The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

Jesus Land: A Memoir

November 13th, 2006

The title of Julia Scheeres’s memoir comes from a series of signs that she and her adopted brother David encounter soon after moving to rural Indiana: “Sinners go to: HELL. Rightchuss go to: HEAVEN. The end is neer: REPENT. This here is: JESUS LAND.”

I’m sure that religious signs with such egregious misspellings do exist—and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some of them. I just wish that Scheeres hadn’t chosen to represent the sign-maker this way, as it reinforces our assumptions that Christian fundamentalists are ignorant. And, in Scheeres’s book as a whole, the Christians who commit the most horrific acts of prejudice and abuse are not those who would misspell words. They’re educated—they just read the Bible in the most selectively literal way, a way that justifies their twisted actions.

Jesus Land is a heart-wrenching book. It’s also a moving tale of love, particularly the bond between the young Julia and her adopted African American brother David. Where these two learned how to love is difficult to figure out, since their mother is extremely cold and distant, and their father is abusive. The family attends a Christian Reformed (Calvinist) church, and the congregation sees them as ideal Christians, unaware of the seamy underside of their home life. (Scheeres also tells us that her parents’ behavior worsened after her eldest siblings left home, but it’s not really clear what triggered this change—I wish we had a fuller portrait here, but the book does have to limit its focus.)

After the family moves to the country from slightly-less-rural Lafayette, Indiana, the prejudice directed against David at the local high school becomes almost unbearable. After he attempts to slit his wrists, the Scheeres parents send him to a “Christian” reform school in the Dominican Republic. After it is discovered that Julia has been experimenting with sex and alcohol, she is given the option of going to join him. Feeling that he is her only true family, she does.

(And I should mention here that one of the most intriguing things about the book is its portrayal of Midwestern “family values” people—the Scheeres parents—who really don’t care about family. After David leaves, Julia watches her mother clean his basement room with Lysol, erasing every trace of his existence from their home. Uf. It’s an incredibly painful scene. See what I mean about Julia’s and David’s strong love for each other emerging ex nihilo? Out of nothing, the two children create their own little family, and Scheeres implies that, in the end, family is all that matters.)

David’s letters home have given no indication of the horrible conditions, including psychological and physical abuse, at the school. Escuela Caribe’s staff tries to instill “godly respect for elders” into the teens by humiliating and otherwise maltreating them. David and Julia survive only by holding on to each other and to the dream of an independent life in Florida after they turn 18.

Jesus Land is at its best when depicting the deep bond between the siblings. Perhaps because Scheeres envisioned this book as telling David’s story (necessarily through her perspective), she never seems to whine when describing her own abuse at home or school. Her own treatment is almost unimaginably evil, but the book describes her growing realization that David receives even worse, simply because he is black.

The book in itself is strong, well contained within the perspective of a sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girl, but reading statements from the adult Scheeres makes her seem more simplistic. For example, in the book’s epilogue, she claims that her time at Escuela Caribe taught her “to believe in people over dogmas.” But she was abused by people—dogmatic people, sure, but people nonetheless. I would suggest that there was something hurting or broken in those people that led them to embrace dogma. It was something about who they were that caused their dogmatism—it’s just not that easy to separate people and dogma. And there are all sorts of dogmas other than religious ones, too.

I say this not to detract from the true pain of Scheeres’s experience or to deny that the fundamentalists’ behavior had roots in (a misinterpretation of) religious faith. Christians need to read stories like these, so that we can understand the lives of those who have been abused by those who also claim to follow Christ and to have deep compassion for them. It also keeps us humble, knowing the many ways in which Christians have perverted the gospel. More than anything, Jesus Land stirs me to pray for the many Christian hypocrites and Christian hypocrites’ victims out there—and to pray that my own hypocritical ways (less extreme, definitely, but still there, since I do happen to be human) will be transformed.

Entry Filed under: Books