High Mountains Rising (37 page)

Finally, the period 1960–2000 bore witness to an increase in the number of serious dramatic works about Appalachia. Recognizing the shortcomings of previous efforts to depict Appalachian culture dramatically (mostly in outdoor dramas), playwrights from the region—including Wheeler, Gary Carden, Jo Carson, and Victor Depta—in the last few decades have written plays that are more sophisticated and less stereotyped. One nonnative playwright, Romulus Linney, has directly confronted regional stereotypes in such dramatic works as
Why the Lord Came to Sand Mountain
(1984) and
Mountain Memory
(1997). The most controversial drama written about Appalachia is undoubtedly
The Kentucky Cycle
by Robert Schenkkan (1993); though receiving wide acclaim from outside the region (including the Pulitzer Prize for drama),
The Kentucky Cycle
was criticized by Appalachian studies scholars for what they deemed to be a negative, stereotyped portrayal of Appalachian people.

By the 1990s and continuing after the year 2000, while other genres of regional writing were receiving attention in more restricted literary circles, Appalachian fiction was reaching the national best-seller lists. Such fictional works—almost all novels rather than short story collections—included Charles Frazier's
Cold Mountain
(1997), Robert Morgan's
Gap Creek
(1999), Barbara Kingsolver's
Prodigal Summer
(2000), Silas House's
Clay's Quilt
(2001), and several works each by Sharyn McCrumb, Lee Smith, and Jan Karon. Some of these novels won prestigious literary awards
(Cold Mountain
, for instance, won the National Book Award), and others among these novels—Karon's “The Mitford Years” series, for example—hold little pretense of being anything other than popular page-turners.

With Appalachian literature gaining mainstream status nationally, it remains to be seen whether future writings about the region or by Appalachian natives will retain the regional distinctiveness of works already part of the Appalachian literary canon. Significantly, whereas his 1977 article did not forecast the remarkable diversification of Appalachian literature in subsequent decades, in “A People Waking Up: Appalachian Literature Since 1960” (1990), Miller not only anticipated increasing national interest in Appalachian literature by the 1990s but also provided insightful analysis to make sense of that growing popularity.

Despite the implication of its title, Miller's 1990 article was less a survey of the region's literature since 1960 than a philosophical discussion of literary regionalism and its present-day manifestations. Exhibiting skepticism toward the current national embrace of “Appalachian” literature, Miller wrote, “What happened in the late 19th century [i.e., the local color movement] is happening again, and for much the same reasons. Much contemporary ‘regional' writing is a packaging of ‘otherness' and traditional
culture for a mass audience outside the region.”
⁶
Miller's historically grounded, skeptical approach to studying regional literature might well serve as an ideal model for future scholarly efforts to assess and interpret literary works from or about the region.

NOTES

1.
Jim Wayne Miller, “Appalachian Literature,”
Appalachian Journal
(Special issue: “A Guide to Appalachian Studies”) 5:1 (Autumn 1977): 89.

2.
Ibid., 86.

3.
W.D. Weatherford and Wilma Dykeman, “Literature since 1900,” in
The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey
, ed. Thomas R. Ford (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1962), 260–61.

4.
Robert J. Higgs and Ambrose N. Manning, eds.,
Voices from the Hills: Selected Readings of Southern Appalachia
(New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975), xvii.

5.
Ibid., xix.

6.
Jim Wayne Miller, “A People Waking Up: Appalachian Literature since 1960,” in
The Cratis Williams Symposium Proceedings: A Memorial and Examination of the State of Regional Studies in Appalachia
(Boone, N.C.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1990), 61.

13

Religion

Deborah Vansau McCauley

Religion in Appalachia is as diverse as the landscape it encompasses. In the region's cities and county seats one can find followers of most any faith practiced in the United States, from American Baptist to Bahai to Antiochian Orthodox to Zen Buddhist, with at least a bit of every flavor in between. Yet Appalachia has been targeted by most mainline Christian denominations as home mission territory, primarily in the expanses of its rural areas, where its people have been deemed largely “unchurched.” That is because Appalachia is also characterized by a distinctive, regionally specific religious tradition to which its “unchurched” people give life.

Appalachia's regional religious tradition is a uniquely American creation, a product of history, geography, and spirituality. This regional tradition has tended to affect the churches created by home missionaries to Appalachia as much as or more than the missionaries' denominational traditions have affected the many mountain church traditions and religious cultures. There may be a Methodist church in every county of the United States, yet there are United Methodist Churches in Appalachia that would confound non-Appalachian Methodists. Velvet tapestries with the face of Jesus or Leonardo's
Last Supper
and blackboards with credal statements chalked on them may occupy the front wall of the sanctuary. Footwashing and “sacrament” (communion) may occur during the New Year's Eve watch night service, and baptism may take place at a nearby river or creek “in living waters” (a common and old expression). Many Appalachian religious practices are not shed by those joining a mainline denomination. These practices are too powerful in their meaning and have too long-standing a history to be put aside for newer, locally untried practices.

The majority of faithful in Appalachia's nonurban areas classify themselves as Christian and claim either Baptist or Holiness Pentecostal as their church tradition. This has been true since the nineteenth century and continues today. These church traditions are not frozen in time, nor are they fading away. Even in the twenty-first century, despite changing demo
graphics and a new level of “worldliness” settling on the most recent generation of young Appalachians through influences such as strip malls and satellite TV, these church traditions are vibrantly alive and adapting in their ongoing development. They remain very recognizable in the essential features that have characterized them as special and unique, or at least distinctive, to the mountain regions of Appalachia.

The principal reason for this resilience and flexibility has to do with the dynamics of mountain church traditions' organizational frameworks as changes are needed over time and place. Mountain church traditions are not grounded in the institutional structures and confines of denominationalism that characterize Roman Catholicism and the churches of America's Protestant mainstream, such as the Presbyterians and Lutherans, Episcopalians and the United Methodist Church, Reformed Church in America, the American Baptist Church and Southern Baptist Convention, United Church of Christ or Congregationalists, and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), to name some of the better known with a greater national presence. Nor are they grounded in the same types of structures as the national Holiness and Pentecostal denominations such as the Church of the Nazarene and the Assemblies of God.

Instead, mountain church traditions function primarily at the subdenominational and independent, nondenominational levels. They have no national organizational bodies or even regional structures of oversight. For Baptist groups in particular, oversight is at the subregional levels of gatherings of churches called associations. For Appalachia's Holiness Pentecostal churches, most often these communities of worship stand either entirely independently or only very loosely associated with a small gathering of others with little real oversight, if any at all. An expression stemming from the nineteenth century and still common among churches in Appalachia affirms, “Each church holds the key to its own door.”

What, then, distinguishes Appalachia's more rural Baptist and Holiness Pentecostal churches from churches that are better known on America's religious landscapes, especially those that are found less in Appalachia's countryside than in its cities, larger towns, and county seats? Churches with a national identity, located in Appalachia's population centers, are categorized as denominations and are listed under “Churches” in the Yellow Pages of telephone directories and in the weekly “Places of Worship” lists in local newspapers. They are counted in census reports at the local, state, and national levels. Because they are publicly visible in this way—and because they are registered with and regulated by federal, state, and local agencies as tax-exempt, not-for-profit organizations—they seem to matter more and be of greater consequence than Appalachia's subdenominational and
independent, nondenominational churches. These small churches are not listed in phone books or newspapers or counted in census reports. Many view them as though they hardly exist or are so few, with so little influence on the larger community, that they must be insignificant not only in the United States but in Appalachia, where they are regionally “peculiar” (a common descriptor).

Because of their limited subregional associational systems, Appalachia's Baptist churches using this form of governance may be described as subdenominational. Because most Holiness Pentecostal churches are unassociated formally or informally with any other churches but are independent, they may be described as nondenominational. Many inaccurately call these same churches sects because they do not define themselves through denomination categories. Use of the term
sect
activates assumptions about a value-loaded church-sect typology.
¹
This typology places America's denominations in the positive category of “churches” and Appalachia's regional church traditions in the negative category of “sects.”

People who make up these mountain church traditions have been historically, and are today, considered by many outside Appalachia to be demographically among the “unchurched.” Many urban, small city, and county seat Appalachian Christians of the Protestant mainstream also share this notion about those who worship in Appalachia's distinctive and largely rural Baptist and Holiness Pentecostal churches. The reasons for this way of thinking are lodged in people's preferences for or identification with the dominant national culture over the realities of the local regional culture, especially in matters of religion, values, and worldview. More directly, preferences and identification lie with a sense of greater influence, power, and prestige, compensating in part for what many perceive to be the stigma of Appalachia's status deprivation, what Jack Weller so famously described in
Yesterday's People
(1965), especially with regard to Appalachia's “fatalistic” religious life and cultures, a characteristic commonly and historically ascribed.
²
Other observers have since considered mountain religion as embracing not fatalism but a hope-infused, situational realism.
³

Can we get in better focus the cultures of Appalachia's outlying, more rural Baptist and Holiness Pentecostal churches? Do they have names? Do they have similarities? What distinguishes them? Appalachia's more rural Baptist churches often go by the collective term “Old Time Baptist.”
⁴
Their traditions carry a variety of names such as “Primitive Baptists,” “Primitive Baptist Universalists,” “Regular” and “Old Regular Baptists,” “Regular Predestinarian,” “Regular Primitive,” “United Baptists,” “Separate Baptists in Christ,” and “Free Will” or “Freewill Baptists” (not from the same origins as New England's better-known Free Will Baptists), to name several but by
no means all. None of these church traditions exists outside the region today except through out-migration; they hark back to Appalachia's earliest years of settlement. They are not few but many. All of them embrace a form of Calvinism emphasizing grace and the Holy Spirit that expresses itself through tender, heartfelt worship practices. It places first God's initiative followed by human cooperation, and it maintains salvation as something looked for not as a certainty through being “born again” but as “a sweet hope in my breast.”
⁵

Mountain people's Calvinistic emphases and understandings separated them from the theological developments of the nation's dominant religious culture by the second decade of the nineteenth century, including a clear separation from the Southern Baptist Convention over disagreements about theology, missions, and an intrusive hierarchical institutionalism when it formed in 1845. By that time, for the churches of America's Protestant mainstream, salvation had become more a matter of works righteousness, and with it a belief in human initiative and God's cooperation. This was summed up in an understanding of the experience of salvation as one in which individuals can initiate a personal, rational “decision for Christ.”