Mississippi – GV Loewen

A Lion in a Christian Den (My Ethnographic Church-Hopping)

There is a well-known distinction made in the sociology of religion between religious belief and religious behavior. Ritual, that which engages in a public and thus shared manner of experiencing action in the world, with a view to integrating and maintaining community, is considered an external and thence observable set of behaviors. This is contrasted with belief, an internal sense or orientation that is in itself maintained by the faith in that said community. The most concise and accurate definition of their amalgam comes of course from Durkheim: “Religion is society worshipping itself.” Certainly, but what then of faith? In investigating this related, but different, question, I found myself over the past quarter century attending a diversity of churches in some very different geographic and cultural regions of North America. I will briefly summarize two outstanding examples below, before attempting an equally cursive analysis.

Mississippi: For three years I found myself in the very heart of what Mencken sartorially called ‘a miasma of Methodism, a backwater of Baptism’ and so on, but in spite of appearances, these most deep southerners more endured the ritualism of their ancestral beliefs than exhibited any sheer fanaticism concerning them. As one neighbor of mine said, ‘We’re like 7-Up; you like us, we like you’. Amicable enough, but the rider to such a sentiment included the sense that one should live and let live in the very much ‘when in Rome’ style. I too was something of an appearance, even an apparition, being a stranger in the strangest land I have ever experienced. My ad hoc but abrupt criticism of people’s beliefs and behaviors could be put down to me being a foreigner, even an ‘alien’, but there is only so long a community of like persons can put up with such before inviting the interloper to take his leave. Before this inevitable moment came, however, I had been equally invited to a great number of churches, since there were not only a plethora of choices scattered round the haunted landscape but as well, I had a great diversity of contacts through my professional employ.

I attended a Methodist church, where people of my ‘class’ – which did not merely refer to socio-economic status; not at all – and ‘race’ – self-explanatory in this region – and found it to be a convivial hearth of semi-reflective self-analysis. Much depends upon the minister, of course, his druthers and his education, and the more so, his concept of faith. These Methodists were engaged in a self-critique which did not extend fully into their society of upbringing, but preferred to lead by implication: ‘If I falter, it is not so much the sources of my character but the way in which I as a character behaves’. By contrast, the Southern Baptist Convention uttered criticism only in the direction of others. I attended an example of this denomination and found it to be in most ways the very opposite of the Methodists. It was overtly anti-intellectual, defensive in its posture, preening in its delivery, and was unconcerned about the hallmark of the distinction noted at the beginning of this piece; that people who heard the sermon could not recall anything of its content when asked promptly after service ended. It was enough to see and be seen. The Mormon students that were in my classrooms were an ingratiating bunch, and I visited their ‘spaces’ and found them to be genuinely interested in learning as much as they could about other viewpoints. These were young people, often quite literally on their youth missions, and they were, in this region, often at extreme risk for violence to their persons, as Mormonism remains the devils’ work in Baptist and Evangelical territories. I also worked with a Mormon colleague whose favorite band was Van Halen and who had taken a doctorate in the social sciences. All of this likely mediocre education had made no impression upon his beliefs, but had completely altered his behavior. I also attended the Church of the Nazarene. This community was made up of blue collar professionals who had climbed one social class above their parents. It was ‘whiter than white’, excuse the apt and oft-used regional expression, and my black students looked at me with great concern and dismay upon their faces when I related my experiences with that sect. And speaking of which, I also received invitations from Black Baptist students and these forays, simply due to my own status and the culture shock felt perhaps more by their community than by myself upon darkening their doors, made for what was by far the most genuine Christian experience of any. The Black churches were ebullient, joyful, and emotional without reserve and reservation. They certainly had their own version of the ‘false consciousness’ about them, and why not, given the circumstances of their parishioners. If salvation was unnecessary for many whites – the white churches exhibited a great self-assuredness not so much that they were in the right doctrinally but that those who accepted their sectarian sensibilities could do no wrong thus-wise – those black took up the work of being saved with great gusto and passion. In a word, the black churches were proud, the white, merely prideful.

Cape Breton Island: An equally marginal economic and cultural region, this ‘white person’s reserve’ – again, excuse the local flavor – had unexpectedly a great many similarities to the deep south. It had been marginalized by historical and economic circumstances; all who could get out had gotten out long ago. It too had a haunted landscape, filled with relics, antique graveyards, historical sites and towns lost to time. The churches were, however, themselves mostly abandoned, which contrasted mightily with Mississippi and contiguous states. My wife and I sat inside venerable piles with less than ten others upon numerous occasions, and we were by far the youngest people present, with the exception of the pastors themselves, who were always in their twenties. The only church that was able to maintain any sort of community was that Roman Catholic, and all others were essentially extended family affairs, in perhaps a fitting mimesis to the original churches of this area, settled as it was so far back in European North American history as to have lost the ability to think itself into a future at all. The United churches had here become as had the Presbyterian and Wesleyan churches elsewhere on the continent; the last vestiges of an ailing demographic willing themselves in and out of a collective grave. Belief was sacrosanct, but in a politely delicate manner reminiscent of arsenic and old lace. There were no abandoned churches in the old south, not even museum conversions, but indeed this latter was the better fate of churches in Cape Breton.

Whereas ritualism was mostly avoided in Mississippi and like regions, the Cape Breton churches gave the appearance of only being able to go through the motions, perhaps reflecting the very lives of their fading converts. Interestingly, tradition was cited as the chief rationale for maintaining such small parishes and this in turn implies that most active reflection upon faith itself had long been replaced instead by a rote genuflection. It was personally disturbing that the two persons who had reached out to us most intimately died almost immediately after we had begun our social ties with them, one in his 80s, but the other in her 20s. They had given us the distinct impression that they had been moved by our interest and our interpretations of their work, which made their unexpected passing all the more resonant of the general passage of the wider cultural landscape and thus religion within it. The only other kind of church in this region could be called ‘new age’, or even ‘hippyesque’, and my impression of these meeting places – like some evangelicals, they disdained the term ‘church’ and did not themselves use it – was that they had collected all of those who had no familial networks through which one gained access to either the Catholic and especially the United options.

Yet in almost every other way of life, the deep south and the extreme maritime regions enacted the same sensibilities and nursed the same sensitivities. Though the American Civil War yet resonated in Mississippi, it was not impossible that the Anglo-French war, occurring a century and more earlier, did not still have some effect in Cape Breton. One could argue that the island never did recover from the final obliteration of Louisbourg. Its simulacra, a brilliantly executed if only slightly more profound version of Caesar’s Palace, did not, in its faux resurrection, bring any of the rest of the region with it into the very much seasonal light of a niche tourist market.

Reflections: A small church is today simply a gathering place for those who have grown up together. It is both a surrogate and genuine family, and one cannot simply show up out of nowhere and expect to be treated as one of its own. This is what large suburban churches, such as the ‘Alliance’ network and like others, are for. Now living in Winnipeg, my wife and I have found a small church that in general acts in a Christian manner, but here too, because of my own ethnic background, a Mennonite church can afford to exhibit its ‘welcome here’. Both sides of my family are from Winnipeg, and I am myself connected to well-known scions of the Mennonite presence, even if at a generational distance. All of this is highly suggestive that due to both the utter erosion of religion’s explanatory power – its cosmogony has no such force up against scientific cosmology – and the serial scandals that plague almost all churches of whatever credo and covenant, many of them to do with sexual abuse, even the word ‘church’ has begun to accrue to itself a kind of difficult baggage. And just as, also sociologically speaking, all churches begin as cults, some also end the same way.

At the same time, modernity has fostered its own hallmark of an absence of community, and at all levels and in all of its institutions. It is a relatively simple thing to debunk belief, and an objective history of consciousness has shown that the very concept of the soul is at the least a cultural figment, at best a place-holder for an as-yet unexplored mechanism of the human psyche. We are mostly content to have supplanted its presence with an amalgam of personal conscience and the law. We have thus successfully displaced the spirit and its mortal expression in the church, but a perduring question remains: how does one replace the human heart?

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Mississippi Metastasized

This July marks the twentieth anniversary of when I left Mississippi. Reading the odd news item emanating from this ‘southernmost place on earth’, seemingly little has changed during the interim. Indeed, what appears to be occurring is that the sentiments that animate the old world vices of this haunted landscape are spreading, popping up in places distant from their epicenter, behaviors behaving more like a cancer than a culture. Sentiments of race and gender division, sentiments of law and order at any price, sentiments that keep youth as children overlong and bring them to conformity through violence, and sentiments that speak not of a class society, an outcome of contemporary economics, but rather one of caste, a symptom of an ancient and archaic worldview.

And speaking of which, not just sentiments, but sentimentalities as well. The ‘last myth’ of the apocalypse and ensuing divine judgment provides a ready rationalization for all of the other blights that mark the social fabric and tear at the tapestry of both civility and civilization alike. For the person who shuns the future, his vice must be turned to virtue, and there is no more sure solvent to assuage any conscience of its doubt than a fervent, nay, fervid, loyalty to Barnumesque religiosity.

I witnessed, and I use the term advisedly, much of this fervor first hand, even intimately. It provided a rationalization for the worst excesses of human behavior. One young woman with whom I became intimate was the child of evangelical parents. She had been whipped regularly growing up, until she had turned eighteen. Any hint of resistance on her part would end yet more badly for her. She related a time when she had simply run and locked her bedroom door. Her father kicked the lock right through and assaulted her with renewed vigor and ‘righteous’ vehemence. Shockingly, upon visiting her parents house, that same door remained in place and in its shattered state, years after the woman had moved out. She even pressed into her parents bedroom and opened one of their dresser drawers. I recall her lips parting and her body quivering as she showed me the belt that yet rusticated in that drawer.

And this was common practice, and apparently remains so, throughout a wide swath of the United States. Nineteen states still allow physical punishment in the schools, and many school boards ignore the federal law that bans it for those eighteen and older given that many eighteen year olds are still high school students and thus subject to such assaults. All fifty states allow ‘discipline’, an evil euphemism which can placed along the same spectrum as ‘concentration camps’, in the home. Many American children are unsafe wherever they go. My friend’s brother received far worse, she told me, simply because he was a boy. If you were wondering why our cousins to the south live in such a violent society, look no further than how they raise their children.

And the other side of this costly coin I also witnessed. The beauty pageants and ‘talent shows’ for young girls; and when I say young, think of ‘child marriage’ young and yet younger. My friend, who had also been entered throughout her childhood and teen years in these spectacles, and I sat through performance after performance of highly sexualized dance and burlesque routines accomplished by girls four years old and up. The combination of such lurid displays ensconced within the iron rods of ‘discipline’ and an otherwise Victorian prudery created an explosive tension between men and women who, even in marriage, lived separate lives.

This four-square social division, black and white, male and female, is threatened by the LGBTQ2 and BLM movements, so it can come as no surprise that these progressive showings are resisted with great force by all whose loyalty is to a past, partly real – slavery, sexual violence against children and youth – and partly fake – this is ‘true Christianity’, Leave it to Beaver is the familial ideal – that neo-conservatism in general hangs its Bolers and Stetsons upon. And it is this ‘past’ that is spreading, given phoenix wings by the anti-abortion politics, the misogyny of Great Awakening sectarians, school curriculum restrictions, book banning parents, the list goes on.

And Americans are aware of this conflict, though they seem hamstrung by it, transfixed by their own inability to counter it. When I travelled across New England in a job search in 2002 my Mississippi license plates gave the locals an excuse to abuse me wherever I went. Seldom did I get a moment to explain that in fact I was Canadian and that I simply had gone south for a job. When I did, the Yankees responded with ‘well, shame on you then’. I lost count of the number of times I was flipped off, and blacks in the Northeast looked at me with a mixture of fear and loathing. In Mississippi itself, they threw rocks at my car while I was driving past, spat at me from across the street. But as soon as they came to know where I was from, all of that changed in an instant. Black people, students and others both, were fascinated, astonished that someone like me should appear in their world. All were aware of its vices, its evils, and all were ashamed of them, and shamed by them.

I was never so relieved to leave it behind. And so I had thought, for two decades. But what I see all around me today is a regression, a recidivism that desires to compel all of us to heed a real-time Gilead of epic proportion and yet narrow vision. ‘Even’ in Canada, you ask? In turn, my three years in Mississippi tells me to tell you to resist, at all costs, this regression and all like them; Putin, the Taliban, anti-abortion, child ‘discipline’, fake religions. If not, we may well find ourselves wishing to turn back the clock to a time when such resistance was still relevant.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over fifty books in ethics, education, health, aesthetics and social theory, and more recently, fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades. He is currently writing a memoir of his time in the deep south, entitled, ‘A Canadian Yankee in King Kudzu’s Court: three years in Mississippi’.