Invisible Old-Time Religion

Religion in the old South

Growing up in an Alabama Protestant town and a Baptist family in the 20th century, I had a clear idea what religion was, but a limited one. Most local religion was austere or invisible in the frontier tradition, all about words and the "truths" they signified, scarcely existing outside of songs, prayers, sermons, books, and pamphlets. A "mixed" religious family was one where a husband and wife disagreed about which church to go to Sunday morning.

There was a Catholic church--small but thriving in 1950 as university influence made Auburn vaguely cosmopolitan--but I've heard that the church was founded by mistake. Around 1910, when no establishment of religion meant promoting all Christian denominations equally, students were required to sign a log at the church of their choice every Sunday morning. Since there was no Catholic church in Auburn, if they registered as Catholic, they could sleep in, and the story is that these nominal Catholics caught the attention of Vincentian missionaries, who built the church there in 1912. They were mystified by low mass attendance.

   This may be apocryphal, but it fits the Auburn I knew. I don't recall a Catholic friend in high school, though I hung out with high-church Episcopalians who revered Rome from a safe distance. When I chanced on a televised Catholic mass, I stared at men in frocks intoning Latin and switched the channel as if I had stumbled on a rack of soft-core porn. The one time I visited the Catholic church for reasons I forget (maybe a high Anglican girl dragged me), the kneeling, crossing, and tongue-extending to unintelligible droning was something out of Gulliver's Travels.   

   But Catholics were ultimately OK--Christian after all, blessed with religious freedom--so my Baptist parents took it well when I turned Romish in 1972. Freedom of religion was a sacred right, but the local ideology held that professing some denomination (even Catholic or Jewish) was the duty of every citizen. All America listened to "prayer time" on Don McNeill's Breakfast Club: "Each in his own words, each in his own way, for a world united in peace -- bow your heads -- and pray." I can recite these words. They were commonplaces of radio America like Big Jon and Sparky's "Teddy Bear's Picnic," the William Tell Overture on The Lone Ranger, and the roar of Buzz Corry's rocket on Space Patrol. Having no way to pray wasn't a respectable option.

   Our religious ideology differed from centuries of Christianity in that heresy functioned only in jokes and history books. Most Americans gave lip service to the "Voltaire" quotation (actually from a 1906 biography): "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." We heard this coinage because, like George Washington's cherry tree, it reinforced the national ideology. It was pro-freedom and anti-Hitler. Auburn First Baptist went as far as to accept all private beliefs based on faith in Jesus Christ and honest reading of the Bible.

   My early understanding of religion was (1) that it was all about belief and (2) that belief asserted that a premise was true in the sense that grass is green. A religion was the sum of its would-be-factual beliefs; if you had a book entitled What Baptists Believe, to the extent that it was complete and accurate, you could read it and understand Baptists. If you also knew how Baptist and Catholic beliefs differed, then you'd understand Catholics. Of course, beliefs came in at least two kinds, doctrinal and moral, and sometimes (rarely) were visible in behaviors besides speech. Baptists didn't believe in drinking, gambling, dancing, and venerating images; Catholics did, in moderation anyway. But in my Alabama Baptist world, this wasn't a big deal. The sine qua non was John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." Believe that (and the doctrinal scaffolding under it) and you're saved. Don't and you aren't. You can repent behavior.

   The religion I grew up with subsisted in invisibles: doctrinal belief and inner conversion. There were no clear outward signs--no Church of Christ or Methodist neighborhoods in Auburn, no church schools, no denominational cuisine or sectarian dress. Segregation was all about race, not religion. Follow folks around with the sound muted, even cataloging their sins, and you couldn't tell a skeptic from a Baptist. Catholics were sporadically visible in crucifixes and smudged Ash Wednesday foreheads, but they usually looked like the rest of us. Except for that hour or two Sunday, religion seldom implied visible difference. Everybody in my Alabama town (except for the occasional foreign student) assimilated into one of two tribes: black and white.

   This isn't the case in much of the world. In Ireland, of course, family religion is caste: a Catholic who disavows the Pope is still Catholic. Catholics and Protestants live in segregated neighborhoods, speak differently, and teach different histories in which Cromwell is either a hero or a monster. I told an Irish woman at a writer's colony that I was a Catholic convert from a Baptist family. In Ireland what would I do? She answered: "Move to England." This matches a story that James Joyce--the anti-religious Irish novelist--reacted to the idea of joining the Church of England: "I've just lost my religion, not my mind." In Ireland, religion is more about tribal membership and resentment of England than personal conviction. Irish religious difference isn't what Alabamians call religion at all, though that's buried in the mix. It's much more like race.

This is also true of Judaism, which is not (in my Alabama sense anyway) exactly a race or a religion, but a heritage or tribal identity. A Jew doesn't lose Jewishness for disbelief. Karl Marx would be eligible for Israeli citizenship by virtue of his rabbi grandfathers. The founding father of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, was a secular Jew who professed pantheism. And, of course, through the centuries of conversion and intermarriage, Jews aren't a biological race either. They don't all descend from Abraham except by continuity of practice. Jewish identity is like the identity a family ax, retained even as the handle and blade are separately replaced. But then Judaism is a religion, and my understanding of that term is at fault if it can't incorporate that fact. A religion may be a community loosely connected to theological and moral beliefs even if it is not defined by them, a fuzzy conglomerate very much like Protestantism in Ireland.

My old Alabama understanding of religion can't account for all sorts of cultic customs. It strains Baptist credulity that, after forming galaxies and bringing forth humanity, transcendent Being would fuss over sideburns, beards, turbans, sleeve lengths, scarfs, and cuisine. So what about Sikhs, Moslems, and Hasidic Jews? How is style part of religion? It doesn't seem of cosmic moment--a concern of the eternal Godhead--that monks wear saffron, brown, or black robes according to their order, but, once they're sworn in, that's religion. By diet, dress, and coiffure, communities of ritual and world view signify cultic roles. One Sunday in the 1950s my parent's friends were scandalized that Brother Jeffers preached in a red tie. Imagine their horror if he'd worn bib overalls. So even among old-line Baptists, fashion played a role. We can't understand religion, as practice anyway, without recognizing the arbitrary signs of group identity revered with the same passion that many Americans revere tricolored rectangles of fabric.

   Roman Christians before Constantine were called atheists because they avoided meat sacrificed to imperial and civic gods. Feast days, public barbecues in which scraps were burned for the gods but the public ate the prime cuts, were celebrations of civil solidarity. Pagan holidays affirmed cohesion within a city or empire, so non-participation was as offensive as  kneeling for the Anthem. America has removed sectarian doctrines from its civil religion of Constitution, founding fathers, July 4th, flag, and freedom. The God "we trust" may be the creedless Higher Power of freemasonry and Alcoholics Anonymous. American Christmas parades are drained of cultic symbolism (unless  you regard gifts, trees, and Santa as a cult).

      This is unlike civil-religious celebrations in more homogeneous nations such as Italy and India, where crowds follow holy images to sacred sites in festivals of local pride. Festa della Bruna in Matera, Italy, centers on a statue of Mary carried on an ornate chariot to the cathedral, much as devotees of Ganesh in Pune, India, celebrate the elephant-headed god's birthday, and ancient Athens paraded Athena to her temple on a chariot. These celebrations are religious but civic too--an entanglement that my doctrine-and-morals religious upbringing ignored. Again, religion isn't so much doctrinal or moral, but pageantry signifying solidarity, participation, and membership.

   A really problematic concept for my Alabama-born mentality is holy place. Protestant churches may call themselves holy, but only as a result of worship in them. It has nothing to do with the real estate. "For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them" (Matthew 18:20). Sometimes Auburnites did tour the Holy Land and feel goosebumps walking where Jesus walked--much as I feel walking the farm of my first memories (my Rosebud)--but my rational part tells me "places" are lumps of matter--relics of dirt, rocks, and ruins--not spacial locations. 

   Since the earth spins at a thousand miles an hour, if Muhammed did ascend into heaven from the Temple Mount, that place (even taking the center of the earth as fixed) would be somewhere over the Mediterranean an hour later and God knows where today--especially given the earth is moving at 67,000 miles per hour around a star circling at 514,000 miles per hour a galaxy moving at over a million miles a minute relative to cosmic background radiation. If the author of the Big Bang endorses any notion of a fixed place, it's not in GPS coordinates. Holy places are human constructs: superstitions of Ptolemaic astronomy or relics like a saint's finger bone. A nation needs a capital and borders. A transcendent god doesn't. But sacred places are fixtures in most religions. It's human to value objects because people or events have touched them. I value my signed letter from J. R. R. Tolkien even if it says nothing new and useful about his fiction.

   Maybe it's no wonder I lost my religion, given that it straddled two dry, invisible worlds, a doctrinal heaven above and a credulous heart within, connected by little but words--words styled like philosophy without the rigor. When I turned Catholic, even Episcopalian, the robes and stately prayers of the eucharist satisfied a deep hunger that Baptist frontier austerity never did.