“Why?” I ask; not letting on how happy I am to hear this, yet equally puzzled why a thoroughly militant, anti-religion, virulent supporter of all society’s many ‘choices’ and freedoms would be against this one.
“Because it’s fucking murder,” he says, looking me in the eye. “Is there any other reason? My atheism is exactly what makes me ‘pro-life,’ as you put it. There is no God. There is no Heaven. There is no reincarnation shit where this person that you killed gets to come back and have another go at it. A person is born, they die, there’s nothing else. Science is all you need for the proof. Spare me all your religious life begins at conception arguments. What else can a fertilized egg grow into? A horse? A unicorn? It either goes to full term or it dies. It’s a human being and you can know this by science and reason alone; save the fairy tales. What really pisses me off is that people think they can just get it on and then if the birth control fails we can erase the mistake.”
“This here, that mistake erasing,” Brent says, holding his index finger in the air, “is the closest I’ve ever come to any type of religious thinking in my life. What if that was me? That person who gets killed in the womb. I don’t give a shit that I would never know, that it doesn’t matter. It matters to me! Have sex all you want. Have as much sex as possible, all the time. But don’t pretend it’s something that it’s not. Liberty is all we have in life and while I’ll live mine to the ends of the earth I’m not going to deny someone else theirs; their only shot.”
“I really respect that,” I say.
“Don’t give me that,” Brent says, “ ‘I respect that,’ who gives a shit? You respect it because you think it’s some sign of me coming to faith. It’s not.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“Well you were thinking that. I know you.”
“Why are you so obsessed with God?” I ask.
“I’m not,” Brent says, “you are.”
“No, I am devout, sure,” I say. “A fanatic, you say. Alright. But I live my faith and that’s it. Yeah, I love talking about religion, but it’s not the first thing I bring up at every chance. You do. Every time we talk you bring something up about religion, religious people, Catholicism.”
Brent laughs, “Right. The next thing you’re going to tell me is that I have this God shaped hole in me and then you’ll quote Augustine; our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
I smile. “You said it, not me. Let me ask you some-thing. How do you live with the impending nothingness?”
“What does that mean?”
“You don’t believe in God or an afterlife. You think when you die you will cease to exist. Try to wrap your mind around that; non-existence. Everything you ever did, thought about, cared about, your very self, will be gone for-ever. Gone.”
“It’s not like I’ll notice.” A perfect light brown stream of tobacco juice ripples over the water.
“But why do anything now if there is no God? If there is no God nothing matters, wouldn’t you agree?”
“No. You live for today. Now matters.”
“I don’t think you mean that. Look at two truly great thinking atheists, Camus and Sartre, both of whom deserve a lot more respect than the atheists today who just reject God without thought and as if the whole question is irrelevant. Both Camus and Sartre realized that life was fundamentally absurd without God.”
“Fine. But they dealt with it.”
“They did. Camus in accepting it and then loving people; in loving the very now in front of you, which is slowly and surely passing away into nothingness. But if you savor your favorite smell, your favorite dish, your favorite people, then you’ve triumphed over it all in some way; you’ve rebelled. Sartre in throwing yourself into a larger cause, for him Marxism, both winning the moment as best they could but, don’t you think there’s something fundamentally pathetic about that? No matter how deeply Camus loved one day he and all he loved would be gone, gone forever and it wouldn’t make one ounce of difference if he hated instead of loved. And what if Sartre became the greatest Communist of all time, made the whole world red, a thriving truly utopian communism…so what? One day gone. Gone and irrelevant. So why do anything if there is no God? Great, you cured cancer! Why not create new cancers? It matters all the same, there is no good or evil, nothing will last, all will one day freeze out or blow up or whatever is supposed to happen with the Universe after all of pathetic, meaningless humanity is gone.”
The sun is setting. Dusk is slowly enveloping the day. We get up and immediately I realize that I can’t feel my legs from the knees down. I have been sitting on them, sitting in the same position for who knows how long. Slowly the blood comes back and the pins and needles come on full force. It hurts but it actually feels really good too. In a weird way it feels really good.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ate a nice dinner at Little Dooey’s last night. The history department hosted a speaker, a professor from UT-Chattanooga, who gave a presentation on Benazir Bhutto in the afternoon and then a small contingent of us, along with him, met at Dooey’s later for dinner.
The City of Chattanooga should hire this guy as some type of human travel brochure. All night long, Chattanooga this, Chattanooga that. Ruby Falls. Lookout Mountain. Don’t get my wrong. Chattanooga is a fine town. A beautiful city, and the drive on 24 that wraps around the Tennessee River is spectacular, especially if you take it a little after dawn on a rainy day. But this guy just wouldn’t quit. You’d think he wasn’t talking about Chattanooga but some imagined city combining the best parts of Florence, Kraków, and Munich that just happens to be in the South. He spoke of Chattanooga as if he had just discovered Atlantis. When coming up for air he also talked about hunting and fishing, little to nothing about his work on modern Pakistan.
Dooey’s, Dooey’s, Dooey’s. Cornbread buttered soaking wet, collared greens and mashed potatoes next to chicken and grits and corn on the cob; a brisket dipped in the sweetest honey barbeque sauce. Pulled pork and pulled chicken. Deep fired green tomatoes. The department paid for it all, thank you very much and much appreciated; so too a lil doff of the cap for the unlimited Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan beer whose bill they footed, the auburn liquid frothing over onto the tablecloths from the ice-cold pitchers that came to us one after the other. I had to exercise serious restraint, a few times, to not drop my head into the froth and lap up like a dog.
I’m heading back out to Noxubee today. Well, in that vicinity. My Noxubee trips are usually spaced out in six to eight month intervals but, less than a week since Brent and I visited, I, we—Brent is coming too— are heading back.
David has invited us to a Christian revival. He gave us the flyers in advance. The topic, on which many pastors will speak, is “Being Christian in the Twenty-First Century.” David says it should be well attended but not a ton of people, maybe 100 in total? In addition to the main focus there will be food, games, and music. A revival that is also “country party,” that’s how David explained it to us. One of the guys from his church is hosting it on his property, a large farmstead somewhere out there by Noxubee.
I eagerly agreed to go. Brent agreed to go “for the food.” Maybe. But, being the secret Herod I think he is, to paraphrase something I once heard from Bishop Robert Barron, there may be other reasons he agreed to go. It’s impossible to know.
Everything is fine, fine, fine
Through the sunshine and the rain
I got a peace of mind
You know I can’t complain
I make it a point to thank the Lord
When I got Him on the line
I’m feeling good and everything is fine
Brent and I park behind a line of cars on a gravel road. The music is blaring from the makeshift main stage. Josh Turner seeps into the car even with the doors closed and windows shut. Brent and I walk across the road. David is waiting for us.
“Guh-eyes!” he shouts, jogging the last ten feet to give each of us bear hugs. “I’m so glad y’all made it! C�
�mon, I got y’all a seat and thuh-foods ready ta’eat!”
Beneath the main stage there are tables set up with red and white tablecloths. Plastic folding chairs ring each table. Each table has about six to eight places. David shows us our place and we get in the food line. The revival will start in about twenty or thirty minutes, David says. Well, it’s not exactly a “revival,” David tells us. It’s really much more informal than that. It’s a bunch of Christian pastors from the area coming together to have some faith and fellowship; to hear some preaching, hopefully get something good out it, and just meet other Christians. We need that, David says, to be with other Christians once in a while; we need that community.
I put bread and pulled pork onto my plastic plate. I grab my plastic utensils and red cup. I take a test sip of the sweet tea and quickly fill my cup full. I grab some cornbread and green beans, too. There will be dessert later, David says. He says it with a huge smile.
We sit down at the table. David heads off somewhere. Brent is gone too. I’m sitting alone at the table with one other person; a white, probably 50-something gentleman, who is dressed in jeans and a button up red and black shirt. I nod. He nods. Then he says, extending his hand,
“Clint Williams.”
“Rhett Lawson,” I say, shaking his hand.
“What denomination you?” he asks.
“Catholic,” I say.
“Cat-lik? Why ain’t you Christian? You thinkn’ bout becomin’ Christian?”
“I am Christian.”
He squints. “Y’all said you were Cat-lik.”
I nod. “Yes.”
Clint squints harder, obviously puzzled. “Y’all yankin’ my dong?
What? “No, sir” I say. “Catholics are Christians. I’m a Catholic Christian.”
Clint shrugs. “I’ma get me some that food fore it gess cold,” he says, standing up form the table. “Ya’know. Ta-day would be the perfect day you give your life over to the Lord Jesus Christ. I’ma pray for you. God bless ya, son.”
“Father God,” the revival has commenced. A balding middle-aged white man in a black suit, the pastor of a church in Ackerman David tells me, Pastor Bubba, opens with prayer. He squeezes the microphone close to his chest, eyes closed. All in the crowd have their hats off and heads bowed. “Father God, we gather here today before you in prayer. We gather as Christian brothers and sisters. We gather to praise you, to praise you and thank you for our families, for our jobs, for this time together. We thank you for this beautiful weather and for the owners of this property opening their homes to us in neighborly love. We thank you for the opportunity to come together and worship you. We ask you to bless this gathering, to have it be not us and our words but you, your Word, speaking through us. We ask this in the name of your Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.”
The crowd says “amen” almost simultaneously, heads up and hats back on. I bless myself, making the Sign of the Cross. Clint gives me a look. Dem goofy Cat-liks, how we gon make a Bible believin’ Christian outta him? he’s thinking. Well, that’s what I think he’s thinking. I don’t know what he’s thinking. But I think he’s probably thinking something like that.
Pastor Bubba gives his testimony and then speaks for another ten or fifteen minutes. Commit yourselves to Jesus daily. Read God’s Holy Word daily. Come to know Jesus in the Scriptures and you’ll begin to build a great relationship with Him. And when you do this, brothers and sisters he says, well, you can’t even imagine how your lives will be transformed.
It’s all good stuff. What Christian would disagree with Pastor Bubba? Saint Jerome famously said that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.
Unfortunately, from this solid beginning, things go downhill pretty fast. A prosperity gospeler follows Pastor Bubba. The theme of the revival is so broad, so all encompassing and open to interpretation, who’s going to say that Pastor Bubba can preach his way but others can’t do it their way? Who’s going to pretend to some spiritual authority over another? As if there could be such a thing as “spiritual authority,” haha.
This man introduces himself as an “Independent Christian.” I’ve never heard the term before. He says he’s an Independent Christian while at the same time, “just Christian,” and also a “New Testament follower of the Lord’s Word Christian.”
“Let me tell you the secret of the Gospel,” this man says to the crowd. He pauses and walks across the stage a few times. “Success!” he booms into the microphone. “Being a Christian is all about success. These aren’t my words. No, this is not my own take on the Word of God. No, no, no,” he says, wagging his finger. “John Ten-Ten. John chapter ten, verse ten. Jesus says, ‘I have come to give you life, that you can have it abundantly.”
“What is abundance, my brothers and sisters?” he asks. He pulls out a small pocket dictionary from his jacket and reads, “Abundance: an extremely plentiful or over sufficient quantity or supply.” He puts the dictionary away. “Now I don’t know about you but it seems to me, seems to me clear as crystal, that God is trying to tell us something. The whole point of Jesus’ mission is to give us the abundant life. That great job. That great house. Those cars and planes and anything else. Listen, there’s going to be some people, even some Christians, who are going to accuse you of being ‘worldly’ when you talk about God’s blessings. They will accuse you of being ‘materialistic.’ Don’t listen to’em. Don’t even say anything. Just show’em John ten ten, show’em John ten ten, it’s right there.”
I look over at David. He’s clapping as the man leaves the stage but his face is a little red. David’s embarrassed. He always blushes when he’s uncomfortable. Brent is sitting back in his chair, arms folded, a look of superiority on his face. He seems to be thinking, Exactly. This guy proves all of my conclusions about Christianity and religion correct, about all the intellectual heavyweights that inhabit this sphere of delusion. Idiot.
The next two speakers aren’t much better. The first is some actor from a television show, the revival’s “celebrity guest.” I’ve never heard of him or the show. Neither have David or Brent. Some people in attendance have; a smattering of oohs and aahs let that be known. This guy, although I don’t think he’s a pastor, is cut from the modern “cool pastor” cloth. He’s wearing sunglasses, a backwards baseball cap, really cool sneakers, cool looking jeans, a cool shirt. He’s just so cool, so so so so cool. Look, accentuate your strengths, right? If you have no substance you’ve got to double the style.
“It’s about relationship not religion, can I get an amen?” he says. The crowd’s response is mixed. “Once you know Jesus you know it’s a done deal. Accept Jesus and accept that you’re good to go. That’s my story. I’m too blessed to be stressed. I’m too much focused on the win to be thinking about sin. I used to be a dud but now I’m way above the mud…sa-sa-sa spiritual stud, can I get some love claps, y’all? Before I knew Jesus, all I wanted to do is cry. Now all I want to do is fly, can I get an amen?”
A preacher named Onnie Ray Lemon follows Mr. Too Blessed to be Stressed. The best way I can describe this man’s appearance is that it’s a mix between Huey Long and Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazzard. “Lemme tyell y’all something, hyear. Lemme giveya thuh secret ah’the Bible, now. Secret is thuh relationship ‘tween the Bible an’you. Thas way iss’always been. Been lie-that since Adam’an’Eve. Whas that mean, y’all ask? Oh, lookiehere, y’all wanna know, righ? Secret thuh relationship ‘tween the Bible an’you is that all ya’need to know God’s Word is open eyes and half’a brain. Doan need no popes, no priests, no church, noanybody tyellin’ ya what some passage mean; them ‘phisticated ‘terpretations and all that. Doan need nothing but-chyas open eyes. Read it and ya’know. Thas it, folks. Thas it plain’an simple. Read the Bible and y’all understand everthin. An’all tyell this thin lastly: if some reason what’ya readin no make sense or ya’juss no understand it…wyell, it ain’t true! If ya can’t make plain sense summthin, it ain’t true. Certainlee not important. Gots to juss gim
mie lots that commonsense, no need thuh rest. Lemme say: why God make something plain’an simple all complicated for no good reason?”
A succession of preachers from the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian denominations improves the quality of the revival that had been trending progressively downward since Pastor Bubba opened. The Methodist speaks on compassion, especially for strangers. The Presbyterian says he wants to put the Calvinist doctrine of predestination in a “softer light.” The Episcopalian preaches on the importance of ritual and church community. She encourages all to find a church where they can improve their connection to Christ and one another while maintaining a proper respect for the traditions of Christianity. She goes on quite a bit about Robert E. Lee and “Genteel Virginia Anglicanism.”
A young man follows her who has apparently never heard of Jesus’ insistence on fulfilling not abolishing the law, of establishing a Church and giving other men authority, the very definition of religion, as well as the numerous New Testament references to the Church and Church structure, etcetera, for his entire message is based on a false dichotomy between Jesus and religion. “It’s all about Jesus, nothing else!” he says, over and over again. “Religion is man made. Jesus hates religion.” He is of course right that religion, the Christian religion in particular, is man made. But he’s omitting the small detail that the God-Man is the One who made it.
The Holdout Page 17