Review by Wendy Besel Hahn
Black Lawrence Press / October 2022 / 44 pp
In the seven stories in Because We Were Christian Girls, Virgie Townsend’s young characters walk the tightrope of faith above the pit of eternal damnation: millennial popular culture. Through their eyes, Townsend blurs the lines between church and the secular world and casts doubt on the very existence of hell. After all, is there much difference between the preacher who lays on healing hands, causing a person to writhe on the ground, and the teenaged popstar wearing a pleather top who holds an adoring audience in the palm of her outstretched hand?
In Townsend’s rendering of fundamentalist Christian homes, sparkling cider provokes as much suspicion as makeup. The biggest act of rebellion for a young girl is tuning the radio past the Christian music station to find the Top 40. In the chapbook’s late 1990s setting, Y2K looms large. Women vie to be seen, but Christian girls are asked to be invisible—to hide their breasts under their dads’ oversized t-shirts while swimming in a pool divided by gender under the careful watch of the camp’s male pastor.
Just as the Good Book offers miraculous stories that require suspension of disbelief, Townsend’s collection contains elements of magical realism: a woman swallows a whale, and three teenage girls huddle around a burning bush in Meg’s bedroom like witches stirring a cauldron. With these images, Townsend upends the fundamentalist assumption that men act as the gatekeepers to the holy.
Anyone who watched the ascent of Britney Spears’ career in real time will appreciate “Heavenly Bodies,” in which Stephanie introduces her fundamentalist cousin Erin to a singer whose voice and sex appeal eventually launch her to international stardom. As Stephanie shows her cousin online photographs of the singer, Erin parrots fundamentalist talking points: “I don’t think we should look at these anymore…. She’s stirring up lust. That’s a sin.” Pulling back the veil to expose the sexual repression and simultaneous deification of the female form is perhaps Townsend’s greatest accomplishment.
Townsend throws a lifeline to her characters from a world in which #MeToo has brought down Hollywood titans and SCOTUS has struck down Roe v. Wade. In “Instructions,” she deftly draws a straight line between the era of Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and the self-talk a teenaged girl engages in: “You’re not gay. You experience same-sex attraction. You can’t be gay because there is no such thing.”
There is so much to admire in this chapbook, particularly in the final story, “What Fundamentalists Do.” When Sarah’s mother grows exasperated with her teenaged daughter’s questions at church, she turns to the Pentecostals. During a church service that involves the very boisterous elements fundamentalists avoid, Sarah realizes something about her mother: “She’s a seeker and she wants me to seek with her, but we’re not looking for the same thing.” Sarah extends an olive branch in a moment that pays homage to Langston Hughes’s essay “Salvation,” wherein the famous author is gaslit into a public declaration of faith. When the pastor of the Pentecostal church singles out Sarah for an altar call, the young girl realizes, “He and Mom are waiting for me to drop. All I have to do is fall back and lie on the ground with a dreamy smile.” Like the young Hughes, Sarah makes the choice to give family what they need, “I decide to fall. I lean back on my heels and go. It feels fake and clumsy, but the air gives way around me like it doesn’t know.”
American writers like Mark Twain lampooned the gullibility of blind faith long before the modern-day religious right reared its head. Yet Townsend veers away from punching down, treating her teenaged subjects with reverence. Her work ends in the place it begins, where children find holiness and love by physically escaping from the adults:
We start running when church lets out. Prayers and communion crackers are still on our lips. It’s summer and Jesus loves and hates us. Or He loves us, but hates our sin. Either way, it’s summer, Wednesday evening Bible study is over, and we’re running out of the church building into the untended field. The grass is long and budding with feathers of golden seeds. We run with our palms out, and the grass can’t decide whether to brush or scratch us.
Since earning an MFA from George Mason University and attending Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as a nonfiction contributor, Wendy Besel Hahn has served as a panelist at GMU’s Fall for the Book and Gaithersburg Book Festival in Maryland. She is the nonfiction editor for Furious Gravity (May 2020) Volume IX in Grace and Gravity Series, founded by Richard Peabody and edited by Melissa Scholes Young. Her work appears in The Washington Post, Scary Mommy, Redivider, Sojourners, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Denver, Colorado. Her work and contact information are available at wendybeselhahn.com.