High Mountains Rising

by Richard A. Straw

  The principal reason for this resilience and flexibility has to do with the dynamics of mountain church traditions’ organizational frameworks as changes are needed over time and place. Mountain church traditions are not grounded in the institutional structures and confines of denominationalism that characterize Roman Catholicism and the churches of America’s Protestant mainstream, such as the Presbyterians and Lutherans, Episcopalians and the United Methodist Church, Reformed Church in America, the American Baptist Church and Southern Baptist Convention, United Church of Christ or Congregationalists, and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), to name some of the better known with a greater national presence. Nor are they grounded in the same types of structures as the national Holiness and Pentecostal denominations such as the Church of the Nazarene and the Assemblies of God.

  Instead, mountain church traditions function primarily at the subdenominational and independent, nondenominational levels. They have no national organizational bodies or even regional structures of oversight. For Baptist groups in particular, oversight is at the subregional levels of gatherings of churches called associations. For Appalachia’s Holiness Pentecostal churches, most often these communities of worship stand either entirely independently or only very loosely associated with a small gathering of others with little real oversight, if any at all. An expression stemming from the nineteenth century and still common among churches in Appalachia affirms, “Each church holds the key to its own door.”

  What, then, distinguishes Appalachia’s more rural Baptist and Holiness Pentecostal churches from churches that are better known on America’s religious landscapes, especially those that are found less in Appalachia’s countryside than in its cities, larger towns, and county seats? Churches with a national identity, located in Appalachia’s population centers, are categorized as denominations and are listed under “Churches” in the Yellow Pages of telephone directories and in the weekly “Places of Worship” lists in local newspapers. They are counted in census reports at the local, state, and national levels. Because they are publicly visible in this way—and because they are registered with and regulated by federal, state, and local agencies as tax-exempt, not-for-profit organizations—they seem to matter more and be of greater consequence than Appalachia’s subdenominational and independent, nondenominational churches. These small churches are not listed in phone books or newspapers or counted in census reports. Many view them as though they hardly exist or are so few, with so little influence on the larger community, that they must be insignificant not only in the United States but in Appalachia, where they are regionally “peculiar” (a common descriptor).

  Because of their limited subregional associational systems, Appalachia’s Baptist churches using this form of governance may be described as subdenominational. Because most Holiness Pentecostal churches are unassociated formally or informally with any other churches but are independent, they may be described as nondenominational. Many inaccurately call these same churches sects because they do not define themselves through denomination categories. Use of the term sect activates assumptions about a value-loaded church-sect typology.1 This typology places America’s denominations in the positive category of “churches” and Appalachia’s regional church traditions in the negative category of “sects.”

  People who make up these mountain church traditions have been historically, and are today, considered by many outside Appalachia to be demographically among the “unchurched.” Many urban, small city, and county seat Appalachian Christians of the Protestant mainstream also share this notion about those who worship in Appalachia’s distinctive and largely rural Baptist and Holiness Pentecostal churches. The reasons for this way of thinking are lodged in people’s preferences for or identification with the dominant national culture over the realities of the local regional culture, especially in matters of religion, values, and worldview. More directly, preferences and identification lie with a sense of greater influence, power, and prestige, compensating in part for what many perceive to be the stigma of Appalachia’s status deprivation, what Jack Weller so famously described in Yesterday’s People (1965), especially with regard to Appalachia’s “fatalistic” religious life and cultures, a characteristic commonly and historically ascribed.2 Other observers have since considered mountain religion as embracing not fatalism but a hope-infused, situational realism.3

  Can we get in better focus the cultures of Appalachia’s outlying, more rural Baptist and Holiness Pentecostal churches? Do they have names? Do they have similarities? What distinguishes them? Appalachia’s more rural Baptist churches often go by the collective term “Old Time Baptist.”4 Their traditions carry a variety of names such as “Primitive Baptists,” “Primitive Baptist Universalists,” “Regular” and “Old Regular Baptists,” “Regular Predestinarian,” “Regular Primitive,” “United Baptists,” “Separate Baptists in Christ,” and “Free Will” or “Freewill Baptists” (not from the same origins as New England’s better-known Free Will Baptists), to name several but by no means all. None of these church traditions exists outside the region today except through out-migration; they hark back to Appalachia’s earliest years of settlement. They are not few but many. All of them embrace a form of Calvinism emphasizing grace and the Holy Spirit that expresses itself through tender, heartfelt worship practices. It places first God’s initiative followed by human cooperation, and it maintains salvation as something looked for not as a certainty through being “born again” but as “a sweet hope in my breast.”5

  Mountain people’s Calvinistic emphases and understandings separated them from the theological developments of the nation’s dominant religious culture by the second decade of the nineteenth century, including a clear separation from the Southern Baptist Convention over disagreements about theology, missions, and an intrusive hierarchical institutionalism when it formed in 1845. By that time, for the churches of America’s Protestant mainstream, salvation had become more a matter of works righteousness, and with it a belief in human initiative and God’s cooperation. This was summed up in an understanding of the experience of salvation as one in which individuals can initiate a personal, rational “decision for Christ.”

  In contrast, mountain Christians sustained, centered in their worship practices, an understanding of the experience of salvation (or conversion) not as an act of human will but as a gracious gift from God. This holds true today. For most mountain Christians, this gift of salvation is based not on their personal initiative or individual merit and achievement but solely on God’s love and compassion. The foremost standard and evidence of personal faith is being sensitive and responsive in speech and actions to what “God laid on my heart” (a common phrase in the mountains). Whether Old Time Baptist or Holiness Pentecostal, God’s own Spirit is understood as the one who lays on their hearts not only God’s love for them as individuals but whatever God requires of them each day in the here and now. As a result, a tender heart responsive to God’s initiative carries far greater importance in mountain communities than a person’s specific beliefs about God and Jesus. (“Pretty is as pretty does” sums it up in mountain culture.) This standard of responsiveness—and responsibility—is always a struggle, and people often fall short in their efforts and results, but it remains the benchmark in mountain religious cultures.

  Mainline denominational churches build membership through a consensus of written, spoken, and avowed beliefs, given form in creeds (such as the Nicene), doctrine, and polity. Mountain churches form around small, often ad hoc groups coming together in worship, where “I can almost see heaven from here,” as the Old Regular Baptists like to say. Although mountain Christians firmly hold that every person has the ability, and therefore the right, to interact directly with God, that opinion does not support or condone a communally disconnected individualism, one of the best-known stereotypes of religion in Appalachia. Instead, mountain Christians understand that God’s interaction with each person, though specific and unique, occurs always in the cont
ext of the larger community, whether inside the church house or in the course of everyday life.

  Mountain Christians, overwhelmingly and historically, also do not equate salvation and faith with religion and belief. “Belief” to them tends to mean a person’s rational assent to confess out loud static creeds and bumper-sticker formulas such as “Jesus is LORD!” By “religion,” mountain Christians usually mean organized religion or denominations, which they often call simply “big churches.” In fact, they rarely speak of religion. Instead they talk about faith as the conscious discipline of embodying through their personal speech and actions, their own words and deeds, God’s gift of saving grace for themselves and each other.6 For this reason, mountain Christians rarely, if ever, speak of themselves as “born again Christians,” the defining signature of American evangelicalism from which mountain religion historically stands apart.

  From the evangelical (and fundamentalist) framework of being “born again,” God’s offer of salvation is always on the table through God’s action in human history: Jesus’ death and resurrection define salvation, which every individual personally accepts or rejects. Each person’s own free will and rational decision provide both the point of origin and the determining factor in salvation as a personal event that occurs in a specific time and place. American evangelicalism’s understanding of salvation through being “born again” makes it far more individualistic and particularistic, into which the individual’s formative community largely disappears, than Appalachia’s mountain religious cultures.

  Overwhelmingly in mountain churches, because of their communal focus, salvation is not a decisive event but an ongoing process, sustained by “a sweet hope in my breast.” This expression sums up the distinctively gentle and regionally specific Calvinism that is one of mountain religion’s historically original and enduring contributions to American Christianity. It roundly contradicts the two-dimensional caricature of “fatalism” long applied by outside observers to Calvinist traditions of all sorts, for which mountain religion has long been derided by its many critics as “do-nothing” or passive, unengaged with the larger world.

  For mountain Christians, God expresses saving grace for them, unmerited though it may be (in their Calvinist heritage), through God’s speech and actions that embody, and thus make real and present, the standard of “loving kindness” (King James Version [KJV], from biblical Hebrew [BH] chesed) and “tender mercies” (KJV, from BH rachamim) at the center of the Bible’s understanding of what it means for people to be in covenant with God and with each other. “Justice and righteousness” (KJV, from BH mishpát-u-tsedahqáh)—by far one of the Bible’s most common word pairs— follow close by as defining values of covenant relationship, for which loving kindness and tender mercies again set the standard. What mountain people place at the core of their faith is what they understand, as Christians, to be at the core of the Bible.

  As a consequence, though always very aware of him, mountain people tend not to talk much about Jesus, except as the preeminent exemplar of God’s saving grace through Jesus’ speech and actions in everyday life. Jesus’ death and resurrection, the iconic focus of American evangelicalism, though world-changing for all Christians, are not the focus of attention for mountain people. Mountain Christians, from Old Time Baptists to Holiness Pentecostals, speak most often of God’s Spirit and their deep relationship with it. “Lord” usually refers first to God or the Holy Spirit, with the two often blended in language and thinking, and secondarily to Jesus. Jesus’ identity as the Son of God is far more immediate and meaningful to mountain Christians than Jesus as “Lord.” These perceptual shifts elevate the human heart to the central place in mountain people’s understanding of what it means to be human in the world God created and created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26–27), a complementary contrast that, in mountain people’s definition of reality, only the heart can reconcile within itself.

  In Appalachia’s mountain religious cultures, overwhelmingly the norm is for the human heart to inform and direct the human intellect, rather than the other way around. In this foundational emphasis on the heart as the seat where God lives and where faith takes root in people’s lives through their speech and actions, we find not only what most characterizes Appalachia’s regional religious tradition but what distinguishes it in terms of values and worldview.7 This distinction has created for nearly two centuries a sustained conflict in American Christianity precipitated almost entirely by the reaction of American Protestantism to “religion in Appalachia” as a radical sign of contradiction to the dominant national culture.8

  Although they profess their own creeds, which they carefully craft in writing, Appalachia’s Old Time Baptist churches share (with appropriate variations) a type of institutional church model with the region’s Holiness Pentecostal churches, which rarely profess written creeds. This church model is regionally specific and highly characteristic of mountain people whose shared values and worldview it embodies. It attempts to express a lived reality summarized by “Everyone Welcome, ‘God Is Love,’ Built for the People,” as one church house sign in southwest Virginia has proclaimed for decades. “Where Everybody Is Somebody” is long-standing as the region’s most common motto found on church house signs of all traditions specific to Appalachia, as well as on those of many other traditions shaped by the region’s defining religious ethos, especially in its more rural areas.

  To help accommodate these values so basic to their identity, Old Time Baptists gather their churches together, as noted earlier, into subregional bodies or groups called associations, a practice historically common to all Baptists everywhere. However, they are not only subregional but subdenominational, having no recognizable denominational institutional structures. It follows that no national or even regionwide governing or judicial bodies exist among the Old Time Baptists. The associations fulfill these roles. They help to formulate polity and doctrine and assist in settling disputes within and between churches as needed, but in a manner that is as unintrusive and respectful as possible of the autonomy and integrity of each church. From Appalachia’s Old Time Baptists comes the expression already mentioned, “Each church holds the key to its own door.”

  The religious life distinctive to the mountain regions of Appalachia is principally an oral culture, one known mostly through its oral literature and oral tradition. The records or minutes of Old Time Baptists’ individual churches and associations, written and gathered over two hundred years, provide us with one of our few primary sources of written documentation. As a result, these records are some of the most important windows into seeing and appreciating the continuity and integrity, as well as the vibrancy and adaptability, of mountain religious life and cultures.

  Closely tied to Appalachia’s Old Time Baptists today—instead of in opposition to them—are its Holiness Pentecostal people, who are commonly known as Holiness. The features characterizing Holiness people in relation to Old Time Baptist are more distinguishing than divisive, and this may come as a surprise. They too embrace Calvinistic emphases of grace and the Holy Spirit made manifest in their worship lives and in their attitude toward salvation. Although their roots for worship are more directly grounded in what scholars call “plain-folk camp meeting religion” that arose out of the Great Revival on the Appalachian frontier at the beginning of the nineteenth century, their theological emphases are tightly interwoven with those of the Old Time Baptists of the mountain regions.

  Like the Old Time Baptists, mountain Holiness people usually worship in one-room structures called church houses; the people themselves are called “church” (with no definite article preceding the term). These church houses often have few if any identifying exterior markings. Holiness churches are started by a man or a woman who feels called to preach to his or her family, friends, and neighbors. Like today’s Old Time Baptist preachers, their ministry is a “called” ministry, not a seminary-educated one. The church building may be of any type or in a home (a “dwelling house”
), any place sufficient enough for a small number of people, often a dozen or less, to gather. These churches remain in private hands and are unincorporated and not tax exempt, with the individual or family paying the utilities and taxes. In such ways mountain people maintain the historical autonomy so important to their worship lives and the intimacy necessary for tenderhearted vulnerability in worship.9

  These small Holiness churches honeycomb the mountain regions of Appalachia. They exist not in the hundreds but in the thousands and may well be Appalachia’s single largest church tradition, easily outnumbering any of the national denominations present in the region. They remain uncounted in any census of church life because of the absence of official church records such as membership rolls. Church services or meetings (their more common name) are held on one or two nights a week, usually more, for at least three hours. This practice harks back to their plain-folk camp meeting antecedents. The meetings are loosely structured around spontaneous preaching, singing, testifying, and praying and are characterized by expressive and ecstatic worship practices. Although people have a home church they attend regularly, they also travel widely to a selection of Holiness churches in their area on any given night. Appalachia’s mountain Holiness churches, like its Old Time Baptist churches, are primarily products of oral tradition, regardless of the literacy level of the people who attend them. Unlike the Old Time Baptists, mountain Holiness churches maintain few, if any, church records.

  When looking at the region’s Old Time Baptist and Holiness church traditions, we begin to see in some significant ways how the religious landscape of Appalachia differs from that of other regions of the United States. These major differences are the result of a preponderance of historically steeped, small, subdenominational and independent, nondenominational churches and their religious cultures. These cultures also influence the practices of individual churches of major U.S. denominations found scattered throughout Appalachia’s more rural, outlying areas. As for the likenesses of Appalachia’s religious landscape with much of the United States, we find them through the presence of the nation’s major denominations concentrated in the region’s cities, larger towns, and county seats. Here they seem to be made more real and significant to religious life in Appalachia, as we have indicated, by the devices of their public prominence and visibility. The result is that the region’s distinctive mountain religious cultures, though thriving and far reaching, are minimized and obscured, if not overlooked altogether. The question is why. Again, the divide between the church traditions of Appalachia’s mountain religious cultures and the major Christian denominations of America’s religious cultures has to do with a basic difference in values and worldview.