High Mountains Rising (38 page)

In contrast, mountain Christians sustained, centered in their worship practices, an understanding of the experience of salvation (or conversion) not as an act of human will but as a gracious gift from God. This holds true today. For most mountain Christians, this gift of salvation is based not on their personal initiative or individual merit and achievement but solely on God's love and compassion. The foremost standard and evidence of personal faith is being sensitive and responsive in speech and actions to what “God laid on my heart” (a common phrase in the mountains). Whether Old Time Baptist or Holiness Pentecostal, God's own Spirit is understood as the one who lays on their hearts not only God's love for them as individuals but whatever God requires of them each day in the here and now. As a result, a tender heart responsive to God's initiative carries far greater importance in mountain communities than a person's specific beliefs about God and Jesus. (“Pretty is as pretty does” sums it up in mountain culture.) This standard of responsiveness—and responsibility—is always a struggle, and people often fall short in their efforts and results, but it remains the benchmark in mountain religious cultures.

Mainline denominational churches build membership through a consensus of written, spoken, and avowed beliefs, given form in creeds (such as the Nicene), doctrine, and polity. Mountain churches form around small, often ad hoc groups coming together in worship, where “I can almost see heaven from here,” as the Old Regular Baptists like to say. Although mountain Christians firmly hold that every person has the ability, and therefore
the right, to interact directly with God, that opinion does not support or condone a communally disconnected individualism, one of the best-known stereotypes of religion in Appalachia. Instead, mountain Christians understand that God's interaction with each person, though specific and unique, occurs always in the context of the larger community, whether inside the church house or in the course of everyday life.

Mountain Christians, overwhelmingly and historically, also do not equate salvation and faith with religion and belief. “Belief” to them tends to mean a person's rational assent to confess out loud static creeds and bumper-sticker formulas such as “Jesus is LORD!” By “religion,” mountain Christians usually mean organized religion or denominations, which they often call simply “big churches.” In fact, they rarely speak of religion. Instead they talk about faith as the conscious discipline of embodying through their personal speech and actions, their own words and deeds, God's gift of saving grace for themselves and each other.
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For this reason, mountain Christians rarely, if ever, speak of themselves as “born again Christians,” the defining signature of American evangelicalism from which mountain religion historically stands apart.

From the evangelical (and fundamentalist) framework of being “born again,” God's offer of salvation is always on the table through God's action in human history: Jesus' death and resurrection define salvation, which every individual personally accepts or rejects. Each person's own free will and rational decision provide both the point of origin and the determining factor in salvation as a personal event that occurs in a specific time and place. American evangelicalism's understanding of salvation through being “born again” makes it far more individualistic and particularistic, into which the individual's formative community largely disappears, than Appalachia's mountain religious cultures.

Overwhelmingly in mountain churches, because of their communal focus, salvation is not a decisive event but an ongoing process, sustained by “a sweet hope in my breast.” This expression sums up the distinctively gentle and regionally specific Calvinism that is one of mountain religion's historically original and enduring contributions to American Christianity. It roundly contradicts the two-dimensional caricature of “fatalism” long applied by outside observers to Calvinist traditions of all sorts, for which mountain religion has long been derided by its many critics as “do-nothing” or passive, unengaged with the larger world.

For mountain Christians, God expresses saving grace for them, unmerited though it may be (in their Calvinist heritage), through God's speech and actions that embody, and thus make real and present, the standard of “loving kindness” (King James Version [KJV], from biblical Hebrew [BH]
chesed)
and “tender mercies” (KJV, from BH
rachamim)
at the center of the Bible's understanding of what it means for people to be in covenant with God and with each other. “Justice and righteousness” (KJV, from BH
mishpát-u-tsedahqáh
)—by far one of the Bible's most common word pairs— follow close by as defining values of covenant relationship, for which loving kindness and tender mercies again set the standard. What mountain people place at the core of their faith is what they understand, as Christians, to be at the core of the Bible.

As a consequence, though always very aware of him, mountain people tend not to talk much about Jesus, except as the preeminent exemplar of God's saving grace through Jesus' speech and actions in everyday life. Jesus' death and resurrection, the iconic focus of American evangelicalism, though world-changing for all Christians, are not the focus of attention for mountain people. Mountain Christians, from Old Time Baptists to Holiness Pentecostals, speak most often of God's Spirit and their deep relationship with it. “Lord” usually refers first to God or the Holy Spirit, with the two often blended in language and thinking, and secondarily to Jesus. Jesus' identity as the Son of God is far more immediate and meaningful to mountain Christians than Jesus as “Lord.” These perceptual shifts elevate the human heart to the central place in mountain people's understanding of what it means to be human in the world God created
and
created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26–27), a complementary contrast that, in mountain people's definition of reality, only the heart can reconcile within itself.

In Appalachia's mountain religious cultures, overwhelmingly the norm is for the human heart to inform and direct the human intellect, rather than the other way around. In this foundational emphasis on the heart as the seat where God lives and where faith takes root in people's lives through their speech and actions, we find not only what most characterizes Appalachia's regional religious tradition but what distinguishes it in terms of values and worldview.
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This distinction has created for nearly two centuries a sustained conflict in American Christianity precipitated almost entirely by the reaction of American Protestantism to “religion in Appalachia” as a radical sign of contradiction to the dominant national culture.
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Although they profess their own creeds, which they carefully craft in writing, Appalachia's Old Time Baptist churches share (with appropriate variations) a type of institutional church model with the region's Holiness Pentecostal churches, which rarely profess written creeds. This church model is regionally specific and highly characteristic of mountain people whose shared values and worldview it embodies. It attempts to express a lived reality summarized by “Everyone Welcome, ‘God Is Love,' Built for the People,” as one church house sign in southwest Virginia has proclaimed for
decades. “Where Everybody Is Somebody” is long-standing as the region's most common motto found on church house signs of all traditions specific to Appalachia, as well as on those of many other traditions shaped by the region's defining religious ethos, especially in its more rural areas.

To help accommodate these values so basic to their identity, Old Time Baptists gather their churches together, as noted earlier, into subregional bodies or groups called associations, a practice historically common to all Baptists everywhere. However, they are not only subregional but subdenominational, having no recognizable denominational institutional structures. It follows that no national or even regionwide governing or judicial bodies exist among the Old Time Baptists. The associations fulfill these roles. They help to formulate polity and doctrine and assist in settling disputes within and between churches as needed, but in a manner that is as unintrusive and respectful as possible of the autonomy and integrity of each church. From Appalachia's Old Time Baptists comes the expression already mentioned, “Each church holds the key to its own door.”

The religious life distinctive to the mountain regions of Appalachia is principally an oral culture, one known mostly through its oral literature and oral tradition. The records or minutes of Old Time Baptists' individual churches and associations, written and gathered over two hundred years, provide us with one of our few primary sources of written documentation. As a result, these records are some of the most important windows into seeing and appreciating the continuity and integrity, as well as the vibrancy and adaptability, of mountain religious life and cultures.

Closely tied to Appalachia's Old Time Baptists today—instead of in opposition to them—are its Holiness Pentecostal people, who are commonly known as Holiness. The features characterizing Holiness people in relation to Old Time Baptist are more distinguishing than divisive, and this may come as a surprise. They too embrace Calvinistic emphases of grace and the Holy Spirit made manifest in their worship lives and in their attitude toward salvation. Although their roots for worship are more directly grounded in what scholars call “plain-folk camp meeting religion” that arose out of the Great Revival on the Appalachian frontier at the beginning of the nineteenth century, their theological emphases are tightly interwoven with those of the Old Time Baptists of the mountain regions.

Like the Old Time Baptists, mountain Holiness people usually worship in one-room structures called church houses; the people themselves are called “church” (with no definite article preceding the term). These church houses often have few if any identifying exterior markings. Holiness churches are started by a man or a woman who feels called to preach to his or her family, friends, and neighbors. Like today's Old Time Baptist
preachers, their ministry is a “called” ministry, not a seminary-educated one. The church building may be of any type or in a home (a “dwelling house”), any place sufficient enough for a small number of people, often a dozen or less, to gather. These churches remain in private hands and are unincorporated and not tax exempt, with the individual or family paying the utilities and taxes. In such ways mountain people maintain the historical autonomy so important to their worship lives and the intimacy necessary for tenderhearted vulnerability in worship.
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These small Holiness churches honeycomb the mountain regions of Appalachia. They exist not in the hundreds but in the thousands and may well be Appalachia's single largest church tradition, easily outnumbering any of the national denominations present in the region. They remain uncounted in any census of church life because of the absence of official church records such as membership rolls. Church services or meetings (their more common name) are held on one or two nights a week, usually more, for at least three hours. This practice harks back to their plain-folk camp meeting antecedents. The meetings are loosely structured around spontaneous preaching, singing, testifying, and praying and are characterized by expressive and ecstatic worship practices. Although people have a home church they attend regularly, they also travel widely to a selection of Holiness churches in their area on any given night. Appalachia's mountain Holiness churches, like its Old Time Baptist churches, are primarily products of oral tradition, regardless of the literacy level of the people who attend them. Unlike the Old Time Baptists, mountain Holiness churches maintain few, if any, church records.

When looking at the region's Old Time Baptist and Holiness church traditions, we begin to see in some significant ways how the religious landscape of Appalachia differs from that of other regions of the United States. These major differences are the result of a preponderance of historically steeped, small, subdenominational and independent, nondenominational churches and their religious cultures. These cultures also influence the practices of individual churches of major U.S. denominations found scattered throughout Appalachia's more rural, outlying areas. As for the likenesses of Appalachia's religious landscape with much of the United States, we find them through the presence of the nation's major denominations concentrated in the region's cities, larger towns, and county seats. Here they seem to be made more real and significant to religious life in Appalachia, as we have indicated, by the devices of their public prominence and visibility. The result is that the region's distinctive mountain religious cultures, though thriving and far reaching, are minimized and obscured, if not overlooked altogether. The question is why. Again, the divide between the church
traditions of Appalachia's mountain religious cultures and the major Christian denominations of America's religious cultures has to do with a basic difference in values and worldview.

The Appalachian Mountains stretch from Nova Scotia to Alabama, including many ranges with their own names such as the Smoky Mountains, Cumberlands, Alleghenies, Poconos, Catskills, Adirondacks, Green Mountains, and White Mountains. What the average American thinks of as Appalachia and what the U.S. government thinks are very different. The Appalachian region has both a political definition, created during the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson, and a cultural definition, which may vary with the person defining it. To some Americans, Appalachia is “anyplace where there's coal under the ground” (so said one of Appalachia's preeminent authors, Jesse Stuart). To others, Appalachia is a place identified with images of snake handling, moonshine, “Li'l Abner,” hillbillies, hollers, hound dogs, hootenannies, feuds, trailers, log cabins, and poverty. To the federal government, Appalachia is defined by the boundaries of states and counties ascribed to it by the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) during the War on Poverty years for purposes of regional redevelopment. For our purposes, Appalachia is concentrated in the mountainous regions of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia, east Tennessee, western North Carolina, and northern Georgia. These make up the geographic areas that are identified by the oral and material religious cultures its inhabitants hold in common and thus the regional religious tradition created by configurations of creed, code, cultus, and community, as described by Catherine L. Albanese in
America: Religions and Religion.