Howard Dorgan. Giving Glory to God in Appalachia: Worship Practices of Six Baptist Subdenominations. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.
An extensive research project with a gestative period of thirteen years, Dorgan’s Giving Glory to God in Appalachia is a thoughtfully organized ethnography that provides a critique of the totalizing stereotypes of Appalachian religion and analyzes the structural makeup of six Baptist subdenomminations and the Appalachian region as a whole. The first and longest chapter carefully distinguishes each of the six subdenominations from one another and includes relevant historical material and helpful information about doctrinal divergences. The next four chapters, together making up most of Dorgan’s ethnography, analyze rhetoric and content in Baptist sermonizing and describe various traditions that, while not unique to Appalachia, take on some distinctive attributes in these Baptist congregations. In the final chapters, Dorgan expands his reach to examine the roles of religious radio (chapter 7) and death (chapter 8) in fostering a sense of community and fellowship. However, despite Dorgan’s meticulousness and valuable insights into this sadly overlooked region, the book is unfulfilling as academic writing, and I cannot help but feel puzzled as to Dorgan’s intentions.
Most of the difficulty in making sense of Dorgan’s research is that it does not appear, on the surface at least, to be organized around a coherent thesis; rather, Dorgan’s collection of observations about Baptist subdenominations seems to function as a guidebook of his selected region, which problematically reduces Appalachian culture to a curiosity. Though Dorgan’s book seems to lack a central argument, there are themes that emerge consistently throughout the text. The recurrent theme that comes closest to being Dorgan’s thesis has to do with social cohesion and the role of religion in maintaining stability and negotiating conflicts. Unfortunately, though, it is unclear how Dorgan wants his readers to interpret the relationship between cohesion and religion, and perhaps it is Dorgan’s indecisiveness that makes him hesitant to foreground his preoccupation with social cohesion into an explicitly stated thesis.
Clearly religion does not guarantee social harmony, as Dorgan himself has occasion to point out; and since we could easily imagine a culture that practices only “secular” types of conflict resolution, surely Dorgan is not suggesting that cohesion depends upon religion. Indeed, Dorgan at times reveals a certain disapproval of the “narrow provincialism and rigid orthodoxy that isolates as it insulates, excludes as it coheres” (215), even though he endeavors to present the region and its religions in the best light. Rather, it seems Dorgan is making the somewhat safer assertion that this is the particular form that cohesion and resolution have taken in this particular culture. Dorgan’s analysis of Appalachia, then, is structuralist, even if his argument is unfocused. In the following paragraph, I want to use an interesting passage to show how the imprecision of Dorgan’s argument allows his book to take on a polysemic character.
The first section of chapter five, “The Flower Service at Mount Paran,” is central to Dorgan’s purpose. In it, he theorizes that this flower service has undergone the “slow fusion of two symbolic meanings of the flower” over time—first, “the flower as sacrificial gift for reconciliation,” a reading which again emphasizes the dependence of social cohesion on the organizing principle of the congregational unit; second, “the flower as statement of praise and love,” a conciliatory (not re-conciliatory) reading that emphasizes how rare the need for conflict resolution is (151). The dual meaning Dorgan expounds here also strikes me as the perfect metaphor for the polysemic function of his book. Dorgan’s book is also a “sacrificial gift for reconciliation”; the thirteen years Dorgan spent researching and writing the book is a sacrifice, and the book itself intends to reconcile the Appalachian region, this frequently misunderstood and misrepresented object, with the academy, whose unfortunate cultural elitism has contributed to the denigrated image of the Appalachian region in popular culture. Yet Dorgan’s book is also a “statement of praise and love” to the region and its churches, as Dorgan himself iterates in the three-page epilogue: “It has been my inclination, therefore, to depict these groups’ practices in a light that is more rosy-hued than not… Nevertheless, the bias had a purpose, that of building within my readers a degree of empathy for these folks who have held so tenaciously to the past” (216).
The tone Dorgan takes in the above quoted passage—in its disconcerting mixture of paternal familiarity (notice the obvious rhetorical design in the forcedly casual use of the homey-sounding word “folks”) and judgmental observation (“who have held so tenaciously to the past”)—is eerily reminiscent of another famous ethnographer of a similarly mischaracterized region. But while Vance Randolph foregrounded his normalizing, modernist assumptions about progress and culture as he maintained his sickly sweet sentimentalizing of the Ozarks as a region, Dorgan, with the advantage of hindsight and a half century of crucial developments in critical theory separating them, desperately tries to avoid Randolph’s mistakes. He does not succeed. Still, he puts up an excellent fight, recalling to me the words of Samuel Beckett in his 1983 short novel, “Worstward Ho”: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” As researchers “on the ground,” we must learn from previous mistakes even as we attempt to correct them, which is a cumbersome but not, I hope, insurmountable task. We cannot expect to undo all of the mistakes of previous scholars with a more appropriate amount of caution or a few critical strokes of the pen. Maybe we can only expect to fail better.
