Note: The following is a response to the documentary film Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus, done for Professor Michael Pasquier of the Louisiana State University's Theology Department for his Reli 3010 class "Religion in the Americas," during the 2010 Spring Semester.
What does Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus tell us about religion in the South? It is dominated by folk religion, as evidenced by the telling of "tall tales" and parables; it is inescapable; it is distrustful of the city; it permeates; and the sacred exists alongside the everyday, every day, in the smallest of moments. The South is a land where "every light pole is a cross, and every bridge has a little memorial," and devotion appears innate.
Just as was seen in Zora Neale Hurst's Mules and Men, religion in the South remains the domain of the storyteller. Parables are created out of whole cloth; just as John the slave triumphed over Ole Massa and the Devil himself in stories told by the descendants of slaves, so too do the pitiable characters who line the roads create their own legends. Just as slave stories which managed to survive the cultural holocaust of slavery to make landfall in the Western Hemisphere were altered and changed by imperialism, both religious and governmental, so are the rural narratives of the South informed by external influences. A man walking down the road with a cane is quick to share his memory of his grandmother warning him that bird spit was instantaneously fatal, all in her attempt to teach him that there are right and wrong ways of doing things, so cloaked in metaphor and Southern mindsets that the moral seems out of place. Imperialism of the Northern expansionists and corporatism is also exposed in a story macrocosm of the Southern experience, as he recounts how the Sears-Roebuck catalog garnered much attention, and his family and peers made up stories about the beautiful people in the magazine, transposing family dynamics, a subject with which they were intimately familiar, making the profane holy. Further, by making god in their own image (as evidenced by the titular statue, as well as the man who says he went looking for "the gold tooth in god's crooked smile"), they profane the holy.
The deification of the secular is omnipresent throughout the film, and its impact on the Southern town is delineated early, as the film crew passes through Farriday, Louisiana: the well-travelled man leading the documentarians points to the four corners of town, where stand a juke joint, a truck stop, a prison, and a church, and he says that this illustrates the four main aspects of rural Southern life. The juke joint, which he calls a "real place," is the main focus of social life outside of the church, where he claims the emphasis is less on drinking and doing drugs, and more on family. Likewise, they visit a prison, and he elaborates on his beliefs as to what causes a person to turn to religion like they would turn to crime: extreme poverty leads to both. Further, he says that, in the South, it's just "in your blood," telling his own short parable about an indoor cat who, upon roaming outside for the first time and running across a chicken, immediately attacks the fowl, because it is his nature (compare this to the story of Aesop's in which the scorpion, unable to resist its true nature, stings the frog bearing it across the river on his back and dooming them both; this kind of metaphor is nothing new).
Ritualism, the aspect of religion most widely discussed, plays a role in Southern religious life as well, and, just like Christ, these people's scars tell their entire stories. The most overt example of ritualism is relayed by the man with the cane, who recalls the proper method of burying a possum: despite being eviscerated and eaten, the possum might still awake and begin digging, and would find and harm the person who had buried them. "Little rituals keep you safe," he says, as he details the necessity of placing the animal's body so that the eyes are down, so as to confuse him when he regains his mortal coil. At a trailer park, tattoos, scarred tissue, tells one woman's entire life story, and the symbols she chooses (winged halo, a cross) are distinctly religious, as she gives the meaning for each one, pressing her fingers to them, as Jesus asked Thomas to press his crucifixion scars, as proof that his life was not illusory and transient.
Perhaps the most uniquely Southern idea presented in the film is the distrust of the city. The rural interviewees have little to say about the city, save for the coal miner who was reluctant to say much more than that he felt the city separated a man from the earth and hard work, before declaring he had no more to say and retreating to within the confines of his warehouse. While no one else makes reference to urban life, their beliefs and biases are apparent in the mural depicting the rapture, seen on the wall of the catfish restaurant. A farmhouse, barn, and church (center of family, livelihood, and salvation, respectively) are detailed, independent structures painted in bright colors, while across the river lies a dark, monolithic city skyline, undifferentiated in its buildings. A man in the restuarant points out the ascending spirits of the Christian chosen, rising from graves and the farmhouse, while the city yields no souls for Heaven's reaping.
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