Frank Schaeffer In Conversation with Author Kristian Erickson, exploring his book, French Kissing in an American Cult.
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Kristian Halvor Erickson
July 3, 1947, Seattle, Washington. I was born into the renowned Longmire family, pioneers in the American Pacific Northwest and Alaska. I spent my youth in the pastoral splendor of the Cascades and Olympic Mountains.
These following six themes dominated my life then, just as they still do today:
1. Mountaineering and preservation of the wilderness
2. Philosophy—especially Enlightenment thought
3. Classical music—baroque to romantic composers
4. Languages—European and Native American idioms
5. Art—both as an artist and as a student of art history
6. The unending struggle for human rights
As with the rest of my family, I was an atheistic humanist, except for the fact that most of them were farmers and adventurers who wouldn't have been able to give their viewpoint a name.
Later in high school, I accepted the belief in God and then was turned to the right politically. Before this time, I had been an innocent young man, interested in boys, not girls, but since I was far more interested in mountains and skiing, my sexuality wasn't a factor. I had lived without fear, but then under the influence of the church, I acceded to the neo-evangelical dogma that I must loathe myself.
In school, the designation “classic dyslexic”was not yet known. I struggled to learn to read and do simple arithmetic; fortunately, my mother and father were tireless, patient teachers. However, in the classroom, I was just a dumb kid, shunted into remedial classes. When I was a teen, counselors told me I could never succeed in college; so, instead, I should become a gardener—now, I suppose that wouldn't have been so bad, but my heart and intellect were elsewhere.
Fortuitously, my parents moved from Mercer Island Washington, farther away from Seattle, to Issaquah just before I started high school. I just showed up on the first day and chose all the “college prep” courses I wanted. At the same time, my latent abilities began to blossom, and I gradually became recognized as an honors student and a school leader.
After high school, I chose Pacific Lutheran University for my major in German and my minor concentrations in philosophy and geology. Thereafter I spent my junior year at the University of Freiburg in Germany, followed after graduation by a summer at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Graduate school was in Germanics at the University of Washington, where I was a TA in the German Department.
As an idealistic young socialist, I was present in radical student movements and protests—notably the May 1968 riots at the Sorbonne and then in the Prague Springtime under Dubček.
The crash: In my early twenties, my future as a polyglot, naturalist, and philosopher doglegged nearly fatally. I imprisoned myself in a Pentecostal mega-church, because I thought that this way I could stop being gay. That Seattle group, small when I started, was Community Chapel and Bible Training Center, where I rose to leadership as the Director of Communications and as the author of many publications—all under the anonymous byline of Community Chapel Publications, where I became the Editor. I was an apologist and an ideologue in this so-called holiness-church. Furthermore, I was a main enabler for the oligarch-pastor, a man tortured by his inferiority complex. I was a little Goebbels to a small-minded Hitler.
In a little more than two decades, this organization succumbed to the oldest ruses in human history. It descended into avarice, greed, and stupendous promiscuity in an atmosphere that cultivated misogyny and depravity. Its collapse was on TV news and print and television tabloid journalism.
Pastor Donald Barnett, now involved with his many hussies, spent time in jail for public exhibitionism. I had been his confidant and ghost writer, but now the vice-president of the corporation mounted a secret campaign against me, evidently because it had become obvious that I was a closeted gay man, who had way too much power with the pastor. The VP persuaded Barnett to fire me, so I lost my job and my big salary just before the organization imploded and crashed in a terror of lawsuits and allegations of misdeeds.
In hindsight, it was a stroke of luck for me to get out when I did. I became moderately successful as a serigraph artist, and I even had some work displayed in a show at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. However, I couldn't support my wife and our son. I managed to parlay my mountain-rescue-oriented medical training—I was a Washington State Emergency Medical Technician—into a job as a state-licensed insurance adjuster specializing in catastrophic and gruesome accidents.
Anchorage Alaska is my home. I have lived here longer than anywhere else in my life.
FRENCH KISSING in an AMERICAN CULT
A Gay Idealist Stumbles,
then Falls Into the Hell of a Pentecostal Mega-Church
This book was published October 2020 (when I was recovering from Covid-19) by my own new company—named with purposeful irony—Tasty Lutefisk Publishing. It is available from Amazon.com as a paperback and a Kindle e-book. It is also available from other booksellers such as Barnes and Noble and Powell's City of Books, Portland, Oregon.
This satire reflects my Norwegian-American self-deprecating nature, and I lay myself bare. Parts of the story are so tragic that if I didn't laugh, I would never stop crying. Folks who were similarly enmeshed in this or other cults, find my book enlivening and helpful.
The once-holiness Pentecostal church organization that dominates my story has mostly died out, but the remnant is scary. Those folks, who think of themselves as guardians of the faith, own arsenals of guns, and it seems that there is no conspiracy theory they don't like. Theirs is an “us-versus-them” world, and by virtue of my book and my liberal views, I am one of the “them's”. One minister, who is now part of a similar California church, sent me an email recently to say that he would not read my book because “it is so wrong on so many levels”. Did he understand the irony? How could he know that the content is bad if he wouldn't read it?
One of the manuscript reviewers, whom I acknowledge in the book, Anne Compton of British Columbia, asked me if I should fear for my life because of what I wrote. I told her that I didn't think so. I live three-and-a-half hours away from Seattle by jet. Also, as a judge explained to me after an unrelated 1993 criminal assault trial where I was the key witness for the prosecution, “Enraged people like the defendant move on to direct their hatred at others.” I trust that the judge was right.
--Kristian Erickson