BOOK REVIEW: Losing their religion

CLOSING TIME: A MEMOIR

By Joe Queenan

Viking, $26.95, 338 pages

I’M PERFECT, YOU’RE DOOMED: TALES FROM A JEHOVAH’S WITNESS UPBRINGING

By Kyria Abrahams

Simon & Schuster, $25, 352 pages

Reviewed by Jeremy Lott

How does religious faith die? Faith dies in a thousand different ways. It dies suddenly, in reverse-Damascus experiences. It dies cut by cut, drip by drip, until the prophets and shades fall silent. It dies in ways comprehensible and ways mysterious.

Two new memoirs, however, suggest a surprisingly common, brutal calculus employed by former fervent believers. When religion ceases to be useful to us, apostasy is almost a given.

“Useful” should not be mistaken for “relevant,” or what passes for relevant in many churches. A lot of happy clapping doesn’t help. Kyria Abrahams grew up a poor Jehovah’s Witness in Pawtucket, R.I. Joe Queenan sprang from an even poorer Irish and Catholic family in Philadelphia.

Ms. Abrahams’ religion is a cultish “fundamentalist” one that shaped her family’s life and limited her associations. In her memoir and first book, “I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed,” she writes that she once fled a friend’s house over the presence of a Ouija board.

How did her pursuits differ from her friends from school? She explains, “At bedtime, I’d lie in my canopy bed and thumb through Jehovah’s Witness literature, reading aloud stories of the coming paradise interspersed with pictures of the wicked being swallowed by pits of lava. My children’s books alternated between Dr. Seuss rhymes and tales of how sinners would scream and gnash their teeth at Armageddon.”

Mr. Queenan as a child won a writing competition with an essay calling for the retention of the Latin Mass. In his 10th book, “Closing Time,” he confesses that he prayed fervently, requesting of the Almighty that the old pastor of the local parish would be granted a long life so that the younger priest with new ideas wouldn’t be allowed to wreck the place.

Somehow, one doubts more “Kumbayas” would have done much good in either case.

Superficially, our memoirists have a lot in common. Their parents held together bad marriages for years, their fathers found it hard to hold down jobs, their mothers ended up the real breadwinners who finally called it quits.

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