Aaron Helton

Reading Talia Lavin's Wild Faith is in some ways like walking in my own footsteps. While I certainly don't recall having experienced more than a fraction of the Christian Right's activities, I was nevertheless surrounded by them in ways that are only becoming apparent later. Most of the experiences I can recall are ones I have otherwise tried to forget, because there is a deep well of unsettling things at the heart of them. This is a recount of some of my earliest remembered experiences, using Lavin's work as a jumping-off point. It turns out I have a lot to say on this topic, and I may revisit it. In fact, the numbering of this entry suggests I will.

I: A Demon Haunted World

Circa 1987 or 1988, Fairview, OK

I got some ocean front property in Arizona
From my front porch you can see the sea
I got some ocean front property in Arizona
If you'll buy that, I'll throw the Golden Gate in free

—George Strait

Somewhere between my 9th and 10th birthday, my family had moved to Fairview, Oklahoma, from nearby Isabella, Oklahoma. Google says it's a 12 minute drive between these towns. As a child, I think it felt like a longer drive. Given the 1995 repeal of federal speed limits, resulting in Oklahoma raising the speed limit on two lane highways to 65, I can be certain that this isn't simply an artifact of childhood memory and its dilation of time. I remember this particular move as having been the reason I got my first computer instead of the large GI Joe battleship my parents had promised me. They had consulted me and given me some choice, though it was a false one: we might not have room for the battleship in the new house, so wouldn't the computer make more sense? In any case I agreed. I got my computer, a Commodore 64C, and then we moved. I can't pretend to know why we moved, but then I rarely knew the reasons.

This wasn't our first move, of course, and it wasn't the last. Prior to this, I didn't have any special connection to Fairview, per se, though in looking at the geography I can see that it must have been a nexus while we lived in smaller towns around it. It remained so for a while after we left. I can remember, for instance, visiting the library there and checking out books, and I can remember earning Pizza Hut personal pan pizzas by reading. Though it had drawn us in for shopping and such, in most respects it was a place we lived for a bit before we moved on, which we did approximately every year, making my sister and me the perpetual new kids in school. That relative rootlessness also means my memory of places is fractured. The circumstances of our moves, which in some sense preserved both continuity of activity and contiguity of place do little to patch this fragmentation; rather, they provide anchors in memory that elide place and time entirely. Piecing together this distant past is therefore an exercise in sifting through disparate imagery and sensations to arrive at something coherent.

One of the things we had been doing during this time as well was church shopping. Oklahoma is pretty firmly in the Bible Belt, which means both that the vast majority of people attend church somewhere and that there are many denominations of evangelical Protestant churches to choose from, in addition to the other denominational options. Church life is so prevalent in this area of the country that as newcomers to any town you can expect your new neighbors to ask you where you go to church. In many cases, of course, these neighbors hoped you might say you didn't go to church, or you hadn't found one yet, so they could use it as an excuse to tell you about Jesus or, at the very least, invite you to their church. These days, looking back, I find it hard to believe that anyone who had spent more than a week in the area would be unaware of Jesus. The more forward of these folks would ask you straight up if you had accepted Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior. They had no compunction against putting people on the spot. This is, in fact, what the evangelical part of evangelical Protestantism is.

Within this vast sphere of the Bible Belt, however, there are nevertheless gradients of worship, and there is considerable variety among the denominations with their often minor doctrinal differences. I don't think there's a real consensus on just how many actual protestant denominations there are in the world. The highest figures are in the tens of thousands, but there are methodological concerns with these figures, namely that they're counting each country's denominations as separate denominations. The degree to which sociological and cultural factors attenuate doctrinal practice is perhaps debatable, but I suspect the monetary and governance structures that bind denominations internationally are more important. The National Catholic Register puts the estimate closer to 200 major protestant Christian denominations in the United States presently, and “historically and globally, [...] hundreds, likely thousands”. Non-denominational megachurches are also on the rise, representing some 40% of the nearly 1700 megachurches in the US.

Out in the sticks, in places like Isabella and Fairview and Cleo Springs (all places in Oklahoma I lived once), there are no megachurches. Or there weren't 30 years ago. Given the rural makeup of these towns, I doubt the situation has changed that much, except that plenty of churches are seeing declining membership, part of a nationwide trend. These reasons are relevant to this discussion, but not the focus, so for now I'll punt on this particular facet. Rural Oklahoma is punctuated with small churches often hewing to one of a handful of Protestant denominations. Some of these are evangelical, and some are mainline. Some are in fact Bible churches with no particular affiliation. During my youth, my family attended two denominations: Assemblies of God and the Church of the Nazarene. Later, in my adulthood, my father sought and obtained ordination in the Church of God, though as far as I can tell he's completely retired now.

For the most part, I'm not interested in attempting to litigate the differences in doctrine between these various denominations. They probably matter more to the congregants than to outsiders. Of the two denominations with which I am familiar, there is one difference between them I want to highlight, however, and that's the use of glossolalia, commonly known as speaking in tongues. The Assemblies of God are an umbrella for a range of Pentecostal churches, and among other things, Pentecostals are known for speaking in tongues. The Nazarene Church generally doesn't practice this, but considers such manifestations morally neutral.

While I lived in Fairview, my family attended the Assemblies of God church there. I have, seared into my memory since childhood, the unsettling image of people spontaneously vocalizing speech-like syllables in a more-or-less fluent-sounding manner, followed by someone else responding with an interpretation of this vocalization. Many of these memories are from evening services, which is part of another peculiarity of life in the Bible Belt: many of us attended church twice on Sunday (morning and evening) and once on Wednesday evening. These evening services were shorter and often featured testimonials wherein people shared how God had helped them overcome some struggle or other. At times, not limited to any specific service time, there would be laying on hands, intense emotional prayers, and always, always the extended musical segments. They also regularly featured speaking in tongues.

I won't lie: this remains among my most frightening memories of church life as a child. It is disorienting, to say the least, when someone begins shouting things you can't understand. And the act of interpretation made the little wheels in my head spin, though I was unsettled by the experience. This was a source of fright for me, but it paled next to the exorcisms. I can remember directly only one, and if there were others, they sort of meld together in the depths of my memory. Such occurrences were thankfully rare, but they made for titillating topics for hushed conversation. Demon possession was a terrifying thing to contemplate as a child, but it is emblematic of the Christian Right's certainty that the forces of Satan were arrayed against the believer, that the secular world was in Satan's grasp, and that only constant appeals to God through prayer could keep those forces at bay.

Summertime in the Bible Belt is like this: school is out, and we (my sister and I) faced the eternal twins of freedom and boredom. Some summers we could count on a trip to visit, maybe even stay with our grandparents for a bit in Amarillo, a constant star around which we orbited, however distantly. In almost all cases, however, there were a couple of church events to break up the summer. Vacation Bible School was a week-long event designed to couple crafts and other activities with the delivery of the Gospel, and it was aimed at kids. Teens in the church, those who hadn't already escaped on a vacation elsewhere, often pitched in, volunteering their time to help run the program. Since these attracted outsiders in their guise as free childcare, they were lower key advertisement vehicles for the churches that ran them, and I sort of imagine a knowing cadre of beleaguered parents enrolling in all the VBS programs in the area to gain respite for several weeks of the summer.

Beyond a certain age, though, we started attending church camps which, for a few years in our case, were in addition to VBS. Unlike VBS, a church camp is a sleep-away camp run for and by the church denominations. The Assemblies of God run their own camps, as does the Church of the Nazarene. I've attended both, though most of my memories are from the Nazarene camps. Even a good estimate of the number of church camps seems out of reach, but I think it's safe to offer an order of magnitude around a thousand. The goals of a church camp are similar to those of Vacation Bible School, but the change of scenery, longer programming, and increased intensity facilitate greater uptake in indoctrination.

At its most benign and superficial, such a camp is no different from a thousand other kinds of summer camps young people can attend. Summer camps create a universal set of conditions that break continuity, taking a young person out of their familiar surroundings and offering something different, sometimes transformational, humorous songs and TV shows notwithstanding. Church camps use this formula of discontinuity to amplify their particular brands of Biblical messaging through intense emotional appeal. This is a feature they share with retreats and revivals, which act as reset switches, energizing practitioners and shoring up their beliefs against Satan's predations. And almost every young person hits some sort of breaking point during the week.

It is evening, and we're at the last chapel service of the night. The chapel is an open-air pavilion, a permanent structure with just enough elemental protection to keep the instruments, the Peavey speakers, and the microphones from getting wet. Moths flutter around the fluorescent lights that snake along the beams overhead, and we're all crowded into benches or folding chairs facing the pulpit. It's the second or maybe even the first night of camp, and at some point during the many prayers and songs, perhaps during the dreaded, interminable altar call, we become aware of a commotion. A confusion of camp ministers bodily surrounds a young woman, a camper, over whom they pray with passionate fervor. Gloves off, so to speak, the worship service shifts focus to this end, and we gawp, eyes like full moons at what we're witnessing. The whispers fly, and we all know the score. She was possessed by a demon, we're told, and who are we to believe otherwise. Lucky for us we're among God's warriors, who can command such beings to flee, just as Jesus had done in the Gospel. After what seems a small eternity, the young woman is free of the demon, and the prayer warriors have prevailed (through the blood of Christ). She emerges from the grasp of the camp ministers, who sing God's praise, with tears of elation streaming down her cheeks.

Some of us who witnessed this will continue to interrogate these events, or our memories of them at least. Was this staged? I've seen enough people respond to altar calls and become “saved” or “born again” to know it probably wasn't. And I don't believe in literal demons, which leaves me with the unsettling opinion that the “demon” was an emotional break facilitated by the discontinuity of camp. It didn't need to be a literal demon for it to continue having an impact on me. This episode remains one of my most vivid memories of church life as a youth, but while nothing else quite approaches it in vividness or in terms of its ability to frighten, the circumstances that produced it permeated the culture in which I was raised.

I left home for good in 1997. While I like to think I could see what evangelical Protestantism was then, and what the Christian Right would become over the next couple of decades, the truth is I was blindly running away from it. At the time of publication I'm perhaps 20% done with Wild Faith, but so far I appreciate Lavin's ability to synthesize and contextualize these aspects into an explanatory apparatus. It may be hard for me to read, but as you can see, it certainly has prompted me to respond. I've numbered this entry in case I am inspired to write more. In any case, there is so much more I can say, but this will suffice for now.

++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed

Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron