How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

by Harrison Scott Key

Our spare little branch of this ancient religion had been skinned back to nothing from the overwrought Protestant theologies of the Reformation that complicated faith with systematic theologies and liturgies authored by men with too much education. We practiced the Occam’s razor hermeneutic: if they didn’t practice it in the first century AD of the New Testament, we didn’t practice it in the twentieth century AD of the American South, which is why you’d find neither infant baptism nor Romish creeds nor U.S. flags in our church, for we could find no records of baptized babies nor of popes in the Bible, nor could we even locate any mention of the Second Amendment, hard as we strained to find it. You could be anybody you wanted in the parking lot, where modernity raged like tongues of fire, but inside the sanctuary, it was the first century, practically a historical reenactment, like those orchestras that only play period instruments. Noble and a little weird.

It would take me years to understand this, but the understanding began in that church hallway, that a good person is a temporary and imaginary creature, as make-believe as unicorns and fire-breathing cows, because the best of us are often the worst, full of proud and viperous snakes, believing ourselves gods. The dragons did not just live in history and myth. They lived inside me.

Our church had precepts against pants and instrumental music and lady deacons and alcohol of any kind, even though Paul in the book of Romans clearly addresses a deaconess named Phoebe, and it says right there in the book of Luke that Jesus had no qualms about manifesting enough cabernet to shoot a Godfather wedding scene.

it was my community’s absolute inability to address the questions with anything approaching a healthy Socratic disposition of free thought.

This is a chronic theme of my life, obediently agreeing to be somewhere and upon arrival very much wishing my head would miraculously burst into flames so that I could be hauled away by medical professionals.

Nobody told me fighting for my marriage would be less a fight than a kneeling in humiliation at the feet of my enemy.