Redneck Nation

by Michael Graham

  Is this absurd? Does this fly in the face of years of carefully gathered scientific evidence? Does it make the parties involved look ridiculous and ignorant? All the better! Simply believing in God isn’t enough for us Southerners. Our faith must be off-putting to others and embarrassing to ourselves. Loving God has got to hurt.

  Just ask Carolyn Risher. She’s the good, southern mayor of the good, southern town of Inglis, Florida. Mayor Risher, duly elected to serve the citizens of Inglis and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, in January of the year of our Lord 2002, did officially ban Satan from the town proper.

  Suburbanites, you’re on your own.

  Banning the Prince of Darkness from your municipality is no small feat. He is, after all, the fallen archangel Lucifer who once served an omnipotent God and currently does battle with His angels as the Prince of the Powers and Principalities of the Air. Meanwhile, Mayor Risher serves on the town sewer and water committee and has to drive her own vehicle while conducting official business.

  But Mayor Risher had a strategy for defeating Beelzebub, one that involved more than merely prohibiting Marilyn Manson concerts. According to wire reports, Risher composed, on town stationery, a five-paragraph communiqué declaring Satan “powerless, no longer ruling over, nor influencing, our citizens.” Copies of this missive (notarized, I presume) were placed in hollowed fence posts at the four entrances to the formerly Satan-oppressed municipality, each post painted with the words “Repent, Request and Resist.”

  That last touch a suggestion by the local tourism board, perhaps?

  At last report, observers were mixed as to whether the mayor’s proclamation had, in fact, ejected Ol’ Slewfoot from Inglis, Florida. Faithful believers commented on the recently improved weather. Cynics noted that not a single used car dealer had closed up shop.

  But there can be no doubt about Mayor Risher’s faith in the inerrant word of God as found in the original King James Version. She demonstrated her devotion through her willingness to be publicly humiliated. In contemporary America, glaring stupidity is the gold standard of the Christian realm.

  Every news cycle finds another band of earnest southern brethren headed to the local library to chuck Harry Potter off the shelves or swipe copies of Catcher in the Rye from the public school stacks. And if Pat Robertson isn’t predicting that monsoons will flood every bathhouse in San Francisco, Jerry Falwell is blaming the recession on the ungodly spending habits of lesbian households.

  You can dismiss the book burnings and gay bashing as part of the Christian fringe, but it appears more and more that the tapestry of southern evangelicalism is all fringe and no rug.

  Which is why U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s “cover-up” of a bare-breasted statue helped confirm the image of the modern evangelical as a clueless bumpkin who would put polyester slacks on Michelangelo’s David. If you don’t recall the story, two statues—the Spirit of Liberty and her loinclothed male counterpart, the Majesty of Justice—stood in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice. They are art deco works from the 1930s, and for nearly seventy years they adorned the Great Hall as a symbol of our national ideals.

  And yes, you could see the lady’s booby.

  No previous attorney general had ever made an issue of this libertine Liberty and her heaving bosom. But soon after John Ashcroft appeared on the nation’s front pages with this bronzed breast giving the AP cameras the one-eyed squint over his shoulder, the Justice Department purchased eight thousand dollars’ worth of drapes and covered the offending organ.

  Subsequent statements from official sources denied Ashcroft ever knew about the draperies, but according to ABC News, former Ashcroft spokeswoman Mindy Tucker and her female staffers “always hated the statues.” Tucker told ABC that “half the women in the department were offended by them and the other half considered them art.” No need to lay odds on which half were the conservatives. The order to burka this buxom wench (the statue, not Ms. Tucker) came “from someone in the attorney general’s office, who delivered the request to the Justice Management Division and asserted it was the attorney general’s desire,” ABC News reported.

  Ah, yes: desire. The root of much evil, particularly for those easily aroused by feminine beauty. It should be noted that Attorney General Ashcroft is the son of an Assembly of God minister from southern Missouri, and he used to travel the region singing gospel music—a potent mix of religion and show business that gave America both Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Lee Lewis. It could be that Mr. Ashcroft is simply more distracted by the unclad female form than the usual U.S. senator or commander in chief. He’s certainly no Bill Clinton, another self-described southern evangelical who could get more policy work done underneath a roomful of stenographers than most CEOs could with them.

  Whatever the cause, the draperies confirmed in northern minds that southern folks of faith are straw-chew in’ rubes who live in fear of MTV and modern art. Ashcroft’s action was silly and indefensible. That’s what made it so perfect. Anyone can do something smart and sophisticated for God. But to be a buffoon takes a true believer.

  Believe it or not, it was my desire to escape this buffoonery that brought me to Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I am often asked why I would go to a university whose name is dangerously close to describing a frequent topic on Jerry Springer, and I usually reply that it was the school farthest from South Carolina that offered me a free ride. And this is technically true.

  But the real reason I chose ORU is that it presented itself as the Ivy league of evangelicalism, a place where reason and deep-seated faith could coexist. Unfortunately the Cornell of the Charismatic Movement turned out to be closer to the Jesus Is Lord School of Straight Chiropractic, combining the intellectual rigor of a Sunday school picnic with the sound theological theories of a slumber party séance. I walked onto the ORU campus a doubting Christian and graduated four years later a confident and confirmed sinner.

  Academically speaking, ORU was a disaster. It may have been the only accredited university in America at the time that did not offer a single philosophy course. (“If the Lord had meant for you to think for yourself, he’d a given you a mind of your own, hallelujah!”—Oral Roberts) There was a medical school, but the biology department refused to teach evolution. The university tried to cancel a performance of Gian Carlo Menotti’s two-act opera The Medium when someone leaked word to the academic dean that the main character was a fortune-teller. Apparently he had been under the impression we were performing an opera about the proper way to prepare a steak.

  Oral Roberts’s philosophy of learning was the same one I had heard from pulpits my entire youth: Our intellect was our enemy, constantly tempting us away from God’s plan for our lives. Increased devotion demanded decreasing intelligence and critical thinking. One of the more popular choruses sung at ORU was “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it for me.”

  You can see why the campus debate team never made it to the state finals.

  But man does not live by buffoonery alone. Another hallmark of southern spirituality is its intensity. Southerners have an innate doubt as to the sincerity of northern faithfulness because it comes with so little passion or fire. For the typical congregant in Westchester County, New York, or Lake Forest, Illinois, choosing a church seems to be of less spiritual significance than choosing a country club. I suspect this is because churches have no membership fees, anyone can join, and God allows mulligans. Even in Westchester.

  My experience with northern churchgoers is that they believe in God, but not enough to bring it to anyone else’s attention. Unlike Southerners, who are looking for the chance to embarrass themselves on behalf of the Almighty, Northerners try to maintain a low metaphysical profile. While living up North, I had the sense that everyone involved in religion was working feverishly not to appear feverish; they were zealously nonzealots. “There is one true and living God,” the congregation intoned, “but that doesn’t mean we expect you to, like, believe in Him or anything.�
��

  The typical Protestant church service north of the Ohio River has all the evangelical fervor of a Rotary Club, except that Rotarians are known to quote the Holy Scriptures occasionally. Having been a music major in college, I can usually find inspiration from sacred music in the most tomblike of settings, but in mainstream northern churches even the hymnals have been neutered and stripped of zest. In one Methodist service, I found myself confronted with the hymn “Easter People Lift Your Voices,” formerly known as “Angels from the Realms of Glory.” The once-inspiring hymn had been the victim of the “inclusive language” movement led by liberal clerics, and the song featured words like “empowered” and “choices,” along with an oblique reference to Roe v. Wade.

  According to the Wall Street Journal, other changes to hymnals and prayer books include still more inclusive names for the Heavenly Being Formerly Known as the Lord. Lords are, of course, males, and usually white males at that, so obviously this would make God a Republican, and clearly, the thinking goes, something must be wrong somewhere.

  Thus the language in church services has been changed to attract a larger, Democratic-leaning demographic. The new lyrics refer to God as “Mother and Father God,” “Great Spirit,” “Daredevil Lover,” and, in a tip of the hat to Tammy Faye, “Bakerwoman God.”

  Northern ministers have gotten into the spirit as well. Instead of sermons filled with fire and brimstone, you’re more likely to hear a homily addressing environmental issues. Rather than railing on the swift righteousness of the Lord’s coming judgment, sermons more often deal with the need for social justice and Christ’s call for campaign finance reform.

  It may be one of my failings as a Southerner, but I like my religion served with red meat. When I was growing up, the preacher at my small Pentecostal church in South Carolina would no more deliver a sermon on social justice than he would support legalized abortion or oppose the death penalty. Standing through yet another three-hour Sunday night service at South Congaree Assembly of God, weeping and praying aloud as a frumpy teenager banged her way through “Old Time Religion” on the piano, the atmosphere was charged with purpose: We were shining with the light of Christ, we were defying the devil, we were in the world but were loudly letting the world know that we were absolutely not of it.

  We were sincere. We were earnest, perhaps even extreme: Though we never actually handled snakes, we knew where to get them on short notice.

  And when the revival preacher came through town, speaking night after night to the same, rugged band of a hundred or so souls, it sometimes seemed I could hear Satan himself scratching on the church house door… though it usually turned out to be a pack of local dogs drawn by the yowling. We saw ourselves as warriors in a struggle for the soul of America, and we had a hard time believing that anyone north of Virginia was on our side.

  The rejection of reason and the embrace of passion are two of the three fundamentals of southern spirituality. The third is Prohibitionism, which may have begun in Massachusetts with the Puritans, but found its fulfillment in the Bible Belt.

  It is no coincidence that Prohibition found its strongest adherents in the South, among the same people who made the only corn likker worth drinking. Modern Americans miss the point of Prohibition. They see it as a cry for help from an incompetent: “Stop me before I drink again!” That’s backward. Prohibition was supported by people who thought everyone else should stay sober, and had no problem using the coercive force of government to keep them that way.

  Southern states have blue laws which, though finally on the wane, kept many businesses closed on Sundays for years and still restrict some commercial transactions. Not long ago, deputies arrested a cashier at a South Carolina retailer for the crime of selling an extension cord on a Sunday morning, thus violating community standards of decency. (Hey, what do you use them for?)

  Excluding Louisiana, a state settled largely by Catholics and thus considered by all decent Southerners a Papist enclave controlled by the Whore of Babylon, Southerners have always made it difficult for their neighbors to take a drink, play cards, shoot craps, or enjoy carnal knowledge of a lady. Tobacco, being a local cash crop, is different. It is not uncommon to see a small congregation of smokers on the front steps of a country church finishing off a quick butt during the offertory. But in nearly every other area of perceived public vice, Southerners are enthusiastic practitioners of the puritan art of annoying their neighbors.

  In the year 2002, for example, a well-respected women’s shelter in Charleston, South Carolina, declined to accept any proceeds from a charity performance of the award-winning play The Vagina Monologues because, according to published accounts, several board members were “offended by the title.” Turning down much-needed money that could aid battered women seemed a ridiculous position for the shelter to take until the local daily ran a listing for the upcoming performance as The V Monologues. That’s right: just “V.”

  Assuming that the performance advertised was not a collection of great moments from the 1980s NBC miniseries V or the twenty-second installment in a series of twenty-six monologues that began with “A,” the conclusion must be that a daily newspaper in a major southern city in the year 2002 would not print the word “vagina.” This has got to present quite a challenge for the medical reporter, not to mention the confusion in the movie listings when D. Tracy and James Bond’s Octop hit town.

  And so, my northern friend, when you are ready to mock, ridicule, and denigrate the irrational, overzealous, blue-haired believers of the American South, I say, “Mock away!” I lived it, breathed it, and frequently gagged on it. Southern religiosity is a circus of nonsensical superstitions, overbearing zealots, and borderline lunacy, and when it’s time to start laughing, I want you to save me a front-row seat.

  I just have one request: Don’t make me sit next to the tree lady.

  I TALK TO THE TREES…

  The tree lady is Julia “Butterfly” Hill, the St. Joan of the modern American religiosity, who lived in a tree and etched her name in the Book of Saints of our new Redneck Nation. I met Julia Hill on the set of Politically Incorrect back when it was on ABC. She was on the show to promote her book, The Legacy of Luna, which describes her 738 days sitting atop a California redwood (Luna) to save it from the woodsman’s ax.

  I was on Politically Incorrect to sit in the token conservative’s chair, the sacrificial goat for the smug Hollywood types who sit on the panel. If you ever watched the show, you know the format: They bring out a conservative, tie us to a stake, and leave us there bleating while they set the three lefties and Bill Maher (okay, make that four lefties) loose to devour us for the pleasure of the twenty-something TV audience.

  When Julia (“Butterfly” if you’re nasty) and I were on together, the topic was “the environment,” which sounds much more profound than saying that five slightly famous adults are going to sit around talking about trees. Which is what we did.

  If you could reincarnate the Prohibition-era Anti-Saloon League and the old KKK (back when U.S. Senator Robert Byrd was a proud member), they would be the environmentalists, the pro-choicers, and the Smoke Nazis of today. Trees, tobacco, and the right to choose are the Holy Trinity of the new American zealot. Like good southern-style evangelicals, these true believers are immune to facts and science. It’s strange to discover that the typical environmental activist has no more interest in actual scientific research than a Baptist preacher has in the newest edition of the Origin of Species.

  When the TV cameras rolled, I tried to offer a few facts—the relative stability of global temperature, the reforestation of the American East Coast, the improvements in water quality that have come with new technology. But it was a waste of breath, because Julia Butterfly’s position was based entirely on, for lack of a better term, religion. She knows the earth is hurting because she feels it in the Earth Spirit. The trees are being “murdered,” the water’s fouled, and the Earth Mother is trying to get us to become one with Her and live in peace.


  Julia Butterfly knows this because the trees tell her. That’s right: According to her book, she talks to the trees. And unlike Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon, they did listen to her. They even talked back. Here’s how Butterfly described conversing with a giant California redwood in a recent interview:

  “When I was [ending the tree sit] I had to leave part of myself behind and it hurt. And so I prayed and asked, ‘How am I going to be able to keep the clarity that I’ve gained up here from this literal perspective that I’ve had for two years? And how am I going to handle losing the best friend I’ve ever had in my life?’ And Luna spoke to me for the last time [emphasis added] and said, ‘You know, Julia, anytime you get overwhelmed or feel ungrounded or at a loss, just put your hand to your heart, because that’s where your experience is. And that’s something no one can take away from you. I’ll be with you always.’ And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.”

  Now, you can call me a judgmental European heterosexual male if you want, but when a seemingly rational human being tells me she has conversations with inanimate objects, I dismiss her as a loon. To me, she’s in the same category as the southern Pentecostal who claims God told her to join Amway. So I proceeded to mock Julia on national television under the assumption that the typical American would side with me and not with the young lady who gets career advice from a conifer.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong. When the show was over, e-mails poured in from people who not only believed Butterfly’s story but claimed they, too, had regular conversations with flora and fauna. Who was I to disparage the great spiritual connection that people like Butterfly have with Mother Earth, Gaia, and the Spirit Goddess?