Composing a Further Life

to different people, and I just … I wanted a container for it. That’s when I asked this woman, Nancy, who was the wife of a Turner Broadcasting executive, ‘to bring me to Christ,’ although I didn’t really know what that meant. It happened too soon, and it was not the right context; fundamentalist Christianity was not what I was looking for. Nancy has a very large Bible study class, about four hundred women, huge. I went to it later on, and I had to flee. So I’ve done everything backwards.”
    “We’ve both done some things backwards,” I said, “but can you tell me the story again? We were talking in the car, and I don’t think we got it on tape.”
    “Okay. I’ve written about it, too. I was realizing that I believed in God, and it was hard for me because my father was so opposed, but I knew that this was becoming something that was important to me. I asked Andy Young to have breakfast with me, and I told him the story, and he said, ‘The Greek word for saved is
whole
, and you are whole, you have been saved.’ It felt facile to me then, that answer. Then I asked my friend about it and told her the story, and she said, ‘What being saved meant to me when it happened was taking the next step.’
    “Well, you don’t say that to me. If you are offering me to take the next step in just about anything, I will do it, just to do it.” One of Jane’s most striking and enduring characteristics is her decisiveness. As a young woman protesting the war in Vietnam, Jane threw herself into action, going to Hanoi, occasionally doing something she eventually regretted, like posing beside a Vietcong antiaircraft gun without considering how the picture might later be interpreted, so her swiftness can sometimes be a problem, but how much more powerful it is than the tendency to dither that overtakes some of us as we get older.
    Jane continued her description of asking her friend to bring her to Christ. “So I said, ‘Okay, help me take the next step.’ And she gave me the Gospel of John, which I found extremely moving—and that was it. I read that, and then she brought me into the chapel at the Peachtree Presbyterian Church. And we knelt in front of the altar and I was weeping, I was very moved.
    “By now Ted and I have split up. He was very angry about the Christianity. He said to me once, ‘If you had to choose me or your faith, what would you choose?’ And I said, ‘My faith,’ and he was very angry. I don’t blame him, because I hadn’t discussed it with him. I was so fragile in terms of the strength and depth of my beliefs, I knew that if I did, he, who was the head of the debating team at Brown, would talk me out of it. And most of what he would say I would agree with, that religion has been the cause of wars and deaths and hypocrisy and all those things, and I completely agree. And yet there was something happening in me that I treasured and I didn’t want him to tromp all over, so I did not discuss it with him. So it was a fait accompli, which was not good for him.
    “Anyway, I didn’t like the group Bible study class, so I began to go once a week to this woman’s house and do Bible study with her, underlining passages and homework and charts; it was—I felt myself go dry. I felt the reverence evaporate, and I told her I had to stop.
    “Meantime, the man that had driven us to the church that day went on a national radio show and said that he had ‘brought Jane Fonda to Christ.’ Then, before I knew it, Cal Thomas (the right-wing Christian syndicated journalist Doubting Thomas) was writing articles saying that he had a hard time believing that Hanoi Jane would become a Christian and so forth. It was really horrible. You know, I was not in a position where I could defend my faith, and yet I didn’t want to say, No, it’s not true. It is true, and I do feel born again, but I didn’t want to be associated with what those words have come to mean. And it was all over the place. I must have gotten a dozen Bibles in the mail, and people would come up to me in airports and give me little slips of Scripture and letters. It was amazing, but where I was coming from was not what they were assuming. I went with Cal Thomas to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, and I thought, I don’t feel at home here.
    “Okay, I thought, I’ve got to figure out what my home is then, because I don’t want to renounce this. I said, I’m going to have to go back to scratch and study.… I had not