Reverend K. C. Ptomey, the Presbyterian pastor of Westminster Church, in one of the more prosperous parts of Nashville, said of country music: “It’s white soul music. It’s comparable to the role that music played for slaves in the last century. It creates community among oppressed people. I like it. I listen to it because in the words I hear protest against the oppressive aspects of life as a poor white person experiences it.” About the much-publicized religious faith of some of the singers, he said, “They’re religious in a special way. Religion is to them a shared emotional experience rather than a shared doctrine.”
AND SOMETIMES the emotions could be extravagant. While I was in Nashville there was published a book called Sunshine and Shadow, the autobiography of a “Grand Ole Opry” singer called Jan Howard. She was about to start on a sixteen-city promotional tour, and the Arts and Leisure section of the Nashville paper, The Tennessean, carried a review of her book:
“One of 11 children born into desperate poverty in rural Missouri, she was raped at age eight by one of her father’s friends. At 15 she married. She bore three sons in four years, then became a battered wife who eventually collapsed in a nervous breakdown.
“When her husband tried to kill her, she fled with 10 dollars in her pocket and her sons in tow. She knocked on the doors of strangers and begged for shelter. Her second husband, an Air Force sergeant, turned out to be a bigamist. Both of her children by him died.”
After this her luck changed for a while. She met a songwriter in California, married him, moved to Nashville, and became a star. Then the marriage ended, messily.
“While she was recovering from the bitter divorce her oldest son Jimmy was killed in Vietnam. Soon after, actor/singer son David became a drug-induced suicide.…”
It was hard to believe that anyone could live through all that and come up singing. But there she was on the stage of the “Grand Ole Opry,” a slender, slight figure, dressed up and smiling, although her terrible story had taken up much space in that morning’s paper. And the Opry audience, running up the aisle to the stage with their cameras, were photographing her and willing her on, wishing her well.
“Down-home music, crying music”—that was how Campbell had described it. But that was only the beginning. White soul music; the singer as star and victim, in both roles representing the community; and in and out of the simple music, through the echoes of ancient Scottish and Irish reels and jigs, there was a feeling of melancholy and loss, the melancholy of a transported people faintly remembering, or perhaps just having a community sense of, “old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago.” Inseparable from this were the fundamentalist frontier religions, which had preserved for these people the idea of a complete, created world and a complete, divinely sanctioned code.
Jan Howard told The Tennessean about the difficulties of writing her autobiography. “It was horrible reliving some of the bad parts. Sometimes I’d be sitting at the typewriter and find myself shaking so hard I literally couldn’t touch the keys. Or I would cry. And sometimes I would literally pray for the strength to do it.”
Music and community, and tears and faith: I felt that I had been taken, through country music, to an understanding of a whole distinctive culture, something I had never imagined existing in the United States.
THE MAGAZINE in my hotel room, mixing its metaphors, said that Nashville was “the buckle of the Bible Belt.” Churches took up twelve pages of the Yellow Pages directory. The Tennessean had a “religion news” editor, and there was a weekly page of “religion news,” with many advertisements for churches (especially Church of Christ churches), some with a photograph of the stylish-looking pastor or preacher. Most of the Protestants in Nashville belonged to the fundamentalist frontier faiths; the predominant denomination was the Southern Baptist.
The classier churches, the Presbyterian and the Episcopalian, looked at this Baptist predominance from a certain social distance, without rancor or competitiveness.
Dr. Tom Ward, the Episcopalian pastor of Christ Church, said that the Southern Baptists who sometimes came to his church found it too quiet: “ ‘Y’all don’t preach.’ The Baptist ethos is the preached word. Which is the ethos of the Christian church in the South. Preaching meaning the emotional speech rather than the learned essay of the Church of England—preaching the word and counting the number of saved souls. But I have to say this. To say, ‘I’m a Southern Baptist,’ is another way of saying, ‘I’m a Southerner.’ What I mean is that that is the ethos, religiously. What is buried in their psyches is the fear of hellfire and damnation. My father was read out of the United Methodist Church in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1931—when he was seventeen—because he went to a dance. That’s the Methodist Church. A lot of the Ku Klux Klan literature is Christian. Revivalism—why? To rekindle the spirit. What spirit? One bad step; many bad steps; and you have the Ku Klux Klan.”
The Presbyterian pastor of Westminster, K. C. Ptomey, agreed that the Southern Baptist identity was in part the Southern identity. “That’s very accurate. You see, a Southern Baptist distinguishes himself from an American Baptist. American Baptists are much more open-minded; they are not so rigid. I would add about the Southern Baptists: it has to do with sharing biblical literalism; it has to do with morality. For example, to be a Southern Baptist is to be a teetotaler. Morality, dancing, drinking—it encompasses the whole of life.”
I asked him about the revivalism.
“The revivalist mind-set is ‘to get back to God.’ You often hear the words used.”
“ ‘Back’?”
“ ‘Lost’ is the word they use. And what they mean by that is ‘damned.’ And therefore they need to be revived.”
THE SECOND-largest denomination in Nashville was the Church of Christ. It was also fundamentalist, and also originally a frontier faith. It had started (K. C. Ptomey told me) as a breakaway from the Presbyterians; and in some ways it aimed at a greater purity than the Baptists.
“They have developed into a sect or denomination that believes they are the only true Christian denomination. The Baptists wouldn’t say that. But the Church of Christ people would say, ‘You are not a Christian. You have to be in the Church of Christ, because it is the only true church.’ ”
There were more Church of Christ churches in Nashville than in any other city. Reverend James Vandiver, who was of the church, told me why.
“The mid-South is at a pivotal point. It is so near the place of American origins. People came here from the seaboard, and they migrated from here to Texas, Oklahoma, and the prairies—and in all these places you will find the numerical strength of the Church of Christ. From a cultural and socioeconomic point of view, the people in this area have common value systems and basically an agrarian economy. And basically people of that niche tend to be a bit more religious.”
Reverend Vandiver gave me much of his time. He was happy to talk about his church and anxious to help with my inquiry. I found him absolutely fair. I wanted to meet someone from the church who had developed doubts about it. He promised to arrange that, and he did. Later he even put me in touch with someone who had left the church.
He was the pastor of the Harpeth Hills Church of Christ, a good way to the south of downtown Nashville. When he was giving me directions on the telephone he referred to his church as a “facility.” When I came to a certain boulevard or ring road I would turn left; a hundred yards on I would see “the facility.” I liked the word. I had first heard it used in a comparable way in Grenada in 1983, at the time of the American invasion: at a morning briefing the military press officer had referred to the temporary barbed-wire compound for prisoners as a “facility.”
The Church of Christ facility at Harpeth Hills was of clean red brick: a prosperous church of a prosperous community. Reverend Van-diver was perhaps in his forties, sturdily built, with glasses. He asked me to call him James or Jim.
“That informality suits me and suits our theology. We try in every way possible to erase the distinction betw
een clergy and laity.”
Music was playing in the office.
Jim said, “A soft-music station. I had it on while I was doing some work this afternoon. The younger generation would call it elevator music.” He smiled.
He was in shirtsleeves, but he was wearing a tie. He sat on a three-seater settee against the paneled wall. Above him was a painting of an arbor; to one side of the settee was a ficus tree. One whole wall was of bookshelves.
Jim said: “Let me explain the Church of Christ in the simplest way historically. We are seeking to do two things in religion. One is to accept the Bible as our sole rule of faith and practice. We believe in the inerrancy of the Scriptures.” The other thing the church was trying to do was to go back to the very earliest Christian faith. “Within three centuries of Christianity’s foundation Romanism was predominant, until Luther, Calvin, and the great reformers, the people who said, ‘Let’s give the Bible to the common man, and reform the Roman church. Let’s lay aside the abuses, the corruption that’s developed.’
“There’s always a thread that looks back to the Scriptures and says, ‘Let’s duplicate.’ In the early 1800s here, with the westward expansion, there arose these frontiersmen—as well as people of the seaboard—and I think the frontier spirit had a lot to do with it. These people represented a broad mainstream of Protestantism—especially the Methodists, the Baptists. The Church of Christ represented an abandoning of Protestantism, and did not represent a return to Rome, but to the very beginning of the faith, all the way back to Pentecost, the first Biblical dating of the Christian culture.
“That was the frontier spirit. ‘We’re on the frontier now. Let’s lay aside differences. Let’s be brothers in Christ.’ I’m not trying to be coy, but I think the church of which I’m a member was established in A.D. 30. I’m just saying that the restoration movement here is a historical tracking of that movement on American soil.”
“When was that?”
“Early to mid-1800s. That was the period we refer to as the American restoration.”
“What was the need, you think?”
“Every great religious renewal has been sparked by a return to the Scriptures.”
“You are so close to the Baptists. And yet you are so opposed to them.”
“We are close to the Baptists in many things. Bible, Trinity, a church, evangelism, personal conversion to Christ. But we are different in other things. We sing without music. We observe the Lord’s Supper weekly. We teach that baptism is essential to salvation. The Baptists teach baptism only as a requirement for admission to the church. And we’re autonomous; every church is independent.”
But, important as the church was in Nashville, it was in decline. The church that had suited the needs of frontiersmen was less suited to city-dwellers. Jim was aware of the difficulties; he was clearsighted and frank.
“We are in a time of great change, and that’s a real challenge for us. Change? From agrarian to business and industry, from rural to urban, from blue-collar to white-collar, from lower to middle and upper class.”
In The Tennessean I had read an item by the “religion news editor” that six Nashville Church of Christ churches were thinking of a merger, “to overcome high overhead … flagging membership and to rekindle enthusiasm for fellowship and missions.” The six churches had a total membership of twelve hundred: six small churches, of an earlier, more rural time.
Henry came into Jim’s office. That had been the arrangement: that Jim and I would talk alone for a while, and that Henry would then join us. Henry was twenty-six. He was of middle size, with well-brushed-back hair, white jeans, and a short-sleeved blue Polo shirt. He had been a student all his life, and though his doctoral studies were in an inconclusive, suspended state, he still had academic ambitions. He had just been to Uganda on behalf of the church, prospecting that country for mission work. At the moment, for money, he was working as a carpenter, just breaking even on his S8.00 an hour.
I asked what he thought about the church’s chances in Uganda.
He said, “Very good. But the situation could be evolving into a situation ripe for another coup.” (And yet, within a few minutes, he was to make me understand that his ideas about Africa and mission work were not so straightforward.)
In southeastern Uganda he had seen terrible things. He had seen hundreds of people tied up and sitting in circles. That had made an impression on him, but he didn’t appear to know what to do with the knowledge and experience.
I wanted to know about the development of his faith—this young man in jeans and a Polo shirt. Had he had some kind of spiritual illumination? Had he made a confession of faith? I had been told that it was necessary.
He said, “There is a loophole. An irony. My parents were both pillars of the faith. There was a strong bonding between father, mother, and child. But—what this is to say—I knew what the necessary steps were to salvation in Christ. As early as five or six, I knew what those steps were. That’s not uncommon at all.”
“It’s like part of your identity.”
“Sure. I followed those steps of faith at the age of eight. I was baptized, fully covered in water, at the age of eight. But, going back to your question about spiritual experience, the answer is, candidly, no. In retrospect, I question whether those actions at the age of eight mean anything.” He broke off and said, “I’m in a whirlwind at the moment. I’ve experienced a split with my family.”
I was surprised. Jim had promised to arrange a meeting with someone with doubts, but I had been expecting to meet that person on another day.
Jim said, “As a mentor, let me say first of all I think Henry is typical of a person who grows up in a religious setting in which he makes a profession of faith.”
Henry said, “As a doctoral student I have come to question the objectivity—the rational processes—which the Church of Christ—”
I had noticed at the beginning how he qualified his words. Now he appeared to be having trouble completing a train of thought: many new things were breaking into the original idea.
He said, “I feel compelled to throw this. My African experience has reinforced a suspicion I’ve had that there might be something amiss—what I want to say—a Westerner’s thought processes or thought form—I believe I can broaden this, and include not only the Church of Christ but other conservative Protestant churches as well—our misuse of reason—the Western mind—the conservative evangelicals—”
I noticed that he was wearing an Yves Saint Laurent belt.
Jim said, “I see you headed to the reduction of a lot of concepts.”
“I got to Africa and I was repulsed by what the missionaries had done. Instead of teaching the Africans first-century Christianity, they had taught them a Western, white-man’s Christianity. Of all things—many of the young African ministers did not see themselves as carrying out their ministry in the most proper way without, for example, wearing a sports coat and tie, something that’s totally un-African.”
That appeared to make a whole: the ideas of the Church of Christ fusing with a rejection of colonial mimicry.
And Henry went on along that line. “Christianity was born out of an Eastern framework—”
A thought, unexpressed, came to me: an Eastern religion for the Wild West? Had the early Church of Christ really been presented to its followers like that? Or was the Easternness of the religion a more recent idea?
“—and we need to know when to separate the true essence of Christianity from Western cultural baggage.”
That made a whole, but then Henry said, “My parents’ mentality is very exclusivistic, in terms of who is going to get to heaven. It’s as basic as saying who are really—with a capital ‘R’—Christians. The real tension began when I went to the university. They were not happy at all about that. I’ve been questioning parts of the body of church knowledge. And the idea seems to be that, if I don’t have the same set of beliefs as my parents, I am rejecting the right belief.” Abruptly he said, “I feel so des
ensitized to what’s going on.”
He said that with relief, as though glad to give up the juggling with so many new and unrelated ideas.
Jim said, “That’s typical of questioning people of conservative churches.”
I said, “Somebody told me that I should study the Southern churches well. Because in fifteen years it’s all going to change.”
Jim said, “I agree.”
Henry said, “I agree.” He added, “The whole package of Christianity is bothering me. The point is, Jim, that is what is going on in my mind intellectually. But emotionally I have a very strong attachment to this fellowship.”
An experience of Africa, the shock of a tribal civil war, a new vision of missionary effort, leading to a wider questioning: what had once been the complete, satisfying faith of a complete, clear, enclosed world no longer answered. And he was “in a whirlwind.”
BUT BEN—whom I met on another afternoon in Jim’s office—was serene. He came from a Church of Christ family. His grandparents on both sides were of the church, and his father was a professional man. Ben was eighteen. He hadn’t come from the country; he had been born in Nashville, but his faith was pure. He had preached for the first time when he was sixteen.
He said, “The youth leader of the church encouraged us to get to know God—”
I asked about the youth leader.
Jim said, “He’s a full-time staff person.”
Ben said, “The youth leader encouraged us to get to know God and to share him with others. He tried to instill in us a zeal and a fervor that would radiate. So naturally, when my knowledge of God grew, I wanted to share that.”
“Were there certain exercises that you were made to do?”
“In worship and in church we would go to class and we would study and interact with each other. But then outside the church we would go and do things together—have a devotional at someone’s house and eat together. And then, just being with the people you share the faith with, you would be uplifted. A lot of the time we would talk about what was going on in our lives. If you weren’t getting on with your parents, for example, we would sit down and talk about that—both as a personal problem and a general issue or topic.”