Terry, I think I'm going to regret this. But the incident of my cousin was not the only time I thought that my relatives were unforgiving.

Personally I took pains not to infuriate my relatives, and I realized after a while that not seeing them so much was a good way of staying out of their wrath. There was, however, one incident when I was at the receiving end of Pentecostalist wrath. I was fourteen or fifteen years old and had just finished sewing a missing button onto a blouse, and I was moderately proud of myself, since it was usually my mother who did those things. Just then my grandfather called. We chatted for a bit, and he asked me what I had been doing that day, and I told him about the button. Adn he blew his top. Didn't I realize that it was Sunday? Didn't I know I could go to hell for doing work on a Sunday?

Like I said, I took care not to infuriate my relatives. Well, when I was ten years old, my mother decided that it would be good for me to join a children's theater company. We were going to rehearse and stage plays for kids, such as H.C. Andersen's story about the ugly duckling.

My mother impressed on me that I must never, ever let my relatives know that I was actually performing on stage. Never mind that I was a kid, and that I was performing for other kids, and that it was as innocent as could be.

Let me tell you, Terry, that it made me quite uncomfortable to know that my relatives would condemn me to hell if they knew what I was doing. It made me feel uncomfortable around them. And it wasn't even my own idea to defy them, as it were. It was my mother's.

Let me talk a bit more about my relatives. They though it was a next-to-mortal sin to see a movie in a movie theater. (Seeing a movie on TV was okay.) I remember one occasion when my favorite aunt called me, almost disconsolate because she had seen Sound of Music in a movie theater. She loved that movie. But now she was worried about the fate of her immortal soul.

Why was it such a horrible sin to see a movie in a movie theater? Long after my childhood was over, probably when I was in my forties, my mother told me that it says somewhere in the Bible that those who believe in God are not allowed to "sit down with sinners". Or something like that. And of course, if you go to a movie theater, there will be all those sinners sitting down all around you.

Also, when something bad happened to people who my relatives regarded as sinners, they - my relatives - would indeed sometimes say that the sinners were getting their just rewards by God. Their misery was their richly deserved punishment, inflicted on them by God. That is why somebody had cancer or some other serious condition or disease, or why somebody had become a widow or a widower.

Of course, when a good Pentecostalist came down with a serious disease or lost his or her spouse, that was never regarded as punishment inflicted by God. Pentecostalists were good people, so when something bad happened to them, God was just trying and testing their faith. Pentecostalists suffered not for their sins, but so that God could be even more certain than before that the suffering Pentecostalists were as good as God already knew them to be.

So the thing is, Terry, my relatives really scared me. For all their warmth and smiles and easy laughter, for all their generosity and hospitality, for all their jokes and all their songs, they scared me. Because when you didn't behave the way they wanted you to behave - even if it was about small things like sewing a button on a blouse on a Sunday or seeing a movie in a movie theater instead of on TV, they could condemn you to hell. Because, bottom line, they knew that they were good and other people weren't. They knew that they had God on their side, and if they didn't like you and things turned sour for you, it was God who punished you like they knew he would.

All that I have said right now describes a small circle of Swedish Pentecostalists in the sixties and seventies on an island with a population of about 3,000.

But I admit that I have no knowledge of what things are like in Wasilla or Brandon. I have certainly never visited them. I suspect that I would be uncomfortable there. But it could very well be that I'm totally wrong about Wasilla and Brandon.

Finally, I don't - I repeat, I so don't want to turn this thread into a mud-slinging smear campaign about religion. And just so that everybody knows, I'm not - I'm not!!!! - saying that all, or most, religious people are ......... (fill in any negative adjective or noun that appeals to you). All I'm saying, really, is that I thought that my Pentecostalist relatives were cruel when they condemned my cousin for becoming a father seven months after his wedding. My goodness, he and his wife are still married after 40+ years. What did the two of them do that was so horrible? How can it be so awful to fall in love, make love, make a baby, get married, and stick by one another and one's children for forty years? I'm not backing down from my position that my relatives were cruel and completely unwilling to follow the example of Jesus when they made my cousin choose between public humiliation and expulsion. My post should be regarded as a reply to Terry's seeming defence of my relatives' treatment of my cousin, not as a general condemnation of religious people. I do hope you all understand that.

Ann