by Simon Schama
Pastor Johnny understands American solitude, and the high-wattage smile tells his flock that when he deplores transgression, he knows whereof he speaks. Not that long ago (a few decades) Johnny Hunt, half Lambee Indian, sharp in the pool room, his life measured out by the beer bottles, was tomcatting around bars and alleys. Then—isn’t this always the way?—he was rescued by Janet the Cheerleader and her twirling batons. (“I noticed how pretty her baton was.”) Janet is at Bible class too, her self-evident sweetness not completely masked by pancake; hair impeccably streaked. Later in his sermon, Johnny would publicly celebrate her as his personal redeemer, right up there with Jesus, without a twitch of embarrassment. But Janet must be used to this by now. Before Micah and Isaiah get started, there are the Announcements, which amount, in effect, to First Baptist’s order of business: a prayer intercession for Rhonda and Mark, who together have to deal with another round of chemo; support for the mission in Argentina (evangelical Protestantism a hit with the gauchos); volunteers signing up for Church on the Street, which goes into the tougher neighborhoods of Atlanta looking to help the homeless and the addicted. I ask Johnny about the strings attached to that help. “None,” he says flatly and without any defensiveness. “If they want to accept the Lord, as I did, they are most welcome, but we give what we can anyway.” And you believe him because, even though every fiber of your agnostic-skeptical brain is screaming NO, the rest of you is recognizing that this is one decent (and snappily dressed) vicar.
The signs on the seats of the vast amphitheatrical “chapel” were marked “SAVED,” which was nice for a Jew like me, but not, I thought, guaranteed. As the faithful trooped in there was a hubbub of rumor. Mike Huckabee, Baptist preacher, ex-governor of Arkansas, local saint to Bill Clinton (the other famous Arkansan of unsaintly fame), a victorious veteran of a hundred-pound battle with girth, a perfect emblem of the Republican commitment to shrinking government, was coming to First Baptist. If you were a committed Christian and couldn’t quite get over your anxieties about the Book of Mormon, then Huckabee was your man for the White House, and since Iowa he was running strong. On the strength of the rumor the lady next to me had driven sixty miles that morning for a Huckabee sighting. From the front of the chapel, gently graduated steps, as if rising to paradise, ascended to a stage, flanked by two huge video screens on which slides smoothly scrolled, rather like local commercials at the movie theater. But instead of Country Joe’s Barb-B-Cue and Tom’s Tune-Up ’n’ Lube, they were: “MUSLIM BIBLE DAY; PREMARITAL COUNSELING; ADDICTION RECOVERY; OBEDIENCE THROUGH BAPTISM; PRE-BIBLE CLASS.” Between the screens were, on each side, two electronic portals, glowing cerise or celadon, and at the center, a pale skin-tone shimmer in which was set a single glowing, silver cross. It was fabulous.
On came the choir, overwhelmingly white, a mere 150 of them, greeted by a wave of happy sound from the 400-piece orchestra: Andrew Lloyd Webber does the hymnal. “He CAME, he DIED, he ROSE again on HIGH…,” they sang, the colossally amplified sound crashing over the flock, which nonetheless did not rise from their seats but stayed put, oddly passive like children in a classroom, uncertain of their allotted quotient of eagerness. As if in supplication, one of the cassocked choir would every so often slowly lift both arms, palms upward, trembling, like a marionette worked by a celestial puppeteer. But there was no general joining in, for the choir was just too far away, across the vast wooden prairie of the stage. To the front of that space on each side of the niftily kitted choirmaster strode four women in their twenties and thirties. They were glossily shampooed and dressed just barely the respectable side of enticing: calf-high boots, cowgirl pleats, shredded buckskin blousons. Spotlit, they belted out the delight.
It was a hell of a warm-up for Governor Huckabee, whose amiably gangling form now loped on to the stage. Arriving a little while before the service, he had been surrounded by believers, eager to shake the preacher’s hand, pledge allegiance, touch the raiment, which in this case was a dark gray suit that flattered the newly trim lines of the ex-chubby. “I have come to campaign,” he winsomely confessed (the disingenuous official line at Woodstock being that he was just another worshipper who happened by in his helicopter), “I have come to campaign for Jesus.” Applause, for the faithful did not for a minute think the as yet unannounced candidacy of Jesus for president was a bar to his apostle Huckabee somehow making it onto the ticket. The preacher went on in his trademark lightly self-deprecating manner, a million miles from the sanctimonious rants expected of evangelicals in politics, to claim that politics and power weren’t all they were cracked up to be, and yes, his heart was in this campaign, but whatever happened, it was always going to be more important to bring souls to the Lord. Sure. But such was the disarming charm, the mellifluousness of the voice, that for a moment you actually began to believe this, even while the Huckachopper was parked not far off by a golf course waiting to spring Slim to his next date with the voters.
When it came to Pastor Johnny’s turn, you could see why he was such a hit with the suburbans. Dapper, he moved lightly on his handsomely shod feet, a bobbing flash of pugilistic energy, like a sparring partner who was just teasing. For the denunciations against iniquity, Johnny could summon up the preacher’s roar, a nod to the great Baptist yore, for he divined the craving for castigation among the BMW classes. But Woodstock is a sinner-friendly church, and the fulmination was carefully rationed, sharing sermon time with scenes from Johnny’s personal odyssey, lost soul to glorious rebirth, that date being 17 January 1973. There were down-home stories of early benefactors. Praise be to Otis Scruggs, apostle in denim overalls, who bought him his first suit. “Johnny,” said Otis, “I never missed anything I ever gave away.” Lord be thanked for Jowls Watner, “a heavy man with a fist like a ham” who had written Johnny a letter every day for thirteen years just to make sure he knew he had a friend who would see he stayed on the straight and narrow. And rising to the climax of all Baptist services, little Johnny, big-time showman for the Lord, opened his arms wide to all those strangers to the Word who wanted, wanted NOW to come and be received…And, from the host in the stalls there arose just such men and women (but mostly men), who stepped or stumbled forward into the embrace of Pastor Johnny (or one of his numerous deacons stationed along the many aisles), some of them ending prostrate at the front, heads bowed on the lowest step, gently raised by the pastor, and on came the choir of multitudes and the strings and woodwinds, fortissimo, and out came that anthem again like a dollop of molasses on morning corn mush: “He CAME, he DIED, he ROSE again on HIGH…”
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.
15. Raven, Virginia, 2008
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 th
e 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?