Bible belting

“Gonna let it rock. Let it roll. Let the Bible belt come down and save my soul”
John Mellencamp ~ Jack and Diane

Although I really don’t want to get into soul-saving, the purpose of religion or anything too complicated, I would like to get on my soapbox for a little bit and talk about life in the Bible belt. It’s been over a year since we moved here, and to be honest, I am still amazed at some of the aspects of life down in the southern Bible belt. Before I go on though, please let me add a caveat, and that is that I’m not trying to criticize any aspect of Christian living, merely question the way it’s being expressed here in the south.

For starters, size really does matter in the US. For not only do we have a church on every street corner and at least two in between, most of these churches are absolutely gigantic. And I mean truly enormous. Maybe they’re not quite on a scale with St. Peter’s cathedral, but some of them could give the Notre Dame in Paris a run for its money. Some churches have their own streets, traffic lights, and I’m betting their own power stations too. Why do we need this many and this many enormous churches? I’ve been doing the math, and if every church in my neck of the woods is full during each service, then we either have about 5000 residents hidden away somewhere, or people go to church at least four times on a Sunday. And it seems that each day I see new signs popping up announcing that a plot of land is “the new location for the First Mount Zion United Baptist Church!”, or I discover another little bitty church hidden in between various strip malls and Walmarts.

And then there’s your language. Now I know you shouldn’t use foul language. And I don’t. Or at least not very often. But down here they take the concept of “foul language” to a whole new level. For one thing, you’re not supposed to say “swear”. Saying something like “I don’t ever swear” is absolutely verboten. You’re supposed to say “cuss”, because “curse” is also an absolute no-no. Apparently the Bible says so. Now I’m not one to challenge that, so I’ve merely made the note that there is to be no cussing whatsoever.
One constant problem is that the lines of acceptable and unacceptable language seem to be in constant motion. While last year, it seemed alright to say “crap”, most of my acquaintances have ousted that word, and are now using the synonym “crud”. I’ve tried, but you know what, I like the “p” at the end of “crap” way more than the “d” at the end of “crud”. Try it. Stub your toe, and try saying “crud”. It doesn’t feel as good, does it? Maybe I should introduce a word of my own, like “crup”. Yeah, “crup”. I like it.
But, and this is where it gets tricky, you’re also not supposed to say things like “oh my God”. Now for someone who harbors a valley girl deep inside of her, this is a tough one. It took me years to get rid of saying “like” all the time, and erasing “oh my God” from my vocabulary has been quite the challenge. I’ve tried to replace it with “Oh my gosh”, but it just does not have the same ring to it. And then the other day someone told me that “oh my gosh” is really unacceptable too since it’s too close to the original. This person suggested replacing the whole phrase with something even less offensive, like, sorry, I mean, such as “oh my stars”. Now you may call me a hard-headed, toe-stomping liberal, but that is where I draw the line. I would rather revert to using the definitely outdated “Oh my word” before I start saying that, or leave off the noun entirely and merely say “Oh my!”. Maybe I’ll buy some ruby slippers, start looking for the yellow brick road too then, and worry about lions and tigers and bears. Oh my.

And there are other small oddities about living in the Bible belt. For one thing, sometimes it seems that it’s easier to find a radio station that will go on and on about “living in sin” and “the devil’s grip on this country” than a station that will play classic rock. And I can’t even begin to describe the fun we sometimes have with the various signs that churches post on their front lawns or alongside the highway (For people into Allstate commercials: “Are you in God’s hands?”). Another oddity is the incredible obsession with marriage. In this part of the world, marriage isn’t so much a question of “Should I?”, but “When will I?”. People seem to get married as soon as it’s legal, and then, in some cases anyway, don’t shy away from trying it over and over again. Now I am in favor of marriage. I honestly like being married. And if you’ve found the one for you, I can highly recommend it. But I’m not too sure about the whole “marriage culture” that seems to revolve around the notion that marriage is the highest attainable thing in life, and something must be wrong with you if you’re not married. I mean, people here still shy away when they hear that husband-dear and I actually lived together before we got married. I didn’t realize how exhausting this gets until we were in Atlanta the other day, and someone actually asked us if we were married, as opposed to just assuming that we were, and I felt a strange sense of relief and familiarity. At last I had met someone like me!

And this last sentiment leads me to what got me started on this Bible belt critique in the first place: a news item on NPR this morning. The news item didn’t just stimulate me into thinking about life in the Bible belt, no, it actually sent me into a loud five minute rant about the craziness of some people around here. Imagine that it was around 7 o’clock this morning, that I was in the car by myself, had not yet finished all of my morning short of caffeine, and you can imagine how seriously I took this news event.

What happened was that the Medical College of Georgia decided to appeal to the Board of Regents to extend health insurance benefits to domestic partners. So how does that relate to the Bible belt? Well, the news broadcast also mentioned that two other state schools had, in the past, made similar requests, but had been turned down. And that’s when I got confused. Well, no, I shouldn’t lie. I wasn’t confused, I got mad. The state of Georgia thus appears to refuse to give the same rights to domestic partnerships as it does to marriage. Even if you’re been living with the same person for twenty years and have six children together, you apparently still don’t have as many rights as people who got married two weeks ago. For the third time. Whatever reason people have for this, it’s just not nice. And sometimes, when I’m at my most cynical, I secretly wonder if people here have forgotten that Jesus himself said that loving God isn’t all you need to do be a good Christian; loving your neighbor as you love yourself is just as much a part of it. It seems that people down have gotten the loving God part down without a problem, now how about we start implementing the rest?