The American Future (19 page)

And you would think that all this would make the pastor ambitious for power, as well as glory. But you would be wrong. Afterward, mopped down and freshened up, Johnny said, “You know, Simon, I don't think the answer lies in the White House.” I had asked him why, Huckabee aside, all the predictions of a Christian vote deciding elections for the Republicans as the conventional wisdom said it did in 2004, seemed not to be repeating four years later. Surprisingly, Johnny replied that being too closely tied to the perceived purposes of the
Bush administration and the pre-2006 Republican Congress may have hurt rather than helped the cause. Would he like to see someone like Mike Huckabee, hell, Huckabee himself, in the White House? Yes, he would. Did the moral future of America depend on that outcome? Not a bit. This line significantly departed from the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition position, that the United States stood on the brink of perdition, unless prayer was introduced into schools, abortion outlawed, a constitutional amendment adopted that defined marriage as a sacrament between one man and one woman (at a time, a rider would presumably have to add). Notoriously, Jerry Falwell had been of a like mind with Mohamed Atta in seeing the massacre of 9/11 as a chastisement meted out by God on a sin-stained America. But modern pastors like Johnny Hunt were not of a vengeful temper, nor did they think whatever ailed the moral condition of the country could be remedied by legislation or the fiat of the Supreme Court. “The answer,” said Johnny, “lies at home,” and by home he meant the individual houses of his 21,000 congregants, but he also meant their shared home, the community he himself had fashioned. His pastorate was just that: a shepherding, and he was more interested in those who had strayed from the flock than the fat and fleecy. Anyone less like a beetle-browed theocrat it was hard to imagine. Once there had been Baptist brimstone. Now there was cool marketing, Christian rock music, and the high-school mission to Argentina.

Unblushingly theatrical demonstrations of faith, then, are not to be confused with a campaign for an American-Christian theocracy. It is certainly true that America, even before the revolution, has been fertile ground for self-appointed prophets, crusaders, and messiahs. There is nothing like a wide-open continent (save the original inhabitants) for postponing disenchantment, for if a prophecy fails to pan out it can always be relocated, preferably somewhere toward the west. There are still a host of Americans reading Tim La Haye's
Left Behind
books (fifty million at the last count) and if they believe what they read, are impatiently waiting for the Rapture, the Last Days' battles with the Antichrist somewhere in the vicinity of, say, Fallujah, to be followed by the inauguration of the Thousand-Year Rule of Christ. The deputy undersecretary for intelligence at Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, Lieutenant General William Boykin, has become notorious for insisting that the Holy Spirit, and sometimes God in person, makes
regular visitations to instruct him on strategy. As recently as last April the retired but unrepentant Boykin told a gathering in Israel that when (not if ) the time came for him to be admitted to heaven he wanted to arrive on all fours, “with blood on my knees and elbows…standing [not kneeling] with a ragged breastplate of righteousness. And with a spear in my hand. And I want to say, ‘Look at me, Jesus, I've been fighting for you.'”

It's safe to say that for General Boykin's regiment of holy warriors, the preservation of democracy, much less toleration, plays second fiddle to the execution of God's Ultimate Plan. But it was the wisdom of the Founding Fathers to ensure that while such visionaries are free to shout their dreams from the mountaintops, they are not at liberty to impose them on their fellow citizens. The First Amendment to the Constitution, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” opens an unlimited space for worship precisely in order never to be ruled by it. Which is exactly what makes the United States a different republic from, say, Iran.

This is not always well understood by habitually secular, skeptical Europeans, some of whom equate two fanaticisms without noticing that America's institutions are designed to protect citizens from religious coercion rather than enable it. A well-meaning lady to my left at a country lunch a year ago in Britain, marveling that I should choose to spend so much time among the Americans, asked, “Tell me why
are
they all so religious?” “They got it from us,” I parried (dancing clumsily around the question), donning the professorial hat and pointing out that, Mormons aside, there was nothing so extravagant in American religious life that couldn't be found in England during the Civil War and the Interregnum. Americans may rant at each other and at the profanities of the modern world, but we killed each other and King Charles for just such matters. If there was, as my lunch partner implied, something hysterical and deluded about American religiosity, it came by it honestly. After all, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was not named arbitrarily. “Oh, but that was so
long
ago,” my lunch partner replied, at which I countered with the Victorians who were not So Long Ago, a time when British churches were packed with piety. The really interesting question perhaps was not why Americans were believers, for most of the world outside Europe and perhaps east Asia remained
believers too, but why the British had stopped believing. A sudden mass conversion to reasoned atheism around 1920? The bitter education of twentieth-century history (my preferred explanation)? Or an established church which saddled Christian theology with the baggage of an exhausted official institution?

In any event, the Founding Fathers by and large shared what Alexis de Tocqueville nicely called “commonly held opinions” in respect of the existence of a Creator, but differed a great deal on the intensity of their convictions. Jefferson, for example, marveled at the credulousness of those who believed that Jesus was the son of God, born to a virgin, while John Adams was mostly Unitarian. The main thing, though, was to make a place for profession of whatever sort, so that the pious or the impious would never feel obliged to kill each other on behalf of the victory of their convictions. That, they could (and did) fairly point out, was what Europeans had done since Christianity began. A bet was made with posterity that, by keeping the church from directing the state, or the state from compromising theology, religion might actually flourish rather than wither, since it could depend only on its own intrinsic persuasiveness.

Much of American history has been the vindication of that original gamble. The implications of the First Amendment have inadvertently, or not, backed America into the great question on which the peace of the whole world, not just the United States, will turn. And it is a question that secular Europe with its donnish bafflement that any properly, rationally wired human being could ever believe this guff, disqualifies itself from addressing if it invariably talks of the religious as though they were all visitors from Planet Loopy. A double standard not infrequently operates here, partly generated by British romanticism about Islam. American evangelicals, who—so far—are obstructed from imposing law, are madmen, but the ayatollahs who are not are merely misunderstood traditionalists. Sometimes liberal secularism does itself a disservice by deferring to intolerance, rather than debating how those claiming a monopoly of wisdom can be prevented from imposing it on others. The First Amendment makes avoidance of that debate impossible, even when it's something as inadvertently comical as, say, the state of South Carolina offering car license plates with a stained-glass cross and the motto “I Believe.” (In a God who will overlook moving violations, for instance?) It's this unavoidable dialogue between faith
and freedom, conviction and toleration, that has always been at the heart of American history and which is only crudely characterized as a “church–state separation debate.” The unmistakable indifference of the American electorate to evangelical dogmatics in this election year, the clear sense—shared by both Johnny Hunt and Barack Obama—that evangelical politics has had its day, only comes as a surprise to those beyond America who imagined it would go on and on, eating away at democratic toleration. It's elsewhere in the world that dogma chokes on pluralism—the coexistence of conflicting versions of the best way to redemption—and uses state power to wipe it out. In the United States the Founding Fathers believed instead that religious truth would best be served by keeping the state out of the business of its propagation; that the power of religious engagement would not just survive freedom of conscience but be its noblest consequence. It was a daring bet: that faith and freedom were mutually nourishing. But it paid off and it has made America uniquely qualified to fight the only battle that matters, not General Boykin's quixotic reenactment of the true god against the false idol, but the war of toleration against conformity; the war of a faith that commands obedience against a faith that promises liberty. That, actually, turns out to be the big American story.

It was when the men started chanting that I found myself slipping down a wormhole of time, emerging somewhere in the mid-seventeenth century. It was a sound I had never heard before in any church: a low tribal drone, diphthonged, nasal, as if exuded from human bagpipes; a sound that might, I thought, have been overheard by mud-caked sheep in some wetly ancient British valley, an adenoidal chant that had been overtaken by the more tunefully gracious hymns of Isaac Watts. Where in God's name
were
we?

In the Macedonia chapel of the Primitive Baptist Universalist Church, halfway up a mountain in far southwest Virginia near the small town of Raven. I was right about the British antiquity of what I was seeing and hearing, but wrong to guess that the human bagpipes must have been Scots-Irish. In fact, the droners were the descendants of Welsh
Tract Baptists who had settled around Newark, Delaware, sometime in the early eighteenth century. Finding the East Coast too peopled for their liking, and too patrolled by the elders of the church for the free practice of their particular kind of Christianity, they moved on in search of sheep pastures and coal mines new. They took their bricks with them to build sturdy little houses amid the timber-frame cabins of the hill country. But this church—not much bigger than a garage—was built from stone, whitewashed against the hillside. Inside there was no ornament at all, unless you counted the faded print of the Last Supper on the back wall. Even the cross hanging just above the doorway had been reduced to the most rudimentary wooden form, as if made by schoolchildren (which it probably had been). Most of the worshippers, men in long-sleeved white shirts and dark trousers, big-hipped women in bright print dresses, were either very young or very old. The “No Hellers” (for they refuse to believe in an eternal inferno, only the punishing tribulations of this life) were unlikely to turn into a megachurch anytime soon. The population of this corner of the Appalachians had always been poor and had stayed that way; a declaration the No Hellers made to themselves when they wanted to profess a simple connection to the life of the Savior. “We are just common people,” one of the Brothers said in the middle of his Words, not something one could imagine hearing at Woodstock. There was the occasional mother with small children seated on benches parallel to the end wall (for there was nothing remotely like an altar, but rather a rough table on which, mysteriously, a blue picnic cooler had been set). Most of the fifty or so worshippers crowded the benches toward the far end of the chapel or sat behind and to each side of the reading desk, at right angles to the wall. The service was free-form. Brother Farley had warned me that all that was arranged was a meeting time. Other than that, they had no idea exactly when they might start and even less notion when they would finish. It all depended on the inclination of the Spirit to show up and when He decided the visitation had run its course. “It ain't a bus timetable,” he said, adding, with a twinkle, “Hope you like huggin',” and I thought, Who doesn't?

At the end of the church there was neighborly chatting and greeting, from which, without any warning, suddenly arose the skirling: “Day and night, the lambs are crying…come, good shepherd, feed thy
sheep.” This went on, over and over for a good ten minutes, the voices seldom rising or falling much but keeping to their hypnotic drone, words alone sounding the emphasis. Apparently, so one of the Brothers told me, they had had a visit from a Catholic woman who, on hearing this same chant, asked, “Are you Jewish? The last time I heard this was at the Wailing Wall.” “Well,” said the Elder, “we claim to be the Spiritual Jews, so maybe she had something.” This wasn't as improbable as it sounds, for I, too, had been put in mind of chants I had heard in remote synagogues, far away from Ashkenazi operatics; songlines crossing time and space in unexpected dissonant weaves of music.

A visitor had come from a sister church: a nervous young man in the regulation long-sleeved white shirt, Brother Craig, who out of courtesy was offered the first chance to speak and did so with becoming diffidence, without any of the vocal confidence that heralds a powerful sermon. “God smote me in the year 2000,” he said, looking neither happy nor unhappy with the fact, but merely acknowledging somehow his draft call. Like everyone else who spoke, Brother Craig was gently anxious about whether he was, in fact, worthy enough to be the instrument of the Lord's will and whether he would in time be saved from his “vile body.” Poor thing, he had all the worry and none of the displaced urge to acquire trophies to assuage the anxiety. He was Max Weber's thesis about Calvinism minus the capitalism. Someone understood how Brother Craig, or possibly God, was feeling about this uncertainty for at one particularly sorrowful moment a wild cry went up from a dainty silver-haired woman in her seventies sitting a few feet from the reading desk. “GLORY BE!” she wailed, “GLORY BE TO GOD,” her voice breaking into a possessed ululation, at which point the women around her delivered the soothing hug and gentled her back to silence.

These mountain people touched each other, and us. A lot. Literally. In midsentence, mid-spate, a Brother would suddenly extend a hand and give the handshake of Christian fellowship to anyone he felt needed it, or who might not need but would welcome it all the same. At other moments, the whole service would simply break up to allow the congregation to wander about the chapel offering hugs and neck kisses to all and sundry within reach, and if anyone was not within reach they would venture up the aisle until they were, pushing the benches aside.
“Good MORNING,” they would say as they reached for a shake or a hug. “Good MORNING,” I responded, dimly remembering a description of precisely the same practices by English Baptists and Quakers in the seventeenth century. There was constant body motion among the No Hellers, walking, singing, embracing, chatting. This is how it must have been, I thought, before Protestantism turned, irrecoverably, into an expression of the social order; the hierarchy of pews, the imposition of decorum; silence until bidden to sing, stand, pray, kneel, leave. The No Hellers, on the other hand, were living relics of radical Protestantism in its earliest purity; all tender sweetness, and nervous, neighborly joy; the kind I had only read about in books by Christopher Hill. Compared to them the Methodists with their Wesleyan Love Feasts were vulgar upstarts.

A series of mindful speakers pronounced, but everyone was waiting for the man who seemed most dependably to be taken by the Spirit and who had the Voice: Farley Beavers. Farley was a slight, bony soul, angular and awkward, in his late sixties or early seventies (the humble age fast in coal-stricken Appalachia). But Farley had the Gift. When Farley uttered, it began as it did with all the brethren, with a low and quiet pitch, lamenting the passing of brothers Willard, Curtis, and Melvin who “will stand at the right hand of Jesus,” but then Farley got into his stride, intensifying pace, passion, and volume, cantering through a recitation of unworthiness and affirmation: HE formed the peace in the darkness, WHOAH, there was no hell only trib-u-lation down here, and why how could there be seeing that the Lord was a kind and tender lord and, WHOAH (sounding this as a rhythmic, punctuating moan), He would not wish any terror or dismay on his people, WHOAH no for He was full always of loving-kindness (wail from the silver-haired lady, Glory BE!), and now Farley Beavers was galloping along, full tilt, auctioneer speed, so fast I wasn't sure whether he was proclaiming the coming of a day in which “I” (the Lord) “will smite every horse with astonishment” or whether it was whores would be smitten if they were not already, but anyway, WHOAH, He wanted us all to think well of each other (handshake handshake, walkabout, handshake) and if there were bad things among men in power, well, WHOAH, we had the good power to change all that with God's Blessing and, WHOAAAH, peace be upon all of us…for are we all not brothers and sisters and are
sent to care and love each other…? And eventually Farley Beavers climbed to the summit and his bony little head looked out at all the No Hellers, and slowed right down, a sign of the Spirit's so-long valediction this particular Sunday morning in the Appalachians, and so it was time, of course, for another walkabout and mass hug.

All of this was a small miracle; not the kind Brother Farley might have been apprehensively waiting for, but a miracle of survival against the odds anyway. Whatever the opposite of a full-service megachurch was (a microflock?), this was it, and the brethren and sisters of Macedonia, Raven, were happy to leave it that way. No Church on the Street for them. Toward the end Farley had said something, on the face of it bizarre, flying on the wings of his free associations. The dead brothers, Willard, Melvin, and Curtis, would all, he said, “meet the Lord” along with the rest of the No Hellers “in the air.” Which led him, right away, to think about those who took to the air in pursuit of power and money and the vain glories of the world, the creatures of false doctrine…Not for us, said Farley,” ‘we don't go out and deceive people, buy a big ay-ro-plane…but that's good 'cause then they leave us alone.” That's the real miracle, I thought, that they can indeed be left alone; at liberty to say whatever the Spirit prompts, and that thanks to the peculiarly American bargain between faith and freedom, the No Hellers could wail and drone unmolested on the dark Virginia hillside.