Into the Woods

A tent revival

I drove out during the cool of the evening yesterday to pick up the mail and look for more canning jars. At Sandy Ridge up near the Virginia line, people were gathering under a big tent for a tent revival. I stopped to take pictures, but I kept well back from the tent, assuming that I would quickly be identified as an outsider up to no good. I watched for a few minutes, though, and it was easy to see that this was a social occasion. Most of the people clearly knew each other. To them, I think, it was an occasion for dressing up just a little and spending a pleasant summer evening fanning themselves and exchanging gossip.

I envy them for the social part. Country churches, had they not aligned themselves with such an ugly politics, could serve as social glue in places where social glue is badly needed. Nor am I just guessing at the politics being offered at this particular tent revival. The preacher behind this tent revival ran for county commissioner a few years ago but lost in the Republican primary. After losing, he set up a little church in a vacant building across the road from this tent. I think the vacant building formerly was a garage. When he was running for commissioner, he ran his campaign from Facebook, where his theology and his politics were on full display. If you’ve read about some of the preachers who recently tried to take over the Southern Baptist church, then you know the type.

If there is an opposite of church culture, I think it would be pub culture. I would argue that one of the reasons rural American culture is falling apart is that church culture has become such a poison. Church culture is highly antagonistic to pub culture. Churches have done everything possible to prevent and kill pub culture. The real reason, I would argue, is competition. Even now, in the state of North Carolina, alcohol cannot be sold on Sunday mornings. Given a choice between a healthy pub culture and church culture, most people would choose pub culture, as they still do all over the British Isles and Ireland.

We do have places here that serve alcohol. But a healthy pub culture does not exist. On the way to Walnut Cove there is a motorcycle bar. I believe it is loosely aligned with one or more militias. On the other side of Danbury, in a nice spot overlooking the Dan River, there is a place that might have succeeded if people in these parts understood pub culture. I am among those who will never go back again, though, because the atmosphere is so ugly and the music is so loud. Those who won’t go back tell similar versions of the same story: friends of the musicians tell people to shut up so they can hear the music, and people who want to talk ask the musicians to keep it down. The owner of the place is so undiplomatic that he makes things worse. And so the vibe is terrible. A pub can’t be a concert hall and a place for friends to drink at the same time. Certainly, in Ireland, the music and noise in a popular pub might go on until late at night. But the locals also know when they can go for a quiet drink and when the place will be a party.

Mental health people tell us that drinking is healthiest when it’s social. In places like this, social drinking is pretty much totally unsupported. Instead, people stop at Dollar Generals and gas stations for beer. Recently, on my way to buy groceries, I passed the ABC store in Walnut Cove a few minutes before opening time. There were a dozen people lined up to buy liquor at 9:30 a.m. Alcoholism is a major rural problem, but social drinking in a form that could serve as healthy social glue is unsupported and almost unknown.

There is little charm anymore in rural American culture, as far as I can tell. Most rural people these days crave a suburban lifestyle, not a rural lifestyle — that is, a lifestyle that revolves around cars, without the slightest effort toward self-sufficiency or any kind of interaction with the outdoors. Even deer hunters rarely stalk deer on foot in the woods anymore. Instead, they set up deer feeders (containing corn) and then put up blinds or stands that they can drive to and in which they can sit and shoot deer. (Walmart sells blinds and deer stands.) I have met one local “coon hunter” whom a neighbor invites to hunt in our woods. I’m not sure that I’m on board with killing raccoons for sport (in spite of the damage that one has done to my tomatoes), but at least the coon hunter does it in the traditional way — on foot, in the woods, at night. I liked this coon hunter, actually. He said he didn’t know why, but that there was something spooky and exciting about being in the woods at night. “It’s primal,” I offered. “That’s it,” he said, “primal.” So he is one unsuburbanized person, at least, who is still in touch with traditional rural culture. He’d probably go to pubs, if there were any. The woods are his church, my guess would be.

I would argue that, decades ago, we passed the point at which rural white churches served any healthy purpose. Instead, the purpose they chiefly serve is to reinforce the grievances and identity that the Republican Party requires to retain its hold on rural America. Churches now operate as social wedges, not social glue. If we liberals were half as anti-freedom as authoritarians think we are, we’d close the churches and open some pubs to save some rural souls.

By the way, not one single mask was in sight at that tent revival.