Aspiration and Inspiration

I recently received in the mail a flier from Heather K. telling of her youth group's plans to evangelize in Europe this summer of 2007. Heather is the teenage daughter of good friends of mine who I think it is fair to say are among America's huge number of evangelical Christians, though they could also be described as charismatic as well. Heather's youth group, the flier said, is looking forward to preaching God's word in countries that they feel have pretty much lost touch with it.

I know there is widespread sentiment on this side of the Atlantic that the Europeans are a bunch of rank atheists, but I can testify from my multiple visits there that there are plenty of Christians in Europe and plenty of churches, some of which I have attended beautiful services in.

One of the things that distorts our understanding of this is that American Christianity has a strong evangelical orientation that seems to be lacking in much of Europe. My guess is that it's because evangelicalism fits in so well with upward socioeconomic mobility in America, but in Europe the movers and the shakers tend to be the ones who have abandoned religious values for secular ones.

Meanwhile the "ordinary" folks in Europe are still religious, but in a quieter way since they don't necessarily aspire to the next rung up the ladder. In this country, folks who are climbing the socioeconomic ladder see God as an awesome, mighty force in aiding that process. In other words, how we experience God depends on how we experience life. Nothing wrong with that, but it does tend to make Christians of different styles talk past one another, rather than to one another.


Those are the kinds of things I told Heather's parents, Chris and Dee, in an e-mail I have just sent them today — in which I also told them I have mailed Heather a small donation in support of her trip. It just so happened that Chris and Dee e-mailed me to find out how I've been doing, and I received their missive on a morning after I had awakened during the night with a host of thoughts concerning evangelicalism in American religion.

My primary thought was this: I have to admit, personally, to having an anti-evangelical bias in my own religious sensibility.

In trying to explain that to myself, I began to focus on the notion that I have never been in the position of aspiring to a great deal more socioeconomically than the life without want I was born into as the son of parents from the American heartland or Bible Belt whose own upward trajectory — a very successful one, in material terms — I would call sort of "European," in a broad sense. Or, at least, cosmopolitan.

Harold Francis Stewart and Leota Isabel Berry Stewart, my beloved parents, now dead, were among the generation of Americans who became teenagers in the Roaring Twenties. It was a time when religious backgrounds (she was Southern Baptist, he Methodist) were experienced by many Americans as hindrances to the high life that could be theirs if they threw off old-fashioned strictures and shackles of religious observance.

My family did very little churchgoing in my youth, though some of my mother's large family stayed faithful to the old-time religion. They stayed away from big cities and remained back in the Midwestern states which Mom and Dad had left behind to make a better life, during the Great Depression, in the "godless" East. Of course, the metropolitan East wasn't really godless, but neither was it evangelical. Religion was mostly a private affair.

My parents kept it so private that, today, I am not quite sure exactly what they believed about God, or how much they believed it. I do remember one dinner-table conversation in which they told me how the home of my maternal grandfather, William Palmer Berry, a man who was trained as a lay preacher in the Southern Baptist Convention, was run so strictly that there was no listening to records or the radio, no dancing, no card playing ... and, of course, no cigarette smoking or alcohol drinking.

My father's father, Willis Warder Stewart, was also a stern sort, in a Methodist way rather than a Southern Baptist one — I never quite caught on to the difference, if there was one. All I knew is that my parents had abandoned religion, while still clinging to some belief in God. They were not, strictly speaking, freethinkers, but their lives had been strongly influenced by the free thought of the likes of, say, H.L. Mencken.

Mencken was the newspaper reporter and columnist who had emerged from strictly local renown in Baltimore, Maryland, to a national audience through his coverage of the Scopes "Monkey" Trial in 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee. This was the famous trial of a local schoolteacher accused of violating state law by teaching evolution. Mencken assailed the Dayton townsfolk who resented Darwinism and set up the prosecution of John Scopes as benighted ones "unable to imagine a man who rejects the literal authority of the Bible" (see this account of his coverage).

My parents felt that success in this world — what I think of as the high life — would follow upon the relinquishing of such benighted, fundamentalist attitudes.

In other words, their aspirations were such as to lead them away from religion. I think for Chris and Dee, as for countless other evangelicals today, it is just the opposite. Aspiration and inspiration are inseparably linked in their religion and in their life experience.


In mid-adulthood I became a Christian. But, rather than having a born-again experience, I gravitated toward and eventually became a member of the Roman Catholic faith. In other words, instead of emphasizing the evangelical, as so many Americans, my life experience has been more of the Old World variety, even down to the style of Christianity I felt drawn to.

I remember during my childhood watching, on that first new TV that entered our home in the primitive 1950s, one of the early televangelists thumping his Bible and asking members of his live audience to come forward and accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. I also remember my mother saying something disparaging about it — her exact words are ones I can't recall. All I know is that it left me with a distaste for that kind of religion, which persists to this day.

In my middle-of-the-night musing about such things, I realized my distaste may be in large part a matter of not wanting to re-associate myself with the socioeconomic class my parents left behind on their rise to the upper middle class.

Or perhaps the class to which I refer was the one their parents had left behind in moving from the recurrent edge of poverty to what I think of as a staid "middle middle class" existence in the American heartland. I may have this wrong, and if so I apologize to any whose feelings I offend, but my impression is that evangelicalism appeals mainly to the peculiarly American socioeconomic stratum that I think of as poor Scotch-Irish and their ilk.

The Scotch-Irish in America, my ancestors, are the descendants of Protestant people who moved away from oppression and penury in Scotland centuries back, to take up residence in Northern Ireland. After their prospects there dimmed, many sought a brave new world in America — including my direct Stewart antecedent, one of three brothers who came here from Ulster at about the time of the War of 1812. One brother struck it rich as the founder of the world's first department store, A. T. Stewart's, later Wanamaker's, but the other two, including my lineal forebear Robert Stewart, weren't so lucky. My heritage on both sides of my family — not all of it identifiably Scotch-Irish, by the way — came through ancestors who often had to struggle to make ends meet.

All my grandparents were devoted to their religion, as far as I can tell, but I received no inkling that they were particularly evangelical in their religious style. By the time I was old enough to sit up and take notice, my paternal grandfather had remarried after mourning the death, some time back, of his first wife, my true grandmother. Then he died before I could get to know him. As for the grandparents on my mother's side, I did get to spend some time with them before their own rather early deaths, but I never knew them as particularly fervent religious types. True, when we went to visit them in Springfield, Missouri, my mother had to slip into the bedroom to sneak a smoke, or, along with my Dad, a wee nip. But I don't recall being taken to church on a Sunday or hearing much in the way of religious talk. And there were the games I'd play with Grandpa Berry, checkers and Chinese checkers, to make him seem like a regular guy. There was a bit of a dust-up, as I recall, over whether I was allowed to chew gum in their house... but a lot of that generation, born in the second half of the 19th century, thought gum-chewing was "common"; it wasn't just religious evangelicals.

The point is, I don't really know why my grandparents weren't terribly evangelical, but I suspect it was because they had attained their early aspirations of middle-class security and respectability long before I came along. That, and they were no longer young and full of zeal.


By the time my parents were thinking about leaving their respective nests, the smart set back East were well known across the land as having traded in the old-style religion for a high life of sophistication and glamor. My father wanted to follow in the footsteps of Mencken ... but W.W. Stewart couldn't afford at the crucial moment to put him through journalism school at the University of Missouri. H.F. Stewart instead joined the Army; served in peacetime Hawaii; turned down Officer Candidate School to spare his intended wife, my mother, a vagabond life of military bases; married and brought his new wife to Washington, D.C., to latch on as a policeman; rose through the ranks; took time out to serve as Executive Officer on a ship in the Pacific in World War II; came home to take Mom on a belated honeymoon and engender his only child, me; and wound up Chief of Police just as I was turning seven years old.

Their world was indeed, I found, one of cosmopolitan sophistication — though later events would show what a thin veneer that sophistication really was. My father even admitted it: at heart he and his Missouri-days associates were still the hillbillies they always were, men who would visit moonshine stills in the Ozarks backwoods during Prohibition to get their dram of liquor. In his salad days, Dad would come to drink 12-year-old Scotch whisky, but in later life he reverted to Maker's Mark bourbon, bless his soul.

One of the things I don't quite get about the poorer whites of the not-too-distant American past — my own ethnic heritage — is this distinction between the born-again set and the moonshine crowd, some of whom were the same people. I have extended family in both camps. Part of me is in both camps!


That's because I'm basically a straddler, from straddler stock. I look at the situation this way: the evangelical spirit is kept alive in folks who in the Old West would have been gunslingers and card sharps and saloon girls, if not for having been saved by Jesus Christ. In more recent times they might have been moonshine runners, not just partakers like my sainted daddy. Being born again is what has put these folks, in their modern incarnations, firmly on the other side of the fault line of sin from their wilder doppelgangers. It is what keeps their energies and zest and zeal from turning rancid. It is what makes them sheriffs, not gunslingers.

As a straddler, I have one foot on each side of that fault line. I identify not with gunslingers and sheriffs, but with "peaceable townsfolk" who can secret a bottle of illicit liquor in their pantry and who believe in minding their own business about the equally minor transgressions of others.

I identify with the old sawbones doctor who may have a drinking problem. (I'm speaking metaphorically here, with all these booze references, since I myself consume no more than a beer with dinner.) Rather than toting a gun, though, he digs bullets out of those who do.

A literary hero of mine is Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, who trumpets no religion but bears malice toward none and charity for all, the way Jesus did.

It is possible to be upstanding as a straddler — like Atticus was and I would like to be — but it is apparently not possible to be an evangelical. I am not able to be a trumpeter of religion. Such a trumpeting of righteous fervor makes no sense to a straddler, who knows the other side of the fault line to be but one tiny hop away.

Which has the curious side effect of making the straddler suspicious of those who find socioeconomic aspiration and religious inspiration to go so easily together. Sorry, Chris and Dee. Sorry, all ye evangelicals of this land.