The Praise Band to English Professor Pipeline

Exchanging My Equipment for a Living

I was recently searching for Kenneth Burke's essay "Literature as Equipment for Living" when, by some algorithmic accident, the results confronted me with memories of my teenage years as a born-again evangelical Christian. Seeking a clean copy of Burke to share with students, I stumbled on a very different title by a very different Kenneth. Atop the search results I saw a book by televangelist Kenneth E. Hagin. The Triumphant Church: Dominion Over All the Powers of Darkness, a treatise on what Hagin and his followers call "spiritual warfare," appeared where I expected to see The Philosophy of Literary Form. Through the coincidence of a single search term, I watched with fascination and horror as two iterations of myself that I sought to keep separate converged in a manner oddly fitting for this essay cluster on literature and the Christian Right.

As one might infer from my familiarity with Hagin, I didn't grow up as a mainline Protestant. I was raised in a "Word of Faith" community, attending three or more services a week at a suburban, predominantly white aspiring megachurch where we spoke in tongues, used faith to heal the sick, and named and claimed our freedom from all manner of physical, psychic, and even economic hardships as we cast cares upon the Lord (and tithes into repurposed paint cans). Nor was I dragged to church begrudgingly by my parents. I did not wrestle with my salvation the way John Grimes does on the "threshing floor" of James Baldwin's magnificent first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, a text that provides the most compelling fictional portrayals of Pentecostal worship I have ever read. No, my "church family" perceived me to be what pastors, youth leaders, and even other parents would applaud as a future "warrior for Christ."

I worked hard to sustain this godly reputation, not for the attention it brought but for the spiritual satisfaction it engendered. I was the drummer in the praise band, and nothing brought me more joy than settling into a syncopated rock groove in 4/4 time, kicking the band into its most dramatic key changes as the fire of the Holy Spirit fell upon the youth group sanctuary every Tuesday evening. Until I went to college, majoring in English, minoring in Philosophy, and taking a couple of illuminating Religious Studies courses, I assumed that this experience — landing a well-timed fill into the boisterous chorus of a praise song while the congregation shouted, danced in the aisles, and wept before the King of Kings — would always be the central fact of my life.

"There had never been a time when John had not sat watching the saints rejoice with terror in his heart, and wonder," Baldwin's narrator explains early in Go Tell It on the Mountain. "Their singing caused him to believe in the presence of the Lord; indeed, it was no longer a question of belief, because they made that presence real."1 When I first read this passage in Baldwin's debut novel, long after I had finally sloughed off the last remaining traces of my childhood fundamentalism, I struggled to suppress an "amen." Years had passed since my drumming with the praise band had "made that presence real," but this sense of God's presence is not so easily shed. As many ex-evangelicals emphasize, it's not really a question of flicking a switch from "yes, I believe" to "no, I don't." 2 When that "presence" is what nourished you through a tumultuous childhood even as it prompted you to ignore your doubts in order to stay faithful to your community, a community that provided a sense of belonging while simultaneously giving refuge to an abusive parent and endorsing the kind of theocratic politics that would erupt at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, your relationship to that "presence" remains complicated long after you have moved on with your life. "The church was very exciting," Baldwin writes in The Fire Next Time. "It took a long time for me to disengage myself from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will."3 Amen.

Since I can safely assume that most Post45 readers are more familiar with Kenneth Burke than with Kenneth Hagin, a brief introduction to Hagin's "Word of Faith" movement may be necessary.4 My family's church in Pennsylvania was led by a pastor who had attended Rhema Bible Training Center in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, the ministry school founded by Hagin himself. A revivalist with an affinity for the TV camera, cut from the same cloth as yet another infamous Kenneth (Copeland), Hagin wove several of the Christian Right's disparate strands into a single thread. Imagine a movement that fuses the ecstatic energies and apocalyptic imagination of traditional Pentecostalism, the cultural politics of the most reactionary Southern Baptists, the health and wealth prosperity message of Jim Bakker or Joel Osteen, the "Jesus was a tough guy" machismo of the sort recently documented by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and an obsession with policing teenagers' sexuality, often called "purity culture," which attempted to rebrand the backlash against the sexual revolution as countercultural and trendy, and you will have a general idea of the world I was immersed in.5 Until my early twenties, this was for me the one true faith, with no alternatives in sight.

Of the untold thousands who have "emptied the pews" in recent decades, more than a few have taken their talents in textual analysis to the professorate.6 Michael Warner, the most prolific literature scholar to have written about a religious upbringing similar to my own, describes his own transformation this way: "For us who once were found and now are lost — and we are legion — our other lives pose some curious problems." He continues, explaining that according to "the religious vantage of my childhood and adolescence, I am one of Satan's agents," but according to "my current vantage, that former self was exotically superstitious." Yet just as I found something oddly fitting about the juxtaposition of The Triumphant Church and The Philosophy of Literary Form in my search results, Warner suggests that the habit of narrating a purely "negative" relationship between "our once and present selves" might not be entirely reliable. "I distrust both of these views of myself as the other," he observes.7 And once I overcame the shock of seeing Hagin mingling with Burke on my laptop screen, I began to wonder if I too should distrust my sense of a bifurcated self.

How much of the literature scholar searching for a book by Burke had grown out of the childhood spent in a church inspired by Hagin? What, if anything, might the path between my "once and present selves" suggest about the role of literary criticism in grappling with the incredible danger — the looming threat, I believe I can say without exaggeration, of a Christo-fascist theocracy in the United States of America — that confronts us today? Could the peculiar praise band to English professor pipeline I followed alert us to anything beyond the fact that, as Paul writes to the Corinthians, "when I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways"?8

Reading Octavia Butler in the End Times

No one anticipates the looming threat of a Christo-fascist theocracy in the United States of America quite like Octavia Butler, especially in her prescient Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents novels. Before I turn to Butler's fiction in order to reflect on what literary studies can contribute to our present predicament, however, I want to give readers a taste of Hagin's The Triumphant Church, a book that turns out to be as representative as any for grasping the nexus of aesthetic education, ethical formation, and political organization that underpins much of the Christian Right. While The Triumphant Church presents many of the familiar themes of Dominionist evangelical writing, its quasi-therapeutic approach to "spiritual warfare," which translates spiritual self-care into political mobilization, offers an illuminating inversion of the patterns I wish to highlight in Butler's fiction.9

"Believers are seated with Christ in heavenly places," Hagin's book begins, "far above all powers and principalities of darkness." He elaborates, explaining that "[w]hether or not believers are victorious over the devil depends on what view they have of themselves as the Church — militant, defeated, or triumphant." To be a "triumphant Church," for Hagin, is to be "a Body of believers who not only know but exercise their authority in Christ and therefore reign victoriously in life" (emphasis original). Such "reigning victoriously" is crucial, he contends, during "this age when demon activity is increasing around the world."10 Reading this preliminary discussion of "authority in Christ," one might assume that The Triumphant Church will sketch a roadmap for theocratic Christian dominion in worldly affairs. Instead, what follows is several hundred pages of spiritual self-help, most of which trains its readers to be alert to how and where they direct their attention. Hagin's supernaturally infused pop-psychology offers its readers a programmatic means of training their attention akin to what the other Kenneth, Kenneth Burke, calls "equipment for living."11 For Hagin, the objects of your attention fuel the spiritual and moral character of your actions, and, cultivated properly, the actions of all believers culminate in a church whose members live the victorious lives that Jesus has already made available, or not. Yet the object of Hagin's "triumphant church" is not solely the individual discipleship and subsequent prosperity that the book emphasizes. Indeed, both the book and the hundreds of Rhema churches Hagin helped to plant worldwide expound a vision of the church that "rules and reigns" triumphantly over what many evangelicals call "the world" — that is, over anyone who does not submit to that particular type of church's authority. The lesson boils down to something like this: do you want to pave the way for God to exercise his authority via your church in this sinful, perplexing world? Then, as the nursery rhyme I learned as a small child in Sunday School admonishes: "be careful, little eyes, what you see."

To witness the conservative evangelical church "triumphant" in an even starker light, we can turn from Hagin's advice to Octavia Butler's Parable novels, which depict a version of the United States in the throes of an apocalypse more germane to our not-so-distant future. Set in a doomsday vision of the mid-2020s where the runaway climate crisis renders Southern California uninhabitable, where racial capitalism has turned everyday life into a harrowing struggle for bare existence, and where slavery has returned to America under the guise of exploitative company towns, the novels provide a speculative account of what surviving the mutually reinforcing catastrophes of climate change and theocratic fascism might entail. In Parable of the Talents, a particularly resonant fusing of religion and politics emerges under President Andrew Jarrett's "Christian America" party, which has risen to power with the help of an eerily familiar campaign slogan, one that harkens back to Reagan and anticipates Trump: "Make America Great Again."12

Despite the vast ideological gulf separating Octavia E. Butler from Kenneth E. Hagin, Butler's Parable novels likewise depict a relationship among the aesthetic (one's attention to and arrangement of objects of consciousness), the ethical (one's basis for acting and evaluating the moral character of one's behavior), and the political (one's participation in a community's conflict or cooperation over legitimacy, power, and resources) not dissimilar to the path from "the person's thoughts" to the "triumphant church" implied throughout Hagin's teachings.13 In Butler's novels, both the "Christian America" paramilitary shock troops who imprison and torture the protagonists of Parable of the Talents and the "Earthseed" community founded in Parable of the Sower by Lauren Olamina recognize that attention shapes behavior which, extrapolated across a community, builds power and sustains legitimacy. Both the reactionary Christian nationalism of Jarrett's party, which urges purification by leaving one's "sinful past behind," and the syncretic spirituality of Earthseed, which enjoins its adherents to "Shape God," begin with patterns of "repetition and response" which bind individuals to communities that serve as a kind of poetics or, as Burke would have it, an "equipment for living," through seemingly unlivable geopolitical and ecological upheaval.14

That both the heterodoxy espoused by Earthseed and the fundamentalism marshalled by Christian America serve Butler's characters as "equipment for living" amid climate catastrophe becomes particularly clear during a pivotal scene in Parable of the Talents. In this scene, Lauren explains Earthseed to her brother, Marcos, who had been a Christian pastor before enduring "the loss of two families, then . . . prostitution and slavery" while Lauren and her followers were escaping North. "I hesitated," Lauren recalls, "wondering how much he still believed in religion as our father had taught it to us. . . . Had his religion given him hope, or had it withered and fallen away when his God did not rescue him?" After explaining that she is a "Shaper" of Earthseed, a leader of "that cult," as Marcus exclaims, Lauren insists that she "didn't make it up," but that it emerged as "a collection of truths" from "something I had been thinking about since I was 12." Pushing back against Marcus's charge that she "made Earthseed up," Lauren insists that "the truths of Earthseed existed somewhere before I found them and put them together. They were in the patterns of history, in science, philosophy, religion, or literature."15

Neither an invention of the new nor a dismantling of the old but, instead, a patterning, or, in Earthseed's language, a shaping of truths already given, Lauren's faith strives to give form to the objects of attention and perception — the scattershot "collection of truths" one gathers from a lifetime of learning and experience — in order to guide the Earthseed community toward a collective "Destiny" (179). Or, more accurately, it teaches practitioners how to discern form already given but nonetheless infinitely malleable, since, according to Earthseed's first principle, "All that you touch / You Change."16 Hagin's version of this axiom purports that whatever you happen to be "feeding into [your] mind" can derail your life by enabling nefarious spiritual forces to meddle with your desires and scramble your moral compass, a warning that reinforces Word of Faith believers' confirmation bias in favor of their church's teachings.17 By contrast, the relationship between "touch" and "Change" in Earthseed is a material one, immanent to the relationship between perceiver and perceived. In the same novels where Butler critically anticipates the leading role played by the Christian Right in the neofascism of today's MAGA movement, she also offers what Sedgwick might have called a "reparative" means of responding to its threat, not by mustering the full repertoire of critique against Christian America's campaigns of disinformation and manipulation, but by forging attachments. In the face of an encroaching Christian nationalism, the Earthseed community cultivates texts, rituals, and relationships that offer "equipment for living," not in more sophisticated analyses of the novel's MAGA theocracy but in striving "to cultivate deeper modes of life" through which they might draw "sustenance from the objects . . . of a culture whose avowed desire has often not been to sustain them."18 And it is in precisely such a spirit that Lauren Olamina, writing the journal entries that bear witness to the violence inflicted upon Earthseed's Acorn community by Christian America vigilantes in Parable of the Talents, uses her Bible, not as dogma, but "as a desk."19

Aesthetic Education as a Practice of Discernment

A decade or so after leaving a movement that serves as a vanguard of the Christian Right, I find myself wondering how the critical methods I learned as a student of literature, the discipline of close reading I developed alongside broad and deep knowledge of histories and cultures unlike the one I grew up in, helped me to escape from such a totalizing worldview. How did studying literature in my early twenties provide the supplement I needed to synthesize the many personal and political misgivings that I was starting to feel without recognizing, to know without naming? Such misgivings, after all, could easily have been explained away, using Hagin's language, as the product of spiritual warfare, an attempt of the devil to waylay me on the path to righteousness. Studying literature "saved me from the Christian Right," but it did so not in the heroic way one imagines, say, a firefighter dragging someone from a burning building.20  A better analogy might be the way water and sunlight enable plants to emerge from the soil where seeds have fallen. Sunlight, however, can be excruciating to one who has long been submerged. How does the still, small voice of nagging doubt, easily dismissed as a passing mood or a tactic of the devil, gradually bloom into the complete transformation of one's life, a transformation that leads one to "empty the pews" of an especially authoritarian evangelicalism?

It began, as church leaders and relatives warned it would, when I was a college student. Still committed to my childhood faith yet inundated by questions I had long felt but rarely, if ever, found the courage to face, I began to read widely across literature, philosophy, and religious studies. What this education provided was not a direct challenge to what we used to call my "biblical worldview" but, instead, a growing capacity to acknowledge, accept, and sit patiently and attentively (if uncomfortably) with the misgivings that, like John Grimes's memory of the swinging and swaying congregation in Baldwin's novel, had been germinating in me for as long as I could remember. For doubt, like faith, begins at approximately the size of a mustard seed, starting out as "the smallest of all the seeds" until, in time, it "becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches."21

Ultimately, it was a broad but fairly straightforward and decidedly non-elite humanities education that served to water both the misgivings and the desires that had lain dormant in me long before I had ever so much as met anyone who was not, like me, a heavily sheltered born-again evangelical Christian. How did close reading, the pillar of what is often dismissed as a methodologically conservative formalism, produce such radically transformative effects? I think it has something to do with the fact that the "discipline" of close reading, as Michael Clune has recently argued, "functions as a kind of negative capability, as a means of countering projection, enabling us to see anew."22 Learning how to read patiently and attentively while actively "countering projection," striving to discern what was actually in the text instead of what I expected or wanted to find there, made it possible for me to take my own doubts and misgivings seriously. I learned to see the questions that emerged as I read the Bible, listened to sermons, and weighed many of my church's teachings not as tricks of the devil to be resisted but as genuine insights that I could no longer afford to ignore.

"Do not be conformed to this age," we read in Paul's epistle to the Romans, "but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God."23 One of the more pernicious ways in which many segments of the Christian Right have employed this bit of scripture is to provide themselves with biblical justification for the formation and policing of echo chambers. Unlike an "epistemic bubble" wherein "relevant voices have been excluded by omission," an "echo chamber" emerges within a community where "other relevant voices have been actively discredited," as C. Thi Nguyen explains. "The way to break an echo chamber," Nguyen continues, "is not to wave 'the facts' in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust."24 When I learned to read literature closely and carefully, supplementing that study with valuable coursework in philosophy, religious studies, and literary theory, I began to emerge from the echo chamber I had been born into. I escaped, not because one of the godless, liberal professors my church warned me about had finally gotten through to me. Thank goodness, none of them tried. Instead, the methods and habits I learned in their courses helped me to "repair . . . broken trust" with my own capacities of discernment. As that trust gradually repaired, my mind was renewed, and I began to face my own questions without filtering them through the echo chamber of the Christian Right.

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Ray Horton (@RayHorton814) is Assistant Professor of English at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky and served as President of the American Religion and Literature Society from 2016-2019. His articles have appeared in Christianity & Literature, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, and PMLA, and his book manuscript in progress is titled American Fiction's Secular Faith.

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