America Unchained (with extra churches)

I've recently finished reading Dave Gorman's book 'America Unchained'. Gorman is a British comedian who decided he wanted to discover the real America. He had spent time in New York, LA and other big American cities, and had also toured America doing a one-man show, but he had become disenchanted with the bland, soulless chain hotels and restaurants of corporate America. So he decided he would do the classic American road trip, driving from coast to coast in a 1970s station wagon, but the catch was to be this: that he would not purchase any goods or services from chains. So the task was to find accommodation, food, gas and all other amenities from independent retailers.

Well, the trip proceeds with unpredictable and hilarious consequences, as you can imagine, and it's a fun read. But I was struck in a way by the similarities which his book has with my blog, in that he's a British bloke of about my age, who thought he knew America reasonably well, discovering things about the places, people and culture of middle America which were new to him. Indeed, some of his observations are uncannily like my own. Take this one, from towards the end of the book when he's driving through Mississippi:

"Outside of the towns Mississippi seemed to be mostly trees and churches. The road we took sliced through a blanket of evergreens, punctuated by the odd rust patch of something more autumnal and then suddenly, there'd be a patch of open land and set back from the road would be an enormous, gleaming white Baptist church. They were mind-bogglingly big places and I couldn't help but wonder where on earth they drew their congregations from. We might drive through a community with a population of less than 400 people and then two or three miles later find ourselves driving past a church that could surely seat 4,000. And then 15 miles later we'd pass another one. These churches weren't relics of the past: they looked new and shiny - white palaces not white elephants - so presumably they'd been built to satisfy demand ... Whichever way I looked at it, I just couldn't make sense of the vast capacity for worship. There didn't seem to be enough people or homes around to make the numbers add up. Maybe the people of Mississippi are really good at hiding? Or perhaps all those trees go to church and nobody told me?"

Although it's an urban rather than a rural area, Oklahoma City is just the same. The ratio of huge churches to residential areas seems strongly out of kilter. Last Sunday I played the organ at a church which has three services on a Sunday morning, and claims to have a membership roll of 1800. (To be fair I wouldn't say the combined congregations that Sunday amounted to more than half that). But what really amazed me was that at one point the minister said that a recent survey had shown that 'in this area' (and I don't know whether he meant OKC in general, that part of it, or just the streets around the church) only 40% of people went to church. 40%?? That's surely nonsense. Everyone in Oklahoma City goes to church.

What I did realise for the first time though was that the actual level of religious involvement of many of these people is quite limited. There was a strong sense which I picked up of a social obligation fulfilled. People filed in to church, sat and listened to the service, stood up and sat down in the right places, and immediately the service was finished they streamed out of the door, got in their SUVs and drove away. It reminded me of one time years ago when I was in rural western Ireland and attended mass at the local (Catholic) church. It was a vast, dark building, completely packed with people. At the back it was standing room only, and I was vaguely aware of the priest a long way away at the front, performing various ritual incantations with incense, bells, etc. As he did so, people would pop in and pop out, chat to their friends about weather and the current prices of livestock, and I'm sure there were a couple of children playing a game together on the floor. Attending mass was clearly part of the culture: something you did because everyone else does, not through any particularly strong personal religious conviction.

I had intended this post to be about Dave Gorman's book but I seem to have strayed into writing about churches yet again. So let me add one more quotation from America Unchained, this time from near the start of the book:

"New York and LA don't really tell you what life in the rest of America is like. To judge America on those two cities alone is to admire a man's bookends without reading any of his books".

How true. But it might be a more apposite metaphor if you imagine a shelf of bookends with a book at either end.