what would jesus tweet
Today’s episode of The Daily’s got us thinking about the way mainstream media often gestures vaguely to Christianity when talking about (usually, what’s wrong with) middle America/the south, without diving into the very real nuances of scripture and religious life at play. To actually be able to eavesdrop on a Texan evangelical woman debating Jesus’s teachings with her father over the phone was a rare privilege that, depending on your upbringing, might be either fascinatingly alien or oddly familiar.
A good companion piece to read along this vein is The Day the Great Plains Burned, a recent dispatch from The New Yorker on the enormous prairie fire from March 6, 2017. It’s worth a read for the writing alone — one character profiled in the piece is described by the way she walks “leaning forward a bit, as if successfully towing a great weight,” and lines like “The smoke mounted in gray cumulus-like eruptions or redacted everything above the horizon line.”
But there’s also a keen observation about the central role religion plays for many people in the Great Plains region and why:
“In conversation, people out here bring up God a lot, but that could be because a self-evident mighty power—the sky above—demands attention almost every day. At any minute, this humongous sky might smash you with hail or whirl you away in a tornado or bless you with rainbows and cloud-piercing sunbeams evocative of celestial choirs and the angels ascending and descending.”
Anyway, this is all to say that whether you’re from it, or you’re a part of it still, or you at least get it on a conceptual level, or it’s a total mystery to you, religion and the way it moves people’s lives is vastly more complicated than most mainstream narratives would let on, and it’s up to a lot of us who **are** from it to help explain.
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