Redneck Nation (16 page)

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 significant
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”?

U
nion.

“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.