Jesus Land: A Memoir

Julia Scheeres

2005; revised 2012

384 pages / 10 hours and 6 minutes

Nonfiction

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Julia Scheeres is a journalist who, to my knowledge, has written only two books. They offer evidence that less can be more because they are both absolutely superb. One is a memoir written in 2005 called Jesus Land.

The other, published in 2011, is A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown and tells the story of the Jonestown massacre. Decades after the fact, we all continue to wonder how Jonestown could've happened. Her subtitle might overpromise a little but it is, to my way of thinking, the best accounting we have so far. And she is especially gifted at showing us the humanity of those who died. The beginning and the end of the book include a row of headshot pictures of many who died. It is absolutely haunting. The portrait she paints of Jim Jones is equally compelling. Always wearing dark glasses to disguise his rampant drug use, he actually started out as a social crusader. How could the good intentions of so many people go so very wrong?

And as good as that book is, it is her first book, the memoir, that I want to encourage you to read. There is a common theme in both books: religion somehow goes very very wrong. The difference is one of scale. While Jonestown is a disaster for thousands, Jesus Land describes for us a very personal, family-scale disaster.

Sheeres and her adopted brother, David, grow up in a fundamentalist household in 1980s Indiana. David, by the way, is black. There is a sign scrawled in a cornfield near their home, we are told in the second page of the book:

Sinners go to:
HELL

Rightchuss go to:
HEAVEN

The end is neer:
REPENT

This here is:
JESUS LAND

I don't want to give away too much of the plot of this searing memoir. But despite their adoption of black children, the parents are clearly racist. They wind up packing Julia and David off to the Dominican Republic (with the help of the courts) when they aren't totally compliant. They are sent to the Escuela Caribe, a brutal Christian boot camp that is little more than a prison intended to make all of the students repent of their sins.

This is, in many ways, an extraordinarily hard book to read. My guess is you're going to shed a few tears along the way. But David and Julia’s commitments and love for one another shine through. One of the things I want to make clear is this book is not a hatchet job on conservative religious convictions, although I would hope it would help some fundamentalists to see a few things in a different light. The goal of this book is not at all to settle old scores or to be mean, though Scheeres clearly would have reasons to do so. In fact, she has changed the names to protect the privacy of those still living who are part of the book.

I'm no great fan of memoirs. They generally strike me as self-absorbed. If you are like me in that way, I would encourage you to make an exception with this one. It is a moving and transforming experience.