Redneck Nation

by Michael Graham

  The Green movement in America is one step away from a tent revival. Druidism, animism, shamanism—the hard-core acolytes will buy anything… except perhaps a can of deodorant. They believe we live on a planet that can feel us, that the woods and waterways are filled with spirits, and that a heaping bowl of organically grown amaranth flakes each morning will connect us to the spirit of the ancient Egyptians.

  Looking back on it, I wonder why I was surprised. Gallup polling in the 1990s saw the percentage of Americans who believe in haunted houses rise from 29 to 42; those who believe that the spirits of the dead can return to this world rose from 25 percent to 38 percent; and those who believe in witches grew from 14 percent to 26. Even among self-described Christians, 50 percent believe in ESP, and nearly as many believe in psychic healing. Not to mention the 80 percent of Americans who believe the government is hiding the truth about aliens from us; the 25 percent who believe in channeling; the 32 percent who claim to have seen an angel; and most bizarre, the 44 percent who believe that “good atheists will go to heaven,” though it remains unclear what they’ll do once they get there.

  This isn’t religious conviction; it’s nuttery of the first order. It’s theology as understood by the God-fearing Christians back home who also carried rabbit’s feet and claimed to know spells that could cure warts.

  That’s why I find it hard to share the dismissive attitude Northerners have about Southerner evangelicals and born-again Christians. Do you know how exasperating it is to have a New Ager make fun of your religion? As a graduate of Oral Roberts, I am a magnet for people who want to talk about their spiritual beliefs and/or their loathing of Christianity. My ORU experience was part of my stand-up comedy act, and it was not uncommon to be harangued after the show by audience members who wanted to get their licks in against organized religion.

  After a set at a hotel in Washington State, I was dragged into a long, drawn-out discussion with a graying, balding New Ager who just couldn’t get over my evangelical background. “You seem so smart,” he kept saying. “How could you buy into that stuff?”

  Here’s a guy wearing a crystal around his neck to open up his chakra, who thinks that the spirit of a warrior from the lost city of Atlantis is channeled through the body of a hairdresser from Palm Springs, and who stuffs magnets in his pants to enhance his aura, and he finds evangelicalism an insult to his intelligence. I ask you: Who’s the redneck?

  Come to think of it, I’m not sure if this guy—who believed in reincarnation, ghostly hauntings, and the eternal souls of animals—actually believed in God. It’s not uncommon for Northerners, especially those who like to use the word “spirituality,” to believe in all manner of metaphysical events, while not believing in the Big Guy. “Religious” people go to church and read the Bible, and Northerners view them as intolerant, ill-educated saps. “Spiritual” people go hiking, read Shirley MacLaine or L. Ron Hubbard, and are considered rational, intelligent beings.

  What the modern American believer has in common with the fervent Southerners I grew up with is a wholehearted rejection of reason. He feels no need to explain where his beliefs come from, or what evidence he’s discovered that led him to these beliefs, or even that these beliefs make any sense. Mock the Pentecostal preacher denouncing eyeliner and lipstick as toys from the devil’s rumpus room if you must, but at least he is bound at some point by the text of the Bible. He’s not going to publicly advocate theft, lying, wife-coveting, or any other direct violations of the Ten Commandments, no matter how often he may practice them in private.

  If he is led far enough astray, he might end up under the desk or under his secretary (or in Jim Bakker’s case, both), but he won’t be found dead in a new pair of Nikes trying to catch the Hale-Bopp Express. That’s for Californians, not charismatics.

  What to make then of the New Yorker once married (thankfully, very briefly) to a friend of mine who told me, “I believe in Jesus, and I believe he was God, I just don’t believe in the Bible.” Isn’t this the intellectual equivalent of “I drive a car but I don’t believe in the internal combustion engine?” I asked her. What other source of information on Christ’s divinity is there?

  “I know it doesn’t make any sense. I just believe it. I think he’s, you know, out there.” Yeah, I said, out there…

  I listened closely for some intelligible belief system or rational thought as she rambled on about her adherence to Buddhism, Catholicism, and (my friend learned later) lesbianism, but she simply wasn’t intellectually serious. She wasn’t bothered that one set of her beliefs contradicted another. She was unconcerned about claims of exclusive truth from the Bible or anywhere else. She believed that what she believed was true because she believed it. In other words, she was an idiot. But she certainly isn’t alone.

  The only difference between these folks—Julia Butterfly and the New Age annoyer and my friend’s ex—and the gang of God-fearing Christians who put Mr. Scopes on trial in Tennessee is the absence or presence of the Bible. In every other feature, they are the same. Two generations ago, Americans looked down at the small courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee, where William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow battled over the theory of evolution and thought: “When are those Southerners going to join the twentieth century?” Today, their grandchildren in Detroit are calling Miss Cleo for $4.99 a minute.

  Actually it’s worse. Most people forget that the South won the Monkey Trial, and John Thomas Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution to impressionable Tennessee high schoolers (a dubious case at best given the unlikelihood of teaching the typical Tennessee high schooler anything). Clarence Darrow went back up North to Chicago, Mencken went back to Baltimore, and the Good Lord called Bryan home in his sleep five days after the trial. And what has happened to the struggle between science and Scripture since?

  It’s been a southern blowout. Eighty years after Dayton, only 10 percent of Americans believe in Darwinian evolution, while 44 percent believe God created the world, including a real Adam and Eve, in a single week, and did so just six thousand years ago. Only one in six college graduates accepts the theory of evolution as true, and, according to Gallup, acceptance of evolution—a virtually undisputed fact in scientific circles—has actually gone down since 1990. It’s morning in America again for our new Redneck Nation.

  I don’t mean to imply that a religious nation is necessarily a redneck one. Belief in God is greater in the South than outside Dixie, but not by much. There is a serious tradition of religious scholarship in the northern states, a tradition that gave America Harvard, Georgetown, and Yeshiva.

  I’m complaining about the irrationalist tradition in religion that was once predominantly restricted to the South, a tradition that gave us ORU, BJU, and the Alabama Theological Seminary and Institute of Auto Diesel Repair. If the northern tradition had prevailed, America would still be a nation of believers, but that belief would be tempered by reason and science.

  Instead, we are now a nation where the number one new syndicated show in the year 2002 is a man who claims he talks to dead people. Crossing Over with John Edwards is a televised version of an old sideshow mind-reading act so lame that no self-respecting carny will do it. But millions of Americans tune in to see Edwards, a self-declared psychic from Long Island, New York, bring messages from the Great Beyond to pathetic losers in his television studio.

  This is the kind of superstition-based entertainment one would expect from Romanian government television—Vampires Live Tonight!—but it’s must-see TV right here in our Redneck Nation. John Edwards is so popular, in fact, that he’s working on a drama series about a psychic who travels around helping people with their problems. Kind of like The Fugitive, except that, being a psychic, he doesn’t have to look for the mysterious one-armed man—he already knows who it is.

  You can dismiss John Edwards and Miss Cleo to the snake handler’s corner of contemporary American spiritualism, but what to do with CBS’s runaway prime-time hit Touched by an Angel? I find the show tremendously sig
nificant from a religious perspective; I believe the sudden popularity of Della Reese is a sign of the coming Apocalypse as foretold in the Book of Revelation.

  The problem with Touched by an Angel (besides the fact that it is hideously maudlin and mediocre even by the standards of CBS) is that many of its estimated 25 million viewers seem to believe it’s a documentary. According to polls, about 70 percent of Americans believe in angels, about half believe they have their own guardian angel, and nearly all of those people believe their angel looks like a cast member from Friends.

  And because of the popularity of Touched, the same Americans who snickered at stiff-haired televangelists now happily accept spiritual insight from a former lounge act. Della Reese, or the Reverend Della Reese as she’s known in the Understanding Principles of Better Living Church, can’t write her books fast enough: Angels Along the Way, What Is This Thing Called Love, and Strength Is the Energy of God!, a collection of devotionals based on her theological insights as the star of a network TV program. If you don’t have a copy, just go to the Touched by an Angel Store website. Once there, you can purchase a copy of her recordings with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, or a CD of Della Della Cha Cha Cha, and everyone’s favorite, the Touched by an Angel Sing-A-Long karaoke album.

  Telephone psychics, TV séances, and prime-time lounge singers for Jesus sound like the programming for the Turner South network, but it’s all U.S.A. Darwin may be dead and evolution on the verge of eviction, but the Spirit of Dixie is moving across the land.

  Can I get an “Amen”?

  10

  It’s a ___ Thing.

  You Wouldn’t Understand.

  Union.

  “E Pluribus Unum” is the defining struggle between North and South. What was the cause President Lincoln found most precious? Union.

  What was the reason young men from Minnesota and Massachusetts took up arms against their southern brothers? Union.

  Why does it cost $11,000 per head for the New Jersey public school system to crank out ill-informed illiterates? Union… Wait! We covered that in Chapter 6.

  In 1861, it was the Union Army that marched into the First Manassas (and, not to brag, got its ass kicked!) against the Confederacy. The North maintained that one set of fundamental laws on issues like liberty, equality, and the democratic process could govern us all as Americans.

  The southern states disagreed. The southern rebellion rose up to rend apart the American Republic, to nullify the Constitution, and to destroy the one nation, indivisible, governed by its laws. They believed regional and ethnic differences between citizens and states were too great to be overcome, even by a document as grand in scope as the U.S. Constitution.

  This was particularly the case when it came to slavery, which southern intellectuals of the day (why are you laughing?) described as the “peculiar institution.” They didn’t use “peculiar” in the “Why is Uncle Derwin wearing Mom’s underwear?” sense. Rather, slave owners argued that, while slavery would be out of place in the northern economy and social structure, it was a perfect fit with the unique southern lifestyle. For Northerners, slavery would be bad, but for Southerners, slavery was A-OK, and Yankees, with their more pinched, puritan sensibilities, had no right to judge or condemn the southern way of life.

  In other words: It’s a southern thing. You wouldn’t understand.

  Fortunately the North rejected this idea. They argued, with words and weapons, that the Bill of Rights was an excellent one-size-fits-all document and that when the Declaration of Independence says that everyone has certain unalienable rights, it meant everyone, whether they ate southern fried chicken or New England clam chowder.

  This was essentially the same debate America held during the civil rights era. Once again, Southerners conceded that their local Jim Crow segregation—with its separate water fountains and whites-only lunch counters—may have seemed odd to outsiders, perhaps even stupid. But they didn’t ask Northerners to practice it, to praise it, or even to like it. They merely asked the rest of America to ignore it and leave them alone. “It may not make sense to ya’ll,” Southerners said, “but it makes sense to us.”

  America’s first multiculturalists weren’t Harvard professors or Harlem intellectuals. No, the first fighters in the modern multicultural war were the white Southerners of the 1960s. In the face of northern hegemony, they fought to preserve their unique culture and way of life. As the forces of the great capitalist juggernaut, led by corporate and commercial interests, bore down upon them, white Southerners cried out against the arid, lifeless conformity of cultural domination and urged a respect for unfamiliar social mores in a multicultural spirit of enlightenment and tolerance.

  Well, the white Southerners of the 1960s didn’t use those exact words…. It went more like: “Yankee, go home! Y’all a buncha goddamn nigger lovers! And take them Jewboys with ya!”

  The North countered with reason, objectivity, and observable fact. The South wasn’t just different, it was wrong. It was unfair and unjust for the state or county to treat people differently based on their race. Denying people their rights for the sake of tradition was objectively, observably, and demonstrably bad. So, the North insisted, we are going to use force of arms and federal law to defeat the dictates of your culture and apply one standard to every citizen, whether you like it or not. The standard: reason and justice.

  There it is, the fundamental struggle between Northernism and Southernism, reduced to its essence: a single, united nation of melded minds and shared ideals versus a splintered coalition of people who consider themselves unique and unknowable from each other, unable to agree on a single, rational standard for behavior.

  Today, 150 years after the Civil War and a generation after the Civil Rights Movement, I ask you, my northern friend: Who won?

  Pal, it wasn’t even close.

  The melting pot of American culture is dead, kicked over by academics, intellectuals, and individual citizens, all claiming that their heritage or ethnicity makes their way of seeing the world unique. Or perhaps I should say “peculiar.”

  Hardly a voice is raised in the cause of Union, of a single, encompassing American culture. No, we’re all croutons in the great American salad bowl, confederates of a thousand different secessions from the ideal of American unity.

  Thus in New Jersey, black state senators killed a bill requiring schoolchildren to recite the Declaration of Independence’s “all men are created equal” statement because they found it offensive.

  Meanwhile, evangelical Christians appear at local libraries to keep Harry Potter from introducing unsuspecting children to the exciting world of Satanism. One of the proud puritans wrote in a letter to the editor, “I’m probably going to be called stupid, but I know what is right for me and my family.”

  In Maryland, the ultraliberal Montgomery County school board voted to force Poolesville High School to drop its fifty-year-old nickname, the “Indians,” despite the fact that more than 80 percent of American Indians surveyed by Sports Illustrated do not find such team names offensive. “But if one person is offended, that’s too much,” said one self-declared Indian leader.

  In Denver, Colorado, Columbus Day has been canceled because some American Indians are offended by celebrations of the conquest of North America by Europeans. They instead celebrate “Indigenous Persons” Day.

  In New York, some Italian Americans are insulted by the idea that Native Americans are insulted by Columbus Day. Italian American traditions are under assault by Indians who are hostile to their culture, the Italians say.

  Meanwhile, Spanish Americans are still trying to figure out why the Italians get all the credit for Columbus when everyone knows that it was Queen Isabella of Spain who put up all the money. Where’s Spanish American Day, amigos?

  Amigo this, reply American Hispanics. You Spaniards are just European white-boy wanna-bes. We’re the real minority around here and we’ve got Cinco de Mayo, a great holiday celebrating the fact that we kicked Euro-butt in Mexico in
1862 and are probably gonna do it again in the World Cup.

  Wait a minute, muchachos, say the Columbian Americans, that World Cup belongs to us. And who decided we have to be called “Hispanic,” anyway? What do we have in common with the desert cultures of northern Mexico? We want our own line on the census form.

  Damn straight, say the Cuban Americans. Why, Miami was a great town when we ran the place. Now all these El Salvadorans and Guatemalans are killing our property values. We Cubans have nothing to do with those peons, and if one more oppressive, Anglo journalist runs another story calling us “Hispanic,” we’re gonna open up an Eli´n-sized can of Cuban Whoop-ass on him. Down with Fidel!

  And all the while, the hearty laughter of John C. Calhoun fills the cavernous halls of hell.

  Less than fifty years after southern blacks and northern whites marched, fought, and died for One Nation, Indivisible, America has devolved into a “peculiar institution.” There is no single standard of behavior, no single standard of reason or justice.

  The only right every American enjoys today is the right to be as stupid as he wants to be and still be taken seriously by his neighbors. If that’s not a Redneck Nation, I don’t know what is.

  YOU WEAR YOUR X…

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

  As I mentioned earlier, these words, from the Declaration of Independence, have been declared “exclusionary and insensitive” by the New Jersey Senate. The attack against a bill requiring schoolchildren to recite this part of the Declaration was led by Senator Wayne Bryant, who labeled it “offensive to [the black] community.” “You have the nerve to ask my grandchildren to recite these words?” he said on the floor of the Senate. “How dare you?”