3 Warnke Become a Papist: The Satan Seller pp. 8-11

 “They made dark threats about fire and brimstone if I didn’t shape up to Jesus. “Who’s that?” I wondered.

One of my favorite questions to ask Christians who are trying to convince me with Bible quotes is, “Who do you think isn’t aware of Jesus?” If you live in an English-speaking country and have not heard about Jesus I’m very curious about you. I’m an atheist, my children do not go to church, and they know about Jesus because they live in a Christian culture. Warnke lives in the Midwest and even if his dad was the gun-toting badass that Warnke portrayed him as, he knows who Jesus is.

The “they” in that sentence are Warnke’s two aunts who are going to raise him after the funeral. This is the 1950s and I guess custody just goes to whoever calls “dibs.” The aunts have him to fill with fear of Evangelical Jesus when in 1959 Warnke’s half-sister and husband explain to the aunts that they had secret dibs and were going to take Mike to San Bernadino California. There’s just one problem: Warnke’s half-sister and husband are Catholic (cue: dun, dun, DUNNNNNN).

Warnke’s aunt tells him to take some pamphlets and let the new family know about Jesus. To a normal person this has to sound absurd, you’re going to tell Catholics about Jesus. Why? They already know about Jesus. One of the more interesting side-effects of the overturning of Roe v. Wade is that Christians no longer have their unifying cause. Catholics regard all non-Catholic Christians as heretics, Evangelicals think Catholics are polytheists, Anglicans think both groups need to listen to the king, etc. Each group has the belief that the other group is wrong, and not just wrong; but damned for being wrong. As Warnke tells his new family, “Hello, you are all going to hell because you’re Catholics.”

The new family doesn’t like it, but they keep Mike around enroll him in Catholic school and eventually, after a few weeks, Mike begins to understand that even a Catholic can be a kind, considerate, and tolerant person. It’s almost like Mike has the understanding that a person’s religion doesn’t matter if their underlying personality is decent.

Despite their Popery the new family seems like a decent place to live. The foster father is a little rough but generally a good person. The Catholic church’s rituals seem a little odd to young Mike Warnke, “No, I saw the rituals only for their own sake, and so they had a different effect on me. I dug the chanting and the outward appearance, and the emotional, almost sensual experience they created in me.”

He calls this a “different effect” but this is the point of the rituals, chanting, incense, and Latin. We get some introduction to the religious figures in his life two nuns: Sister Mary Frances and Sister Mary Boniface. The latter he calls a “1930s Hollywood Nun.” I have no idea what this means. There’s a red-headed priest named Father Erickson who I will assume is also Irish and has a great singing voice. He is hypnotized by the ritual of the benediction of the Eucharist. IF you are unaware of this, the host (which in Catholic belief is the literal body of Christ—but in a metaphysical sense not a physical sense) is presented in a gold monstrance. I’ve been an altar server, and this is a unique ritual that many outside of Catholicism are not familiar with. It requires you to buy into the whole religion, but even just watching people react to the ritual can give you chills.

Warnke is enrolled in confirmation classes and becomes confirmed, “Yes, I was finally confirmed, and my mother was confirmed with me, but she stopped going shortly after that.”

What Warnke leaves out of this narrative is what any of that means. I know what it means and as a critic of just the writing he should toss in an explanation that getting confirmed means that he’s not longer a Protestant, he’s a Catholic. It’s confirmation of the faith. He says that his mother was confirmed with him, does he mean his half-sister or someone else as his actual mother is dead.

Warnke graduates 8^th grade and enrolls in a public high school but takes religious classes in the church basement. It’s interesting that he’s still taking those classes because he’s confirmed. Confirmation was it for the public-school kids in my day. Warnke seems like a true believer, a real convert, but then he meets the forbidden fruit, e.g. girls.

An odd thing about this book, is that we are 10 pages in (according to the PDF) but we have no idea what Warnke is actually like, so I don’t know if “I started to date girls quite a bit” is him bragging, lamenting, or just stating a fact.

The narrative gets a little dicey here. He tells us that he wasn’t allowed out except on Mondays for confraternity class and Thursdays to go to a gym, but “most nights, this one girl and I would cut out right away and go somewhere and mess around.” I don’t get the impression that he’s sneaking out of the house so it’s an odd thing to say. There’s a line about how his foster parents didn’t object to dating which I feel is a dig at the supposed lax view on dating.

I’ll say this: so far, I’m not seeing anything to objectionable. It seems like he’s bragging about how many girls he used to date but he only concentrates on one. He should just supply us with a name, not her actual name, just something rather generic like “Susan.” It sounds more believable if she has a name even if we know that it’s a fake name. Otherwise, this sounds like, “I totally banged this girl, she’s from Canada though you wouldn’t know her.

The first chapter ends with Warnke saying that he knew he was doing wrong, but he didn’t care. Even if what he was doing was hurting Jesus. He’s not doing anything wrong though. Making out with a girl afterschool? This is the harm that religion does. Outside of the religious experience, and even inside most of it, no one is being harmed. He’s not pressuring the girl, in fact, she seems to have been leading him along.

The end of chapter 1 is Warnke setting the stage for his descent into Satanism. He wants us to think he’s abandoning Jesus, but he’s not. He just skipped out on some CCD classes to make out with a girl. So far, I must admit that this is a good character set up. Now we need to get some plot.