designated a Fulbright Senior Specialist by the U.S. Department of State. He and his wife, Kathleen Stone, have taught courses and seminars on U.S. law in numerous countries in Europe and the Far East. His writing has appeared in WBUR’s Cognoscenti and the Boston Globe.