Holy Hills of the Ozarks: Religion and Tourism in Branson, Missouri (review)

Not surprisingly, the inventor of the Kewpie doll hails from the Branson area, which Aaron Ketchell portrays not only as a place convinced of its sacrality but of its homogenous theology. Described by a local minister as "America the way it ought to be" (102), Ketchell also reveals a darker side, reflected in a statement from country music legend Merle Haggard: "If you don't believe as they do, then you're just out" (xiv).

Locating Branson in the regional phenomenon created by Harold Bell Wright's 1907 novel The Shepard of the Hills—a testament to homespun morality and the Edenic quality of the Ozarks—Ketchell describes the residents' local pride, anti-institutional religiosity, and anti-modernism (including anti-urbanism and nativism), and how they construct, maintain, and profit from their notions of the region's sacrality. He carefully traces this to American popular Protestantism in the nineteenth century, the growing relationship between leisure and spirituality by the turn of the century, and the rise of conservative Protestantism as a response to liberal modernism by the second half of the twentieth century. Ultimately, Ketchell examines the perception by some of consumerism as a threat to the monochromatic vision long held in the area, and the ways local businesses are confronting whether to be Christian or more commercially successful.

Ketchell's work is a pleasure to read not only because of the author's ability to expose the roots of the topic, but also because of his ability to blend in his own ethnographic research. Using civil religion as an organizing principle, he describes an American nationalism overlain with conservative Protestantism wherein each justifies the other; being a good Christian makes one a good American, and being a good American makes one a good Christian.

Readers might be particularly interested in the ways in which Ketchell describes attitudes toward institutional expressions of religion versus a lived (Christian) spirituality that is an expression of the local general culture. American popular Protestantism is in full evidence here as Ketchell describes the very natural, personal, and sincere impulses among the people instrumental in the development of this area, as they work to bring their faith into action in their parks, entertainment, and crafts outlets.

If there is one critique, it is the absence of an in-depth exploration of the conflicts that such cultural and religious self-confidence engenders in marginalized parties. Much of the recent literature on American sacred space is built upon a "conflict" model, exploring the construction of the "sacred" not from a consensual center but on the conflicted boundaries. Ketchell hints at some of these conflicts—a discussion of unacceptable performers like Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash; another of marginalized Catholics and the limits of ecumenism among the area churches—but he does not explore them as deeply as others might have. At the very least, virtual "throw-away" comments about the acceptance of patriotic Mormons like the Osmonds, juxtaposed with stories of the unofficial ban on the late John Denver (apparently for his habit of using profanity in his shows), merit closer investigation.

But this does not condemn the work. Ketchell has done a wonderful job presenting the history and ideology of sacred Branson and its connections to a conservative Christian America that laments the passage of its own cultural monopoly even as it celebrates its faith. Ketchell's work may be of greatest value as an example of one polarized vision of the "united" states.