Mark believes that if he had accepted Jerry Patterson’s deal to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of fifty-five years in prison, as his brother did, then, like his brother, he probably would have been paroled after a fraction of that time. And if he had maintained his plea of not guilty and gone to trial, the jury might have been persuaded to take into account his age, his horrifying upbringing, and his brainwashed state, and there’s a possibility that he would have been given a much lighter sentence, as was the case with Lucy. Mark Harris, the autodidact, after many years following his mother’s death, after many years separated from the people who had brainwashed him and themselves at the same time, after many years of therapy, education, self-directed reading, intellectual exploration, deeply serious thought and reflection, came to see all of this more clearly, and still had to sit there in prison as the consequence of the decision he had made when he had been the seventeen-year-old “prophet.”

  He tried, in any way that he could, to find a way out. The way out. In Franz Kafka’s story “A Report to an Academy,” Rotpeter, the captive ape who has assimilated into human society, describes the feeling of being confined in a cage with no way out:

  Over and above it all only the one feeling: no way out.

  I fear that perhaps you do not quite understand what I mean by “way out.” I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense. I deliberately do not use the word “freedom.” I do not mean the spacious feeling of freedom on all sides. As an ape, perhaps, I knew that, and I have met men who yearn for it. But for my part I desired such freedom neither then nor now. In passing: may I say that all too often men are betrayed by the word freedom. And as freedom is counted among the most sublime feelings, so the corresponding disillusionment can be also sublime. . . .

  No, freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out. . . .

  Today I can see it clearly; without the most profound inward calm I could never have found my way out.*

  Mark had thought that his first wife, whom he loved and who he believed loved him, might help him find a way out, before he learned that she had no incentive to help him get out because the only reason she’d married him was to claim him as a dependent on her taxes. His brother, the only contact he had on the outside, abandoned him for ten years after he was paroled, and even after Mark managed to get in touch with him, Daniel was a sporadic and unreliable correspondent and not much help. For forty years, Mark Harris had no way out.

  In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Alabama that mandatory sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole are unconstitutional for juvenile offenders; it was later strengthened by Montgomery v. Louisiana in 2016. Following the decision, many states passed new laws to bring their justice systems into compliance with the new ruling. Arkansas passed Act 539 in 2017, and after it went into effect, Arkansas inmates serving life sentences for crimes committed when they had been minors became eligible for parole. The difficulty was getting their cases heard by the parole board. Whatever the Supreme Court’s decision, giving clemency to violent offenders, Mark believes, was bad political optics for the governor.

  So they got around that. What the Department of Corrections did was they cherry-picked people that had only served twenty years or less to go before the parole board. That is, those cases they could reasonably reject for parole. And the rest of us, who had served thirty, forty years, were ignored. We were told, in my case, that I had to be added to the list by some kind of legal process, right? And my brother was supposedly trying to do that, but it wasn’t happening. So at any rate, I wrote to the governor, Asa Hutchinson. I told the governor in my letter that I believed they were cherry-picking who they were allowing to go up for parole. And I sent that letter on a Friday. I sent it registered certified mail so it couldn’t get lost. And Monday morning, I get a call from the parole officer. I’m going up next month! And when I went up for parole, I was the first person they called. And they were very nice to me. And the head of the parole board was looking at my file, and he said, “So you’ve done twenty years?” “No sir. I’ve done forty.” And he was looking down at the file. He says, “That’s interesting—it says here you’ve done twenty.” So obviously somebody had mistyped the number so that I would look less likely to be considerable. But they were very agreeable. Anyway, I made parole.

  In July 2018, at the age of fifty-seven, after serving forty years in prison, Mark was paroled out of state to Georgia. His brother, Daniel Gobe Smith, took him in. He was then taking care of his wife, Robin Lynn Holt, who had stage 7 senile dementia. “That was a thirty-six-hour day for him,” Mark says. “He had somebody coming in to help take care of her during the day and such. Finally she had to go to a senile dementia facility because she kept falling. She lived out the rest of her life in that facility, and he was unable to visit her there for some time, until the very end of it, because of the covid epidemic. Except through glass.” She died in November 2020. Not long after his wife died, Daniel was diagnosed with lung cancer—stage 4 when it was detected—and Mark spent the next year and a few months taking care of him, until he had to go into hospice care. He died a few days later, in January 2022.

  When he got out of prison, Mark was still bitter about his brother’s having abandoned him for so many years and then about his fairly minimal and ineffectual help after they were back in touch again—but he had nowhere else to go. I asked Mark what it had been like living with his brother in his first years out on parole.

  “He was an alcoholic,” Mark said. “He would drink at night.”

  “And a Bible thumper,” Barbara added. She likes that phrase.

  “Yeah, he was still into that track,” Mark said. “Couldn’t get him out of it. He was still into that cult belief stuff, basically. Still ‘doomsday prepping,’ for whenever that happens. It’s just really sad. My dad carried that until he died. My brother carried that until he died. I’m the only one who escaped from that craziness.”

  Later, Mark was reminded of another anecdote: “He told me that he would always respect homosexuals because when he was in prison, the administration refused to feed him when he was in isolation. And the prison homosexuals—who apparently all worked in the kitchen—were sneaking him food. So it’s an irony that all these outsiders to his faith had shown him so much love. And it’s sort of a testimony that love is so much bigger than religious doctrine.”

  What a year 2018 was to see the outside world for the first time as an adult, with red and blue America both spasming with paroxysms of madness and much of the country literally on fire—followed in short order by the covid pandemic, when the whole world became a prison, when Daniel, asshole though he may have been (and, well, a murderer), had to watch his wife die from behind glass, not allowed to touch her. Around the time his brother lay dying, deep in the lockdown in the fall of 2020—while I was teaching a “hybrid” class, trying to talk about a Flannery O’Connor story through a KN95 to six remote-learning Bard freshmen Zooming in from their childhood bedrooms and seven in person in surgical masks sitting at desks spaced six feet apart in the middle of the basketball court—Mark met Barbara Shaw, a Canadian woman eight years older than him, through mutual friends on Facebook.

  “He is the kindest, sweetest person I’ve ever met,” Barbara told me. “The most giving, the most thoughtful. That’s why I fell for him.” Barbara has had a full life. Originally from Edmonton, she lived in Victoria, British Columbia, for many years; she’s worked many jobs—hypnotherapist, website designer (“I’m like a jill of all trades”)—and she has three children and had been married three times before she met Mark. “My first marriage, he was on the abusive side. I left with two little kids. Then my second husband, he died of an epileptic seizure. And then I found out my first husband, the nasty one, died of a heart attack when he was forty. When I was with Doug, my third husband, I thought, Well, he’s younger than me, he’s probably not going to die on me. Nope! He got ALS. ALS, of all things! And so I had to watch him die in increments. It was terrible. So I nursed him until he died. He had social anxiety disorder, so he couldn’t really go anywhere. He wanted to stay with me the whole time. It was really hard. But I did it until the day he died.” Shortly after her third husband died, she met Mark. “We just talked every day, and then we started video chatting. And he really helped me through the grief process. But it wasn’t just how kind and sweet he was to me, it was watching how he talked to other people in groups we were in on Facebook. Constantly thoughtful, decent and kind. I thought, Gee, he’s kinder than I am, you know? He’s like a role model for kindness.” Barbara has been retired for several years, with a pension from the Canadian government. At the time she began talking and video chatting over the internet with Mark, who was himself nursing his older brother unto death, she and her recently deceased husband had for some years been living in Kewlona, British Columbia, where her youngest daughter lives with her husband and daughter. “I had to think long and hard to marry him and not be with them,” she says. “And I know they miss me, but . . . we really love each other. It’s just so easy.”

  When I met Mark and Barbara at that Panera Bread, Mark apologized for being groggy. He was sleep deprived, as he’d had to work until one in the morning the night before and then had trouble sleeping due to the anxiety of meeting me. He had told me in the course of a phone conversation that he worked at a candy factory. I asked him if he worked a night shift. No, he said; it was only a few days after New Year’s, and the factory had closed for two weeks for the holidays. But this is America, after all, and the South to boot; the factory did not give its workers those two weeks off but furloughed them without pay, which meant that Mark had to pick up gig work in the meantime, and was making deliveries for DoorDash to make ends meet until the factory reopened. I asked him what he does at the candy factory.

  “I carry boxes,” he said. “I package stuff into boxes. I made Mensa when I was in prison. I’ve got one month short of a degree in social work. And I work in a factory doing manual labor.” He shrugged, and went on, “I am married and living about as happy a life as I possibly can be, although it is much later than I had hoped. And my entire youthful life was spent in prison. So my desire for a doctorate or maybe a master’s in social work even are pretty much out the window, because I can’t afford to go to school. I’m just trying to survive.”

  As I was driving back home, he texted me photos of some of his paintings, as well as this afterthought:

  Another thing I may have mentioned before is the danger of the Christian doctrine of Sola Scriptura, where the Bible alone is studied by ignorant and uneducated Christians with varying levels of intelligence, education, and possible mental disorders or obsessive agendas, without the benefit of exposure to the historical traditions of the developing Church through the centuries, and the stressed importance of human cognitive reasoning.

  This is avoided in the Anglican Church and the Episcopal Church by the emphasis on the three things, envisioned as a three-legged stool supporting the Church’s doctrines and beliefs: Scripture (of the Christian Bible, including the Apocrypha); Tradition (of the Church, including the Church’s understanding and interpretation of Scripture); and Cognition or Cognitive Reasoning (of each individual member of the Church). This last emphasis is particularly stressed in Episcopal Seminary Schools.

  I believe this, along with dissatisfaction felt by people about many forms and practices of the organized and matured Christian faiths, was one of the major contributing factors to the rise of bizarre Christian cults in the 70s and 80s, and may continue to be a significant danger in our society at present.

  Of the various Christian denominations he studied with the Kairos Prison Ministry, it was the Episcopal Church that most deeply affected Mark’s religious thinking. The prison chaplain he worked under at one point was an Episcopal priest, and Mark had been close with him. He was impressed with the Episcopal Church’s humility and moderation, as well as the stress it places upon the importance of reason.

  “The emphasis on reason allows for a greater freedom of thought and interpretational viewpoint of individuals within the faith,” Mark wrote to me when I asked him about it. “Since the primary focus of the Episcopal Church is of the Liturgy of the Church, the structure of the worship services, instead of what the individual worshipper BELIEVES (so stressed in many of the Protestant faiths, such as Baptists, Pentecostals, etc.), there is much less conflict among the membership.” In that I heard an echo of what the practicing but not-terribly-fervent Christian Jerry Patterson had said about religion: It can be a wonderful thing as long as you don’t actually believe it. The practice of religion matters more than belief in it.

  Perhaps the Episcopal Church affected Mark’s thinking more than it intended to, as he would eventually think himself out of the Christian faith entirely, exiting with a vague and agnostic definition of God as maybe, if it exists, a sort of pantheistic universal consciousness that certainly could not ever involve itself in his affairs or anyone else’s—a belief in a deist, Cartesian kind of God there is absolutely no point in praying to, which for all practical earthly purposes is not functionally different from atheism.

  Sola scriptura was one of Martin Luther’s doctrinal cornerstones, and it is a crucial load-bearing pillar in the ecclesiastic architecture of many Protestant denominations, especially the ones descended directly from Luther and Calvin, such as Presbyterianism. (The Episcopal and Methodist Churches emphasize the less extreme prima scriptura, holding that scripture is not necessarily the only thing a Christian needs but should come first.) Sola scriptura is one of the first three solae, the key beliefs that differentiated the Protestant Reformation from the theological doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church: sola scriptura, sola fide, and sola gratia. By scripture alone, by faith alone, by grace alone. Or: scripture over tradition, faith over works, and grace over merit.

  To take the second two first: Faith over works means that all you need to enter the kingdom of Heaven is faith in Christ. One of John Wesley’s illustrations of this is Luke 23:39–43, when one of the “malefactors” (in the KJV) crucified alongside Jesus says, “Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” That anonymous malefactor presumably led a life of sin that resulted in his being tied up there and left to die on Golgotha, and he hadn’t enough time left alive to counterbalance it with any good works. What you actually do with your life doesn’t matter; all that matters is faith in Christ. (I enthusiastically recommend James Hogg’s 1824 novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, for a disturbing and phantasmagoric work of art that revolves around the principality of this concept to Calvinism.) Grace over merit is a similar concept. God bestows grace upon you because he wants you to have it, not because you have done anything to earn it. “ ’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,” John Newton wrote of the moment on March 21, 1748 (it was a very important date to him, and he remembered it, just as Paul Kleinpeter remembers July 4, 1979, as the day Grace appeared and turned him from his riotous living), when the slave trader, aboard a tempest-tossed ship off the northern coast of Ireland, prayed for his life and God reached down and saved a wretch like him—“and grace my fears relieved.” The concepts of faith over works and grace over merit are what make Protestant Christianity particularly attractive to criminals, alcoholics, and other such people who have badly fucked up their own and other people’s lives: Grace allows you to be born again; it forgives the unforgivable. As the father says of the prodigal son returned, you have to be lost before you can be found.

  But sola scriptura comes first. It is the principle that the Bible is the sole infallible source of authority for Christian faith and practice. From Luther’s perspective, it makes sense; the Reformers saw themselves as rebelling against a Church that had grown from a dozen Jewish bumpkins preaching in the desert boondocks of the Roman Empire to eventually supplanting that empire and moving into its hollowed-out structure like a hermit crab, with a pope instead of an emperor and a well-organized and militaristically hierarchal pyramid of ecclesiastical authority trickling down from him in widening tiers and resting upon the foundation of the illiteracy of most of its parishioners. A major influence on my angry young man’s atheism was William H. Gass; in the essay “Spectacles” he describes the medieval Church with characteristically nimble brutality of wit:

  Throughout the medieval period, the Church had carefully confined intellectual study to authorized and holy texts, and even among those of the public who might be able to read, only a select few were allowed so much as a peek at the Word of God. Instruction in matters of the faith was performed by pictures; consequently, painters—visual artists of all kinds—were commissioned to illuminate pages and adorn walls, to carve figures and design windows that would depict and applaud the Christian message. The masses were illiterate and spoke a vulgar tongue. Their culture was crude and had been created close to those sharp edges of want and necessity that were likely to sever the lines of life at any luckless moment. God’s Word might beat in the heart of things, but ordinary language was no more than the body’s bad breath. Kept chaste and forced into clerical service, thus from a surfeit of both denial and privilege, the Latin language died.

  Last weekend Caitlin and I visited the Cloisters at the northernmost tip of Manhattan—the arcades of four French Gothic monasteries that were disassembled, shipped to New York, and reassembled into a very beautiful museum of medieval art—and I was reminded of the overwhelming dominance Christian imagery held over every hour of the day of medieval life. (Religion wasn’t a part of life, it was life.) The clergy hoarded and kept guard over the written word and interpreted it for the masses, told them what it said, and then told them what it meant, keeping them dazzled into obedience with images, statues, ornaments, and conducting their rituals in a magical language the hoi polloi didn’t understand. (One theory of the etymology of “hocus pocus” supposes that it’s a garbled corruption of the opening words of the liturgy of the Eucharist in Latin, “Hoc est corpus meum”—“This is my body”—which the priest says as he transubstantiates bread into the body of Christ.)