Jesus in America and Other Stories from the Field (review)

In Jesus in America, Claudia Gould provides six vignettes of religious experience in small North Carolina towns. Gould's stories interweave her own childhood memories of summering in the mountains of Western North Carolina during the 1960s with interviews she conducted while doing anthropological fieldwork in the 1980s. These stories are eclectic and represent a range of southern fundamentalist experiences without supplying an overt analysis of their meaning or connection to one another.

Gould's stories are vivid, compelling, and poignant. Anyone, like myself, who was raised in a southern fundamentalist home will recognize Gould's themes. The father—both earthly and heavenly—is a figure to be admired, respected, and above all feared. Deep, biblical meaning lies beneath the most mundane events and life itself is a parable of eternity. One ought to be prepared for eternity because God could return at any time and bring woe unto those guilty of unconfessed sins.

Although profound and even moving, Gould's stories are fiction. Most of the characters are compilations of various people Gould has interviewed. The effect is to intensify each story's theme. In "A Red Crayon," a woman resents the excessive punishment that her abusive brother-in-law meted out to his children. She herself stopped attending church when she realized that churches relied on scare tactics to get people to behave. She recalls how, while a child, she had stolen a crayon in Sunday school. Her fear of God's judgment gave her nightmares for a week and taught her that the fear of God was at the heart of all religion, just "like my sister's little boy fears his daddy" (34). In actuality, the stolen crayon and the abusive brother-in-law were two distinct stories that Gould mashed together. By combining the two, Gould more clearly presents a view of God as a cosmic bully.

The most fabricated story is "Jack at the Mercy Seat." Gould wrote this narrative after hearing a man apologize in a church service for accepting Christ into his heart only as Savior without acknowledging Christ as Lord. The man confessed his lack of evangelism, his unwillingness to share Christ with others. Gould dramatizes the testimony into a complex tale of wartime conversion, wife abuse, and a life of crime and vagrancy. It is hard to imagine that this man would have recognized his own voice after Gould finished reimagining his testimony.

Gould claims that she fictionalizes these accounts "to do justice to the people among whom [she] worked, who can be reduced to nothing less complicated than their stories" (118). But by combining and streamlining those stories, she turns her characters into caricatures of Southern racism and fundamentalist religion.

Gould's most compelling story is also the least varnished. In "A Moment of Rapture," Gould relates the terror a woman experiences when she awakens to find her husband missing from their bed in the middle of the night. Laurel grows convinced the rapture has occurred and she has been left behind. Only once Laurel discovers her young son still sleeping peacefully does she find reassurance, for no God, she contends, would leave behind an innocent child. "A Moment of Rapture" bares the reality of southern fundamentalist experience in a raw and vivid manner yet does so without reducing Laurel to a caricature. It suggests that Gould would have better served her interviewees if she had conveyed their stories with less embellishment.