BOOK REVIEWS
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed.”
Francis Bacon (d. 1626).

Reviewed by Dee Miller,
Dee Moines, IA

Fire In The Bedroll
Susannah Anderson, www.lulu.com , 2004, $12.
www.takecourage.org

What happens when parents brainwashed in fundamentalism raise their children the same way?  A lot of dysfunction. That’s what Fire In The Bedroll is all about. Make no mistake—not all ministers, not all missionaries raise their children the way the author was raised. Not all ministers are abusive or engage in sexual misconduct either, though the percentage of perpetrators in the profession is far too high. While plenty of naivety abounds in the faith community, there are plenty of families that manage to impart a great deal of health to their children while doing God’s work. Yet few do so while embracing strict adherence to the literal meaning of “wives submit.” The author of this story was set up from the very start to be a long-term victim.

Fire In The Bedroll clearly illustrates what happens when children, isolated and “sheltered” from reality, grow up. A person with low self-esteem often finds a mate with equally low self-esteem. Yet the children are unable to live except by the script that has been so rigidly written for them. The result is often decade after decade of remaining under the spell (while calling it normal), all the while bringing up another generation of children who have difficulty writing their own script.

In this case, it involved marrying a guy who had been kicked out of seminary, couldn’t keep a job, never managed to stay in one place for long, yet someone whom the wife author saw as a clergyman for many years before her husband ever found a vulnerable congregation! Oh, how she needed to believe in that fantasy!

The book is often dramatic, especially the final chapters. It reads like a Lifetime TV movie, with the reader on the edge, hoping and praying that the victimized wife and children are able to escape. What relief when if\t finally happens! The most shocking event to me, even as a seasoned listener to such stories, was the collusion of the author’s father, who aided the perpetrator after the wife and children had managed to escape!

It is impossible to describe the eerie feeling that came over me personally when I read the town name “Duncan.” That was the name of the small city where my husband and I chose to take our family for furloughs from our own mission service, beginning only four years after Susannah’s terror ended. Yet, Duncan, Oklahoma was also the location of the final chapters of this book, a place where collusion from at least one person was so evident! The place where Susannah’s family ended up before their final escape was only a few years before my husband and I arrived, ourselves devastated from collusion, sexual harassment, and abuse on the mission field.

This is a story that provides considerable insight into life within a dysfunctional, abusive clergy marriage, as well as clergy sexual misconduct, as witnessed by the spouse of the perpetrator. It does so regardless of the fact that much of the story transpires in Mexico, in a cross-cultural marriage. The problem and the dynamics are the same, no matter the setting and no matter the culture.

Although this couple conveniently and easily moved from one denomination to another, it is important for readers of Christian Ethics Today to know that the perpetrator eventually conned his way through the wide gates of the Baptist ordination process, where accountability issues are not consistently built into the system.

A good deal of story-tightening in the middle of the book (leaving out some of the superficial scenery), would have made the narrative considerably more readable as a case study. I also longed to have more dates for the various parts of the story, Yet, the story is a precious gift, worth the read for anyone who needs to understand just how difficult it is to break the cycle of intergenerational abuse and victimization, in clergy homes or in any family.

As a writer who has studied and written about the problems of clergy sexual misconduct and domestic violence, hearing frequently from readers with horrific stories to tell, I was especially impressed with this one. It should be in every church and seminary library!

Note: Dee Miller is the author of How Little We Knew (Prescott, 1993), a first-person story of collusion with sexual assault and abuse of minors on the mission field, and The Truth About Malarkey (1^st books.com, 2000), a novel about clergy sexual misconduct in an autonomous congregation.

Updated Monday, October 24, 2005