A half-dozen years ago, I found myself attending a Tuesday night Bible study at a little southern church of a hundred regulars. I had started attending because I'd caught its members in acts of love and forgiveness that transcended normal niceness. After some personal crises, I needed more love and forgiveness in my life. I had started to trust them.

But at Bible study that night, my trust reached a crossroads. We were talking about a story in the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus casts out evil spirits. Because I was a newcomer, and also because I studied religion for a living, I was in the habit of paying attention and keeping quiet. But as I listened that night, I slowly absorbed the uncomfortable fact that I was sitting in a group of people who were talking about, well, demons.

Finally I couldn't hold back. "Wait a minute," I interrupted. "Does everyone in this room believe in demons?" Their eyes got as wide as mine in the face of such an outlandish question. "Well, sure!" they sputtered. I was stunned. I shut up and listened some more. But privately I thought, if this love thing involves believing in demons, I'm outta here.

As it turned out, my trust survived the night. But the shock of that confrontation between the familiar worldview of my middle-class academic background and the exotic-to-me viewpoint of church members stayed with me.

It's an experience readers can get the easy way, in a new book by James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church. And it's a crucial experience, I would say, in a country divided into blues and reds, crudely labeled liberals and conservatives, who not only don't understand each other but increasingly don't know how to understand each other.

A documentary filmmaker and sociologist, Ault spent the mid-1980s and '90s getting to know key members of Shawmut River Baptist Church, a small fundamentalist congregation in working-class Worcester, Massachusetts.1 He attended worship services, Bible studies, prayer breakfasts, softball games, and countless other official and unofficial occasions of visiting and socializing that make up small-church life. He witnessed the ordinary stirring moments of people practiced in caring for one another's bodies and souls—as when church members left groceries for someone struggling with unemployment, or when the pastor counseled an agonized cuckold not to be consumed with hatred for his wife.

Bringing out the innate drama of everyday happenings at Shawmut River—both in this book and its sister project, the critically acclaimed 1987 documentary film Born Again—Ault quietly counters headlines about mega-churches and televangelists, trumps panicky accounts of Christian Coalition forces and radical-right conspiracies. He does so simply by showing fundamentalist Christianity's typical face. Small churches like Shawmut River, not sprawling "campuses," make up the vast majority of conservative Christian institutions. Loosely connected to national groups—Shawmut River's pastor Frank Valenti attended Jerry Falwell's Liberty Baptist College—these churches remain fiercely independent and largely aloof from national politics. They're located in northern, coastal, and industrial states as well as southern, central, and rural ones. And—guess what?—their members are human beings, neither the saints of America celebrated by conservative Christian activists nor the brainwashed masses derided by their liberal antagonists.

Ault himself is very much a part of the story, and the book will perhaps be most compelling for readers who identify with him as an outsider to conservative Christianity—though they may be surprised by the outcome of his up-close encounter with fundamentalism. Shawmut River members regarded Ault as "unsaved," but they welcomed him into their midst and, in time, trusted him. Working him into the deep network of mutual aid, men of the church pitched in time, tools, and parts to keep Ault's clunker of a car running when his one-year teaching job—and money—ran out. Ault came to see their persistent inquiries into the state of his soul not as annoying proselytizing but rather as heartwarming care. In time, he trusted them, too.

Since Ault started attending Shawmut River as a self-described atheist academic, this mutual trust was nothing less than a bridge across the chasm of the culture wars that continue to roil America. When he began his fieldwork, the religious dimensions of the post-'60s liberal-conservative divide had only begun to attract notice. Now, as we perch on the brink of the most highly polarized presidential election in over a century, both liberals and conservatives pay obsessive attention to the "religion gap." Churchgoers' voting patterns, Democrats' discomfort with religion, and Republicans' manipulation of it are part of everyday election analysis.

Ault's two worlds of friends—at home, at church—occasionally obliged him to enflesh stereotypes of the opposing camps. On one side, Ault's colleagues were urbane, educated scholars who not only didn't believe in demons but regarded those who did as pathetically ignorant, if not pathologically rigid, right-wing screwballs. On the other side, Ault's friends at church railed against "secular humanists" whose faithlessness and "selfishness" were destroying the family and taking the country to hell with them.

But Ault's very presence in the church belied the liberal cant that fundamentalists aren't flexible. Pastor Valenti's wife Sharon was one of many who were disturbed that Ault wasn't saved. But she made room for him, even interpreted his presence at Shawmut River as part of God's plan. Was this orthodox fundamentalism? She didn't care. "I never know where you stand on things," she told Ault one day. "But somehow I think you understand."

Ault does understand, and he is at his best when pointing out the ironies of positions on both sides of the liberal-conservative divide. For example, at Shawmut River, women defended the Pauline biblical injunction that wives be submissive to their husbands, but effectively controlled interpretation and practice of this teaching to bolster their massive behind-the-scenes influence in church and family life. For their part, Ault's feminist colleagues eagerly championed many women—black or poor women, for example—who figured out crafty and daring ways to wield power without directly challenging patriarchal frames; why was it so hard for these feminists to admit that white fundamentalist women might be doing the same thing?

Ault's weakest point, on the other hand, is his explanation of why political conservatism and religious fundamentalism go hand in hand. Because, he says, fundamentalism mirrors assumptions about family already embedded in conservative politics. In contrast to liberals, raised in families that empowered you to go out and make it on your own, Shawmut River members were largely raised in extended families ordered by duty, sacrifice, and shared burdens. Fundamentalism offered a language and a book with the same values that shaped their formative years.

Ault thus avoids the false notion, widespread in liberal circles, that fundamentalism "causes" conservative politics, but he nevertheless fails to explain the particular appeal of fundamentalism. After all, there are many duty-oriented, extended-family communities, from African American churches to upper-class aristocracies, that are not fundamentalist, or even conservative. (This explanatory muddiness might account for the occasionally excessive repetition in the analytical parts of the book, which too often take the edge off its narrative momentum.)

So, what in particular about fundamentalism drew these particular conservative people to it? One intriguing answer lies right in Ault's own pages. The author found that the draw of the movement for many Shawmut River members was quite specific: its ability to bring peace to their troubled marriages. Couple after couple testified to the salutary changes in their marital lives after they sought to live in "accord with biblical principles"—which, practically speaking, turned out to mean training both partners, but especially the husband, to sacrifice personal needs for the sake of the family. This concrete experience of transformation was so important that it was a key predictor of those who stayed in the church and those who left. If the church fixed a couple's marriage, they stayed. If the church failed to fix it—Ault profiled several marriages beyond repair, and one whose demise pastoral counseling might have quickened—the unstuck halves of the couple didn't stick to the church, either.

In dozens of ways, Ault's careful study of one small church raises questions about the big picture of fundamentalism, American-style. What if Shawmut River couples' experience of restored marriages turns out to run parallel with national trends? What if fundamentalism is to conservative marriages what therapy is to liberal marriages—and both result in empowered women? With that in mind, could liberals hear the mellifluous testimony behind earsplitting "family values" jargon? And might that make a difference in the ability of liberals and conservatives to get along, in the ability of America to thrive?

Ault hopes so. It's a high hope, and it would take supernatural means to make it a reality. But in Spirit and Flesh, we see a glimpse of what's possible—with a little trust.

Julie Byrne teaches American religious history at Duke University.

1. To protect the privacy of his subjects, Ault does not give the actual name of the church.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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