Out of the blue last week I got a message from an “Amy Jo White.” (Not her real name.) She had spotted my name while surfing the web and reached me through my former church.

Amy Jo. Amy Jo. Amy Jo.

DING.

Her family and my family were devoted members of Mill Creek Baptist Church in Youngstown, Ohio, a church that unwaveringly preached born-again, washed-in-the-blood fundamentalism.

I hadn’t seen or heard of Amy Jo since she was 24 and I was 16. She was friends with my older brother and sister, not me.

Amy Jo was the talk of the church because she was the first in our congregation of working class families to go to college. She became a nurse.

My mother adored Amy Jo. She admired her poise, demeanor, education, and wisdom.

When I was contemplating college during my junior year, my mother consulted Amy Jo. My parents had no clue how to select a suitable college.

My father was adamant that I attend Moody Bible Institute in Chicago because he mistrusted colleges and universities. He wanted me properly indoctrinated.

My mother did not. She wanted me properly educated. She knew the difference. She admired professors, psychologists, and physicians—ministers, not so much. 

Amy Jo begged my mother to resist my father’s recommendation in favor of Wheaton College and the liberal arts it offered. My mother heeded her advice. She stood firm and my father—surprisingly—relented.

And just like that, thanks to Amy Jo, my life was spared intellectual and spiritual twaddle.

At Wheaton I read widely. Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Hume, Voltaire, Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Simone Weil, T.S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, Hannah Arendt. I studied anthropology, pyschology, sociology, and biology. I earned a BA in philosophy.

Amy Jo fell off my radar long ago, but I still thought wistfully of her now and then and wished I had thanked her at least once. Alas, by now I figured she might be dead.

Last week I found out she wasn’t. I contacted her immediately.

She told me she’d come across reviews of my most recent book, The Bible Reexamined, and was curious how a child of fundamentalism had become such a progressive freethinker like herself. 

Well, Amy Jo, let me tell you how it all began.