Discovering Dignity 1 comments

By Ann Conway

I came home recently to find a plastic bag hanging from the front door. It contained a paper, which I assumed was a business announcement of some kind. The usual hard luck story these scary days, I thought—an unemployed contractor looking for odd jobs.

The bag turned out to contain a gift of microwave popcorn and a flyer advertising a rapidly-growing local evangelical congregation. Independent-minded Maine is notorious as a not especially fertile ground for religion, so the church had begun as the mission of an Alabama-based denomination. Its motto was “Real Friends, Real Families, Real Faith.” It advertised free oil changes for single moms, sports camps, a grocery-buying cooperative and scriptural study groups.

Later, I looked at the church’s website. Under a link to “Beliefs,” fourteen Biblical concepts were enumerated. Among its self-help groups was “Porn and Pizza,” a group combating addiction to pornography.

At one time, I would have joked about a church like this. But an old friend became a member a couple of years ago. She was tired of the infighting at her mainline Protestant church and dismayed by its stand on some social issues.

Karen’s baptism ceremony, at a local lake, was held on a chilly day last fall. Fifty or so people were gathered, mostly young families, a few older women. Their faces were those of the luckless—prematurely aged from the afflictions of the poor: abuse, smoking, or drugs. Many had tattoos or missing teeth. But as the pastor spoke, the congregants straightened up, their posture becoming formal.

Paradoxically, their faces grew softer, as if they felt loved and young again. They laughed as my friend and a few others emerged sputtering, from the water.

They have been given dignity through this church, I thought. Or maybe the church, goofy and unsophisticated as some of its activities seemed, had uncovered the dignity that remains in people no matter what life has done to them. I hadn’t been able to hear this minister, but I thought of how Catholics deem a child “prophet, priest and king” at baptism.

Recently, David Brooks of The New York Times wrote a column on the decline of dignity in American life, noting how George Washington had copied out 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation” from a sixteenth-century guidebook. They were a “dignity code,” Brooks wrote, designed to “improve inner morals by shaping the outer man.”

This code of reticence, dispassion and disinterest—putting national and community interest above that of the self—remained, in the writer’s view, implicit in American cultural life until the modern period. He attributed the decline of dignity to capitalism and its attendant individualism, the “cult of naturalism,” which encourages self-expression, “radical egalitarianism,” and “charismatic evangelism with its penchant for public confession.”

My experience at Karen’s baptism was alien for me, committed as I am to the formal, changeless religious tradition in which I was raised.

I know the dangers of idealizing the past. I can imagine what Brooks would think of this new and vibrant church, its social-work approach to bringing in the lost. But then I think of Abraham Lincoln, whom I read about in Fred Kaplan’s excellent 2008 Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer. The mythic Lincoln seems a bulwark of the old order, reading the Bible as a child and studying Dilworth’s principles of moral behavior. His elegiac writing exhibits economy and grace.

But Lincoln was also a bawdy storyteller, raised as he was among the frontier poor. Kaplan’s many anecdotes show that Lincoln had a “sardonic earthiness” about sex, birth and death.

According to Kaplan, Lincoln was more committed to law and reason than the Christian story. But he recognized that for life to be dignified and ennobled, it had to be placed in a larger context than the mundane. His sense of life was tragic, which is unsurprising given the events of his life course. But the dignity of man remained his most profound belief.

And this belief is not alien to this new church, although I wonder about its theology and how the comfort of its community aligns to a larger sense of the sacred. But it helps to put aside my snobbery, for I do think dignity is alive there, albeit in a new and different form.