on another note, the first weekend I spent hunting for a place to live, I mapped all the opportunities out and drove around. At one point, I hit a stretch of road -- a major thoroughfare -- that seemed to contain one "just christian" church after another. I can't know for sure they were independent, evangelical, christian in the 1st century christian sort of way churches, but you can often tell by the name. They make no reference to being baptist, methodist, presbyterian, or anything: they are, instead, the First Church of God or the South Street Fellowship in Christ Church. Run down churches in what looked like burned out warehouses or tucked into abandoned former fast food restaurants, with the old fastfood sign still hanging. One was even in what appeared to be an old bowling alley. Another seemed to have some kind of dibs on an abandoned drive-in movie theater.
Get me outta here, I thought to myself. I kept thinking that as I looked at the rentals in that neighborhood, all very run down. There weren't a lot of people around, but the houses, contrasted with the photos, were just a rundown mess in neighborhoods where people kept angry looking dogs in cages in their backyard and dogs barked constantly. It was spooky. The neighborhoods emulated the design of suburban housing tracts, but they'd become incredibly broken down and ill-kept. In this case, a lot of the housing was single family built for the military bases nearby so they'd originally been built with the veneer of middle class respectability: cape code houses and bungalows. They were run down and shabby, probably since there is so much transiency in family housing around here.
I said to R when he got here and we were looking at still more rentals, "The first sign of a not so great neighborhood around here is all the freakin' churches. What is up with that?!" (Because I am not a fan of the argument that it is supposedly only the poor who attend evangelical-type churches.) "One thing you can bet about this Bitch, sweetie, is I ain't living in any neighborhood where everyone is going to be going on about their personal relationship with the sweeeeet baybay jaysuz. Had enough of that in LimpDick."
He laughed and agreed.
We drove around look again last week, through some nicer neighborhoods. He started pointing out the churches and said, "Looks to me like religiosity is prevalent in any neighborhood. You just didn't notice the "normal" churches like the catholic church back there, the methodist church on the corner, the synagogue where we just turned around in the parking lot, or the episcopalen church we just passed."
heh. He was right. But, hey, we saw some homemade sign advertising a fire and brimstone type churchn last weekend, name of which I've forgotten, but it was something like "Hellfire is the Lord Worship Center". heh. Big old sign with red and orange lettering. I have to go to that one sunday and do some ethnographic research to see what it's like being in one of those places, possibly charismatic christians where they speak in tongues and such. Not to mock them, but damn I just have to see such a thing once in my life.
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