Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church 1st Edition

Critical acclaim for James Ault’s Spirit and Flesh

“A unique contribution to the study of American religion….the best single-volume explanation of why American fundamentalist Christianity thrives among certain people, what needs it fulfills and why it will not die out.”
—Mark Oppenheimer in The Washington Post Book World

“This ethnographic study of working-class Christians is not just a first-rate piece of sociological journalism. Ault weaves his own story into the book, and the gradual coming together of the Harvard graduate and his fundamentalist research subjects gives Spirit and Flesh a warmth and humanity that set it apart.”
—Don Lattin in The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"This brilliant book is essential for anyone who wants to better understand fundamentalism—or for fundamentalists who desire to understand how they are viewed by others."
—Cindy Crosby in Christianity Today

“ One of the maladies of contemporary American politics is its descent into incivility….Spirit and Flesh calls this politics to task, challenging all of us ‘to listen more patiently, carefully, intelligently—even generously—to our
opponents.' Can somebody say amen?”
—Stephen Prothero in The New York Times Book Review

“This extraordinary book….an insightful look at some of America’s most conservative Christians and helps explain why the new Christian right has moved into the mainstream of American politics.”
—Elizabeth Bennett in The Houston Chronicle

“An absorbing, groundbreaking, and intimate tale….an ethnographic study that often reads like a novel.”
—Jane Lampman in Christian Science Monitor

“ Ault masterfully combines narrative with careful, and frequently groundbreaking, analysis….what is most striking is the way Ault brings his whole person, not just his capacity for insightful abstraction, into the story….required reading for anyone who would understand America’s most conservative Christians.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Advance praise

“It is vital that we learn to see fundamentalists in all traditions as vulnerable human beings like ourselves. If we simply dismiss them as either evil or hopelessly irrational, we contribute to the polarization that is putting us all in such deadly peril. James Ault has traced his own journey from disbelief to understanding and will take his readers with him. This book has made an important contribution to one of the greatest problems facing the world today.”
—Karen Armstrong, author of The Battle for God
 
“I was swept into Ault’s absorbing narrative right away. The book is a superb combination, a sympathetic portrayal of real people involved in a fundamentalist Baptist Church woven together with a well-informed portrayal of an increasingly important element in the religious and political life of America. His brave and courageous inclusion of his own journey as he worked on this project deepens and enriches the story.”
–Harvey Cox, author of Fire From Heaven
 
“Ault is a masterful participant observer who acquires a sympathy for this movement’s basic beliefs while retaining a scholar’s analytical eye. A community study that reads like a novel (with a surprise ending), Spirit and Flesh is a remarkable American story.”
–Joel Carpenter, author of Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American
Fundamentalism
 
“Compelling for its intimate portrayal of the men and women and valuable for its insights into the larger culture of Christian fundamentalism. This book takes readers into a world far beyond the common stereotypes.”
–Gustav Niebuhr, Correspondent and Associate Professor of Religion and Media Syracuse University

In an attempt to understand the growing influence of the Christian Right, sociologist and documentary filmmaker James Ault spent three years inside the world of a Massachusetts fundamentalist church he encountered while studying a variety of new-right groups. He observed―and where possible participated in―the daily lives of the members of a church he calls Shawmut River. His book takes us into worship services, home Bible studies, youth events, men’s prayer breakfasts and Saturday work groups, after-Sunday-service family dinners, and bitter conflicts leading to a church split. He introduces us to the principal members of the congregation, as well as its shadow community of ex-members. We see how they respond to each other, to Ault as an unsaved newcomer, and to the outside world.<br><br>Ault draws our attention to how members use the Bible as a “handbook for life,” applying moral absolutes taken from it, more or less successfully, to both daily life and extraordinary events. We see how the congregation deals with issues around marriage, adultery, divorce, teenage pregnancy, and alcohol abuse. Ault makes clear how the church, embodying traditional extended-family life, provides the security of like-mindedness and community to its members. He also reveals the pervasive power of gossip to engender and perpetuate divisions and conflicts within a community. And finally, Ault describes his own surprising journey of discovery, revelation, and belief during, and in the wake of, his three years studying Shawmut River and making an intimate documentary about it.<br><br>Having experienced its life personally and in depth, James Ault is remarkably placed to guide us through the world of Christian fundamentalism―an abiding and, to many Americans, baffling phenomenon. In the course of telling his story, he builds a useful framework for better understanding the popular sources of both fundamentalism and new-right conservatism and their distinctive place in American life.

"It is vital that we learn to see fundamentalists in all traditions as vulnerable human beings like ourselves. If we simply dismiss them as either evil or hopelessly irrational, we contribute to the polarization that is putting us all in such deadly peril. James Ault has traced his own journey from hostility to understanding, and will take his readers with him. This book has made an important contribution to one of the greatest problems facing the world today."
- Karen Armstrong, author of The Battle for God

"I was swept into Ault's absorbing narrative right away. The book is a superb combination, a sympathetic portrayal of real people involved in a fundamentalist Baptist Church woven together with a well-informed portrayal of an increasingly important element in the religious and political life of America. His brave and courageous inclusion of his own journey as he worked on this project deepens and enriches the story."
- Harvey Cox, author of Fire From Heaven

"Ault is a masterful participant observer who acquires a sympathy for this movement's basic beliefs while retaining a scholar's analytical eye. A community study that reads like a novel (with a surprise ending), Spirit and Flesh is a remarkable American story."
- Joel Carpenter, author of Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American
Fundamentalism

"Compelling for its intimate portrayal of the men and women and valuable for its insights into the larger culture of Christian fundamentalism. This book takes readers into a world far beyond the common stereotypes."
- Gustav Niebuhr, Correspondent and Associate Professor of Religion and Media Syracuse University

James M. Ault, Jr. was educated at Harvard and Brandeis universities. After teaching at Harvard and at Smith College, he made his first film, Born Again, a portrait of this fundamentalist Baptist congregation, which won a Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival and was broadcast in the United States and abroad in 1987. He has since produced and directed a variety of documentary programs for the Lilly Endowment, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Episcopal Church Foundation, and other organizations. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Meeting

You're either for God or against him.

I remember trying to muster the courage to first pick up the telephone to call the Reverend Frank Valenti. It was February 1983, the middle of Ronald Reagan's first term as president and a moment of ascending strength for a popular conservatism that was then transforming American politics. As a young sociologist having recently completed my Ph.D., I was several months into a research project to better understand what I called the conservative "pro-family" movement. By that I meant those groups struggling to defend what they saw as traditional family values through a constellation of enthusiasms including opposition to abortion, sex education, homosexual rights and the equal rights amendment. While the New Right as a political coalition also contained Libertarians and old-style Republicans, it was this popular movement animated by concerns around family and gender that gave new-right conservatism its mass base and political clout.[1]

My apprehension about calling Pastor Valenti stemmed from the suspicion and hostility that hovered over my first contacts with conservatives. I had sought them out near my home in Northampton, Massachusetts, a county seat on the Connecticut River in the western part of the state, where I had moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to teach sociology at Smith College. My first contacts had been with grassroots activists in right-to-life groups and in Birthright, an antiabortion counseling group. They were almost always wary and guarded, imagining that a sociologist--and one teaching at Smith College at that--would be prejudiced against all they stood for. Since I often sensed among them the lurking suspicion that I was an enemy spy ultimately up to no good, I felt it important not to do or say things that would stamp me as an opponent. This constant vigilance was often more exhausting than making one's way in a foreign country where you do not know the language or customs. In that case, at least, ignorance did not mark you as the enemy.

I took care in dress, demeanor and speech not to do anything that would offend. Yet sometimes seemingly inconsequential things would trigger distrust. For example, I once asked a soft-spoken woman who counseled pregnant teenagers in a Birthright office about contemporary attitudes toward "sexuality."

"What do you mean by that word?" she snapped with an alarmed look in her eyes. "I can't stand when people use it. It always makes it seem more important than it should be!"

I had been referred to Pastor Valenti by Bill and Karen Fournier, a Catholic couple active in right-to-life and other conservative causes in the Worcester area. They reported to me with delight that Valenti's wife, Sharon, and her mother had just gained public notoriety by protesting a youth conference, "Dealing with Feelings," sponsored by Family Planning Services of Central Massachusetts. The conference had been held at a local Congregational church and had featured Dr. Sol Gordon, a noted sex educator. The Fourniers showed me an article on the protest in Worcester's Evening Gazette, in which Sharon Valenti's mother, Ada Morse, was quoted as saying, "This assault on our children's mores and morals is by an insidious humanist group hiding behind a veil of feigned decency, voraciously seeking to undermine patriotism, obedience, academics and morality and supplant them with subversion, rebellion, ignorance and sexual disorientation." This was the kind of conservatism I was looking for.

It had been the Fourniers' own campaign in their local schools against Our Bodies, Ourselves, the feminist health-care book, that had brought them to the attention of a correspondent I knew who interviewed them for a National Public Radio program on book banning. Though devout Catholics, Bill and Karen Fournier were unhappy with what they saw as the liberal and humanist directions of the Catholic Church. Two years earlier, Karen, a petite and energetic woman in her thirties, had asked a young priest teaching in her daughter's parochial school to reintroduce opening prayer in his classes. By then, only two teachers in the entire school were carrying on that practice, she reported. He refused, saying "It would upset some of the students."

What caused Karen greater distress was seeing her oldest daughter, then in seventh grade, come home from school wearing jeans and makeup and swearing. This caused "a heaviness in my heart," she said, which she carried with her to Washington, D.C., in 1980, to attend the first Family Forum, a conservative conference on defending traditional family values. There, she recalled, "God brought me to Raymond Moore's session on home schools." Soon after, she and Bill took their four children out of parochial school and, with several like-minded families, started their own home school, which they called the Holy Family Academy.

I made several trips to the Worcester area that fall to visit the Holy Family Academy, run in a renovated barn attached to the Fourniers' home, and to interview some of the close circle of parents involved. The Fourniers themselves took more easily than other conservatives I met to conversing with outsiders like me. This was not because they were less radical or militant in their conservatism. On the contrary. But they seemed more adept at articulating their positions in the face of opposed views, in part because they were able to notice and handle contrary assumptions underlying them. For example, though I felt comfortable describing Our Bodies, Ourselves as "a feminist health-care book," Bill, who had done graduate work in philosophy at Boston College, contested "the very word 'health.'"

"That particular book," he explained, "takes the word 'health' and calls 'healthy' the lifestyles it happens to agree with--like extramarital sex, homosexuality and masturbation--and 'unhealthy' or 'sick' lifestyles it happens to disagree with."

"They would like to change society's values totally," Karen explained quietly, "especially in the areas of sexuality and family. Using this book is one way of doing it, to get rid of the traditional family."

In retrospect, I realize, the Fourniers helped prepare me to meet the Valentis and their church. I remember walking a picket line with Bill Fournier one cold, sunny December afternoon in downtown Worcester outside a tall, turn-of-the-century office building that housed a Planned Parenthood clinic. As at other small demonstrations I had once attended as an antiwar activist, people came and went throughout the day, greeting and kidding friends. Some unloaded a pile of signs with stenciled slogans: stop murdering babies, end death clinics and so on. Others carefully assembled more elaborate and well-worn homemade posters with photos of bloody "fetuses" (or "babies") and lengthier hand-printed text. Bill introduced me to those he knew by saying, "This is Jim. He's doing a book on pro-life."

"Great! We need that!" several offered in hearty encouragement for a book they assumed would affirm their cause. I felt strange about suddenly being taken for a fellow partisan, though I could not help appreciating the relief Bill's tact provided.

Later that afternoon some of the bolder demonstrators sneaked into the building and rode the elevator up to the Planned Parenthood floor. Bill and I went along. Soon after we arrived, in the reception area, a commotion erupted. A policeman arrived, and, as he herded us to the elevator, some took the opportunity to speak their views: "They're murdering babies in there!... Next they'll be killing old people and the handicapped!" I was unprepared for the icy looks and hateful stares from the Planned Parenthood staff as I stood there mutely looking on, now suddenly on the other side of a line of battle.

The Fourniers said that before I finished my research in the Worcester area I should go see "the Valentis' school." Just as it had been Karen Fournier's inspiration to start the Holy Family Academy, it had been Sharon Valenti's idea to start the Christian Academy attached to their fundamentalist church. What had moved her to do so, Sharon later explained to me, was picking up some textbooks from her children's public school and being "totally shocked at what the humanist view was teaching."

"It was sex education that really bothered me," she said, "because it was from a perverted standpoint. It wasn't abstinence. They taught about different contraceptives and how to use them, and encouraged the petting and the experiencing. The Bible says to abstain from all those things. They think they're not teaching any kind of morals," she allowed, "but you can't do that. You're either for God or against him."

In the wrenching reversal of American politics toward conservatism over the past quarter century, no institution has been more decisive than local fundamentalist or evangelical churches.[2] Week in, week out, thousands of such churches across the nation educate members on issues of the day, arousing and directing their political outrage and concern. Such churches have provided a ready-made organization for both Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition and, before it, Jerry Falwell's more radical Moral Majority. At the height of the Moral Majority's influence in American politics in the 1980s, most of its chapters across the country, like the one in Massachusetts, were headed by fundamentalist preachers trained at Jerry Falwell's Liberty Baptist College or at schools affiliated with the Baptist Bible Fellowship, a loose federation of rigorously independent fundamentalist churches to which Falwell had initially belonged. Moreover, fundamentalists in this independent Baptist tradition represented the har...