Religion - Part One of a Conflicted and Contradictory Series

i grew up in eastern kentucky, a land peopled with interesting and fascinating characters that you'd never find anywhere else in the entire country. the culture is clannish, mecurial, hard-drinking, and poor. they also love jesus christ as their lord and savior. they are, despite the high level of sin -- drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, divorce, alcoholism, etc -- god-fearing people.

when i say they are a religious people, i mean that practically half of all households have a metal patina wall-hanging of jesus on the cross, his eyes turned upwards at heaven in pain and suffering, but also masochistic ecstacy. some of this things have elaborate faux baroque frames, so the whole effect is something like a hodge podge of styles ranging from medieval illuminated drawings to elements of those florid late fifteenth century religious paintings, complete with their bomb-ass mega frames.

i guess it's something of a hold-over from the old world and colonial america. historically, the population has been rather isolated, and a lot of people can trace their lineage back to at least the early 1700s. every church i was forced to attend in my childhood used the king james version of the bible. i knew kids at school who didn't bother to do any assigned reading for class, but had read most of the bible.

bible school in appalachia is no joke. seriously. they make little kids read the king james bible. however, the teachers *do* go out of their way to really make it easy for them. they're armed with a whole bunch of religious educational tools specifically designed to help teach the bible to kids.

i remember they had tons of visual aids. in particular, they often had an entire library of these felt cutout figures of people from the bible, each one complete with little props like some sheep, a staff, and a selection of robes. they could be stuck to a special board as a way to illustrate particular stories in the bible.

even if the public school system sucks, any kid from even a moderately religious household would learn how to read if they parents made them attend bible school. in some churches, it was practically a requirement that the younger children go to bible school while their parents attended services. services themselves lasted for several hours in at least one church where my mom dragged me and my sister.

going to church was an all day event for that congregation. people got there by nine in the morning. they jawboned for about half an hour. then the little kids were shuttled off to bible school while the adults sat down for a three hour screaming rant. of course, they had breaks of 15 minutes every now and then while the collection plate was passed around.

there was no thought of making a whole bunch of kids sit quietly through that. i hardly think anything short of a threat of death would have ensured that not one child would have fidgeted, whined, cried, or otherwise made a nuisance of themselves.

the adults themselves needed to take breaks because that building got blistering hot in the summer, and that's a shitty deal when you're all dressed up in your sunday best. people needed to take smoke breaks, stretch their legs, go to the bathroom, and otherwise digest the fire and brimstone in manageable chunks.

the preacher usually covered several topics, so the whole affair could be broken into smaller pieces. meanwhile, the kids read sections of the bible aloud to each other while the teacher helped with comprehension using those endless props. i think that nowadays, if this church still exists, they would probably use those children's bibles.

back then, the teacher used to pose hypothetical ethical dilemmas to discuss. these too often came from religious educational tools designed to help children understand the basic moral tenets -- don't lie, don't steal, don't cheat -- basically how to weigh actions such that one takes them with good moral intentions and for good moral reasons.

if these kids never read anything else in their life besides magazines and newspapers, they knew the bible inside and out as long they continued to attend church later in their lives. for a lot of people, i think the bible is pretty much the only seriously challenging thing they've ever read. where i grew up, everyone was either modestly lower middle class or dirt poor. all those blue collar workers and stay at home moms were very quick and studied readers of that book, but often not much else.

in some ways, given that the version in question is the king james bible, the literary challenge of that is like trying to attack shakespeare's entire body of works. i don't mean just to read them carefully through once -- but repeatedly throughout one's life. anyone who attends school to become a preacher would not only have to intensely study every last word of the bible itself, but they would have to devour an entire body of religious philosophy -- which is also an intellectually challenging task.

even though i stopped going to church after i was ten or eleven, i remember being able to recite at length entire sections of the bible. i knew the details of most of the major stories and a fair number of more obscure stories. so, i understand why mel gibson's jesus flick is so damnedly popular.

what makes the popularity of this movie even easier to understand is that in about half of the households diplaying the metal patina crucifixtion scene, there was a velvet elvis painting and a velvet john wayne painting on either side.