Flannery O’Connor said that if the South is not Christ-centered, it is certainly Christ-haunted (several of those words should have been in quotation marks, but I am quoting from memory so I don’t know which ones). I started this academic year with the notion of a dissertation on religion in contemporary Southern literature—after O’Connor and Percy. I had imagined it as a broad cultural studies project that would take into account the prominence of Evangelicalism in politics right now and the sway of the Bible Belt on the governance of this country. I had imagined also looking into the works of Southerners who do not claim to be religious, or who overtly reject religion, for traces of the ghost of Christ that haunts the South. In A Turn in the South V. S. Naipaul observes that in the South faith is almost universal and religion is something in the air, always available for people to draw from according to their needs.
As my project has taken shape, it has become something much less about culture at large and much more about individuals contending with their religious cultural heritage. And mostly about individual women and girls—writers and their characters—trying to understand what their inherited religion means to them as women, daughters, and mothers. How they find, or cannot find, spiritual fulfillment in a religion that demands their physical and spiritual submission to men. And how they cope when religious obligation goes against their sense of what is right. How they, out of necessity it seems, change their understanding of religion and of God into something that is useful to them when the God of their fathers and husbands seems distant if not irrelevant.
A lot of these questions are a way of contending with my own religious heritage. I grew up in Evangelical religion and was a very religious child, even more so as a teenager. I was at church every time the doors were open, and sometimes when they were not. No one made me go—I would go to church without my parents. Some of my favorite times were at revivals and youth rallies, and my best friends were the ones there beside me.
I won’t go specifically into my current spiritual crises or discuss the presence of religion in my life right now. But I will say that I am drawn to the topic of my dissertation because if my life now is not Christ-centered, it is certainly Christ-haunted.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
Wasn't Percy Catholic? Or perhaps he converted. I left Protestantism behind in high school after I became sick of what I considered the "showiness" without substance. Then for a while I knew that I would either be Catholic or nothing--Catholicism being the religion my grandparents held, that my mother's generation left. By my point, rather than my personal spiritual journey, is to ask whether you notice any perceptable difference between Southern Catholics dealing with faith and Southern Protestants/Southern Protestant Evangelicals.
You're right that Percy and O'Connor were both Catholic, and they have been the by far the most prominent figures in criticism of religion in Southern literature. I have not set out to compare, in literature or among people I know, Southern Protestants and Catholics. My work on O'Connor has relied largely on her stated affinity for Evangelicals. That's a good question for which I don't have an answer. Perhaps Catholicism is viewed as more intellectual--there is a lot of conversion to Catholicism among Southern intellectuals--the ones famously concerned with defining the South, that is.
You know, I never really picked up on O'Conner's Catholicism from the very limited things I read by her. Yet she claimed a very strong connection between her faith and her writing. I don't know her work well, and all I've read by Percy is Lost in the Cosmos. Liked it though! I have a vague interest in Catholic writers, even those who have "renounced" Catholicism--you can take the writer out of the Church, but you can't take the Church out of the writer. (Ask Joyce!)
I do wonder about that intellectualism--I think Catholicism was/can be viewed as more intellectual--but why and by whom? One book I've read argues that the Church in America in the 1800s-early 1900s was decidedly backward & anti-intellectual, and that converts are responsible for its rejuvenation. If you ask many intellectuals, faith is by nature anti-intellectual. And I'm moving more into contemporary issues and out of the literary historical realm, but specific Church teachings are definitely seen as in opposition to intellectual trends.
Sorry for the tangent--not where you were going here, I know. But it is curious that the South should harbor so many Catholic intellectuals. Georgia didn't even have its own Catholic university until 2001!
Well, there is Louisiana (where Percy is from)....to answer the Catholic thing...
Well, there is Louisiana (where Percy is from)....to answer the Catholic thing...
Louisiana (where I am from) is split between the Catholic South and the Protestant North. Percy lived in the Southern part mostly, I think. But so did Faulkner and Tennessee Williams when they were there, and I'm not thinking of any examples of Catholicism creeping into their works. But as someone else said in a comment about religion in the South in general, Catholicism is "in the air" in New Orleans. However, it might be described as more of a cultural than religious thing, though there are plenty of practicing and non-practising Catholics, with devout Catholics in both categories.
The Catholic/Protestant divide in Louisiana is also indicative of the cultural divide in Louisiana--it comes down to who settled where. The ethnic makeup of Southern Louisiana is very different from the rest of the South--more French, and most of them not Hugenots. Northern Louisiana is like Southern Arkansas, or Western Mississippi, or East Texas (though parts of East Texas are like Western Louisiana!), whatever!
I think that changing how we view religion out of necessity is a point we all come to. We eventually choose what we need from our religions to get through day by day. I am certainly at that point. No longer fitting into the doctrine I was raised in, I found it hard to have God or religion in my life at all in the past seven years. It is tainted in my eyes. The governing powers of a church make me cringe. I spent too many years letting church officials tell me what to do and who to be without finding out for myself who I am. However, there are still pieces of detrimental influences left while I am striving to find God and personal relationship with him that I need. These feelings follow and “haunt” me while I am trying to change my view of religion for the better. I think "Christ-haunted" is very fitting.
MRF
Sometimes it is possible to find out who you are, and then realize that religion is a part of that whole--or should be. The haunting leads to something else, and you realize that some of your perceptions of control were perceptions. For a while, organized religion was distasteful to me because it seemed anti-intellectual, shallow, and showy. The Church I was drawn to--that resolved these other issues for me--seemed to want to *control* aspects of my life that I had convinced myself were mine and mine only. Eventually, I realized that I stood to gain more than I lost, and that identity was not necessarily centered on incidentals. Later I learned that I had not lost anything after all. So yes, everyone must come to a point at which they exchange their naive assumptions about religion, perhaps living without faith for a while, replacing it with something else--or nothing else. But maturity in faith can lead to unexpected conclusions--that the Church isn't out to get us after all, or that a personal relationship can make us a part of a community. These were revelations for me.
Post a Comment