Highlights from my class's fieldtrip to a local fundamentalist church:
1) A tourist from Tennessee, this blonde woman with tons of make-up and on crutches because of a withered foot, told me at the post-service guest reception that Ashley Judd was "radical" and had "lost touch with her roots" and really wasn't a "fiscal conservative".
She also asked if I was a Christian, and I said that I used to go to Catholic school but never really practiced. She didn't reply.
2) I was really really struck by evangelicalism is defined by "narrative thinking" - the relation of anecdotes to make the gospel new, but also part of a wider phenomenon (e.g. explaining global warming by saying that more and more asphalt is affecting thermometers, understanding Obama's economic policies through Joe the Plumber)...
At the post-services tour, the tour guide was relating some different stories (e.g. how the church founder got bread and water after prayer, when he was ministering to dying soldiers; how a guy on the Titanic yelled out, "Women, children, and the unsaved first"; how the church founder said the distance to heaven was "one step - will you take it?").
I later related those to my students who weren't there, and they found them corny - and I had to tell them that the people there nodded their heads at them, and they found them deeply meaningful.
3) After the post-services tour ended, I was leaving the choir section, and the tour guide sidled up the woman from Tennessee and was like, "You know, my brother is an atheist, he says religion is a crutch..."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment