While fishing through some old blogs from “Highly Sophisticated Rednecks” (2005-2006, RIP), I came across a piece I wrote about the ten levels of religious fervor. While having lunch one day, I was politely accosted by a young man who asked me where I went to church. Although I started to tell him that my name was Habib al Kwanza just for shits and giggles, I settled on being polite. And honest. I told him that I did not, in fact, regularly attend services.
My answer generated this exchange:
“You really should get to know Jesus. The End Times are near. That’s not why you should get to know Jesus, though.”
I looked at this guy kind of like Ralfie looked at the kid wearing the goggles and pilot’s helmet as they are waiting in line for Santa Claus. [Note: I wrote this piece around Christmas 2005. The A Christmas Story reference is solid.]
“Uh, right. Whatever.”
“Do you believe in Jesus?”
That was an easy enough question. Jesus is a pretty well known historical figure, as is Buddha and Confucius and Mohammed and Daniel Boone. “Uh, yeah. Of course,” seemed like a reasonable answer.
“That’s good. That’s a start.”
That was really the end of the conversation. As good, solid Baptist or Episcopalian testimonies go, it was a little on the light side, but for a guy like me, it was just right.
[The] more I thought about it, the more I liked the Taco Bell Guy. First of all, he wasn’t at all confrontational. It was like he just thought striking up a conversation about church and Jesus was the most normal thing in the world and isn’t that what the Bill of Rights is all about? If not for the unsettling mention of the end of the world, this might have passed off as an almost completely normal conversation.
So this past weekend, I went with my wife and her family to their small church in Pine Mountain, Georgia. It is a fine church with a tiny, friendly congregation. They sing a lot, which I find comforting (more so when I actually know the hymns). Their pastors tend to be quiet men who give short sermons blissfully free of fire and brimstone and guilt. Since I don’t believe in hell, such an approach has been long lost on me. I’m big on the teachings of Jesus: the red words, for those of you Bible-belted enough to know what those are. Mostly, I like “Do unto others.” I think you can boil J.C. down to the Golden Rule and you wouldn’t be short-changing him much. The same tenet, for what it is worth, is present in nearly every major world religion.
So imagine my surprise when there was a “guest preacher” at the little church in Pine Mountain on Sunday—a guest preacher with a crew cut and a voice that carried through the smallish house of worship even in normal conversation. I went to Baptist school long enough to know what was coming: I call it Hollering for Jesus. For the record, only black congregations can get away with Hollering for Jesus. Black preachers inevitably have a tempo and timbre and manage to insert the “Amens” into the right spots in the narrative. They come off as pious versions of Little Richard or James Brown.
The Drill Sergeant reminded me of Little Richard, but not in a “a wop baum a loom opp, a wop bam boo” sort of way.
First, he Hollered for Jesus. This is annoying. It is especially annoying when the offending preacher is a) wearing a microphone or b) in front of a congregation of 30 people in a church the size of small barn. Thank Allah we were just inflicted with “B.” God is omnipresent and the oldest members of the congregation have hearing aids. You can use your Inside Voice.
Second, he committed the cardinal sin of preaching: he took a verse out of context. People who Holler for Jesus have been doing this for a long time and giving Christians everywhere a bad name. According to the short biography the congregation was given, this man had been preaching since he was 17 years old and had attended seminary. He must have failed rhetoric or matriculated through one of the plethora of religious institutions without such a class in the course book. Pat Robertson endorses this sort of religious teaching. No matter the cause, there was a hole in his sermon you could drive a truck through. One line—one!—in 2 Samuel and it gets flubbed to hell and back.
Third, the sermon contained only one point, as I gleaned it. It was, “YOU SHOULD BE A GOOD CHRISTIAN ALL THE TIME EVEN WHEN IT ISN’T FUN IF YOU EXPECT GAWD ALMIGHTY TO LIFT A FINGER FOR YOU. AMEN.” This point was reiterated over and over again, with slightly different wordings. The feel-good title of the sermon was “You are never alone,” a reliable (if clichéd) bit of Christian aphorism, but the actual title should have been “You are never alone except that the whole world is against you and guilt-guilt-blah-rhetorical lapse-bullshit.” You get the picture.
Fourth—and this is where it gets tricky—Brother Loudspeaker played the “it’s us against them” card. It’s here that you draw the line between people who understand Jesus (or Mohammed or Baha’u’lla or the Buddha) and the people who use religion as a clubhouse. Dickheads of every religious stripe all across the globe have been playing this card since cavemen started carving fat women and praying to them. It is how men have consolidated power for generations. Modern political discourse has even torn a page from the playbook in recent years, serving to drive a wedge between people rather than unifying them. The thought of putting every person on the planet who uses religion to divide rather than to comfort into a room and letting them hash it out while the rest of us get along happily is a thought that warms me. “Do unto others,” is a grammatical construction with a pretty clear direct object—one that isn’t a proper noun.
Lest anyone say I’m giving the guest preacher too short a shrift, I should point out my honest belief in the goodness of men (and women) and the particular goodness of men (and women) of religion. But the truth is, I’m not cut out to be the quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons and not everyone is cut out to stand in front of a roomful of folks in a house of worship and Holler for Jesus.
The guy at the Taco Bell in 2005 was a pretty good fellow, too. He did unto me as he would want done to him. He said his piece and went on to eat his Number Three meal. There were only inside voices. All was right with the world. It’s a pretty stark contrast. I think I took more away from thirty seconds with a random stranger than thirty minutes with a seminary graduate. I think the End Times might not be as close as we think.
Still, the next time I go back to Pine Mountain, I hope they have the regular preacher. Or a black one if they feel particularly compelled to Holler for Jesus.
Scott, of course you see the parallels between this and politics in the year 2010. That preacher was a populist. He had no intention of “converting” anyone; he was playing to his peeps, and everyone else be damned, pardon the pun.
You, sir, are apparently damned, but we knew that already.
But one more thing. As a son of a Baptist minister of 50 years, I do have one tale to tell about raving, rabid evangelicals. When I was in my teens, my long hair was a bit of an issue between my dad and me. (In retrospect, he was totally right; I looked like a rail-skinny stick with an expanding brown Q-tip wobbling on my head).
And, as the son of a Baptist minister, we often had revival preachers stay with us in our home in Odum, so I got pretty used to ministers of varying degrees of “Hollering for Jesus” in the household. I had no real opinion of this particular guest preacher; I was too busy chasing women who I thought might be interested in white dudes with brown, bouncy afros. But as the son of THE preacher, I was compelled to attend revival services, so I did.
Around the second or third night of this particular revival, the dude started going off on men with long hair (keep in mind, this was the early 70′s. That WAS an issue then, no matter how stupid and irrelevant it might seem today.) He stood on the pulpit of my dad’s church and DECLARED that men with long hair were going to Hell. His whole reference was I Corinthians 11:14; “Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?” That one verse of scripture was what he based his sermon on, part and parcel.
He even said that parents who allow their sons to grow their hair are doomed to “E-Turn-al DAM-Nation!” Needless to say, I was one pissed-off white boy with some goofy-ass long hair, and I got up and stormed out of the church and walked the few blocks to our house.
But even in my outrage, I knew my dad was going to know I’d ditched church, and that might even be a larger issue. Dad took great care to respect his colleagues, and as I stomped the asphalt toward the pastorium, I began to wonder what I had done. At that age, I just assumed that the preachers were all in it together, and seeing as how Dad and I never seen eye-to-eye on the stupid haircut thing, I figured I was in for a good talking-to at best.
So I went home and closed myself up in my room, as pretentious and self-righteous teens are wont to do, and waited for the post-service cake and coffee clatch with the minister and friends in the living room to end.
And it did. I don’t remember if this happened that night or a day or two later, but dad and I sat down to talk about my transgression. I was fully expecting a little heat, but a funny thing happened.
Dad calmly opened his Bible, and pointed out a little loophole in the revival preacher’s interpretation of the Word of God. It was a small thing; just something you’d think a man who feels he has the authority to tell me I’m going to Hell and dragging my parents with me might notice. If that minister had just read two verses further, he would’ve read I Corinthians 11:16:
Dad read it to me in his best pulpit voice, “But if any man seem to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the Churches of God.”
Case closed.
He then picked up his Bible and walked away.
About two weeks later, he made me get a haircut.
But you get the point, right?
This post needs a theme song. Thankfully, the Drive-By Truckers have already written it. “Late For Church,” from their debut “Gangstabilly.” (1)
http://bit.ly/bRqK66
(Feel free to ignore the video — some pretty shots, but best I can tell it’s pictures from some dude’s fishing trip).
It’s a song, like so many of their’s, likely to resonate with those of us reared in the South and possessing of the annoying habit of thinking too much about things.
Couple of sample lines:
“Reverend Bob he’s pointing his finger/fire and brimstone is pourin’ down./Me I’m wondering what’s for dinner/waiting for 12 o’clock to come ’round.”
And …
“All that hollerin’ makes me wonder/does a whispered prayer get heard?”
Then, Mike Cooley provides us the resolution that a lot of us have probably stumbled upon ourselves somewhere along the way:
“Everybody’s got their own heaven they all find in their own way.”
Also … it’s been my experience that hollerin’ black preachers tend to be a lot more joyful about it.
(1) I am aware that, in two posts to this blog, I have mentioned the Drive-By Truckers twice. I attribute this to the fact that (a) the Truckers are just about the finest band in existence, only pretty-good most recent album nonwithstanding, and (b) thinking by “highly sophisticated rednecks” is right up their alley. I promise not to make a Truckers reference next time. Unless I want to.
Thanks to both of you, but quit making comments that are better than original blog. That is all.