Still Culturally a Protestant

During the last week, I have been watching and re-watching a video entitled Searching for the Wrong-Eyes Jesus. It is a documentary, produced by the BBC, about the Deep South. Much of the photo footage is about fundamentalist Protestant churches.

Because I was raised in conservative Protestant churches and perhaps because I have Scots-Irish ancestry, I feel a deep pull to the people appearing in the documentary even though people from different cultural backgrounds would no doubt regard them as semi-literate and uncultured. Most people would probably regard them as frightening. I feel this even though I was not raised in the South but in Florida, which is culturally not southern at all.

I love the passion, the sensuality, the risk-taking, the individualism of this kind of religion. It is a visceral attraction that moves me in a way that the Mass never will--even though I believe very much in the communion of saints and love many of the saints--the Blessed Mother, Anthony of Padua, St. Jude, and St. Therese especially.

I have enough education or intelligence or insight or whatever to doubt religion but not enough to escape it. Hence, I am torn between reason and faith, vacillating forever between skepticism and a kind of reserved faith. While watching this film, I longed for that total surrender to the irrational side of my nature that this kind of religion represents.

Think of Paul's words about the wisdom of God being revealed to the foolish. Perhaps in spite of all about this form of religious expression that is *gentuinely* frightening, there is a visceral wisdom. Fundamentalism survives when liberal Protestantism does not because the fundamentalists have an intuitive but accurate grasp of human nature and how to meet the needs of that nature.