A few years ago, an obscure pastor in Florida held a sacred book in one hand and the promise of a lighter in another, threatening, in effect, to throw an ideological grenade into a crowded room and take the viewing world hostage in an unprecedented display of evangelistic theatrics and foreign policy nightmare. I raised my politically progressive divinity school graduate voice with millions all over the world in protest. How could he? What an ignorant, hateful human being. Why I’d never. Such an outrage–oh, wait. Slowly and painfully, a memory surfaced through a fog of forgetting, like the kinds of memories dimly created in alcohol-drenched mental states and so easily lost in morning-after hang overs but then, gasp, sneak up on you at the drugstore while you are nursing your post-party malaise and make you cringe at the realization: I did what?

The memory returned as this: I held the Book of Mormon in my hand, looking for a way to destroy it. I was twenty and at the sad end of my own student missionary year–a failed experiment in adult freedom, religious conviction, and wanderlust. The ordinary sadnesses of a young woman living far from home collided with a wall of doomsday theology that drew its life-force from a fundamental state of alienation from God–an even greater loneliness for home–and the fanatical tendencies of a boss who claimed, at the low point of that year, that I was an agent of the devil. For months, I had been homesickly; my journal read like the calendar of a prisoner with a release date. Now, finally, I could go home. My roommate and I were closing up the little one bedroom apartment we had shared for the past nine months as we learned in fits and starts how to live in a foreign country and forge bonds of friendship that made the miseries of “working for God” more bearable. My suitcase had been packed for nearly a month.

The holy book in my hand was, in that moment, a reminder that we were not the only missionaries in the neighborhood. And things had not gone well between us and the Elders. We never knew the Elders’ first names; even between themselves they used their surnames, addressing each other as Elder so-and-so. We came to each other then, not as goofy, earnest college students clumsily attempting God’s work in the world but rather as dangerously self-assured ambassadors from competing cosmic visions–we of the Seventh-day Adventists, they of the Latter-day Saints. (If you are neither, then you might be saying to yourself: aren’t both religions equally weird?) And we warily circled each other for months at bus stops and the grocery store.

On Halloween, a holiday no one in the country paid attention to by American standards, we encountered the Elders on the subway dressed for the occasion, inexplicably, unadvisedly, in full nun habits–big, kitschy rosary beads included. Judging from the many sideways looks the Elders received, it was clear that even if the locals understood why these two men were dressed in irreverent drag, that they thought doing so was in bad taste. Yet, the Elders rode on straight-faced like real nuns might, moving through the crowds of people with the same amiably fixed composure they carried door to door in their crisp white shirts and dark slacks as they doggedly trekked the Soviet-inspired cement landscape inviting each person they met to consider something More, something Better, something Truer. Like hardened veterans, they calmly shared stories of being chased from doorways, once, with a shotgun aimed at their backs. By comparison, my missionary year as an English teacher who occasionally helped with worship was a soft-sell for Christ. I didn’t like the Elders or their imperturbability.

Once, though, in our loneliness for more English-speaking friends, my roommate and I attempted to bridge the space between us. But overtures of friendship while sharing a meal together quickly degenerated into a bloodless religious war that ended with an ugly Scriptural face-off, prayer dare, and one of the Elders repeating over and again, “We believe the Book of Mormon is the second testimony of Jesus Christ. We believe the Book of Mormon is the second testimony of Jesus Christ.” All my roommate and I had as proof of that unfortunate evening was the Elders’ parting gift of that very book.

I needed to get rid of it. And here, honest to God, was my logic: If I didn’t dispose of the book, then Satan might use it to convert more people to Mormonism.

I’m not sure when I first arrived at the idea that Mormonism was a tool of the devil. I remember that in the church library of my childhood was a video with scary background music and ominous narration that detailed the “false teachings” of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. And somehow I had gotten it into my head that Satan had helped raise the Church of Latter-day Saints in the mid-19th century as an “evil twin” to the true and special remnant people of God, the Seventh-day Adventists (of course), who were themselves born out of the same religious fervor, geography, and yearnings of that time to be God’s true messengers at the very End of the World.

When we were kids, my parents once left my brother and me with our pastor’s family while they made an overnight trip. Perhaps it was the effect of sleeping in a strange bed in the pastor’s house but my dreams that night were unusually potent with religious meaning. In one, I was in a forested area running. I can’t remember if I was running away from or pursuing someone–possibly both–because there in the forest was also my sister, Mavis, my father’s oldest daughter by his first marriage. Given the twelve-year age difference between us and the painful emotional webs blended families often find themselves in, I’ve never really known her except early on from a distance and now, as an adult, not at all. It made sense then that in my dream she was an elusive figure, darting through the trees.

From across a small pond, I finally saw her and began to shout. I still remember what I said to her because I woke up yelling: “My God is better than your God!” I said this loud enough that the pastor’s wife burst through the door to see if I was all right.

Now, this dream may have been my psyche’s way of working out feelings of competition and possessiveness around our father. But I think the dream was telling me something pretty literal, too. I absolutely did think that my God was better than her God. My father’s ex-wife converted to Mormonism after their divorce. Around the same time, my dad became a Seventh-day Adventist. And their children apparently got doses of each until they were innoculated against both religions.

I, on the other hand, was a fourth-generation Seventh-day Adventist through my mother. And if there is a gene we inherit that makes us predisposed towards religion, then I am a genetic freak. Everything I learned about Mormonism at church made me believe that it was the evil twin to Seventh-day Adventism.

Whatever my path to this conclusion may have been, however, a simple Google search verifies this: I was an ideological granddaughter in a long lineage of fears and prejudices about the Latter-day Saints that extended well beyond my own Seventh-day Adventist roots into a much broader story of American history that, at its worst, bore acts of violence not only against books but against human beings.

Not yet taking in the gravity of this history and my small part in it, I considered throwing the book away in a conventional manner: into the garbage where it would then make its way to the dumpster. But at twenty years of age, I inhabited a world in which demons and angels were everywhere–more demons than angels, it seemed–and the metaphysical threat I needed to account for in that world was that Satan might send a dispatch of demon helpers to rescue this copy of the Book of Mormon from certain destruction (as if he didn’t have access to a million more), lift it on invisible hands out of the dumpster, into the air, across the street, through a window, and onto the kitchen table of an unsuspecting man or woman with life circumstances that had poised them to be the next perfect victim of the complex lie of Mormonism.

So I did what the logic of my mind in that moment required: I tore the book apart with my hands.

Of course it wasn’t logical at all. It was a manically joyful, cathartic act of destruction in which I frenetically turned a sacred text into fistfuls of confetti while my roommate watched on like a passerby of a car wreck. I wince with pain to think that somewhere in the world there may still exist a photo of me dancing with arms raised in that rain of paper, trying to shake off my own demons.

Thirteen years later, I nearly accomplished a full forgetting of that strange and chaotic time in my youth. The world of meaning I once inhabited at the age of twenty was, by thirty, a shattered snow globe and I persisted through strata of grief and anger to re-create my place in the universe. By some combination of life experience, personal searching, and higher education, I left Fundmentalism behind like a woman leaving a bad marriage.

But suddenly, Pastor Terry Jones–with his Wild Bill mustache and Wild West theology–was no longer just some ugly caricature of everything wrong in American Christianity. He was a mirror. And as painful as it was to see my face in his, I could not deny that he and I held more in common than most, if only that we would forever be linked by membership in the small and ignominious club of holy book destroyers. I mean, there really aren’t that many of us. But it only takes one person to start a bonfire.

At first, it seemed like Terry Jones might back away from his own threats. He milked media time like a movie starlet, appearing on every news outlet that would give him a microphone. Like a surreal game show, a car dealer in New Jersey offered him a new vehicle if he promised not to burn the Quran. Pastor Jones accepted the prize then gave the car to a charity. Important political, religious, and military leaders all knew his name. President Obama addressed the controversy himself in an interview with George Stephanopoulous, imploring the pastor to listen to his “better angels” and rescind the proposed Quran burning. And ultimately, the September 11 deadline came and went and no holy books were burned. In a phone call from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Pastor Jones promised he would not burn a Quran. Blessedly, Pastor Jones flinched. Perhaps he took to heart the warnings, perhaps he just got scared. Not exactly the makings of a true believer, I thought.

Maybe Terry Jones thought the same thing about himself after the media circus of last Fall. Because when he re-emerged in the following Spring, he did so quietly, with an accomplice–Pastor Wayne Sapp–and a lighter. The two men oversaw the burning of a Quran in their church, the grossly misnamed Dove Outreach World Center on March 21, 2011. Most Americans, including myself, did not learn about the burning until two weeks later when nearly twenty people were brutally killed in Afghanistan, including seven U.N. workers, in a series of violent protests incited by President Karzai’s suspicious utilization of the news that Pastor Terry Jones, in front of a paltry audience of thirty, had proven himself a true believer, after all.

Predictably, Pastor Jones said he holds no responsibility for those deaths. And the debate continues about the limits of freedom of speech. It is already settled law that one’s freedom of speech does not extend to falsely yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater and causing a panic. And yet, Pastor Jones obviously believes there is a different kind of fire raging in the world–he sells books and T-shirts that say “Islam is of the Devil”–and is on a personal crusade to do battle with what he sees as the demonic danger inherent in Islam and, by burning the Holy Quran, meet fire with fire. Does Pastor Jones have the right to act on what he believes is true–that there is a fire where there is not–even if by doing so he causes a different kind of crowd response that results in the deaths of human lives?

In that little apartment building in a foreign country, I believed with my whole being that the Book of Mormon was a tool of the devil. So I destroyed it. Though I didn’t televise my actions as a statement of protest to Latter-day Saints all over the world or demand an audience with the President, I believed mine was an act of protest against Satan himself. I believed I was right and I acted accordingly. Like Pastor Jones did. Like the Afghan mob did.

Strangely, inside the ugliness of our self-declared righteousness, this is where I am finding forgiveness: in the understanding that we are each doing what we believe is right in the world. The problem arises when we do what we believe is right within the untested delusions of our own private snow-globe worlds. Fundamentalism arises when that snow-globe of our understanding becomes the entire universe in which all other beings must conform to the contours and limits of that glass structure or otherwise be punished. Wrestling with Fundamentalism in ourselves and in this world is daunting but necessary work. Because if we settle for doing only what we believe is right–or project that belief onto some idea of God or Government–as our only rubric for action in the world then we will eventually destroy ourselves with our rightness.

What is helping to cure me of my Fundamentalism has been the deceptively simple practice of honoring what others say is right and true and sacred for them. Through a series of unexpected (perhaps karmic) life events, I became a hospice chaplain and in that role I have sat at the death beds of hundreds of people, many of whom held beliefs and ideas about Life and the Universe that were strongly different from mine. But each time I sit with another at the precipice of the great mystery of Death in the honest searching of how can I offer love and compassion in that moment, I am humbled at how little beliefs really matter in the end. The more we can let go of our beliefs–none of which are sufficient alone to hold us in the annihilation of everything we believed we were–the more we open to an experience of Life that does not require categorizing , defending, and destroying. And I am changed by each encounter as I try to allow my own heart and mind to truly join with another on their path. Whereas I once was willing to divide the world into a pie of Truth and Lies, Sacred and Profane, Right and Wrong, I now embrace countless names of God, including the atheist song of No God, that awaken in us an awareness that our precious snow-globes cannot even begin to hold the quantity of beauty and complexity and mystery in this Universe.

I wish I could have known this for myself before I joined the club of holy book destroyers.