I once heard a preacher during a revival say that if you can’t remember the instant you were saved and experienced this hypnotic and spellbinding occurrence, then you probably weren’t saved at all. Baptists, in those days did not believe that a person grew in their knowledge of the message of Jesus as many other churches believed, but they believed in Instant Salvation, much akin to the conversion experience of Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus. .I know that this, more than any other event, helped to develop a lot of guilt feelings in me for many years as I had never felt this blinding light experience. It took me a long time to finally realize that most of the preachers had heard this from other preachers and they were repeating this “guilt trip” gobbledygook or they were probably fighting their own demons and not mine!
I remember several preachers who gave sermons which were intended to scare the devil out of us but they always seemed to have the opposite effect on me. They only added to my feelings of having committed a religious crime without having any of the pleasures associated with it. It was only after a revival preacher, Brother Chester Sylvestor, brought the sermon at Vacation Bible School that my sister, Dorothy, walked the aisle to join the church and I followed her. I don’t know if I did it because I didn’t want her to get saved before me or if I thought it would make my mother happy. I didn’t feel any different after this experience as there was no blissful voice from Heaven and the lack of this feeling only added to my shame and sense of guiltiness which had been growing for some time. Dorothy and I were both baptized in Pecan Bayou Creek, as we knew that it didn’t count unless it was ‘total immersion’ a dogmatic Baptist tenet.
One of the problems I had with baptismal dogmatism (principles of incontrovertible truths) came much later when I was an adult and read the Baptist Standard, a monthly magazine from the high muck-a -mucks of the Baptist Publishing House in Dallas. I had been told all my life that baptism was not a condition for salvation, according to Baptist belief. Yet, a writer had asked the Editor, Rev. E. S. James, the Editor of the Baptist Standard, as to what would happen to an individual who had found Christ and had been saved but had died before the person could be baptized. Would that person go to Heaven? The Editor did not give the obvious easy answer which should have been, Yes! Instead, he rambled around and made it sound like it would be very difficult for that person to enter the gates of Heaven without first being dunked under water. I think that this event was the first time I really began to question Baptist dogma and doubt that the Baptist Church was infallible in their credo or set of beliefs, just as the Baptist believed the Catholic hierarchy and the Pope to be.