“Do you remember the lady from The 700 Club –” Crankenstein started to ask me a couple weeks ago, and before she finished the question, I knew the answer was no. My parents would’ve thrown our television out the window before subjecting their family to evangelical Christian programming, while Crankenstein was raised by religious fundamentalists who forbade her from listening to secular music or playing non-Biblical video games. When she came into possession of an illicit copy of Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill as a tween, she hid it as if her life depended on it never being found — because she sincerely thought it did. The first time she listened to it, she kept pausing to double-check that her parents were still gone, and she recalls holding her breath during its risqué lyrics, wondering if her house was about to be struck by lightning.
In high school, she took part in residential academic enrichment programs along the East Coast, returning with books she had to diligently conceal, including To Ride a Silver Broomstick (the old version with the cover that looks like a Teen Witch poster) and The Complete Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, a collection of grisly comics that made me uncomfortable enough in my thirties that I can only imagine her parents locking her in a toolshed for the rest of her life had they laid eyes on it when she was 16. (In my room, I hid far more pedestrian fare, like Judy Blume’s Forever and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle. Sure, D.H. Lawrence novels already lined my bookshelves, but my parents had never heard of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial, while my mom would’ve zeroed right in on Forever, having once read it herself.)
Back in the present day, Crankenstein went a-Googling to find the 700 Club host whose name she was trying to recall. “Terry Meeuwsen!” she exclaimed, again falling silent as she skimmed a Wikipedia page. A few minutes later, I was rolling around on the floor with our dog when she commanded our attention: “There’s something we have to listen to together, as a family.” She cranked up her phone’s volume and I looked at her expectantly, assuming whatever I was about to be subjected to would be worse than Dixie Carter’s cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire.” But I was unprepared for just what an experience former beauty queen turned Christian TV personality Meeuwsen’s “Eyes of My Heart” would be. Here is its Kathie Lee Giffordesque chorus:
There is power in your blood and I receive it
— Terry Meeuwsen, “Eyes of My Heart”
And the work you have begun will be completed
Surrendering to you, Lord, I see the healing start
Now that I’m looking through the eyes of my heart
“It’s no ‘Shining Through Your Eyes of Love,'” I joked when it was over, a reference to an inspirational song from Love Note, an ’80s teen Christian romance film I made her watch the previous year. As Crankenstein reminisced about the praise and worship music she’d been exposed to in youth groups, I imagined a voice-over in an ambulance chasing attorney’s commercial sternly announcing “If you received the power in Jesus’s blood between 1995 and 2000, you might be entitled to compensation. Call this toll-free number to see if you qualify, representatives are standing by!”
Crankenstein left her parents’ church as soon as she could, and they later joined an even stricter denomination, while she pursued gentler forms of Christianity, giving Quakerism the old college try before finding a home in a gayer, more liberal Episcopal setting. When we first started dating, her parents were not particularly thrilled to learn that I’m an agnostic Jew, and elderly members of her church choir acted friendly but seemed concerned I might try to lure her away from them. On the other end of the spectrum, a handful of misguided optimists were hopeful I’d join their flock.
Meanwhile, my clown-car full of atheist siblings were disturbed that I sometimes accompanied Crankenstein to Sunday services. But I wasn’t ripe for conversion; I was only there because we had so little time together during her second year of residency — and because we grabbed lunch from a nearby Thai joint afterward. “What did you think?” she often asked as we filtered out, and I’d wait until her fellow congregants had scattered before wondering “What the hell is with the music?” a question we revisited all these years later, after listening to “Eyes of My Heart.”
“Why do Christians have such low self-esteem in these songs?” I asked her. “Everything’s ‘I’m a worthless piece of crap, God/I see it in your eyes/Until the day I found you/I didn’t want to be alive.’ If you’re made in His image, are you really that bad?” And then there were the depictions of violence, implied or otherwise. (As Meeuwsen cheerfully belted, “Now we’re on that hill together/And I see your agony/Struggling, suffering, so I can be free!”) Left to my own devices, I’d prefer something peppier and slightly less gruesome, like Delaney & Bonnie’s “Soldiers of the Cross.” Or better yet, a haunting, gorgeous song about a religious experience of a different sort: George Michael’s “Jesus to a Child.”
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