The rest of the essay. The line in the second to last paragraph with the phrase “deranged country polka” is on general principle one of the best sentences I’ve ever written.
Before discussing the content that made up [the pastor’s] sermon, it would be helpful to describe its form. Though [the pastor] was a confident speaker, his delivery was generally unpolished, and his sermon at first seemed to follow no definite narrative structure. Instead of a logical organization, [the pastor] used his sermon to deliver a series of thematically (rather than topically) linked arguments. He would accompany each argument with a relevant illustration, usually a slice of life story with an obvious moral that he would explicate, before circling back to a refrain, usually a verse from the Bible. This haphazard approach to structure could be contrasted with Ammerman’s description of Ronald Thompson, the pastor of Southside, who tempered his improvisatory approach by sticking to a specific topic that would be “organized around three or four easy-to-remember points” (38). While more difficult to follow, [the pastor’s] stream of consciousness approach allowed him to cover a broad range of topics that fell under his thematic umbrella and allowed me a closer look into the mind of an Ozarks fundamentalist.
[The pastor’s] theme this Sunday was the uncertainty of life, coupled with the certainty of death. Through expounding on the uncertainty of life, he demonstrated how to construct and maintain a world of certainty in the face of chaos and suffering without posing the complex questions of theodicy. [The pastor] unconsciously followed the two-step plan to certainty outlined by Ammerman: first, one must be saved, which allows the believer to find meaning within his or her life, thus constructing a world of certainty; second, one must join the church, which allows the believer to maintain this world in concert with fellow believers (47).
To construct and maintain a world necessarily entails drawing boundaries, and [the pastor] closely scrutinized doctrinal differences. He argued that, regardless of the existence of numerous denominations, only one salvation exists, and his church openly offers that salvation, implying that his is the standard against which all other churches must be judged. Perhaps this issue is pressing because the Ozarks is home to so many denominations of Christianity. While he never evoked the names “modernist” or “liberal,” as Ammerman does (76-77), [the pastor] was clearly differentiating these branches from “true” Christianity, the Christianity that sticks to the fundamentals--namely, the Bible. Because all fundamentalists accept the Bible as the perfect, inerrant word of God (51), [the pastor] seemed compelled to use Bible verses to authenticate every point. In addition, [the pastor] viewed the Bible synchronically, jumping from book to book indiscriminately (38)--though the main reading of the day was from Romans, he directed the congregation to relevant verses from Hebrews, John, Luke, Proverbs, and James before the sermon was over. While this view of the Bible separated [this church] from non-fundamentalist denominations of Christianity, there was a conspicuous absence of political boundary drawing. In Ammerman, the members of Southside were carefully conscious of the outside world, looking at current events in the light of biblical prophecies (44). Perhaps the Ozarks, with its geographical remove from the capital, is hearkening back to the apolitical fundamentalism of pre-Falwell days that emphasized moral boundaries above political ones--or perhaps [the pastor] was having an off day.
In addition to what [the pastor’s] sermon revealed about the church’s essential beliefs, music was also an integral aspect of the church’s religious communication. The appropriately if unexceptionally titled The Hymnal was filled with simple folk and gospel songs such as “I’ll Fly Away,” which were legitimized by their spiritual implication and a Bible verse printed under each title. While the song titles and lyrics clearly echoed the music of Southside congregation that Ammerman described (38), there is a deeper cultural connection to this music in the Ozarks, as evidenced by a distinctive instrumentation. The musical accompaniment of a baby grand piano, an electric bass, and an accordion produced an eccentric sound that blended with the congregation’s enthusiastic (though clearly untrained) voices to create some kind of deranged country polka. There was no percussion, but there was a definite rhythm to the songs; I even noticed the pastor and several members around me keeping time with their hands or feet. Despite the fact that Ammerman’s congregation considered “music with a strong beat” as “inherently seductive” and a tool of the devil (85), my visit showed a church in the middle of an ongoing process of acceptance and incorporation of modern musical vocabulary. While their music was stylistically conservative compared to anything on the radio in the last half century, “the beat” has somehow wriggled free from the devil’s grasp in some fundamentalist minds.
As Ozarks fundamentalism evolves and unburdens itself of less desirable traits, one might question whether fundamentalism has a coherent identity any more. Yet fundamentalism, with its fantastic promises of meaning and a blueprint for daily life, does not appear to be vanishing, for fundamentalism has not lost its ability to provide certainty for uncertain people and boundaries that the believers experience as if they were something tangible. Though the fundamentalism presented in Ammerman’s Bible Believers has undergone a reformative process, my visit to [this church] has convinced me that fundamentalism has retained and maintained a discrete identity in the Ozarks.
