TONY DUSHANE’S debut novel Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk is a disarmingly sweet collection of scenes from the life of Gabe, a fictional Jehovah’s Witness boy surging with teenaged lust and guilt. Gabe’s desire for any kind of sexual knowledge constantly battles with the Witnesses’ belief that the apocalypse is coming any day and that sinners (including masturbators and non-married fornicators) will be killed by God, missing a chance to live eternally in the “new system”—a post-Armageddon earth of untold riches and jungle cats as pets.
The world that Dushane exposes is simultaneously funny and heartbreaking: The adult Brothers and Sisters overcompensate for deep wells of shame with stern adherence to the edicts of monthly religious publication The Watchtower, while their teenage children yearn for the answers to forbidden questions. But what could be bitter caricatures prove themselves deeper as Gabe’s worldview too deepens.
As the novel progresses, underlying sadness threatens to overwhelm its wit. Thankfully, though, Gabe’s interior dialogue is constantly funny, a fevered litany of PG-13 desires. Despite Jesus Jerk‘s religious trappings, its center is the universal theme of growing up awkward and horny. The humor that emerges is familiar and painfully honest—less Porky’s, more The Squid and the Whale. By keeping his focus small, Dushane does the hard work of making Jehovah’s Witnesses perfectly relatable before making you damn glad you didn’t grow up as one.
Jesus Jerk?
I think whether you are a jerk has ALOT more to do with personal choices than one’s religion. Call me crazy, but that math makes more sense to me. That, and I don’t think the VAST MAJORITY of JWs or Christian in general ACTUALLY think people who masturbate will be killed be god. Makes me wonder who the jerk is.. ..
Maybe the jerk is someone with no sense of humor. As David Rakoff said, “Not being funny doesn’t make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does.”
few stereotypes are as true as that any group of people that come knock on your door at the crack of dawn on your day off to share the word of their cult with you are in fact jerks.
Hey as a kid who grew up this way- I am looking forward to reading this book. 2/3 of us who grew up JW, end up leaving the “truth” in our young adulthood or adolecence, only to be alienated from our family, friends and the world we were part of (that ironically alienated us from the world). This is a a fairly large subculture of fuckups- as the JWs are over 1 mil strong in the US.
The teenage kid who is knocking at your door at 10am probably is aware at some level he is being a jerk, but is only doing what he is told good kids do…. so please be nice to him if possible. Just dont take his magazines, or else he will be obligated to come back.
Fortunately, the majority of Americans will have a religious experience that is so watered down and secularized they’ll never really be able to relate to what it’s like to be isolated and brainwashed from birth – that’s not a personal choice, it’s a total, involuntary immersion. Think more old school, Catholic-style guilt. You’re indoctrinated from such an early age that by the time you get to your teenage years the guilt is so powerfully internalized that your own mind provides enough torment and sense of shame about sex to make a flagellating monk jealous.