Southern Baptist Zen

JACK BUTLER Southern Baptist Zen HERE’S MY FAVORITE SOUTHERN BAPTIST JOKE: DO YOU KNOW WHY Southern Baptists don’t like making love? It’s too much like dancing. In high school they called me Jack the Baptist. Well, okay, only a few people did, but one of those few was the best public school English teacher I ever had, Lois Blackwell. She smoked cigarettes, which was scandalous for a woman in Mississippi at the time, and she was Catholic, which was weird. She taught us “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which I hated. It was the single most famous example of that “obscurity” widely held to be the problem with modern verse. I came to love it later, and it no longer seems obscure. We were witlings, untraveled in words, and like the ignorant everywhere, located the fault in what baffled us rather than in the puny scope of our own learning. Her claim to fame was that she had published a poem in Poetry. As I remember the first line, it went, “What fabulist writ these pages. . . .” Something about fog, I think. Strikes me as lame now, but I was impressed then, though the archaicism bothered me (and the poem was a bit obscure). I got the moniker because I had been foolish enough to express doubt, within her hearing, that Catholics were Christians. It was a witty derogation and fully deserved. True, the opinion was common among my fellow Southern Baptists, but it was idiocy and I had accepted the idiocy without skepticism. Mrs. Blackwell disliked me for other reasons as well, which I will not go into here, but which were also fully justified. I’m the better poet, but she was the better person. One hopes my character has improved since. It has been my lot to be seen as a rebel by the people who raised me and as a reactionary by the more radical strangers I’ve encountered. I sustained long bitter arguments with my preacher father over racism and the Viet Nam war, and have found myself contending just as passionately with PC intellectuals in Santa Fe that, despite its glaring faults, the U.S. is NOT the Great Satan. 170 Jack Butler My father himself was neither racist nor sexist. It was clear he and my mother thought all people were equal, and thanks to their example, I have always known that bigotry and misogyny were nonsense. I thought of my father as a rigid fundamentalist then, but he preferred caritas to hellfire and damnation, and I think now he sought God in the only way he knew how. Similarly (if with less exculpation), I point out that the Southern Baptists of that day were not the Southern Baptists of this. Now they are (predominantly if not entirely) a fattening tribe of slick-haired selfrighteous suburbanites, masters of architectural monstrosity and money-grubbing televangelism. Then they were a ragged band of country faithful, rude and unsophisticated, and, as I came to think, disastrously mistaken, but nonetheless honorable. My father was the youngest of nine. The Butlers, sharecroppers turned landowning cotton farmers, were Methodist, but when I was six Dad began attending the little Baptist church founded and built by my grandfather, Doc Niland (called, naturally enough, Niland Baptist Chapel). Soon Dad had converted, and by the time I was eight, he had, as we put it, committed to the ministry. Doc was half-Irish, a former Catholic whom I suspect had become a Baptist for love of my melancholy grandmother and then become apostolic in his fervor. Like mother like daughter. Mom, who was a beautiful young firecracker of a Christian, probably had more than a littletodowithDad’stransformationfromhard-drinkingharum-scarum wild boy into sobersided preacher. But after all if we were to try to disentangle the ways of God from the ways of romantic love, we would end in utter confusion. From then on, we were Baptists. Regular attendance at the Methodist church in Alligator had never seemed necessary, but the next decade and a half provided enough churchgoing to last the rest of my life. Suddenly I was obliged to attend a minimum of five services a week...