Region and Religion, Part 2 ½
I just finished two fascinating nonfiction books that fed my current region-and-religion obsession: Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia and Timothy K. Beal’s Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith.
Both had some topical connection to Lee Smith’s Saving Grace (see previous post): Salvation on Sand Mountain is an account of a journalist’s time among Appalachian snake handlers, and Roadside Religion features a chapter on “biblical mini-golf” courses with great names like “Golgotha Fun Park.” Only in the South, I said to myself, only in the South.
Both Covington and Beal are remarkable for the credit they, as fairly mainstream Christian believers, give to these somewhat eccentric—sometimes dangerous, sometimes merely kitschy—expressions of faith. Beal even struggles to acknowledge the spiritual merit of Precious Moments when he visits the Precious Moments Inspiration Park in Carthage, Missouri. That takes far more graciousness than I have (we hates them, with their huge, droopy eyes!).
In the process of giving weird practices the benefit of the doubt, each writer finds himself opening to mystery, God’s mystery, and they interweave their spiritual narratives with the tales of the places they visit.
Covington gives some historical and sociological explanations for why some Southern Pentecostals handle snakes: the first documented instance of snake handling was in 1910 in Tennessee, and Covington suggests that it may have had something to do with the hills people feeling powerless at the increasing urbanization of the South. But he doesn’t wholly attribute the phenomenon to sociological circumstance, and he recognizes the mystery of both power and powerlessness involved in charismatic experience.
In one of the many beautiful passages from the book, he writes: “In both sexual and religious ecstasy, the first thing that goes is self. The entrance into ecstasy is surrender. Handlers talk about receiving the Holy Ghost. But when the Holy Ghost is fully come upon someone like Gracie McAllister, the expression on her face reads exactly the opposite—as though someone, or something, were being violently taken from her. The paradox of Christianity, one of many of which Jesus speaks, is that only in losing ourselves do we find ourselves, and perhaps that’s why photos of the handlers so often seem to be portraits of loss.”
As a Flannery O’Connor fan, I found it easier to give credence to snake handlers than to Precious Moments pilgrims. The Precious Moments devotees are seeking comfort, while the snake handlers are living their faith on the edge. Not that I don’t think they’re really, really insane, because they are. But I don’t want to deny that God can actually work through their snake handling, even if God doesn’t really want them to do it. (I suppose, for consistency, I ought to grant the same potential benefit for Precious Moments figurines, but everything in me rebels against that).
Beal’s book is at once more amusing and more academic than Covington’s, while Covington delves deeper into the personal. However, Beal has some important insights. In trying to describe why certain sites appealed to him more than others, he writes, “In these places I experienced a correlation between connectedness to the land, personal authenticity, and openness to others. The more the place was locally grounded, rooted in its particular natural environment, the more uniquely personal it was, and the more hospitable it was to others. Hospitality is always local.” (Thus, Beal finds deep hospitality even in places with signs declaring “Hell is HOT” and “You will burn”). Though he doesn’t name it as such, that’s the mystery of the Incarnation, God self-revealing in particulars (most importantly, the ultimate particular in the person of Jesus Christ).
The last paragraph of Salvation on Sand Mountain is so beautiful that I cried when I read it aloud to Porpoise. While driving through his childhood neighborhood, Covington remembers how his father used to call him in for dinner. Rather than shouting his name or banging a dinner bell, his father would come to find him. “This is how he got me to come home,” Covington writes. “He came to the place I was before he called my name.”
Ooh. Shivers.
So maybe that has something to do with religion and regionalism, as well as Incarnation. God comes to the place we are, to our particular circumstances, before calling our name. And the South (at least for writers of the previous generation—it may now be changing) has a shared history of defeat (a necessary defeat) and post-Civil War poverty. Flannery O’Connor believed that the South was “Christ-haunted,” and that it was “traditionally opposed to the idea of Enlightenment perfectibility” that characterized the Northern states. Southerners shared “a distrust of the abstract, a sense of human dependence on the grace of God, and a knowledge that evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured.” So if there’s something distinctive about Southern Christianity, it may be because God, respecting the particular experience of Southerners, self-reveals in ways that appeal to them.
As I said, though, I believe that the South O’Connor observed is changing, at least to some degree, due to the universalizing influence of various media. Having grown up in pre-Internet Arkansas, I’m now shocked when I return home for a visit and discover that Arkansan churches are singing the same songs, reading the same Rick Warren books, and preaching the same politics that evangelicals across the U.S. are. The evangelical subculture sometimes seems so monolithic. Maybe that’s why I find tales of quirky faith so refreshing. But, God being God, there are no doubt ways that he’ll reveal himself through the particular, peculiar circumstances of today’s strangely universal evangelicalism.
1 comment April 23rd, 2006