Notes from the dark heart of the Bible Belt
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 7: The Lure of Fundamentalism
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Creed O'Hanlon
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On the large, mushroom-like water tower above Elk City, Oklahoma, a rural town of about 11,000 souls just an hour's drive from the border of Texas, a three-metre-high, hand-painted sign announced that this was the "Home of Susan Powell, Miss America, 1981".
It was Sunday evening. My pregnant wife and I had driven all day across the dusty North Texas panhandle, a cold, hard wind blowing sagebrush and grit against the windshield. Now, as we passed fields of freshly tilled, red soil on the outskirts of Elk City, the air was still and humid. "Tornado weather," my wife said. A part-Cherokee native of Oklahoma, she knew the signs well.
We turned off Interstate 40 to search for a motel, falling in behind a beat-up, black Cadillac Seville as it sharked from the exit to the town's wide main street. As the old car pulled up in front of a small, steepled, white clapboard church, we noticed a bumper sticker on its rusted rear mudguard: "I'm reddened by his blood. Jesus Christ." We slowed to look at some of the churchgoers. Stiff-necked, skeletal old men with the resigned demeanour of undertakers pulled disconsolately on their starched shirt collars as their wives, heavy-set women in ankle-length floral frocks, some with dense beehive hairdos that seemed to melt into the rubbery folds of their necks, gossiped among themselves. They shuffled past a black-suited pastor who stood like a shadowy, slightly sinister figure from an Edward Gorey illustration at the entrance to greet them.
Inside, the tinny wheeze of a harmonium accompanied a few discordant voices singing an unfamiliar hymn. The notes hung in the evening air like a lament.
Elk City was my first glimpse of the so-called Bible Belt, the deep, fervent trench of Protestantism that runs eastwards from the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, and above them the Kansas/Colorado border, and straddles the traditional geographical and cultural divide between the old Union north and the Confederate south, to the coasts of Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas. It threads through some of North America's worst ghettoes of rural poverty, a poverty indifferent to the racially biased economics of its large cities: according to US census statistics, in the back-country farming communities across the South that are furthest from metropolitan centres, white, black, Hispanic and native American all share the same hard-scrabble grind that gives real meaning to the phrase "dirt poor".
The land around Elk City lends itself to biblical metaphor. Neither expansive nor picturesque, there is something pared down and almost puritanical about the unkempt hedgerows and stands of gnarled hickory and oak that enclose fertile, arable smallholdings. The surrounding flatlands are stark and unprotected from the moist equinoctial depressions that bring fierce southerly gales, thunderstorms and the threat of destructive tornados and flooding. (As the adage has it, "When the wind blows in Texas, Oklahoma sucks!") In winter, the temperature can drop a score of degrees below freezing, turning the air to ice and blighting the autumn plantings of winter wheat and sorghum. At the height of summer, a harsh sun heats even the few patches of shade to well above 42 degrees, where it simmers for weeks on end until the last drops of moisture evaporate and the earth becomes as brittle as kiln-heated clay.
The locals are the spiritual ancestors of the Joads, the fictional Okie farmers who were the heart of John Steinbeck's classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Memories of the Great Depression are still vivid among them. Back then, Western Oklahoman families were crushed by drought and debt so they abandoned their homesteads to migrate westwards from the worsening dustbowl to work as low-paid fruit– and vegetable-pickers on abundant southern Californian plantations. "Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes, it'll on'y be one." The long drive across half the country on the narrow, two-lane blacktop known as Route 66 – with the few possessions they had managed to keep out of the hands of county sheriffs piled high on the backs of small, rickety trucks – was a hardship, but traversing the last few hundred kilometres across the empty south-western desert was like an Old Testament trial of their faith. Somehow, their faith endured despite the press of evidence that if their God did exist, he was all out of mercy and had long since turned his back on them.
Maybe it takes a long haul across the ragged flatlands of the central plains to begin to understand why the roots of American evangelism are planted so deep in this part of the country, and why it appears, much like the land itself, to be at once bountiful and unforgiving. It also takes some time living around it, as I did for three years in Oklahoma, to understand how it can insinuate itself into even an insistently secular life, comforting you with its fellowship, its pervasive sense of community, and presenting the solace of a reductive world view, in which everything is neatly deconstructed as a choice between good and evil. If you didn't think about it too much, it's easy to embrace – and the one thing that can be said of most people in this part of the country is that they are pre-Socratic: they don't like to think.
A FEW HUNDRED KILOMETRES TO THE NORTH-EAST OF ELK CITY, Oklahoma's second-largest metropolitan area, Tulsa, is the self-proclaimed buckle of the Bible Belt. Home to several thousand Christian congregations and churches, very few of them mainstream, the business of evangelism is as important to Tulsa's economy as American Airlines, medical care and energy.
It wasn't always so. The area was first settled in 1836 by the "Five Civilised Tribes" – the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles. Forced to surrender their homelands east of the Mississippi to the federal government by the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the tribes were escorted by the United States Cavalry on a forced migration westwards along what became known as the Trail of Tears. Christianity arrived with the St Louis and San Francisco Railroad from the West coast in the form of a Presbyterian missionary, the Reverend Robert Loughbridge, who delivered the city's first sermon from the front porch of a local store. But while the first church was, not surprisingly, also Presbyterian, its founding congregation was made up of converted Creeks. Creek and Cherokee pastors quickly established Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist churches to serve native settlements.
It took more time to convert the rangy cowboys and Indian traders who were the city's first white settlers. The first white minister, a Presbyterian, the Reverend William Penn Haworth, endured three years of his congregation's unrepentant sinfulness before he delivered a fiery admonishment from the pulpit about the evils of alcohol. He was beaten bloody and left for dead in the street; when he regained consciousness, he resigned – and fled, like many before and after him, to California.
The city's first black ministers, who arrived at the turn of the century, were a little more cautious, not least because racial prejudice was, and still is, a raw, ugly cicatrix across this part of Oklahoma. The first black churches were denoted as "Negro" – as in "Negro only" – on a 1911 city map published by Sanborn, and one of them, Brown's Chapel, at 307 North Frankfort Avenue, went so far as to describe itself as "Colored Methodist Episcopal". Still, that probably just inflamed Tulsa's deeply ingrained bigotry. In 1921, when leaders of the prosperous black neighbourhood of Greenwood, in Tulsa, tried to thwart a mob lynching of a young black man unjustly accused of a sexual assault on a young white woman, it degenerated into an all-out urban war that became known as the Tulsa Race Riot, and black churches were among the first targets. About 300 blacks were killed – their bodies dumped into an unmarked mass grave at a municipal cemetery, where they lay undiscovered for half a century – and several thousand more were driven into the countryside as rampaging armed gangs destroyed their homes and businesses. God-fearing whites had no qualms about smiting down their black brothers, whose Christianity, they might have argued, was less righteous, less devout than their own.