1 of 3
Spirit and Flesh
Spirit and Flesh By James M. Ault, Jr Knopf, 2004 415 pp., $27.50 |
A half-dozen years ago, I found myself attending a Tuesday night Bible study at a little southern church of a hundred regulars. I had started attending because I'd caught its members in acts of love and forgiveness that transcended normal niceness. After some personal crises, I needed more love and forgiveness in my life. I had started to trust them.
But at Bible study that night, my trust reached a crossroads. We were talking about a story in the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus casts out evil spirits. Because I was a newcomer, and also because I studied religion for a living, I was in the habit of paying attention and keeping quiet. But as I listened that night, I slowly absorbed the uncomfortable fact that I was sitting in a group of people who were talking about, well, demons.
Finally I couldn't hold back. "Wait a minute," I interrupted. "Does everyone in this room believe in demons?" Their eyes got as wide as mine in the face of such an outlandish question. "Well, sure!" they sputtered. I was stunned. I shut up and listened some more. But privately I thought, if this love thing involves believing in demons, I'm outta here.
As it turned out, my trust survived the night. But the shock of that confrontation between the familiar worldview of my middle-class academic background and the exotic-to-me viewpoint of church members stayed with me.
It's an experience readers can get the easy way, in a new book by James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church. And it's a crucial experience, I would say, in a country divided into blues and reds, crudely labeled liberals and conservatives, who not only don't understand each other but increasingly don't know how to understand each other.
A documentary filmmaker and sociologist, Ault spent the mid-1980s and '90s getting to know key members of Shawmut River Baptist Church, a small fundamentalist congregation in working-class Worcester, Massachusetts.1 He attended worship services, Bible studies, prayer breakfasts, softball games, and countless other official and unofficial occasions of visiting and socializing that make up small-church life. He witnessed the ordinary stirring moments of people practiced in caring for one another's bodies and souls—as when church members left groceries for someone struggling with unemployment, or when the pastor counseled an agonized cuckold not to be consumed with hatred for his wife.
Bringing out the innate drama of everyday happenings at Shawmut River—both in this book and its sister project, the critically acclaimed 1987 documentary film Born Again—Ault quietly counters headlines about mega-churches and televangelists, trumps panicky accounts of Christian Coalition forces and radical-right conspiracies. He does so simply by showing fundamentalist Christianity's typical face. Small churches like Shawmut River, not sprawling "campuses," make up the vast majority of conservative Christian institutions. Loosely connected to national groups—Shawmut River's pastor Frank Valenti attended Jerry Falwell's Liberty Baptist College—these churches remain fiercely independent and largely aloof from national politics. They're located in northern, coastal, and industrial states as well as southern, central, and rural ones. And—guess what?—their members are human beings, neither the saints of America celebrated by conservative Christian activists nor the brainwashed masses derided by their liberal antagonists.
Ault himself is very much a part of the story, and the book will perhaps be most compelling for readers who identify with him as an outsider to conservative Christianity—though they may be surprised by the outcome of his up-close encounter with fundamentalism. Shawmut River members regarded Ault as "unsaved," but they welcomed him into their midst and, in time, trusted him. Working him into the deep network of mutual aid, men of the church pitched in time, tools, and parts to keep Ault's clunker of a car running when his one-year teaching job—and money—ran out. Ault came to see their persistent inquiries into the state of his soul not as annoying proselytizing but rather as heartwarming care. In time, he trusted them, too.
share this page
RSS Feed
