Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory

- A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America

Randall Balmer.

Read from about November 12 - 30, 1996.

Billed as "a companion to the PBS series," Balmer claims in the introduction that the TV series is really a companion to this book, which of course it is, no book is a companion to a TV show where the pace and content are necessarily abridged and set by production realities.

Balmer, a producer and author, has toured America with his tablet and TV camera in search of his own faith. Brought up as the son of an evangelical touring evangelist, strict in the faith as was I, and sent off to Bible camp, a version of what happened to me, now he has to live in the real world, not the small, protected, apart world of the evangelicals, and he's trying to make sense of it all through a longing for his simpler past. So, he's visited a lot of places that are evangelical. The question was raised in my mind, "Is this all the same God?" "Why are we so ingrown and infighting amongst ourselves?" "What do/should outsiders think of all this?" Shudder the thought.

He visits the descendants of the Jesus People; straight laced Dallas Theological Seminary; Don Ritchie, divinely blessed movie producer; Frisby's pyramid chapel in Phoenix; Fundamendalists in the backwoods; Charismatics in the south; Bible School; the Robertson presidential campaign of 1988; Perkin's missions in Mississippi; the Christian Booksellers Convention ("Bibles are Big Business"); Indians in South Dakota who are also Epispocal, and who don't see a whole lot of difference between their old faith and their new; a Camp Meeting; A Billy Graham Crusade in Central Park (where he goes more as a supplicant and comes away disappointed); and the Oregon Extension of Trinity College, where he finds some realism in the philosophy that we are all sinners all the time.

This is in fact more or less a superset of the locations visited in the three hour PBS special by the same name.

The book starts with more pre stuff than I've ever seen in a book: Preface, Acknowledgments, A Word About Words, and Prologue before the first chapter. (I guess there wasn't an Introduction.) And at the end, as throughout, he sums up his own thoughts and feelings about what he is learning in an Epilogue. Balmer's vocabulary is extensive. I could have read the book with a dictionary beside, and probably lost a bit for not having done so.

My early impressions of the book and TV show were that this was an arena in which I was at home. There wasn't much here that I hadn't experienced in my own journey, though to date I've landed closer to my roots than Balmer has. It's worth thinking about the reasons a bit. For me, the attraction in church is in my participation in the music. (I started to say "power," but that would be an exaggeration.) To the extent that I'm moral within Protestant rule keeping, it's more because I fear the consequences than the Deity. (This probably illuminates spiritual ignorance.) Knowledge of the rules and the consequences comes from my early training. Both are somewhat flawed and much of my struggle now has to do with working all this out in a real life in the current present and future. There is illumination in this book and series, to the extent that there are people who have roughly the same problems and struggles that I do and who are facing them in their own ways. Some of them are devoting intellectual lives to working on it. Most of us are having to do it on our own time, having other real jobs, obligations, and avocations. (Faith certainly ranks as an avocation for me....) Balmer is somewhere in the middle. He's spent several years of his career addressing this.

In the middle of the book, we reach things that are further from my actual experience, or more vague in memory. Camp meetings, for example, are not something I've been to spend a week at, but there were attempts made by my father and colleagues early in my youth to have local gatherings along those lines. I could relate to them though, and noted that this institution was dying as the people to whom it was important in their youth aged and passed on. It is no longer relevant to the current society or there would be more of an age spread. Many institutions (as I've written in my journal and elsewhere) are indeed like this.

The three chapters that impressed me most were 11, Episcopal Indians; 13, the Graham Crusade in New York Central Park (near home for Balmer); and 14, the Trinity Extension, a new more realistic faith that doesn't draw such divisive lines, or at least tries not to. I was more impressed with Chapter 13 than with the Epilogue, in which the author in first person tries to express the same thing more abstractly. He had gone to the Crusade largely with a hope of finding something he missed from his past, some surety perhaps, but came away easily re-bruised by accusations of guilt and sin. We have enough of that these days, God could surely do some affirming things too, one would think. The juxtaposition of his anger that there wasn't an alter call with the fact that he would have derided one had it been given rang very true to my own views. The simpler view of good versus evil, corruption versus salvation, and the simplicity of coming to Christ is attractive, but unsatisfying. Perhaps Graham is rapidly losing touch. Perhaps he should.

Heck, to extend on Balmer for a moment, while it is true that a big part of our faith rests on a belief in an imminent apocalypse, it seems a bit self serving that giants of faith such as Billy Graham will see in the scriptures the end hastening in when they are just misreading changes in society that they don't follow or really understand. I've spent a bunch of my life fearing the imminent end of history and what I would suffer by being present for it and, though it or something like it could happen, I now fear the natural end of just my individual life more, and with good reason. The apocalypse hasn't happened despite predictions for the last 2000 years, but everybody born here has died after a time and I will be no exception. This is one thing that is surely certain.

After finishing the book this afternoon, I turned to the day’s mail. In it were two of the three or four religious periodicals we get, Decision from Billy Graham and Focus on the Family from Dobson. Abiding my new policy of dealing with these same day so that my piles won't grow, I scanned over and took in parts of them in basically the same way that I have for many years but now with a higher consciousness of what I'm doing. I'm treating these as touching stories but discarding much of the underlying philosophy as something that I've worked beyond, or at least away from. This is slightly freeing. I hope for more freedom as I look into the Bible for myself in a new personal survey without commentary and with a strict eye towards not falling into my old trained, strained, safe, and partial interpretations in coming months.

The video set was borrowed from Lois Bascom, and used (or scheduled for use) in our life group November 17, December 1, and 15, one TV episode each.

Postscript, 2007 June 30.

Today I don’t remember this series or this book at all. I can believe, however, that I read and watched such a thing. I remember the Life Group, but has it really been ten years?

I have made some of the progress projected. I no longer get any of those para-church magazines and if I do I don’t queue them for serious review. Rather, I am in the middle of going through the Bible directly and for myself. See

http://cbduncan.110mb.com/Faith/Bible_Const/Bible_Const.html

One thing notable is the degree to which the Bible itself diverges from denominational teaching. … the teaching of all denominations.