Category Archives: religion

Naipaul finishes A Turn in the South at Chapel Hill, NC, not far from where he made his first foray into the American South.

I had been told that the politics of the region were “tobacco politics,” small-farmer politics, in which a promise of a continued subsidy for tobacco-growers could somehow also be read as a promise to keep blacks in their place.

But Reverend James Abrahamson, pastor of the Chapel Hill Bible Church, thought that this ridiculing or underplaying of the conservatism of eastern North Carolina was foolish.

He said, “The fundamentalist political impulse has always been there. From the 1930s it has been repressed, largely because it did not have the support of the universities. Ideologically, the universities pulled up their tent pegs and moved to another side. Ideologically, they moved from a world view which embraced a Christian God to a place where the only reality that was recognized was material, could be measured, scientifically defined. They are reappearing–the fundamentalists–largely because they have seen or felt the pressure of a secular society.

“That eastern-North Carolina conservative side is viewed by many as being redneck and knee-jerk. Irresponsible–fanatical, almost. Unenlightened, lacking what I call the three ‘I’s–intelligence, information, and integrity. But they’ve got a stronger argument. They’re easy to laugh at, and they’ll never be popular. Our culture may self-destruct before they have a chance to articulate clearly the common sense they represent–for a culture that is based on more than self and materialism.”

Jim Abrahamson–it was the way he announced himself on the telephone–was from the Midwest. He was a fundamentalist himself, and he felt that his Bible Church was meeting a need in Chapel Hill. He had a number of Ph.D.’s in his congregation; and his church was expanding. Extensive construction work was going on when I went to see him. American society, he said, had been built on a religious base. It couldn’t float free. A recent poll had found that one out of every three Americans was a born-again Christian. “That’s a lot of people.”

But he had his quarrel with the fundamentalists of North Carolina. “I think there are powerful and legitimate and almost eternal principles that would recur again and again. But the people fighting for those principles are not able to articulate them palatably. The religious right appear not to understand the world view the left or the secular intelligentsia embrace. They tend to dismiss them as God-haters or infidels. And they have a difficulty about knowing how to translate religious ideals into a political policy.”

It was the Islamic problem too–since the Islamic state had never been defined by its founder–and it was the prompting to fundamentalism in many countries: how to know the truth and hold on to one’s soul at a time of great change.

It was strange that in a left-behind corner of the United States–perhaps the world motor of change–the same issue should come up, the same need for security.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 284-285.

North Carolina’s Research Triangle is a “left-behind corner of the United States”? Anyway, it’s a book full of insights and fine writing. RTWT.

Naipaul titles his chapter on Nashville, “Sanctities”: referring to both religion and music.

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.”

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 233-234.

Naipaul interviews theology students in northern Georgia.

Identity as religion, religion as identity: it was the very theme of another theology student, a young man from a background quite different, a mountain community in northern Georgia.

He said, “When I think of growing up, the two things are very much the same thing–family and church. The church was a small church, with about forty-five members, all related. Seven or eight generations ago the first member of our family moved into that area and bought four hundred acres, and we still live on that. It isn’t a plantation. There might have been slaves early on, but that disappeared pretty soon. We were a family of small farmers. My grandfather had fifteen or sixteen brothers, and their descendants all live within three miles of one another. It is very rare that anybody moves away. When you go up there you know people, and you know them as relatives.

“At the same time it is very easy for your own identity to get lost. But I have since grown to appreciate how wonderful that is: a warm, loving, open kind of family, not just father and mother and brothers and sisters, but cousins, aunts, and uncles.

“The church is very much the same thing. Family members. The Holiness Church is a very emotional religion, and what struck me early on was how very different people were in church from what I knew of them at home. The emotion they expressed in church was different. There would be a lot of shouting. The preacher would try to work them up to the sinfulness of human nature. There would be moments during the service when people would get up and speak in tongues, and people would try to interpret what was being said. And there were times when people would get saved.”

“This religion was not a reaching out to the world?”

“This religion was a calling away from the world, an excluding of the world. I still struggle to find how I relate to all that now. The first year in college I spent alone in my room. I was scared to go out. Then I became angry with some aspects of the faith that had such a rigid view of the world.”

But now (like the Mississippi plantation, and for the same, economic reason) the mountain world was changing. “A lot of the people have to go away to get work.” They came back, it was true; they never lost touch. But: “The twentieth century is pouring over the mountain.”

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 48-49.

The church inside was as plain and neat as it was outside. It had newish blond hardwood pews and a fawn-colored carpet. At the end of the hall, on a dais, was the choir, with a pianist on either side. The men of the choir, in the back row, were in suits; the women and girls, in the three front rows, were in gold gowns. So that it was like a local and smaller version of what we had been seeing on the television in Hetty’s sitting room.

At the back of the choir, at the back of the girls in gold and the men in dark suits, was a large, oddly transparent-looking painting of the baptism of Christ: the water blue, the riverbanks green. The whiteness of Christ and the Baptist was a surprise. (As much a surprise as, the previous night, in the house of the old retired black teacher, the picture of Jesus Christ had been: a bearded figure, looking like General Custer in Little Big Man.) But perhaps the surprise or incongruity lay only in my eyes, the whiteness of Jesus being as much an iconographical element as the blueness of the gods in the Hindu pantheon, or the Indianness of the first Buddhist missionary, Daruma, in Japanese art.

The singing ended. It was time for “Reports, Announcements, and Recognition of Visitors.” The short black man in a dark suit who announced this–not the pastor–spoke the last word in an extraordinary way, breaking the word up into syllables and then, as though to extract the last bit of flavor from the word, giving a mighty stress to the final syllable, saying something like “vee-zee-TORRS.”

He spoke, and waited for declarations. One man got up and said he had come from Philadelphia; he had come back to see some of his family. Then Hetty stood up, in her flat blue hat and pink dress. She looked at us and then addressed the man in the dark suit. We were friends of her son, she said. He was outside somewhere. She explained Jimmy’s tieless and jacketless appearance, and asked forgiveness for it.

We got up then, I first, Jimmy after me, and announced ourselves as the man from Philadelphia had done. A pale woman in one of the front rows turned around and said to us that she too was from New York; she welcomed us as people from New York. It was like a binding together, I thought. And when, afterwards, the man in the dark suit spoke of brothers and sisters, the words seemed to have a more than formal meaning.

The brass basin for the collection was passed up and down the pews. (The figure for the previous week’s collection, a little over $350, was given in the order of service.) The pastor, a young man with a clear, educated voice, asked us to meditate on the miracle of Easter. To help us, he called on the choir.

The leader of the choir, a big woman, adjusted the microphone. And after this small, delicate gesture, there was passion. The hymn was “What About Me?” There was hand-clapping from the choir, and swaying. One man stood up in the congregation–he was in a brown suit–and he clapped and sang. A woman in white, with a white hat, got up and sang. So I began to feel the pleasures of the religious meeting: the pleasures of brotherhood, union, formality, ritual, clothes, music, all combining to create a possibility of ecstasy.

It was the formality–derived by these black people from so many sources–that was the surprise; and the idea of community.

Someone else in a suit got up and spoke to the congregation after the black man in the dark suit had spoken. “This is a great day,” the new speaker said. “This is the day the Lord rose. He rose for everybody.” There were constant subdued cries of “Amen!” from the congregation. The speaker said, “A lot of people better off than we are didn’t have this privilege.”

Finally the educated young pastor in his elegant gown with two red crosses spoke. “Jesus had to pray. We have to pray. Jesus had to cry. We have to cry…. God has been so good to us. He has given us a second chance.”

Torture and tears, luck and grief: these were the motifs of this religion, this binding, this consoling union–union the unexpected, moving idea to me. And, as in Muslim countries, I understood the power a preacher might have.

As Howard said afterwards, as he and Jimmy and I were walking back to the house, “Everything happens in the church.”

Amen.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 14-15