America’s spiritual landscape is as expansive as a hypermarket,
and its consumer choice just as intoxicating. Douglas Kennedy,
equipped with a Ford Mustang and notebook, visits its backwaters
in the deep South in order to gain first-hand insight into the
religious culture of the Bible Belt. This book contains no grand
historical sweep of America’s spiritual development, neither does
it attempt to place the writer’s experience within a broader social
context, and In God’s Country succeeds and fails for those very
reasons.
It is the individual citizen that Kennedy is interested in, and
the book is packed with fascinating encounters. These range from
the mildly amusing to the faintly disturbing (although many of
the characters can provoke both reactions) and at times the stories
they tell, with voices that fight to explain ‘away’ the paradoxes
inherent in religious conviction in this most unashamedly materialistic
society, are poignant in their naiveté and conviction.
We meet Sheila, corporate woman by day, exorcist by night; Carman,
the musician from Nashville with the ‘intensified desire to make
an eternal impact’; and Wally, self-styled missionary of the radio
waves on Florida’s very own Grace FM, among many others.
Occasionally, and despite all the best intentions of neutrality,
Kennedy cannot help sniggering at these characters, and although
the superficiality of many aspects of America’s religious market
is deserving of this treatment the book does suffer from confusion
as to the seriousness of its subject. The characters are at their
best when they speak for themselves rather than when they are
described by the writer, and Kennedy’s self-imposed detachment
comes across in a tone which prevents the reader from a closer
examination of his subjects: ‘One by one, the disappointed of
Lakeland were slain in the spirit and collapsed… I decided
it was time for a beer.’ This, combined with some passages of
decidedly lethargic naturalism: ‘She was only 25 – a slightly
chunky doctor’s receptionist who was pleasantly attractive in
that wholesome sort of way which is unashamedly American’, serve
to blunt some of the impact of this travelogue.
In the latter chapters Kennedy spends some time examining large-scale
religious institutions. He visits Jim and Tammy Bakker’s Heritage
USA Christian theme park (complete with Heavenly Fudge Shoppe
and Heaven Scent Perfumery), John Hopkins University (where the
students all wear brown 1940s suits and attend dating ‘parlours’)
and, lastly, the State Correctional Facility in Carolina (where
the preacher on Death Row is an ex-convict and one-time murderer).
Kennedy should have spent more time here, for it is on Death Row
that the sniggering stops, and here where the bewildering mindset
of American Christianity finds perhaps its most paradoxical expression.
While sitting in on a service at Death Row’s chapel, he writes:
‘To hear a group of condemned men sing those lyrics [Swing
Lo, Sweet Chariot] was to be rendered inarticulate’. It is
perhaps the most fitting end to a book so full of strangely empty
words.
Reviewed by Simon Peters
