Eight months ago, I began preaching part-time for my presbytery’s (think “diocese,” but Presbyterian) pulpit supply team. Our presbytery comprises faithful, yet sometimes fading, church congregations throughout West Alabama’s “Black Belt” region. So, about once a month, I drive south from Tucaloosa early Sunday morning to fill a pulpit needing coverage. To fill my body and prepare my soul beforehand, though, I like to pop into a Jack’s Family Restaurant for a breakfast biscuit.
Jack’s is one of Alabama’s state treasures. I’d go so far as to put it up there with Stitt and Sarris’s Bottega and Fish Market. While technically a fast-food joint, Jack’s hosts a hearth-like, homey vibe, and Jack’s now corporate visionaries are happy to preserve or otherwise plant new locations in the Deep South’s rural and small towns.
I made my Sunday morning stop at Jack’s a few weeks ago, dining this time in Hale County. This Jack’s, like many others, seemed to be an archetypal “third space” for this small Black-Belt town. Norman Rockwell could have painted it. Wearing a suit and tie, I walked in and got not a few glances from five older men sitting around a table in the center of the dining room. These five seemed to have dug deep into their geographic space in a way that would have made a medieval monk smile.
Their conversation, however, betrayed a deeply disgruntled and mutually negative opinion about the state of our Union. This happened before Trump nearly was assassinated; Biden and Trump had debated the week prior, and the discourse between those two pesky New Englanders was the talk of their round table. Grievances were aired, and our current government, especially its executive leadership, was their common enemy.
These Sunday biscuit eaters had legitimate concerns and complaints, and I at least sympathized with much of their conversation’s content. They are told their white skin gives them a privilege which their pocketbooks don’t feel. Government policies probably frustrate their farming. Country living is surprisingly expensive, and today’s farming community might be more attuned to trends in public policy than to the Farmer’s Almanac, given that the former now seems to dictate a farmer’s economic flourishing more than the latter.
Wanting something of a “cultural exchange” experience in my home state, I introduced myself to their breakfast club. Before any substantial pleasantries were exchanged, I was tested with a gate keeping shibboleth: “Are yew a Trump man … or arh yah a Bih-den man?”
I turned the question around by asking, “What if I’m not a Trump man?”
I eventually indicated that I was the owner of the pickup truck in the parking lot with the American flag sticker on the bumper, a wise move on my part which seemed to put their minds (and bodies) at ease.
Changing the topic, I asked if they were going to church that Sunday morning. It was about 9:30 a.m. – early enough to still go home, get changed, and head to the late service at one of several local congregations. That Sunday, though, none of these men were planning to go to church.
Recent commentary and polling indicates that a surprisingly high number of Americans self-identified as “evangelicals” are more knowledgable of (or preoccupied with) politics than they are of their Christian religion. Similarly, U.S. religious participation has declined overall in recent decades.
While Alabama ostensibly comprises the “buckle of the Bible Belt,” I am curious whether the ecclesial abseentism I saw at Jack’s was emblematic of a larger whole. Is Alabama really a bastion of religious fervor whose citizens are known for active involvement in the local church?
In his novel Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy wrote of the “Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world,” suggesting that we might settle for the vocabulary and structures of Christianity without the deeds or caritas concomitant to the Creed. If that one table of men is indeed emblematic of a broader whole, then I do not think that the “Bible Belt” is a useful term of sociocultural analysis for Alabama.
In our state song, “Alabama,” Julia Tutwiler called our land “Goodlier than the land that Moses / Climbed lone Nebo’s Mount to see.” (She’s talking about the Promised Land.) But was Percy more realistic?
Tutwiler was a realist, though, and seems to understand that human responsibility must necessarily accompany divine sovereignty, for the sixth stanza of her state hymn concludes:
“Make us worthy, God in Heaven
Of this goodly land of Thine.
Hearts as open as thy doorways.
Liberal hands and spirits free.
Alabama, Alabama, we will aye be true to thee!”
Alabamians are free to play hooky from church. Brave men and women died for our right to do so. But man cannot live on biscuits alone.
Russell Galloway lives in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where he’s a Spanish literature PhD student at the University of Alabama. He also works as a part-time pulpit supply preacher for his denomination.
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