Table of Contents
Foreword by Martin Gardner……..5
1. Peter ........................ 7
2. Pentecostal Power .............18
3. The Invisible Hand ...........28
4. The Guiding Fiction ..........36
5. Gray Towers ...................42
6. The Mustard Seed of Doubt ....48
7. Chesterton ....................60
8. Angelina ......................66
9. The Flames of Hell .......73
10. Karl Barth ..................84
ll. Situation Ethics ...........92
12. Room X .....................99
13. Marx ........................105
14. Lois ..........................116
Part II: The War ................125
15. Boots and Sparks .......127
16. USS Montgomery ........138
17. The Ship Becomes a She .....151
18. Mothballs ..................160
Part III: After the War ............173
19. Electronic Machine ........175
20. The Molecules of Jesus....184
21. Martha ..........................192
22. Between the Horns .......201
23. Disenchantment and Diamonds ..209
24. The Unknown Tongue .......218
25. First Draft ........................223
26. Come and See ................229
27. Knockout .......................233
28. The Secret of Easter .......243
29. Aphasia .........................254
30. The City of Saint Francis ...262
Afterword ..........................273
Foreword
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, from
1932 through 1936, the university was in the throes of its now-famous
"Hutchins-Adler” period. Robert Maynard Hutchins had been lured
from the Yale Law School, where he had been dean, to become the
country’s youngest, handsomest, wittiest, and most arrogant college
president. Hutchins in turn had lured to Chicago his friend and mentor,
Mortimer Jerome Adler. A great hue and cry went up from these two
men about the deterioration of the higher learning in America, the im-
portance of the Great Books, and the need for a return to metaphysics
and theology. No one who was not at Gray City on the Midway during
this clangorous period can appreciate the shock waves that rattled the
academic community when it first discovered that its president, invoking
the name of God in commencement speeches, actually meant what
he was saying.
It was also the time of the University of Chicago’s so-called “New
Plan.” A student could proceed at his own speed, take final exams when-
ever he felt like it; class attendance was noncompulsory, and one could
audit, without credit, as many extra courses as desired. As a philosophy
major with vague yearnings to become a writer, I took the utmost ad-
vantage of these freedoms. One of the most rewarding of the many
courses which I audited was Dr. Homer Wilson’s introduction to the
psychology of religious belief. I can still remember the bewildered
divinity school students, shifting positions uncomfortably on their
chairs, listening intently to Wilson’s measured, sonorous tones as he
slowly, inexorably undermined the foundations of their faith.
Several years later, when I was working in the university’s depart-
ment of press relations, I became personally acquainted with Wilson and
his wife, and with Wilson’s young protege and friend, Peter Fromm.
In the late forties, after I had settled in New York City to pursue a writ-
ing career in earnest, I lost contact with all three, though occasionally
I would come across an article or book review by Wilson, usually in
a scholarly journal, or see a notice of the publication of a new book
by him.
Homer Wilson died in June, 1971, a few days after the passing of
Reinhold Niebuhr. Wilson was 86. A year later his widow, searching
his files, came upon the typed manuscript of a book which he had titled
The Flight of Peter Fromm.
Incredibly, Mrs. Wilson had not known that her husband had written
it. No one else, it seems, was aware of the manuscript’s existence except
Peter himself. Although the book’s first chapter makes clear that
Wilson intended to publish his book, there is not a scrap of correspon-
dence to suggest that it had ever been submitted to a publisher. I do not
know why. Perhaps he felt it was too personal a story to make public
until many years had intervened between the narrated events and the
book’s publication. Perhaps he was never satisfied with what he had
written, for the manuscript was cluttered with revisions in penciled
longhand on almost every page.
Mrs. Wilson wrote to me in October, 1972. Would I, she wanted to
know, be willing to read her husband’s manuscript, to tell her candidly
whether I thought she should make an effort to get it published? I read
the pages with mixed emotions. The Wilson who tells the story of his
strange, in many ways inexplicable (at least to me), friendship with Peter
comes through the lines as stuffier, more pedantic, certainly more opin-
ionated than the Wilson I remember. At times his lengthy, rambling
discourses on theology--the Barthian theology in particular--are an-
noyingly tedious and tendentious. Peter, as I recall him in the thirties,
was not nearly so straightforward and guileless as Wilson makes him
out to be. And Mrs. Wilson, an attractive, vivacious woman, remains
curiously in the shadows. It may be that Wilson considered it unseemly
to write about his wife in depth and detail. He was, after all, not writing
a novel.
If personalities in Wilson’s narrative, including himself, are slightly
caricatured, as it seems to me they are, I do not think that Wilson con-
sciously intended it that way. I am convinced that every incident and
conversation is as accurate as he could recall it or reconstruct it from
what he was told by Peter and other participants in the story. If distor-
tions are there, they are surely understandable. Small, seemingly irrel-
evant facts have a way of slipping from an old man’s memory. Events
shed their ragged edges, their loose ends. They take on sharper outlines,
more vivid colors.
The thousands of corrections and marginal insertions scribbled on
Wilson’s battered manuscript testify, as I mentioned before, to his
constant efforts to polish his text and bring it up to date. It is a pity
he did not live to add some pithy comments about the recent revival
of fundamentalism and the young Jesus People with their upward-
pointing index fingers, their Pentecostal fervor, and their quaint proph-
ecies of doomsday. One wonders, too, what Wilson would have said
about the exploitation, by the Broadway money-changers, of the life
of Jesus. Hard rock of ages, amplified for me. It is difficult to say if he
would have liked or disliked Jesus Christ, Superstar, or been utterly
indifferent to it.
And there is that latest Protestant fad, the “theology of hope.” As
though hope were something new in Christianity! What would Wilson
have thought, I sometimes wonder, of the recent Protestant emphasis
on singing, dancing, laughing, playing, with Jesus as the great super-
clown of history and the crucifixion as the climax of God’s vast super-
comedy staged with such brilliant light and sound effects on a hill out-
side the ancient city of jerusalem. (See Harvey Cox’s, The Feast of Fools,
Sam Keen’s To a Dancing God, and a dozen other recent books with
similar ploys.) There is, we all know, not a single reference in the New
Testament to Jesus as having smiled or laughed. As I write, one can buy
a “Jesus wristwatch” bearing the face of a grinning Savior (he comes in
two racial colors, white and black) and a rotating crimson heart.
On the surface The Flight of Peter Fromm is the story of a young
man who, to the end, never shares an old man’s conviction that God
does not exist. Below the surface, the clash between these two irrecon-
cilable ways of viewing the mystery of our existence generates an elabo-
rate counterpoint of conflicting ideas. Wilson was writing about a theme
deeper, older, and more permanent than perhaps he fully realized. The
battle between atheism and theism is as ancient as humanity and un-
likely to subside as long as the human species, with its unimaginable
progeny in the millenia that may lie ahead, is on this old earth or flour-
ishing in colonies on other planets. Who can say that the conflict is not
one that divides all thinking creatures on billions of other planets in this
monstrous universe of ours? Who can say that it is not a conflict that
will last until the end of time?
But it is best to say no more. At Mrs. Wilson’s request, I have edited
her husband’s manuscript only in the most superficial way. It is a privi-
lege to have played a small role in its publication.
Martin Gardner
Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.
1973
Peter
Chapter 1
If you were living in Chicago in the spring of 1948, and if you read
one of the city’s newspapers on the Monday following Easter, you may
have seen the story. A divinity school student named Peter Fromm had
been preaching an Easter sermon, his first Easter sermon, at the Midway
Community Church in the Hyde Park section of Chicago’s south side.
Toward the end of the sermon Fromm suddenly lost control of his
speech. After collapsing on the floor of the pulpit, he had been rushed to
the University of Chicago’s Billings Hospital, a few blocks west of the
church. If you saw the story, perhaps you paused for a few seconds of
genuine compassion. Or a few seconds of sardonic amusement? More
likely you read it quickly, wondered for a fleeting instant what had been
wrong with the poor fellow, then promptly forgot about him.
Except for one garbled story in the Chicago American-even Fromm’s
last name was misspelled-the newspaper accounts were brief and
accurate. Fortunately, it was not until Sunday evening that the City
News Bureau, which then supplied local stories to city papers, heard
about the incident. Their account of Peter’s collapse had been based
on nothing more than one telephone conversation, late Sunday night,
with Dr. Homer Wilson, pastor of the Midway Community Church
where Peter Fromm had been invited to preach. Wilson did not tell
the reporter on the phone that young Fromm had first interrupted his
own sermon by bursting into wild, mirthless laughter. He did not explain
how the sermon had degenerated into nonsense words, or describe the
unfortunate assault suffered by Beulah Schwatzer, the church organist.
No Chicago paper printed a single line about the chaotic physical strug-
gle which took place in the pulpit or reported that Fromm had finally
been subdued by a blow on the side of his skull. When the pastor
page 8
answered the reporter's questions he had not, to be sure, exactly lied.
He had merely omitted. The lurid, slapstick details spread rapidly by
word of mouth through the University of Chicago area. Miraculously,
they never reached the city's newsrooms.
This is a book about what happened in the Midway Community
Church on that crazy Easter morning, why it happened, and what hap-
pened afterward to Peter Fromm.
l am Homer Wilson.
I first met Peter in 1938, three years before Japan’s little toy bombs
dropped gently down on Pearl Harbor. I was then in my early fifties.
For fourteen years I had been pastor of the Midway Community Church;
for twelve years I had been a part-time teacher at the University of
Chicago`s Divinity School. Peter had been one of my students.
A teacher’s first impressions of a student are often so wide of the mark
that he learns to guard against them. Every new face is a fresh encounter
with a young, hopefully malleable mind, but I had been teaching too
long to suppose that I could predict on the opening day of a class which
minds would react favorably to my radical brand of Christianity. Most
of the students, I knew, would be disturbed by my approach. They would
conceal their disagreements, avoid controversy in their questions, but
I would sense the hostility in their eyes. As the months galloped by,
two or three who were receptive to my views would become personal
friends; my “disciples," I sometimes called them. They would take other
courses from me. I would follow their academic careers with interest
and, after they left Chicago to become ministers in other cities, I would
exchange letters with them about their problems.
But the majority of students in my classes would remain permanently
nondescript. Week after week I would see their cherubic, unlined faces
arranged in rows in front of me, eyes watching me warily, not quite
sure of how to take my phrases. Was I or was I not an atheist? Occa-
sionally one of them would nod in agreement or frown slightly with
disapproval, yawn or cough or scratch his nose, or smile at one of my
stale, time-tested jokes. I would find it difficult to memorize their names.
Even their faces, as soon as they left the classroom, would blur in my
memory. Unless they spoke first, 1 seldom recognized them when I
passed them on the campus or met them in an elevator.
From the start, Peter Fromm was an exception. Although he disagreed
strongly, sometimes violently, with almost everything I said, I found
it impossible not to take an instant liking to him. On the first day of my
class-it was a course listed in the divinity school’s catalog as “Problems
of Applied Christianity"-I was sitting behind a desk in a second-floor
page 9
room of Swift Hall, in the middle of my opening remarks, when the door
on my left burst open and Peter hurried in.
"I'm sorry,” he said, a bit out of breath. “I got lost. I hope you’re
Dr. Wilson
“So do I,” I replied.
Polite laughter rippled around the room and Peter grinned as he
took one of the few remaining empty chairs in the front row. I can close
my eyes now and see him sitting there, looking incredibly boyish,
Watching me intently, waiting for me to resume speaking. His eyes were
large and clear and blue. A faint scar slanted across his forehead,
above his left eye, and there was a slight, barely perceptible twist to his
nose that gave him the appearance of a good~looking young pugilign
Indeed, I learned later, he had been the top middle-weight boxer on his
high school team. It was in a high school boxing tournament that his
nose had once been broken.
Peter was never a brilliant student in the academic sense. Not that
he lacked intelligence. He simply had a low threshold of impatience
with the minutiae of scholarship. He was too eager to get finished with
one book and on to the next. But he had one rare, refreshing trait, 9,
constitutional inability to accept any form of intellectual evasion.
To be a Protestant minister today, in the typical church of a pros-
perous suburb, one must be as skilled as a politician in the rhetoric of
ambiguity, circumlocution, and double-talk. I am not referring now to
those fashionable “in” terms that vary from year to year in the nation’s
leading seminaries: estrangement, kerygma, didache, hermeneutics
agape, demythologizing, or such Germanisms as Angst, Wissenschaft and
Redaktionsgeschichte. At the moment, at divinity school teas, phrases
most often heard are those that Dietrich Bonhoeffer invented when he
was in a Nazi prison-cheap grace, religionless Christianity, holy world-
liness--and Harvey Cox’s Christian secularization. When, however, the
student becomes a minister he obviously has to bottle up this esoteric
jargon. He must talk plain language, though in such a way that no lis-
tener can take offense. He may attack race prejudice, but it must be
done obliquely so that no one in the congregation imagines it refers to
him. He may attack business ethics, but it must be in such a manner that
no businessman who listens will think that he is implicated. The minister
can, indeed must, use the old doctrinal phrases, but always so cunningly
that conservative listeners will take them one way, liberal listeners
another. In brief, he must learn to preach without saying anything.
One of the great functions of a liberal divinity school is to train its
students in just these skills. It is amusing to watch a student slowly
page 10
acquire them as he moves closer and closer to his graduation. But Peter
would have none of it. He insisted, at all places, at all times, on calling
a spade a spade. He struggled perpetually to get down to brass tacks, to
the nitty-gritty. Other students in my classes, who also did not share my
radical views, would remain discreetly silent. Not Peter. We collided
openly and head-on. It was not hard to see, however, that behind his
blustering confidence, behind his brash dogmatism, his mind was in a
typical ferment of seminarian uncertainty. He knew so little. He had
so much to learn.
One afternoon, a few weeks after the class had begun, I mentioned
--too casually perhaps--that not many Protestant ministers today, out-
side fundamentalist circles, believe in a physical Resurrection of Jesus.
A deep Hush came over Peter’s face.
“But how,” he said, interrupting my remarks in a loud voice, “could
such a person accept Saint Paul’s remark in First Corinthians, Chapter
fifteen, verse fourteen: ‘And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching
vain’?”
A deathlike silence sat on the classroom. I must have looked startled.
It is not the sort of question that students at the University of Chicago
Divinity School often ask their professors.
“Mr. Fromm,” I said, trying to keep my face solemn, “I agree with
you that Paul thought of the Resurrection of Jesus in a literal, physical
sense. But Protestant Christianity has never been a fixed, unchanging
set of doctrines. There are all sorts of things we can see more clearly
today than Paul could. Old wine must be put into new bottles. The old
dogmas have to be reinterpreted. They have to be given fresh meanings,
meanings relevant to our secular, scientific age.”
“But,” insisted Peter, oblivious of the smiles around him, “suppose
you have a church. Suppose the people in your church all believe in the
Resurrection the way Saint Paul did. Wouldn’t it be dishonest to be their
pastor if you didn’t believe it, too?"
“In a way,” I said “Surely, though, it’s a trivial and justifiable kind
of dishonesty. In the first place there are many Protestant congregations
in which only a small handful of members take the Resurrection story
literally. And even if they are a majority, a minister has the responsibility
of holding his congregation together while he liberalizes it. He doesn’t
want to split it down the middle into two warring factions. He has a
choice”-and here I threw out an alliterative aphorism I had stolen
years before from one of my older colleagues-“of being a truthful
traitor or a loyal liar. If he’s too explicit in making his doctrinal views
known to his congregation, he’s not likely to remain long at that church
as pastor. If he wants to continue his ministry, to work inside the frame-
page 11
work of an ongoing, viable denomination-in short, if he wants to remain
a loyal Protestant-he can’t avoid a certain amount of deception. After
all, jesus himself side-stepped a lot of embarrassing questions by an-
swering them ambiguously."
Peter didn't agree. He had just challenged me to cite an example
when the class bell rang like the gong that closes a round of a boxing
match. After the other students had left the room, he was still standing
by my desk and arguing.
“I really can’t stay any longer,” I said, checking the time on a watch
I always carried in an upper vest pocket. “I have another class on
another floor.”
As Peter followed me out the doorway and down the hall, I found
myself making an impulsive suggestion. It surprised me. Never before
In all ml’ Years of teaching had I made such a proposal to a student I
had so recently met.
Why don’t you come over to my house tonight? It’s hard to discuss
things like this briefly. If you have the evening free we can talk as much
as we like.”
Peter was delighted. I gave him my address, in the fifty~seven hundred
block of Harper Avenue, and suggested he drop around at eight. It was
the beginning of a series of similar evening sessions that continued until
they were interrupted by the war and Peter’s enlistment in the Navy.
When the war ended, in the shadows of those two malevolent mush-
rooms, Peter returned to Chicago to complete his studies, and I began
to see a lot of him again.
Over the years my wife and I grew extremely fond of Peter. Our
own son, had he not died a few weeks after his birth, would have been
about Peter s age. The complications of delivery had left my wife unable
to bear more children. We had one older child, a daughter, now married
to 9. physicist and living in Pasadena, California. As for Peter, he had
been a small boy when his father died. There was clearly a strong corn-
POHCIH, unrecognized by either of us at first, of a father-son attitude
toward each other during those early formative months of om' friendship.
Although I carefully followed the constant twists and tums in Peter’s
thinking as he stumbled away from his boyhood beliefs (twists and turns
for which I myself was partly responsible), it was not until after his
mental breakdown that I began to attach a mythic, archetypal quality
to his development. I do not want to minimize his unique traits. Peter
was very much an original. But there was a general sense in which his
history seemed to me more and more a paradigm of the mental growth
of thousands of young men who come to the University of Chicago
Divinity School from the small towns of the Midwest, bringing with
page 12
them the shabby, disintegrating baggage of their narrow sectarian
backgrounds. My long affiliation with the school had kept me in close
touch with the minds of these young men and with the problems that
most tormented them. In Peter I could see those problems heightened,
intensified, dramatized by the impulsive candor of his personality.
Like his namesake in the Gospels, Peter was impetuous in both speech
and action. While other students kept a diplomatic silence, he never
hesitated to voice his doubts, express his convictions, ask the foolish
questions. Where other students accepted compromises, soaked up the
comfortable, other-directed attitudes of the university’s religious com-
munity, Peter plunged recklessly into the very core of things until he
found an answer that satisfied him in the deepest recesses of his soul.
It was Simon Peter who did not pause, as John did, at the entrance to
the open tomb. He ran inside. It was Simon Peter who did not hesitate
to step out on the waves or draw his sword in quick defense of his
Master. It was Simon Peter who wept bitterly when the crowing of a
rooster reminded him of his proud boast and cowardly denial. And when
the risen Christ appeared on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, the
wonderful old myths tell us, it was the naked and impatient Peter who
put on his fishing coat and cast himself from the boat into the sea.
In a loose, fragmented way, the story of Peter Fromm parallels the
history of Protestant theology. His adolescent conversion was, as we
shall soon see, to a type of primitive Christianity indistinguishable from
the childlike, apostolic faith described in the Book of Acts. As Peter
matured, his views inevitably grew more sophisticated. During his
second year in the divinity school, he was deep in the study of Augustine
and Thomas Aquinas. He plunged with enthusiasm into the dusty
writings of Luther and Calvin. Then came the gnawing doubts of the
Enlightenment, the Higher Criticism, a fatal flirtation with Karl Barth’s
abortive attempt to go “beyond modernism” and back to the theology
of the Reformers. The analogy must not, of course, be pushed too far.
Nevertheless, as Peter boxed his way nimbly down these spiritual
corridors, there were few major periods in the evolution of Christianity
with which he did not have at some time, in his rough, intuitive way, an
insider`s understanding.
None of these thoughts occurred to me until after Peter’s breakdown.
“Of all the forms of genius,” Thorton Wilder wrote in one of his early
books, “goodness has the longest awkward age.” I thought of Peter as
a student and a friend who I was helping through an awkward age. It
was not until I learned more about his history, before he came to
Chicago, that I realized how rocky and twisted had been the road he
had traveled.
page 13
There is a poem by Stephen Crane that goes:
The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
“Ha,” he said,
“I see that none has passed here
in a long time.”
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
“Well,” he mumbled at last,
“Doubtless there are other roads.”
Peter was as incapable of taking easier roads as most Protestants are
incapable of walking the hard pathway to truth. They do not even look
for such a path. Outside the “Bible Belt” a churchgoer seldom asks
himself what he really believes about any central doctrine of his faith.
It IS true that in recent years a small number of young Protestant liberals
have become active in such causes as civil rights, peace, the wars on
poverty and drug addiction, and the currently fashionable “ecumenical
dialog.” But activism in those areas, admirable though it be, is quite a
different thing from activism in theology. The typical American Protes-
tant today is in a state of unprecedented metaphysical indifference.
His theology has the shape and substance of a fog-bank.
Question him about his deepest religious convictions and what will
you discover? You will find him believing vaguely that Jesus is somehow
the son of God, but in precisely what sense he neither knows nor cares.
He may tell you, if he has thought about it at all, that the Bible is a
unique document. In exactly what way it is unique he isn’t sure. If he has
read any part of the Bible since he went to Sunday School, the chances
are high that he is some variety of fundamentalist: Pentecostal, Seventh-
Day Adventist, Jehovah’s Witness, or any of a dozen other sects that
bemuse the poor and poorly educated. If he is not a fundamentalist, he
may still insist that the Incarnation and Resurrection are the foundation
dogmas of his faith; but ask him what exactly those dogmas mean, and
you find him strangely ill at ease. He stammers gray phrases. He parrots
fusty platitudes. Do you really think, he will counter, that those are
important questions?
For most Protestants today their “religion” is little more than a weekly
ritual which they endure for reasons which have nothing to do with
Cod. The ritual is familiar and comfortable. It reminds them of their
page14
childhood. And their children in turn must not be sent morally rudderless
into the world. After all, a child must write something in those blanks
on school questionnaires which ask for his religious affiliation. Church
membership confers social status. (The church of highest status in a
community is, of course, the one with the highest proportion of lawyers,
doctors, and wealthy businessmen, plus one or two families of well-
educated blacks, preferably light-skinned, to prove that the congre-
gation is racially progressive.) The church is a place to meet friends on
Sunday morning, listen to good music, and (hopefully) to hear a sermon
that arouses a warm feeling of piety without suggesting-God forbid!-
that one alter a single prejudice or behavior pattern. The ancient doc-
trines-sin, salvation, atonement-float high overhead like distant, misty
clouds, utterly irrelevant to daily life.
Nor does the average upper or middle-class Protestant care one rap
about what his pastor or any of his Protestant friends believe. He would
sooner ask Mrs. ]ones, sitting next to him at a church dinner, her opinion
about clitoral versus vaginal orgasm than to ask her what she thinks
about the Trinity. Theological questions are invasions of privacy. They
are upsetting questions, annoying questions, de tmp questions.
Americans do not even ask such questions of their political leaders.
To be sure, our country still considers itself a Christian nation (“In God
we trust”), and voters still insist that their political leaders belong to
a church. Because Protestants outnumber Catholics and Jews, the church
of choice for the president is Protestant, but it is only his attendance at
church that matters, not what he believes.
It would be hard to find a Protestant troubled in the slightest by
Richard M. Nixon’s naval career or his bombing of North Vietnam,
even though he knows that Quakers are traditionally and steadfastly
pacifist. Nixon plays golf with fundamentalist Billy Graham, has ap-
peared on the platform of Billy’s revival meetings, and has even (in
November, 1962) written an article on “A Nation’s Faith in God” for
Graharn’s magazine, Decision. In that article he tells of his high school
conversion in Los Angeles by Chicago evangelist Paul Rader, then one
of the Windy City’s windiest and most ignorant fundamentalists.
On the other hand, when Nixon lived in New York City, he attended
the liberal (in the religious sense) Reformed Church of Norman Vincent
Peale, and it was Peale who performed the marriage ceremony when
Julie Nixon married David Eisenhower. By having himself photographed
with both Peale and Graham, Nixon works both sides of the Protestant
street and strengthens his image along the entire spectrum of WASPS
who elected him. As to which direction he leans in his private con-
page 15
victions, toward Peale or Graham or neither, most WASPs couldn’t
care less.
With respect to John F. Kennedy, the situation seems at first to have
been altogether different. Was it? Arthur Schlesinger, ]r., writes in his
b1ography of Kennedy that the president had an essentially “secular
mind. He was, Schlesinger tells us, a Catholic in the same sense that
Franklin D. Roosevelt was an Episcopalian. This isn’t much help. It only
raises the equally puzzling question: In what sense was F.D.R. an
Episcopalian? Kennedy was the first American president to be a Roman
Catholic, Schlesinger continues, but he was not the first Roman Catholic
president. What does that mean? The words are discreetly evasive.
Was Kennedy a believing Catholic, or was he Catholic in name only,
like the machine-controlled mayors of so many big cities with large
Catholic populations? Had Kennedy broken early with his Catholic
upbringing he would have had no political future in Catholic Massa-
chusetts or, for that matter, anywhere else. A Catholic will vote for a
Protestant or Jew. never for an ex-Catholic. But there is another point
to consider. Had Kennedy talked much about his Catholic beliefs,
assuming he had some, he would probably have lost the presidential
election to Nixon. And so, like Episcopalian Roosevelt and Quaker
Nixon he kept his inner religious life concealed.
Let us sharpen the question mercilessly. Did john Kennedy, in the
private sanctuary of his mind, believe that the mother of Jesus was born
without sin, remained a virgin after giving birth to the Son of God, and
did not die a natural death but was transported bodily into heaven? It
is possible that not even his wife, Jacqueline, knew precisely what John
Kennedy believed about his church’s major doctrines.°
The point I want to make, however, is not that no one knows what
a president of the United States really believes about religion, but that
___(begin footnote)___
When I originally wrote this section about Kennedy's religious beliefs there was
still a sort of gentleman's agreement among journalists not to ask such questions. The
aggreement was broken by William F. Buckley, Jr., himself a devout Catholic, in his
Review of John F. Kennedy and American Catholicism, by Lawrence Fuchs. (See the
New York Times Book Review, May 14, 1967.) Buckley's opinion is that the great religious
event which supposedly occurred in 1960, the election of the first Roman Catholic to
the White House, actually was a pseudo-event.
In contrast to Kennedy's perpetual evasions, Buckley quotes a delightful rejoinder by
Hilaire Belloc. Belloc had been running for a seat in the House of Parliament when a
woman asked him if it were true that he is a "Papist."
"Madam," said Belloc, taking a rosary from his pocket, "do you see these beads? I
say them every morning when I rise, and every evening when I go to bed; and if you
object to that, madam, I pray to God that he will spare me the ignominy of representing
you in Parliament." --H.W.
___(end footnote)___
page 16
no one is even curious. We are a nation of Laodiceans. The typical
Protestant churchgoer-young activists who join freedom marches and
peace demonstrations are not typical-is neither cold nor hot, believing
nor unbelieving. He attends church regularly or irregularly, drones
though recitations of the Apostles’ Creed, sings the dreary, antique
hymns, occasionally eats the Bread and drinks the Wine. Do not ask him
what he thinks the ritual is supposed to mean.
In every age, in every society, there has always been a small band of
men and women of a different breed. They are blessed, or cursed, with
a compulsion to take religion seriously. If they are atheists, they will
have no part in religious ritual. If they believe in God, they hunger to
know as much as they can about what God would have them believe
and do. Such was Peter. He was too honest with himself to suppose that
the “good”-what one should do-can ever be separated from the “true.”
If nothing is true, said Nietzsche, everything is permitted. If something
is true, some things are good, some bad. Is it true, is it really true, that
God, through the agency of an historic faith, is calling on us, His
children, to do this and this, to not do that and that? And if God has
in truth revealed a strategy of living, what sort of Revelation is it? A
book, a creed, a living church? How does the child of God extract from
the Revelation a way of distinguishing this from that?
The more I thought about Peter, after his fantastic Easter sermon, the
more I thought about the knife edges along the weedy road he had
traveled, the stronger my desire grew to write a book about him. I
began to carry a notebook in which from time to time I jotted down
recollections of events and conversations. For more details I went to
Peter himself. I spoke to his friends. 1 called on several girls with whom
in one way or another he had once been intimate. Finally I set to work
in earnest, shaping the material as orderly as I could into what I suppose
is best called a spiritual biography.
Twenty years passed before I convinced myself that this confusing
narrative could be published without harm to Peter and to others. Peter
himself has read the manuscript. On his insistence I removed several
episodes which he considered too uncharitable to the participants, but
otherwise I have told the story as fully and faithfully as I can. I cannot
add that Peter has approved its publication. The most I can say is that
he did not vigorously disapprove.
Had Peter been an imaginary character in a work of fiction I doubt
if I could have invented for him a name with more suitable overtones.
I have already spoken of his temperamental likeness to Simon Peter.
His less familiar surname is a German word for “pious.” In Danish it
page 17
is spelled “from,” and it is interesting to learn that Kier-
kgaard’s satirical sketches is about a theological student named Ludwig
From. Young Ludwig imagines he is seeking the Kingdom of God when
actually his ultimate concern, to use Paul Tillich’s still popular phrase,
is for the comfortable, secure life of a parson. Kierkegaard himself, in
his youth was not totally free of this conflict. In a later chapter we
shall see how a form of it was involved in Peter’s emotional crisis.
It is also singularly appropriate that Peter’s surname had been used
by Kierkegaard because, at the end, the Final question Peter asked him-
self was the same final question that Kierkegaard shouted into the com-
placent ears of Danish Protestantism. Is it possible to be a Christian in
any honest sense without believing heart and mind and soul in the
orthodox view of the divinity of Jesus, in what Kierkegaard called the
great Incognito of God?
"There has been much that is strange,” Kierkeaard wrote “much
that is deplorable, much that is revolting about Christianity; but the
most stupid thing ever said about it is, that it is to a certain degree true.”
In this, as in many other respects, Peter Fromm’s mind and tastes,
though not his temperament, resembled those of the Danish thinker.
They shared a fondness for the hot-cold cleavage of either/or. They
shared an abiding hatred for the tepid mixture of both-and.
Finally Peter's surname conveys an essential fact about his spiritual
Odyssey. He was fleeing "from” the superstitions of his childhood. Is
he also on a pilgrimage? It is possible. But it is only with the "from"
that this book will be concerned.
Chapter 2
Pentecostal Power
While Peter was under heavy sedation in the psychiatric ward of Billings Hospital, I wondered if I should get in touch with his mother and step-father. The psychiatrist assigned to Peter thought I shouldn’t. It would be best, we both agreed, to wait until more was known about the nature and severity of Peter’s illness before one of us tried to explain to his parents (how could anyone then explain?) exactly what had happened.
Peter’s deceased father, Matthew Fromm, had been the eldest son of a large German family which came to America and settled in Pennsylvania in the early 187O's. Young Matthew had worked as a roustabout in the Pennsylvania oil fields until the large oil deposits of Oklahoma, discovered in the first decade of the new century, drew him like a magnet to the vicinity of Tulsa. After working several years as a driller in oil fields around the state, he became a foreman--the vernacular term is “tool pusher"--for a large drilling company that had its home office in Tulsa.
Oklahoma’s southern boundary is a river, the Red River, a dreary, rusty-silted river that snakes its way through the shallow valley celebrated in the familiar old song. It was in this valley that Peter's mother, part German and part Irish, had spent her childhood. Hilda Yates was sixteen when the drilling of a wildcat well on her father’s farm, in Bryan County, south of Durant, brought Matthew Fromm into the Red River Valley. They met at a revival meeting sponsored by a Pentecostal Church of God. The well proved to be dry, and Matthew was shifted to a new location; but, as the old ballad goes, he must have missed Hilda’s blue eyes and sweet smile. They were married a year later in 1918.
A few months after Peter was born, in 1919, they settled in Sand Springs, Pentecostal Power a small Oklahoma town on the north bank of the Arkansas River, bordering Tulsa on the west.
I have mentioned before that Matthew Fromm died when Peter was just a boy. There was one other child, a girl named Gabrielle. She was a year old at the time of her father’s death. Four years later Peter’s mother married Gregory Brown, a widower who owned a plumbing shop in Sand Springs. There were no children by her second marriage. Brown’s previous marriage also had been childless.
In the early spring of 1941, when Peter was in his third year at the University of Chicago Divinity School, I had an opportunity to visit his parents. Reverend Alexander Wilkes, one of my former students, invited me to Tulsa to preach at his First Unitarian Church. (The church’s name has always amused me. Its founders no doubt expected it to be the first of several Unitarian churches in the rapidly growing “Oil Capitol of the World,” as Tulsa then liked to call itself. To this day it is the only Unitarian church in the Greater Tulsa area.) Wilkes offered to reimburse my travel expenses and to put me up for a stay of several days.
“Why don’t you visit my folks while you’re there?" Peter suggested. "Sand Springs is only a fifteen-minute drive from downtown Tulsa.”
He had written so much about me to his mother, he went on to say, that he knew she would enjoy seeing me in the flesh, and he added that she was one of the best cooks in Oklahoma. My immediate inclination was to tell Peter I would not have time to see his parents. I knew that both of them were fundamentalists. They would regard me, a Unitarian, with grave suspicion. On the other hand Peter had told me almost nothing about his family or his childhood. To my surprise I was intensely curious. Did I know then, in the dark substratum of my mind, that some day I would write a book about Peter? Did I sense then in some dim way the mythic quality of his flight?
I do not know. All I can say is that I heard myself telling Peter I would indeed like to meet his family. Please inform them, I said, that I would telephone them Sunday afternoon, after my sermonizing, and arrange to see them the following day.
As my plane glided down toward Tulsa’s Will Rogers Airport on a late Saturday aftenoon, I could see ahead the small cluster of office buildings sparkling in slanted April sunlight. Twenty years earlier, when I had been offered the pastorate of Tulsa’s First Unitarian Church, I turned it down. Had it been a wise decision? How could one tell? Wilkes apparently had been happy there. He was an ambitious fellow, a bit conservative in his political views but with a flair for comedy, showmanship, and publicity. That church had featured jazz concerts and folksong fests long before it became fashionable to sponsor such events in more traditional churches. It would he relaxing to see him again. His congregation, he had written, was enlightened theologically. I could speak freely on any religious question. As for political and social topics, he sounded a cautionary note. Many of his church members, he warned me, including the publisher of Tulsa's evening newspaper, reflected the city’s strong Republican sentiments.
My sermon was well received. If any of the wealthier listeners were offended by my temperate remarks on the evils of unregulated capitalism, they said nothing about it when they shook my hand on their way out.
Wilkes drove me to Sand Springs the following afternoon and deposited me, as Mrs. Brown had requested when I telephoned, in front of the fire station on Main Street. He had no desire to meet the Browns.
“See you in the sweet bye and bye," he singsonged through the car’s open window as he quickly drove away. Mr. Brown had promised to get me back that night to Wilkes' house where I intended to stay a few more days before returning to Chicago.
A thin, prematurely gray-haired woman--I guessed her to be in her early forties--walked toward me smiling. “I'm Peter’s mother,” she said.
We shook hands. “How in the world, Mrs. Brown, did you recognize me?”
She gave a quick, embarrassed laugh. “Peter told me you were real tall and had white hair. And he sent me a story from a newspaper once. It had your picture in it.”
Mrs. Brown’s narrow face and birdlike features wore a pale, faded look, but her blue eyes, behind rimless bifocals, were bright and penetrating. I could see a strong resemblance to Peter around the eyes.
“And is this Gabrielle?” I asked. A pretty girl of fourteen or fifteen had walked over to join us.
“Yes, this is Gabrielle,” Mrs. Brown said proudly.
The girl smiled and said shyly that she was pleased to meet me. Her face was free of cosmetics, young and innocent and hard to improve on. She had blue eyes like her mother and soft yellow hair.
We walked along Main Street, past the dismal, dusty-windowed shops. Even in daylight, before the awful red and blue neon tubes begin to glow, is it possible to tell the business street of one small Midwestern town from the business street of another? We turned off the pavement to climb a gently sloping dirt road.
“You don’t know how happy I am, Mrs. Brown,” I said, “to meet you at last. Peter has told me so many good things about you.”
There are millions of Christians like her, I thought, scattered through the nation’s vast farming areas: gentle, self-sacrificing, loving of neighbor. She would practice the golden rule with all the light she had. But she would have a low opinion of the Jews (did they not execute and refuse to accept their own Messiah?), and the notion of taking communion next to a black-skinned neighbor--well, it would simply be unthinkable.
Has an organized religion ever failed to sanction its culture’s mores? For the majority of believers is it not always God’s will that social patterns be pretty much the way they are? As I grow older, though, I find myself becoming more charitable toward simple souls who can hardly be expected to rise higher than the prejudices of their habitat. One can and must condemn their beliefs. It is more difficult to condemn their hearts. How can you condemn a set of conditioned reflexes?
The house where the Browns lived was an old, ramshackle two-storied colonial, but its white clapboard siding was freshly painted. Gabrielle excused herself at the porch steps and sauntered off up the road. “Be home by six!" Mrs. Brown called out. The girl turned and bobbed her head.
“I’m so glad you can stay for supper,” Mrs. Brown remarked over her shoulder as I followed her up the steps and into the house.
The living room was like a dozen others I had seen before in the homes of Midwestern fundamentalists. An upright piano with well-worn hymnals on the rack, assorted pieces of ancient furniture, a brick fire-place with a large picture of Jesus in a frame above its high mantel. It was a reproduction of Heinrich Hofmann’s popular painting: Christ praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. A shaft of supernal light bathed his sad, effeminate profile. Scriptural quotations lettered on large slabs of colored cardboard hung here and there on the walls.
Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He will sustain thee.
Underneath are the Everlasting Arms.
God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son.
They looked as if they would shine brightly in the dark.
Mrs. Brown seated herself on a creaky wooden chair and motioned me into a sofa backed against two open windows.
“l know you must be very proud of Peter,” I began. “He’s working hard this year. I expect him to pass his finals with flying colors.”
Mrs. Brown had been sizing me up carefully through the tops of her bifocals. "I pray every night for God to bless my boy,” she said, “and protect him from false teachings. I’ve heard a lot about the University of Chicago, Dr. Wilson. There are so many professors there who are the servants of Satan.”
I nodded imperceptibly.
“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine,” she went on, tapping a bony finger on the arm of her chair while she recited Saint Paul, “but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth.”
I made no reply. My own left ear began to itch. I scratched it thoughtfully. Through the windows behind me I could smell the oil refineries and hear the sound of heavy trucks rolling on the highway. The sofa’s cushions were hard and uncomfortable. A cool breeze caressed the back of my hot neck.
We chatted for a while about inconsequentials. Suddenly, without warning, she leaned forward. “Dr. Wilson,” she said, looking me straight between the eyeballs, “have you accepted Christ? I mean, have you accepted him as your personal savior?”
I must have jumped visibly. It had been thirty years since anyone had asked me that.
“You don’t have to worry about me, Mrs. Brown,” I said smiling. “I was saved when I was a small boy in Wisconsin. I’ve been preaching the old, old story ever since.”
Solemn-faced, cheeks flushed, she leaned back in her chair, searching my eyes. I had a feeling she did not believe me. But I was not questioned again about my status among the elect.
“I’ve been so afraid Peter would learn more than what was good for him,” Mrs. Brown said finally, “That he’d read too many books. Remember how the Savior prayed? ‘I thank thee, O father, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.' ”
“I remember,” I said, nodding piously.
Mrs. Brown seemed to be examining the pink flower pattern on her print dress. “Peter has changed since he went to Chicago,” she said, almost in a whisper.
“In what way?”
“I don’t know as I can rightly say. He used to go to prayer meetings with us every Wednesday night and give such wonderful testimonies. The last time he was home he wouldn’t go at all. He just sat around the house and read books and looked out the windows. He used to laugh and talk all the time. But last summer .... " Her voice trailed off. I could see moisture in her eyes.
It was a good moment to change the subject again. While she cleaned her glasses on the hem of her dress, I asked, “What church do you and your husband attend, Mrs. Brown?"
“We go to Holiness Tabernacle. It's just a short piece down the road. The minister’s such a fine man.”
Peter had told me that his fundamentalist upbringing had been of the Pentecostal kind. “Holiness” is a favorite word of these noisy, ignorant little congregations. They differ from most other fundamentalist sects by their belief that certain “gifts” on the day of Pentecost--healing, prophecy, speaking and interpreting the Unknown Tongue, the power to pick up serpents or to drink poison without harm, and so on--were given for all time to congregations of true believers. Other fundamentalist groups maintain that the Pentecostal gifts were withdrawn by the Lord after they had played their necessary role in strengthening the early church, although in recent years there has been a curious, unexpected revival of faith healing and glossolalia even in the more respectable churches, Catholic as well as Protestant.
Saint Paul had a good deal to say about the gifts. “I thank my God,” he wrote, “I speak with tongues more than ye all.” I have often reflected that if Paul were to return to earth today, his original beliefs unchanged, it would be the Pentecostal movement with which he would instantly affiliate. There and there only would he find an authentic Pauline theology combined with the emotional enthusiasm that characterized the early “awkward age" of Christianity which he knew so intimately. I must admit, however, that Paul would surely be shocked by the movement’s fiery female preachers. (“Let your women keep silent in the churches,” Paul wrote, “for it is not permitted unto them to speak.”)
“Does your congregation practice the taking up of serpents?" I asked. The injudicious question slipped out before I could stop it.
Mrs. Brown adjusted her glasses to give me a long, cold stare. “We don’t believe in tempting Cod,” she answered, tight-lipped. "But we do say that if a Christian has sufficient faith in the Lord, nothing can harm him unless it be God’s will.” It was an admirable answer, and I did not pursue the matter further.
Our talk returned to Peter. I told a few innocent anecdotes about him that seemed to amuse her, and was relieved to see that apparently she had no intention of grilling me about changes in her son’s beliefs. Perhaps she had made up her mind that I was to be counted among the false teachers, that it would be pointless to discuss these things with me.
Something she said touched on Peter's conversion, and I asked her if she would mind telling me about it. No, she did not mind. Although Peter had been brought up in the Pentecostal faith, she explained, he had not taken it seriously until he was in his first year at the township high school. A cowboy evangelist--this worthy gentleman preached in spurred boots, black-string tie, and ten-gallon hat--had been conducting a tent meeting a few miles out of town along the highway “He had such power then,” Mrs. Brown said wistfully. “But a few years ago he took to drink and terrible sins.” I did not press her for the details.
It was midsummer at the time, and the revival was well attended. There was a great outpouring, she said, of the Holy Spirit. In my youth in Wisconsin I had been to country meetings like these, and while Mrs. Brown talked about them I could picture the scene vividly in my mind. Hot summer night, suppressed sexual excitement in the air, the smell of woods, sawdust, perspiration. There would be group-singing from grimy hymnals, solos by shapely young farm girls with guitars, breasts, and nasal voices:
Would you be free from your burden of sin?
There's pow’r in the blood, pow'r in the blood
Would you o'er evil a victory win?
There's wonderful pow'r in the blood.
The evangelist, red of face, sodden of shirt, would take off his jacket when the Power seized him. He would slam it against the back of a chair, knocking it over with a resounding crash. “Praise the Lord! “Thank you, Jesus!” The shouts could be heard for miles. Slowly the preacher’s delivery would increase in volume and tempo as his sermon pumped its way toward an orgiastic climax of athletic oratory. Then the altar call and the plaintive invitation hymns:
Come home ... come home ...
Ye who are weary, come home.
Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
Calling, O Sinner, come home!
The clapping of a thousand hands, beating out a slow jungle rhythm has a curiously hypnotic effect on any crowd. Rock-and-roll is old fashioned music to these Pentecostal congregations. The beat gets faster, cries and moans grow louder. The chanting and clapping and tapping of feet reach a crescendo of uninhibited frenzy. Shouting. Weeping. Everyone praying at once in a great babble of confusion. People rise, heads thrown back arms upraised, neck tendons swelling. They shake with the Power. They scream with the Power. The sick are healed. The blind see. The deaf hear. The dumb talk. Cripples throw away their crutches. Thank you, jesus!”
There as pow'r pow'r,
Wonder working pow'r
In the blood
Of the Lamb!
There as pow'r pow’r,
Wonder working pow'r,
In the precious blood of the Lamb!
Some poor creature eyes rolling, armpits wet, stands and jabbers in the tongue of angels...
Peter had gone through it all. He was fourteen when the Holy Spirit called him an age when pent-up sex drives explode in the most intense conversion experiences. I listened with embarrassment while Mrs. Brown told me how her son had wept miserably for his sins, how he had shouted his response to the altar call, how he had knelt trembling and groaning at the toes of the evangelist’s black and silver boots. He had been roped and tied like an Oklahoma steer. Yes, Peter had been through it all.
Do you smile at this, 0 my gentle Christian reader? Are your refined spiritual sensibilities offended by these twentieth-century American counterparts of the ancient Bacchic rites? Then take in hand your Bible and read--or read again--the fourteenth chapter of First Corinthians or the second chapter of the Book of Acts, and ponder well the revival techniques of Simon Peter, the Rock of Faith upon which Christ built your holy church.
"It was that very night,” Mrs. Brown said, her eyes glittering through her glasses, "that Peter gave his life to the Lord. It was then that he decided to become a great preacher. He wanted to win millions of souls for Christ. He wanted to start a big revival up and down the land.”
She spoke of the diligence with which her son had studied his Bible. Five times in one year he had read it through, verse by verse, word by word. (I slid a handkerchief across my forehead. Yes, Peter knew his Bible well.) He taught Sunday School at Holiness Tabernacle. He preached at prayer meetings. One summer, between his junior and senior high school years, he hit the sawdust trail. I did a double-take. Peter had never told me that. Billed as Oklahoma’s boy evangelist, he had howled and pounded on the pulpit at tent and tabernacle meetings throughout Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas ....
Mrs. Brown handed me a badly centered, out-of-focus snapshot taken during Peter’s senior year. He was scowling into the sun. A large shock of dark hair hung over his forehead.
“How old was Peter when his father passed away?" I asked as I returned the picture.
She walked over to a table on which a large leather-covered Bible was resting. “I think he was eight, going on nine.” She opened the Bible to slip the snapshot between its pages. “Yes, that must be right. It was in nineteen twenty-eight that my husband was killed. Peter was almost nine.”
“Killed?”
“Didn’t Peter tell you?"
I shook my head.
“Peter was with him when it happened. It was terrible, terrible." She walked slowly back to her chair, shaking her head, and sat down again.
It had been an accident. The derrick of a drilling rig, a rig on which Mr. Fromm had been working, had collapsed. All the drillers had been killed but one.
“Is that man still living?"
“Oh yes. He’s made lots and lots of money since he was a driller. He’s president now of some kind of company of his own. They make machinery for drilling oil wells. He lives in a big house in Tulsa.”
“Do you know the company’s name?”
She couldn’t remember.
“What was the man’s name?"
“Howard. Howard Richter. He and Matthew were right good friends. But we never see him any more.”
She was watching me with a slight frown, puzzled as to why I wanted to know all this. She started to ask me something, but the sound of the front door opening made her stop and turn her head.
Gregory Brown, a large chunky man, moon-faced and bald, came into the living room. He gave me a hearty handshake, apologized for the black grease stains on his hands, asked me how the weather was in Chicago, and chuckled loudly when I told him it had been windy and cold on the day I left.
Mrs. Brown excused herself and was on her way to the kitchen when Gabrielle rushed into the house. The girl gave us a quick, worried nod as she hurried into the kitchen to help her mother. Brown and I talked for twenty minutes or so about nothing of importance, then Mrs. Brown summoned us all to the dining room.
We stood around an oval table, behind our chairs. Mrs. Brown asked me to give the blessing.
Heads lowered. I cleared my throat. I was not caught unprepared.
“Father in Heaven,” I began, in my best stained-glass voice, “we thank thee for all the good things thou hast granted us today. We thank thee for this wholesome food. Bless it and consecrate it that it may nourish and strengthen us. We pray that thou wilt watch over Peter. Protect him from the wiles of Satan as he studies to show himself approved unto thee, a workman who needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. Bless us all and fill us with thy Spirit. We ask it in the holy name of our Lord and Savior, who shed his precious blood that we might be cleansed from all sin. Amen.”
There was a chorus of muted “Amens” around the table. As we sat down I noticed that Mrs. Brown was gazing at me intently. My appetite was ravenous. Peter was right about his mother’s cooking. It was the best meal I had had in years.
