Always With You 27 comments

By Laura Bramon Good

I grew up in a tiny Baptist church filled with characters: the blind man who insisted on pitching at the Memorial Day baseball game; the longsuffering convict’s wife, cursed with a congenital burping ailment. Also among us was the lumbering man with the mind of a child who loved to sing to God, and the proverbial bossy, soft-bosomed matriarch who raised five children and fostered an uncountable number of crack babies.

Lest these people, whom I still love, feel slighted by caricature, let me add to their number an Austen-esque family of four loud daughters, squired by a Seven Habits-obsessed small businessman and his beautiful wife. Their oldest, bookish, most awkward daughter was me.

For all the fervor and color of its huddled faithful, my childhood church often seemed the black sheep of the Little Bonne Femme Baptist Association. It was not earnestly respectable, like the other congregations of one hundred or less, and despite its early concession to a contemporary worship style, it was not cutting edge. The associational sister worthy of that title is Woodcrest Chapel, the original megachurch of my hometown—now on a run for its money, thanks to The Crossing, the first “emergent” church to siphon not only the young, but also the old away from the city’s white-columned bastions.

In these latter days of the denominations, what does it mean to be Baptist? To be anything, for that matter? Tomorrow, my husband Ben and I will become Anglican, and as the recipient of one of the last truly denominational upbringings—Baptist from birth all the way through college graduation—I am mulling this question with some sadness.

It was not until I became acquainted with the thievery and gluttony of Faulkner’s Southern Baptist Snopes that I felt anything but pride in my religious heritage, which I associated with food, love, a constant flurry of giving and begetting, and a jealous God whose need for human fealty was both His strength and His woe. I loved all of this and I believed that, like my parents and grandparents, I would be Baptist my whole life.

Well before my Faulknerian revelation, I had come to take for granted the fact that Baptists were privileged for our rare ability to span social strata, to reliably count among our flock the wealthy, the poor, the sane, and the strange. While we were no good at bridging racial barriers, the host of odd characters who loved me—and the “normal” adults who taught me that loving the odd was necessary—let me experience the difficulty of bridging the class schisms that are often scuttled in fashionable discussions of diversity.

Now, it is politically correct—on all sides of the spectrum—to care for the poor. But as always, it’s not very cool when they won’t leave you, personally, alone. Truly living with them—having meals in their cramped trailers, fixing their perpetually broken sinks; taking the home-bound among them their Diet Cokes and peppered salami, and then staying for hours while they revel in entertaining face-to-face guests—none of that gets you style points. What it gets you, ultimately, is a reputation for hanging out with poor people, for treading the awkward lines that keep the respectable safe from the weird.

And I’ll be honest: what I’ve seen of Anglicans so far is that they are a respectable bunch. They may be politically contentious, both in religious and secular terms, but on the whole, their communities are moneyed and calm. They are less high-class-conscious than the Episcopals from whom they have jumped ship, but they choose African and South American bishops, which gives them a majority world “cool.”

Perhaps the real bone I have to pick is with my own city’s Anglican churches, which tend to be havens for over-educated twenty- and thirty-something professionals who have grown away from their low-brow Baptist and Pentecostal roots. My church makes a gesture toward its care for the poor (as well as its lack of funds) by meeting in a homeless shelter, but we struggle to build friendships with the men who live there.

The whole awkward situation reminds me, painfully, that it is easier to be a tourist among the poor than it is to be a peer. It makes me long for denominational kinship with odd people who demand my daily presence and respect. It makes me ashamed of my era’s move to stratify each new church community according to generation and class, isolating and catering to one demographic at a time. It seems a strange way to do Body life.