Taking It to the Farms

Back in August I completed my second big road-trip, on my way to visiting all major creationist museums and most of the minor ones. I came away convinced of something which has become lost in our modern-day perspective, and that is simply how vitally important it is to be able to breach the disonnect between urban and countryside mentality.

Let's look through a wide-angle lens for a moment: Major cities are hubs for secular thinking, made necessary due to a need for respect for all different walks of life, diverse religious and non-religious views, skin colors and ancestral nationalities. Everywhere media outlets of all sorts super-saturate people with ideas, issues, and debates. It's a wonderful free-for-all exchange of brainwaves! Is it any wonder that the old, outmoded superstitions of religion have a hard time surviving here?

Now look at the American countryside. Small homes, small communities, even smaller leaders, and everywhere, everywhere, is the standard of Christianity, of Jesus Christ, of Southern Baptists and Pentecostals. There isn't much media here. The small-town folk have no time to listen to talk radio during a non-existing commute to work, and don't see the point in wasting their money on cable television -- if they can even get it. If they can, they often glue their eyes onto the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Free exchange of ideas? That's for shake-the-boat radicals! Is it any wonder so many city-slickers refer to these areas as "flyover states?"

One of the most beautiful areas I visited was the Ozark mountain region of Northern Arkansas. Paradise! Except for one thing: People seem to think it's latter-day Israel.

I went there looking for a creation museum. And I found it, all right. But it was neatly nestled inside of what I can only describe as a Christian Disneyworld. "The Great Passion Play," it was called -- an exhibition which shows itself many times weekly inside an ampitheater built right into the side of one of the Ozark mountains. Around the theater, an entire industry of shops, rides, childrens' areas, and exhibits. There was a Christian History museum, a Bible museum, and, finally, a creation museum. And overlooking it all, a large statue called "Christ of the Ozarks," reminiscent of the large statue of Jesus overlooking Rio De Janeiro -- except this one is far, far uglier.

For brevity, I'll ignore how ridiculous the creation museum itself was. (It took only 20 steps to go through the entire structure! And the most substantive disply featured the creationist joke-argument of 'Piltdown Man!') Instead, I'll focus on the question it brought home to me: Why is it that rural America is so Christian? Why do cities "get it," and townships don't?

The question was made even more weighty before that point when, for the first time in my life, I actually toured the grounds of Oral Roberts University, exactly one day before I'd reached Arkansas. Talk about sheer arrogant avarice! Perfectly manicured grounds amidst towering skyscrapers housing "Full Gospel Business." Expensive bronze statues adorned even more expensive gardens, and cathedrals which were ornate than the Champs-Elysees. There were marble -- marble, mind you! -- fountains with flames amidst them, huge dormitory complexes, and a rather welcome-looking baseball stadium. All for God. And in the middle of it all, the much-described "prayer tower." A structure which resembles a high, narrow, radio-telescope, stretching high into the air -- almost as if flipping nature the bird.

So why is the city so different? Why is the countryside of modern-day-Rome still languishing in the Dark Ages?

The answer, I think, has to do with a common occurrence in American history which forever scarred -- er, I mean, changed -- the country. That common event, was the campmeeting. Structured weekly, made into a major event which drew farmers out of their fields and into large tents, campmeetings once featured the best in entertainment ninteenth century America had to offer. It gave people good memories. It gave them religion. And the present-day result of this is that religion is now so deeply ingrained in America's skin that it has become a tatoo -- a permanent mark that cannot be removed.

Well, almost. If traveling evangelists could rub it in, traveling debunkers can rub it out. We need to take evolution to the Farm!

But is it justifiable to evangelize in the name of stamping out fundamentalism? Probably not. But one hardly needs justification if one is invited. Just let it slip that you're willing to debate them, anytime, anywhere, and they'll beg you to come out to their church or Sunday school, just so they can crucify you in effigy. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

Only a specialist in this sort of thing should even try it. I may be just that sort of specialist, being a theologian and not a scientist. But am I up to it?

Let's find out. Bring it on, creationists!