In the Blood of the Lamb : KEEPING THE FAITH<i> by Carol Clewlow Poseidon Press: $16.95; 119 pp.; 0-71-67117-0) </i>

I remember the exact moment when, as a child, the firm and impenetrable walls of religion surrounding my life showed their first crack.

I was 11. My father had recently been named to a position of leadership in the local church when he came to me and said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you can’t ride your horse on Sunday any more.” He had to ask this of me, he said, because there had been complaints from other church members. How could they expect their children to observe Sunday as a day of rest when they saw me, the bishops’ counselor’s daughter, galloping around on the Sabbath? “If it were up to me,” he added, “I’d say OK, go ahead and ride, but it isn’t.”

If it were up to me . . . With those words, the formerly impenetrable world cracked, and I realized anything could leak through this opening--anger, questioning, reason. In fact, all three began to do so in precisely that order. If he (my powerful father) could be forced to adopt a position he didn’t believe in, what about . . . me ?

So when I came upon “Keeping the Faith” by Carol Clewlow, a short and poignant novel about a childhood spent in the clutches of a fundamentalist sect, what I read was of more than passing interest. I found an account full of the anguish, shame and embarrassment felt by the children of the ultra-religious who are led to believe their souls are full of sin, their innocent activities are depraved, and everyone--even small children--are admonished that they must engage in a consuming battle against their own inherent uncleanliness.

Clewlow is English, and so is Maud, her narrator, an only child of religious fundamentalists (Jehovah’s Witnesses, I would think from the many references to “Kingdom Hall,” though the sect is never named). The dichotomy of such religious fervor is that it is both passionate and cold, attractive and repulsive. It’s also simply the only world the child knows. Even at a young age, Maud understands this:

“I know I must be washed in the blood of the Lamb. I know I must be saved. How can I know this, just a child in a child’s coat and an old woman’s hat, a child still learning to write her own name, a child scarcely off the breast? Because I sucked the gospel with my mother’s milk, that’s why.”

Mikey and Corrie and Matthew, Maud’s young friends, chant, “Our Father which art in heaven; Harold be thy name,” but this sort of joking terrifies Maud and estranges her from her friends. She’s fearful, scalded with guilt and scarred psychologically, stunted and saddened and made separate by her family’s excessive, obtrusive and sentimental religiosity.

Uncle Ezra and Cousin Arthur are the worst examples of this fanaticism. Uncle Ezra is fond of saying, “Only a little while, Maud, only a little while,” meaning Judgement Day is near, as though she should look forward to the conflagration as if it were Christmas.

And Cousin Arthur? “Cousin Arthur is still a commercial traveller but now instead of drinking and smoking and doing other things in the evenings he tries to convert the other travellers in his lodging house. He taxes them with the state of their soul across the liver and bacon, and leaves tracts beside his bed for the next occupant. They say that Cousin Arthur cuts a swathe for Christ wherever he goes and his route each week can be traced by the trail of converted souls.” He also taxes Maud, and terrifies her.

As Maud grows into a teen-ager and experiences small forbidden pleasures--her first dance with a boy, illicit face powder, a kiss one day beside a pond--the torment inside her grows. She begins working in a factory and meets a woman named Jane whose father is a reverend of a more liberal ilk.

Amid his books and music, while he smokes and listens, she anguishes over her ability to believe in the tyrannous, inflexible, demanding God of her father’s. He lectures her on the possibility of a different sort of God: “We don’t expect anyone to believe any longer in a God with a long beard looking down on the world from a cloud. That sort of God is really no good to anyone. Find your own God, Maud, he says, puffing contentedly at the ceiling.”

Soon she’s lying to her mother in order to attend parties at Jane’s, and staying on at the pub after work to socialize. She falls in love with Frank, son of the factory owner, and on her 17th birthday, after first gaining his sympathy, she makes love with Frank. Things won’t last with him. Early on she’s understood how “old strictures are employed to guarantee the new”--meaning tales of her repressed life are poured out to men in order to bind her in fresh ways: One hard master (religion) is exchanged for another (the too-quick love). Nevertheless, the sexual awakening is the beginning of understanding that her soul is her own.

“Keeping the Faith” has a slightly claustrophobic feel, not only because of the suffocating themes of sin and redemption but also because of the way these themes are treated as mental storms constantly brewing in the narrator’s head, obsessive and relentless.

The book is mostly narrative. Yet it works because Maud’s story is powerful, and her adult, reflective voice is poetically strong. She describes with grim beauty the violence done to the spirit by religious zeal. When, for instance, Maud sees an old woman chastised by the elders for buying her husband tobacco on the Sabbath, she feels the anger “rise inside her like a sickness. I feel her gulp and force it down . . . this concern hiding within its kindly exterior an implacable remorselessness . . . I see him (the elder) now grasping her limp sad hand, forgiving and magnanimous. I see her walking home alone in sadness and anger, in tears of shame and pain.”