American Aquarium Drinker 18 April 2005
Drunk on pop-culture holiness, it's easy to forget the nation's first noble truth: America is not a religious metaphor.
By Peter Manseau
Six years ago I lived in the chi-chi wilds of Western Massachusetts, in a town whose population increased fivefold every June and in which the biggest houses around were left vacant nine months out of the year. It was the kind of place where summer people liked to invite the hired help to garden parties to mingle with their city friends. As long as the keg was full of microbrew, everyone was eager to believe this social equality was real, that Appalachian-style poverty didn't exist in the Berkshires, that the men who fixed the gutters, mowed the lawns, and laid down the ceramic tile floors were satisfied country craftsmen able to support their families on eight dollars an hour. The beer, in fact, rarely ran out (I've never seen excess like Tanglewood-afterparty excess), but the working stiffs would usually head home early anyway -- handymen know no weekends.
I was working at the time on a house building crew, as an under-the-table, uninsured roofer, gopher, and nail-puller. I was never much of a carpenter but I was glad for the chance to work outside and I liked my crewmates well enough -- mainly I appreciated the fact that three or four of them were bluegrass musicians. I was learning to play the music myself, so I enjoyed nothing more than the occasions when a fiddle or a mandolin would come out at lunchtime and in the middle of a half-built house we'd eat our sandwiches to the haunted sounds of Civil War ballads and century-old mountain reels.
It was just around this time that Revealer editor Jeff Sharlet and I began a correspondence about religion in America that eventually led to the creation of KillingTheBuddha.com. Jeff had been writing about a movement in Anglican theology called Radical Orthodoxy for The Chronicle of Higher Education; in my hours away from the construction site, I had been chipping away at a novel about a 14th century convent. Somehow through our research into these two subjects we came to the same conclusion: that religion was not being written about in a way that acknowledged its importance or influence in the world.
Looking back now on the kind of things we were talking about then, it seems the idea common to medieval nuns and Radical Orthodoxy was the notion of religion's pervasiveness, its ubiquity. Why separate religion from all the other categories of living? Pop culture, politics, history, family, sports –- it's all religion, we decided.
Life becomes a bit more interesting when you believe even the small things we do are a reflection of how we think about the Big Things, about Life, God, Death, etc. Naturally this excitement followed me to work from time to time. So it was that one afternoon when I was on break with my housebuilding crew and we got to talking about music, I said that what I liked best about bluegrass was that it was religious even when it didn't mean to be. All the songs, I said, were about crossing the Jordan, getting to Canaan, answering when Jesus calls. Bluegrass was like taking the Bible and making it the soundtrack to Bonanza, I preached; it laid bare the fundamentally -- if not fundamentalist -- religious character of American culture.
"If you say so," one of my crewmates said. He picked up his fiddle, gave a wink to a fellow with a guitar, and together they launched into a rousing rendition of a moonshiner's anthem: "Hot Corn, Cold Corn, Get yourself a demijohn..."
They didn't say it, but I could hear a denial in the irreligious joy they took in the singing that day. It's not about God, asshole. It's about whiskey. I could make all the claims I wanted, in other other words, but, like the phony egalitarian vibe of those Berkshire parties, saying it didn't make it so.
I was reminded of this humbling lesson many times while reading David Dark's new book, The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea. The latest (and, from what I've seen, the most ambitious) of what might be called Christian-revelance literature, it is a longform essay that attempts to lay bare, as I tried in my bluegrass exegesis, the basically religious character of American culture. Our cultural heritage, Dark writes, "might have more wisdom and insight concerning our place in history and our relationship to the coming kingdom of God than we usually assume."
This is no book about the faith of the founding fathers, however. Dark, a teacher at a Christian high school in Nashville, locates the spirit of the nation in its subversive, harshly self-assessing elements. In moments as different as Elvis Presley's shoot-out with his television and the "uniquely American anti-rhetoric" of Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, Dark sees "the salvific power of self-doubt."
He also sees the Bible's inescapable shadow. The heroes of our national mythology, Dark says, "viewed America through 1 Corinthians 13-colored glasses." In this telling, Elvis, Lincoln, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dylan, and a fraternity of minor prophets saw, "through a glass, darkly," the land and its people for what they were and could be. Moved by such vision, they have expressed "a uniquely American mysticsm
comprehensive and curious but confident at nobody's expense."
It's worth noting that "uniquely American" is a descriptor Dark favors; before its several appearances in this book the only time I can remember hearing the phrase was during one of George W. Bush's recent forums on social security. A single mother explained that she was having a hard time raising her three children because she works three jobs and is rarely at home. "You work three jobs?" the president asked, obviously taken aback. "Uniquely American, isn't it?"
Dark's "uniquely American" is just as hopeful, but more romantic than naïve. He is filled with an awed reverence for this nation of people who "have committed themselves to something either entirely heroic or completely insane." It is a description that has a lot in common with the challenge, made famous by C.S. Lewis, that Jesus Christ was either lying, insane, or the Son of God. http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_001890.php