Post by Jesse Morrell on Jul 27, 2006 21:16:51 GMT -5
www.news-daily.com/opinion/local_story_207232944.html?keyword=topstory
Published: July 26, 2006 11:29 pm
My debt to a mad Southern preacher - Daniel Silliman
My father was a drug dealer, back in the 1960s. He grew up in Berkeley and when the Vietnam protests and the Civil Rights movement and the student revolts came along he was there selling LSD. There’s a whole long story to that, but let’s shorten it to this: Once upon a time my dad was a drug dealer, selling the then-really-popular and supposedly mind-expanding hallucinogenic, LSD.
The fact that my father stopped selling drugs long before I was born and that my father lived long enough to become my father is due in part to a Georgia-born street preacher named Hubert Lindsey.
Lindsey was a preacher in the old sense, a fire and brimstone, fear of hell, damnation and judgment preacher who heard that things were happening out in California and decided to go and see it for himself. In those days, Berkeley was a mad house and all sorts of people were there proposing their ideas for the world in a loud voice to the passing people. There were Satanists selling the Satanic Bible, Hare Krishna’s dancing and Moaists passing out their little red book. Lindsey, nicknamed “Holy Hubert” by local newspapers, stood there preaching for eight hours a day.
My father found him on Telegraph Avenue — the main street leading up the University of California with, then, 10,000 people a day walking one way or the other — standing on a wooden box quoting obscure passages of the Bible and telling people they were going to hell.
Lindsey’s style was aggressive and abrasive. He would shout his way through a list of people who were, he thought, going to hell. Communists, hippies, homosexuals and drug users were high on the list. This didn’t make him popular. He was often heckled and often that heckling turned violent. He was beaten by Hells Angels, Black Panthers and the Manson family. One audience beat him until he lost all his teeth, another until he was blind.
My father said he saw him shot. According to those who were there — and I can’t verify this, these are just the stories I grew up with — he was miraculously healed in the ambulance and convinced the driver to take him to the jail so he could tell the man who shot him that, unless he accepted Jesus, he was going to hell.
Lindsey would just be another quirky character in history, one in a long list of colorful preachers, except Lindsey knew my father. Most people haven’t heard of him and I certainly wouldn’t have, except that he played a huge role in my dad’s life and, by extension, mine. For a couple of years he talked to my father, personally preached to him about the dangers of hell and the need for Jesus. After a couple of years my father thought maybe he should take this red-headed Southern street preacher seriously and, to abridge this story, became a Christian.
The fact that I was born, that I grew up in a Christian home with a strong family, that the father I knew was a follower of Jesus, a reader of theology and the Bible, all owe some debt to a crazy man named Lindsey.
I’ve been fascinated by him. Who was this guy? I’ve gathered some information about him, looked up the biographical facts. Whenever my father told his story I always asked him about the part about Lindsey, and sometimes I still call him with a random question. I find myself, on occasion, thinking about the man, just randomly wondering about him. I wonder how he heard about Berkeley. I wonder if he ever doubted his own faith, why he was so certain that a Jew who died 2,000 years ago came back from the dead and saved his soul. I wonder what he read, besides the Bible, when he went home at night. I wonder if he dreamed of going back to where he grew up in Georgia and South Carolina. I wonder what he would have been, if he hadn’t been a preacher.
Lindsey’s Christianity is not my own. I’m not interested in the sort of certainty that doesn’t allow you to listen to people. I’m not interested in separating the saved from the damned. I dislike Christianity that can’t distinguish its faith from political and economic positions. I’m opposed to the violent words and angry rhetoric that drove Lindsey’s Christianity. But still, the man was there talking to my father when other more intellectual and less caustic Christians weren’t. For that I owe him.
Daniel Silliman is the crime reporter for the Clayton News Daily. He can be reached at (770) 478-5753 ext. 254, or by e-mail at dsilliman@news-daily.com
Published: July 26, 2006 11:29 pm
My debt to a mad Southern preacher - Daniel Silliman
My father was a drug dealer, back in the 1960s. He grew up in Berkeley and when the Vietnam protests and the Civil Rights movement and the student revolts came along he was there selling LSD. There’s a whole long story to that, but let’s shorten it to this: Once upon a time my dad was a drug dealer, selling the then-really-popular and supposedly mind-expanding hallucinogenic, LSD.
The fact that my father stopped selling drugs long before I was born and that my father lived long enough to become my father is due in part to a Georgia-born street preacher named Hubert Lindsey.
Lindsey was a preacher in the old sense, a fire and brimstone, fear of hell, damnation and judgment preacher who heard that things were happening out in California and decided to go and see it for himself. In those days, Berkeley was a mad house and all sorts of people were there proposing their ideas for the world in a loud voice to the passing people. There were Satanists selling the Satanic Bible, Hare Krishna’s dancing and Moaists passing out their little red book. Lindsey, nicknamed “Holy Hubert” by local newspapers, stood there preaching for eight hours a day.
My father found him on Telegraph Avenue — the main street leading up the University of California with, then, 10,000 people a day walking one way or the other — standing on a wooden box quoting obscure passages of the Bible and telling people they were going to hell.
Lindsey’s style was aggressive and abrasive. He would shout his way through a list of people who were, he thought, going to hell. Communists, hippies, homosexuals and drug users were high on the list. This didn’t make him popular. He was often heckled and often that heckling turned violent. He was beaten by Hells Angels, Black Panthers and the Manson family. One audience beat him until he lost all his teeth, another until he was blind.
My father said he saw him shot. According to those who were there — and I can’t verify this, these are just the stories I grew up with — he was miraculously healed in the ambulance and convinced the driver to take him to the jail so he could tell the man who shot him that, unless he accepted Jesus, he was going to hell.
Lindsey would just be another quirky character in history, one in a long list of colorful preachers, except Lindsey knew my father. Most people haven’t heard of him and I certainly wouldn’t have, except that he played a huge role in my dad’s life and, by extension, mine. For a couple of years he talked to my father, personally preached to him about the dangers of hell and the need for Jesus. After a couple of years my father thought maybe he should take this red-headed Southern street preacher seriously and, to abridge this story, became a Christian.
The fact that I was born, that I grew up in a Christian home with a strong family, that the father I knew was a follower of Jesus, a reader of theology and the Bible, all owe some debt to a crazy man named Lindsey.
I’ve been fascinated by him. Who was this guy? I’ve gathered some information about him, looked up the biographical facts. Whenever my father told his story I always asked him about the part about Lindsey, and sometimes I still call him with a random question. I find myself, on occasion, thinking about the man, just randomly wondering about him. I wonder how he heard about Berkeley. I wonder if he ever doubted his own faith, why he was so certain that a Jew who died 2,000 years ago came back from the dead and saved his soul. I wonder what he read, besides the Bible, when he went home at night. I wonder if he dreamed of going back to where he grew up in Georgia and South Carolina. I wonder what he would have been, if he hadn’t been a preacher.
Lindsey’s Christianity is not my own. I’m not interested in the sort of certainty that doesn’t allow you to listen to people. I’m not interested in separating the saved from the damned. I dislike Christianity that can’t distinguish its faith from political and economic positions. I’m opposed to the violent words and angry rhetoric that drove Lindsey’s Christianity. But still, the man was there talking to my father when other more intellectual and less caustic Christians weren’t. For that I owe him.
Daniel Silliman is the crime reporter for the Clayton News Daily. He can be reached at (770) 478-5753 ext. 254, or by e-mail at dsilliman@news-daily.com
