Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South

Sacred Art, Southern Fried: Harlots and Hellfire

h a r l o t s a n d h e l l f i r e It’s not well known that I was once, for a very short run, an actual salaried art critic for a large northern newspaper. But it’s my reputation as an independent theologian that best qualifies me to comment on the paintings of the late Reverend McKendree Long. As a lapsed Unitarian I fall at the opposite end of the theological spectrum from Reverend Long. Maybe the only thing we had in common was a taste for the sort of woman the tabloids call “statuesque.” Surely I’d be among the lost souls he sent hurtling into the Lake of Fire, in their bathing suits or less. Members of my family have even been guilty of that heresy know as Universalism, the bland and beautiful belief that everyone is saved whether they like it or not—“the final harmony of all souls with God”—and that even if you ended up in hell somehow it was only temporary. It just meant that you and God needed to get a few things straight between you. I myself once wrote, in an art review , “I’ve never been able to follow the notion of God’s plan much beyond the boundaries of the human ego.” I suppose I’d be a secular humanist, if I had a little more faith in humans. I’m profoundly uncomfortable with some of the images in Long’s paintings, of Christ with a sword or a bloody sickle, of God Sacred Art, Southern Fried 143 orchestrating colossal slaughters and mass extinctions of human and animal life, toward what end we’re not really sure, except to confirm to individuals like McKendree Long that they were right all along— that God is as uncompromising and unforgiving as the face they see in the mirror every morning. When it comes to scripture, I line up with the British writer Zadie Smith, who declares in her novel White Teeth, “The Book of Revelation is the last stop on the nutso express.” No one knows much about this man John who wrote the book of Revelation on the island of Patmos some time around 100 A.D. Very few scholars still believe that he was John the disciple of Christ. All we know is that he had a lurid and spectacular imagination—like McKendree Long—and that every period of Christian history has produced new and increasingly bizarre interpretations of his prophecy. If I were a biblical scholar, I’d make a study of the vegetation on the isle of Patmos, to see if Patmos grows anything recognizably hallucinogenic . But in present time John’s nutso express is carrying more passengers than ever before, including American fundamentalists who are rooting for World War III in the Middle East because it suits their timetable for Armageddon. A man named Dale Pollett came to my hometown last month with a video-illustrated lecture series, “The Time of the Beast,” including a lecture revealing “nine ways to identify the Antichrist—a crystal clear revelation of who the Antichrist IS.” First-class passengers on the express also include the Reverend Pat Robertson of Virginia Beach—an educated, gentleman evangelist like McKendree Long—whose book The End of the Age prophesied that Christ would return in the year 2000 in a spaceship, a “jeweled cube” measuring fourteen hundred miles on each side. Reverend Robertson also ran for president in 1988 and won more delegates at the Republican Convention than anyone except George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole. Speaking of politics—the work of McKendree Long reminds us that it’s profoundly important to keep church and state separate, as nearly all the Founding Fathers, mostly deists, Unitarians, or agnostics and none of them fundamentalists, insisted from the start. If you believe you’re doing exactly what God demands, as Pat Robertson 144 Objections Sustained does, why should you care what anyone else thinks? Pat knows what to do with God’s enemies—with you and me. And Reverend Long’s grandson recalls that “Whatever disagreed with him at the moment went into the picture.” That is, into the Lake of Fire or the Bottomless Pit. From Long we got these wonderful paintings—congratulations to the collectors and art historians who, unlike his family, recognized how really singular they are—but imagine what...