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20100413-big-baptists-by-caroline-langstonYesterday morning I woke up laughing, thinking of a phrase my mother used to use but which I hadn’t heard in years, “Big Baptists.” “He was a big Baptist,” she’d say, commenting on something she’d read in the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger, or even in The Baptist Record, the in-state newspaper of the Mississippi Baptist Convention, before her free subscription petered out because she’d long stopped going to church.

(It should go without saying that I’m talking exclusively about Southern Baptists; there were a few Primitive and Free Will churches around—“maybe out in the hills,” my mother said—but we didn’t know anybody who went to them. And I had to go to Massachusetts to encounter the American Baptists, who might as well have been Unitarians for how alien they seemed to me.)

So what was a Big Baptist? Depending on my mother’s mood, the phrase could be a compliment or an insult. Generally, though, it meant the kind of Baptist, usually a rich one but not necessarily, who was a public and vocal pillar of the community. The Hederman family, who owned the Clarion-Ledger when I was little and sold the paper in the early 1980s for something like 100 million dollars (at least that’s what I overheard at the time) were perhaps the ultimate Big Baptists. (In his first novel Geronimo Rex, published in 1970, the great, recently-deceased Mississippi writer Barry Hannah offered a thinly veiled description of the family as “a long line of gloomy rich jingos.”)

Another type of Big Baptist was someone who gave a lot of money to Mississippi College, the Baptist college in Clinton, Mississippi that was founded early, early in the nineteenth century and where my father had earned a Biology degree in 1937. (The place was famous for turning out future doctors.) My own paternal grandmother, in fact, was a Big Baptist, because, so the family mythology goes, she kept giving the family’s savings to the school for ministerial scholarships rather than hoarding it away for her sons’ inheritance.

My mother looked approvingly on these Big Baptists.

But woe to the bad Big Baptists: Nothing could irk my mother like the prominent, devoutly churchgoing families in our town that she a) thought were overly demonstrative and “showy” about their faith, and b) felt looked down their noses at anyone else who wasn’t down at the First Baptist Church “every time the doors were open.” The executives of our local fertilizer plant—engineers and lawyers who’d come from other parts of Mississippi, or Nashville, or Atlanta, and who’d built a succession of Sixties glass-walled houses on the hill overlooking the Country Club—came in for both her envy and her scorn.

Be careful how you talk around your children: Early on, I easily parroted my mother’s disillusionment. “You don’t have to be here every time the doors open,” I said obstinately to my Sunday School teacher, on the random Sundays my parents put me in the car and drove me there. “You can worship God just as easily in your fishing boat as at the First Baptist Church.”

How confusing all that was. I had a naturally religious sensibility, but was constantly being told how the pillars of the church were, more or less, just a bunch of small-town hypocrites, and demonstrating that I, too, agreed, became a kind of a part of being on the family “team.” I can see now that I was already headed down another path—even as my father lay dying of cancer, I’d devoured Natalie Savage Carlson’s convent school novel Luvvy and the Girls—and was destined to fall into that astonishing 44% of Americans that change their religious affiliation, according to that Pew Trusts poll from a couple of years ago.

But even at the time, I thought that the First Baptist Church was pretty much all right, and that my parents should go there more. The building was cool and dark, a solid, mid-century heap of pastel bricks and glass windows the color of Easter eggs. This was the Southern Baptist Church of a gentle, very slightly progressive evangelicalism—in my town, at least, pro-integration, pro-“World Missions.”

At 41, I see now how the seeds—as few and paltry as they may have been—really did sink deep into the soil of my psyche and bear fruit. The year after my father died, I was in an elementary children’s choir that I attended faithfully, and I remember how kind the director was, a police officer who took off from work each week early to come and be with us kids.

And there was also a period when I participated in a Scripture memorization program for children that involved visiting another adult in the community each week to practice memorizing verses, and to earn the opportunity to win prizes from the Broadman catalogue. Ironically, perhaps, the woman to whom I was matched to recite my verses was none other than one of our local congregation’s Biggest Baptists of all: Mrs. Homerline Clower, the wife of erstwhile fertilizer salesman and wildly famous Southern comic Jerry Clower. (Check him out on YouTube here.)

Each week, my mother would drop me off at the Clowers for half an hour, and I would stammer through a few verses I’d spent almost no time memorizing. Mrs. Clower was invariably encouraging, and smiled. I thought it was neat that she could be married to somebody so famous and still find time to listen to me.

I still remember a couple of those King James verses well, in fact—the first foundations of Scripture in my head, the basis for any and all memorization I was to do in the future: “All we like sheep have gone astray / Each has gone unto his own way.”

But also: “Draw nigh unto God, and He will draw nigh unto you.”

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Written by: Caroline Langston

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