When Religion Loses Its Flavor - The Rise Of Political Ecstasy

Barbery Byfield had grown up in a small town in Mississippi not far from Indianola.  Her father was a mill worker and her mother a teacher, and with the exception of one trip to Biloxi, they had spent their whole life on the Delta.  

 

It was a good life - no accidents or serious disease, enough to eat, strong family ties, and especially religion.  They were members of the River Of Life Baptist Church, born-again Christians who had been baptized in the Yazoo River.  Farley Byfield served as deacon of the church, and his wife ministered to the elderly, and Barbery attended a church-run school and went to Bible camp for a week in the summer. 

It was a family never tempted by drink, moral waywardness, or infidelity; in other words a model of piety, devotion, and faith. 

Barbery was a bright girl, very bright in fact and noticed by her teachers as a girl with promise.  She would be a good candidate for Millsaps College in Jackson, an institution known for its academic rigor and solid Christian faith.  Students there who studied secular subjects were in no danger of questioning their faith, for the faculty, schooled in fundamentalist theology and righteous practice acted as intellectual monitors. Parents never needed to worry about their child's fall from grace. 

Barbery, however, was not just an ordinary student, but a superior one who found the curriculum of Millsaps unchallenging and uninteresting. Despite the rigor of her Christian upbringing, she had a sense of intellectual adventure and grew increasingly restive at what she called 'the harboring faith' of the college.  Her mind was simply ill-suited to the doctrinaire and the prescribed. 

At the same time she was profoundly moved by the sermons of Parsons Fielding, chaplain of the school, a man who was unashamed of his rock-ribbed, unshakable fundamentalism.  The Bible was the unerring word of God - the only rock in a violent ocean of sin - and every morning at chapel, he inspired the students to pray, to seek salvation, and to spread the word of the Savior. 

The two worlds - that of absolute faith and secular knowledge had to be one, she reasoned, envisaged as they were by the mind of God; and that conclusion was the beginning of her maturity and political evolution.  

The plight of the black man, the tenant farmer still slave to the plow, cotton field, and the company store and the need to free him once and for all, only existed within the compassionate and welcoming spirit of Jesus Christ. 

She made forays into Darktown, the black neighborhood of Jackson hoping for a revelation, a sign that Jesus was there walking with her. Her belief in the Negro and his ultimate role in Jesus's salvational army was clear.  If the black man was not the very embodiment of the poor, the blind, the lame, and the destitute whom Jesus loved, then who was? 

She prayed for him, but because of her bi-worldly outlook knew that only prayer plus effort would raise the black man to his rightful place atop the social pyramid. 

As it happened the Congressman from Mississippi's 2nd District was a graduate of Millsaps and gave the commencement speech to the college.  Barbery,  a girl who had gained in poise, confidence, and charm during her years in Jackson, felt comfortable going up to the Congressman after his speech, telling him of her reformist ambitions, her unshakable faith in the Lord, and her desire to please Him and to make a difference. 

The Congressman, old enough to remember the halcyon years of Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy and their ebony-and-ivory marches through the segregated South, was pleased to see that this white girl of obvious faith and goodwill wanted to serve him and the black people of his district; and he invited her to meet him and his staff in Washington. 

Now it was no surprise that the Congressman was cut not only from the same political cloth as his mentor Dr. King, but from the same sexual one.  King was a known sexual vagabond, a man with an insatiable sexual urge, and with the stature, composure, and charm that attracted both black and white women to bed with him, and the Congressman was no different.  Inviting the innocent Barbery Byfield to his chambers in the Dirksen Building was like leading a lamb to slaughter. 

 

Yet like Perdita, :Pericles's chaste and virtuous daughter in Shakespeare's Pericles of Athens, she not only resisted the salacious and irreverent overtures of her patron, but succeeded in chastening him, and returning him to the way of the Lord. 

It was at that moment that she realized her destiny.  She had the power to transform, and she must use it for righteous ends. 'I am a prophet', she said, 'a messenger, a harbinger of reformation, a disciple of the Lord' -  a bit windy and self-important, but no less real for its old-fashioned Baptist assuredness. In fact she felt like getting up from her chair, walking onto the Capitol grounds and shouting 'Hallelujah!' 

It was only a hop, skip, and a jump into progressivism, for there she found - absent the Christian belief of course - the very same passion, righteous ambition, and absolute faith that she had known back at the River of Life church and Millsaps College.  She felt one with her fellow activists, bonded by a secular faith which was no different than the ecclesiastical one with which she grew up. 

Progressivism was a secular religion - one with a canon, a liturgy, a litany, commandments, prayers, and ablutions. The leaders of the movement she met in Washington had the same limitless energy, boundless confidence, and absolute belief in the moral nature of their reform as Reverend Parsons Fielding. 

Barbery found environmentalism the closest to her Baptist faith as any issue in the progressive pantheon, one which had become the religious movement of the day and little different from the apocalyptic notions of Revelations.  The world will end in a fiery Armageddon, said Environmentalists.  

We will pay for our sins against the Earth, and our fate will be hot, brutal, and inescapable. However, we can save the Earth and ourselves through prayer and good works.  There is still time.  How different are these warnings, chastisements, and admonitions from the fire and brimstone that rages from the pulpit of Pastor Fielding? 

It was not long after joining the environmentalist movement that Barbery had fully incorporated her religious belief within the progressive agenda.  Both were based on faith, hope, and charity. Both believed in the fiery conclusion to humanity's sinful excesses. Both were indivisible and absolute in their beliefs.  There was no doubt whatsoever, not one scintilla of uncertainty, not one iota of niggling concern in their belief. 

Religion satisfies primal needs and has since the first human settlements provided simple answers to unfathomable events, offered refuge and consolation, and perhaps most of all, the eventual release from a brutish and unremittingly painful world. 

Religious worship is no different than what it was in pre-history.  We still worship unknown forces, pray for divine intervention, and solve the riddles of the universe by saying ‘God's will’.  We still have priests who interpret divine will; ceremonies of sacrifice, penance, and repentance; and we all wear the protective mantle of belief.

Progressive secularism is no different.  Believers simply pray on a virtual altar to secular god, but within the same type of ordained canon.  Beliefs are taken as truths, inescapable absolutes, permanent and unchangeable facts.  The world will incinerate because of indifference, moral satiety, and ignorance - no different from the world Jesus found when he began his evangelism.  Sin and moral indifference are no different.  Lack of faith and apostasy are equal moral failings. 

Barbery, once indoctrinated into this new, progressive faith, became one of its most convincing, passionate, and articulate prophets.  Her transformation from religious absolutism to progressive zealotry was complete.

When she returned to her home in the Delta and visited Pastor Fielding at The River of Life church, the man witnessed the change in the young woman.  As she spoke and shared with him the urgency of reform, the debilitated morality of America, and the need for evangelical passion, he forgot that she was talking of secular issues and saw her as a latter day prophet of the Lord.  Washington, often thought of as a den of iniquity from which no one escapes with soul intact, had proved just the opposite. 

Until he realized the errancy of her ways, fallen into the trap of secularism - the idea of progress and the attainment of salvation without God.  

As often happens in both religion and secularism, true belief can become unhinging.  There are religious madmen wandering the streets howling about the end of the world and demanding repentance and return to the Lord and secular madmen warning of the devastation of the planet, the extermination of gay men, the incarceration and deportation of asylees, and the creation of insurmountable bastions of capitalist greed.  

Barbery in her final days became a whirling dervish of eccentric, wild, tamed ferocity.  The twin towers of religious fundamentalism and secular mania joined in a perfect storm and she went completely around the bend, ending her life in St. Elizabeth's, an American mental hospital the likes of Bedlam or Broadmoor, a hellhole of a place under the radar of reformists, still operating and the only place for fanatical zealotry gone insane.