It would be hard to overstate the importance of this book to the Evangelical world of the late 1970s and the 1980s. I had forgotten about it, but I recognized the cover immediately just now; it was on the bookshelf at one time of pretty much every family I knew.

Memories came rushing back.

As a teenager, I found the book's message ridiculous. The idea that God broke Joni's neck because she made out in the backseat seemed unsupportable. Were all people with serious injuries hurt because they personally sinned? Most people? Only some people? How about all the people who had sex before marriage and ended up just fine? My parents got married because my mom was pregnant. God didn't break her neck, or my dad's neck.

For that matter, God didn't break the neck of Joni's boyfriend. Didn't he sin in that backseat as much as Joni did?

I asked myself all those questions and more as an early adolescent. The process weakened rather than strengthened my faith. It wasn't so much that I wondered if Joni was telling the truth in her book. That didn't matter a whole lot to me. What really got me is that the Christian leaders I knew had no answers to those questions and didn't even think the questions were important.

That made me wonder what else they were being stupid about.

That encouraged me to look for my own answers outside of Evangelical authority structure, which I'd already started to do anyway, for other reasons owing to my distrust of Evangelical stupidity — like young earth creationism and the literal truth of the global flood myth.