Mark Scandrette

Deep within the American psyche is a longing for convertive piety. We are a nation and culture of extremes and polarities: The Saturday night drunk who weaps in repentance on Sunday morning; The Sunday night holy man who leaves his ethical convictions at the door of the church when he steps into the office on Monday morning; Lips that sing the halleluah chorus opening to display the forked tongue and nasty sting of our gossip, fears and anxieties. As a culture we are literally haunted by God– the preacher, the church lady, the tortured backslider, the agnostic and the atheist. Religion, and our strange reactions and repulsions to it, reveal more about us than the nature and character of any divine being. What is revealed in our convoluted spiritual pursuits is the beauty and ambiguity of our common humanity. We are people who can imagine what love is, but can never quite make it to be “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Nothing illustrates the tensions we feel about religion and our humanity more than the cultural relic of the revival meeting and the revivalist phenonmenon. In America, everyone is converting to something — to Jesus Christ or the teachings of the Buddha, from P.C. to Mac , from City to Suburb or country to city. We are going green or going straight edge, coming out gay or republican, becoming locavoires or vegetarians, quitting our smoking or not buying anything. We put our faith in the latest technology, the newest idea or the best looking person that serves it all up to us just the way we like to hear it.

Perhaps no American archetype better embodies the glories and struggles of our search for collective meaning and divine purpose than the tortured soul of the self-proclaimed and duly annointed preacher or revivalist–That rare mix of eloquence, showmanship, falsetto emotionalism, alligator tears and stark piety–selling us God, salvation or a revelation from the best and worst motives or intentions. Few images are more enduring or annoying than the two-bit, second rate evangelist in a starched white shirt, sweating up a storm as he labors to convince us to repent, to change our ways and to make a fresh start. He is running from what he knows about himself, fleeing from the leaks and shadows of his own brokeness that is briefly suspended by the white/black contrast of heaven and hell, God and Satan, good and evil that he whoops up into an ecstatic fury over 50 or 60 minutes. But secretly we know that the perspiring troubador revivalist is just like us and we wonder and we hope that the healing change being proclaimed is really possible. Because if there was ever a time when our world needs love and healing and reinvention and redemption, that time is now.

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.” Flannery O’Connor