By Ann Leamon

Amy Leach’s book may help you understand the rewards of  Christian fundamentalism for its followers — and how much richer a non-fundamentalist life can be.

The Salt of the Universe: Praise, Songs, and Improvisations by Amy Leach. Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Fundamentalism has grown more powerful since the Christian Right exerted control over the Republican Party. That stranglehold culminated in the Supreme Court’s rejection of a woman’s right to choose, a vision of repression that reaches its apex in the frighteningly reactionary strictures proposed in Project 2025. The flap copy of The Salt of the Universe, the third book by award-winning writer Amy Leach, says it is “a book of mischief and improvisation that answers fundamentalism with rage, music, and delight.” I opened it up immediately. I was eager to learn how Leach, brought up in the strict Seventh Day Adventist Church, had found the intellectual and emotional strength to break away from the institution’s straitjacket of prohibitions — among them, no eating of pickles or meat, no dancing, no coffee — and into the world of free-thinking skeptics. I thought she’d walk me through her growing awareness and discontent, rebelling from being told how to think, what to eat, what to do. I thought she would show me the path to secular enlightenment, perhaps even providing lessons that would help me convert fundamentalists into freethinkers.

I was delightfully wrong. Leach doesn’t tell us how not to be fundamentalist. She doesn’t lead anyone through anything. She dumps us in the middle of the wonderfully muddled dance of life and lets us figure it out for ourselves.

Leach starts with her experience as a musician, writing that “fundamentalists love rules. I used to be a fundamentalist fiddler. When first I went from playing the violin in an orchestra to playing the fiddle in a bluegrass band, I had a list of rules for myself, all subtractive … until one day I listened to a song by a bluegrass band whose fiddler flouted every one of my rules. That was the day my fiddle fundamentalism gave way to freedom and I am no longer a fuddy-duddy fiddler.”

I read on, still looking for rules on how not to be a fundamentalist. Patiently, Leach repeated the same lesson. I finally heard it clearly when she discovered who to kick to the curb: “I said, ‘Sayonara!’ Sayonara to annoying boyfriends and annoying churches who try to control me by speaking for God. I’ll hold out for firsthand messages.”

The Salt of the Universe immerses the reader in firsthand messages from God, delivered via nature, food, and dancing. Leach takes particular aim at the myriad rules promulgated by the Adventist movement’s founder, Ellen White, generalizing her objection in this way: “The two most annoying things about Adventism, to me, are its fetish for the apocalypse and its fear of harmless things, like coffee, and cheese, and dancing, and bracelets, and jeggings, and drums, and Winnie-the-Pooh.”

For Leach, the antidote for her 30 years of living under the rules of fundamentalism is to embrace nature, language, and unpredictability. She finds things to admire in individual Seventh-day Adventists, commenting that “my problem is with the –ism [the philosophy] more than with the -ists [people].” She has left fundamentalism; she remains Christian. She reserves high praise for the Bible, insisting that it is “… not an Adventist book, its truths too large, its wisdom too manifold, its questions too real…. When you worship the God in the heavens who ‘hath done whatsoever he hath pleased’ [quoting Psalm 115], I assume you start doing whatsoever the hell you please too.” The suggestion here is that you become what you worship, and that “when you worship an institution, I think you lose your soul.” If you pray to an expansive, explorative, joyous deity, Leach argues, that’s what you become.

This is a book that requires at least two readings. Leach plays with language; she uses nouns as verbs — “I fox and I phlox and I fritillary too; I pika and toadflax and speedwell and sapphire.” The reader can become drunk on rich prose like this, its cadence and words and images. Sometimes you just have to cast sense aside, let it float like a stick in a river of words. But Leach’s points are clear and convincing, once the reader climbs out of the eddy where “moose goose and geese goose and chickens moon…” and starts to think about what this liberating kaleidoscope of images says about doing what you please in life.

To help us understand her perspective more fully, Leach has added to each chapter what I would call an “expansion.” In these pages she expounds, sometimes in several entries, on an earlier concept. “Unconscious goodness is better than conscious goodness” receives two explanatory entries. The first is: “As Mr. Emerson says in A Room with a View, ‘A baby is worth a thousand saints.’” The second cites the Bible: “Jesus said, ‘But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.’ The left hand is so gauche, such a blabbermouth. Keep it in your pocket while your right hand is giving some change to the homeless couple outside the gas station.’”

For all its instructions, The Salt of the Universe is not a manual but a spiritual dance. Those of us who were eager for a tutorial on how not to be a fundamentalist are pushed toward looking at the reality of a non-fundamentalist (read: self-determined) life. “Praise,” writes Leach, “for the bad examples! The bad examples were good examples of what not to be. As canned asparagus taught me to appreciate fresh asparagus, so canned ideas taught me to appreciate fresh ideas.” True to its subtitle, this is very much a book of “praise, songs, and improvisations.” It gladdens and enthralls, inviting the reader to do a celebratory cartwheel or play a non-fuddy-duddy fiddle. So, be warned: what’s in this book won’t help you deprogram your relatives at the family reunion. But Leach’s words may help you understand the rewards of  fundamentalism for its followers — and how much richer a nonfundamentalist life can be. The universe is so much more delicious with plentiful shakes of silliness and salt.

Ann Leamon’s writing spans the genres and has appeared in Harvard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, MicroLit Almanac, North Dakota Quarterly, and River Teeth, among others. She holds a BA (Honors) in German from Dalhousie University/University of King’s College, an MA in Economics from the University of Montana, and an MFA in Poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She has attended residencies at the Prospect Street Writing House, Blackfly Writing Program at the Haystack School, Stonecoast Writers Program, and Dorland Mountain Artists Colony. She lives on the coast of Maine with her husband and a Corgi-Lab mix.