The Gospel according to Sister Pat

When I was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the campus mall, which opened onto Madison’s State Street, attracted not a few colorful characters. There were street musicians and jugglers, and people peddling political agendas.

One chubby guy wearing a pink tutu, white tights and black army boots would arrive with a boombox and pirouette to Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots are Made for Walkin’.” (As “Cheers” character Cliff Clavin would say, “What’s up with that?”)

Several “regulars” — fixed features of that cityscape — could be spotted shuffling up and down State Street, carrying on full and animated conversations with themselves. They must have wandered in while tripping on acid some time in the late ‘60s and just never found their way out.

One bearded, disheveled and mumbling guy was, I was told upon my arrival in 1986, a philosophy Ph.D. candidate who, after several years of being at ABD (all but dissertation) status, still had not finished. He was still there mumbling when I left in 1991. I would not be shocked were I to return today and spot him, still mumbling and agonizing over that opening sentence.

State Street also attracted street preachers, who would ascend the low landscape walls and proclaim their messages to passersby. Among these were two characters who went by the names “Sister Pat” and “Preacher Dan.”

Wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and an ankle-length dress, Sister Pat looked as though she had just come from Reverend Alden’s church services in Walnut Grove. Preacher Dan wore an unremarkable suit and carried a remarkably large Bible. Both preached hellfire and damnation to passing students.

Sister Pat had the endearing habit of singling out jean-clad young ladies who happened by, declaring them “whores” or “harlots.”

Preacher Dan’s trademark was his “Bible Gun,” that he used against the many hecklers who gathered. He would bring the Bible down to hip-level, gunslinger style, and mimic the recoil of a fired shot. Then he would raise it to his lips, where he “blew smoke” from the holy barrel, and then explained, “I just shot you with my Bible gun.”

(If you are picturing either Jethro or Goober here, you are not far from the mark.) This, of course, was met with delirious laughter from a crowd far more entertained than edified.

Now I do not doubt that the Madison campus was and is in need of redemption. While it is true that U.S. News now ranks the University of Florida as the top party school, Madison is still number one according to Playboy — a magazine interested in something a little racier than strawberry punch and cheese dips.

I’m pretty sure that the parties that were begun, say, in the 1970s, have continued uninterrupted to the present, an ever changing but overlapping supply of revelers coming and going with each new entering or exiting class. It is theoretically possible for today’s freshman to attend the very same party at which he was conceived when his biological parents were students.

What I do doubt is that the efforts of Sister Pat and Preacher Dan, however well-intentioned, were effective in persuading anyone of their gospel message. I expect that, if anything, they had the opposite effect for many. They were simply the other side of weird — the hidebound yin to pink tutu guy’s tights-swaddled yang.

Such evangelistic strategies might have paid off in an entirely different cultural milieu. For instance, such street corner preaching might have struck a chord in the small-town America of a half a century (or more) ago, where even the “unchurched” assumed an essentially Christian view of things and might have been made to feel guilty as “backsliders.”

But it is an insular and culturally illiterate Christianity that would expect such a bizarre presentation of the gospel to speak to the minds and hearts of people in today’s secularized society — particularly on the university campus, where a premium is placed upon the life of the mind.

Sociologists speak of the “plausibility structure” of a given culture. For any society, there is a limited range of competing views that are regarded as being so much as plausible.

For example, as a Christian theist, I think the central tenets of both atheistic naturalism and Scientology are false. But, even if false, naturalism is plausible and interesting in a way that Scientology is not.

It is well worth my time reading and assessing the works of important naturalists such as Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins and engaging their arguments. It is not worth my time to read the works of L. Ron Hubbard. I am far more likely to write a satirical piece, where Scientology is the subject, than a serious treatise that aims to refute its claims. My “personal plausibility structure” is such that Scientology is not even in the competition. It is not merely false. It is laughable.

Many Christians do not seem to realize that their own religious convictions are regarded by people in our increasingly secular society in the same way that I regard Scientology.

The phenomenon of Christian belief is routinely assigned an unflattering social science explanation suggestive of abnormal psychology, or, perhaps, unusually low intellectual wattage. The theistic worldview responsible for the founding of our greatest universities no longer so much as qualifies as a serious contender on those campuses.

When Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, he meant, as he put it, that “belief in the Christian God has ceased to be believable” for European intellectuals. He portrayed the empty churches scattered across that continent as God’s “tombs and sepulchers.” The popularity in this country of the spate of books in the “new atheism” genre should give believers in this country pause. American unbelief has gone militant.

The solution is not, I think, in contemporary efforts at repackaging the gospel message so that it appeals to those given to American pop culture or pop psychology.

The message of “Amazing Grace” — sin and salvation — is no more believable to the secularized mind for having been put to the tune of the Eagles’ “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” (Yes, I am sad to report that this has been done.) Like the street preachers in the small-town America of old, the appeal is chiefly to the already — or mostly — persuaded (who, in this case, also happen to be Eagles fans).

Nor are the “therapeutic” effects of faith, by themselves, evidence of truth. I might find contentment and overcome depression through belief in faeries, but this does not make their actual existence any more likely.

Those believers who would enter the public square — or the campus mall — should come equipped with more than a guitar, three chords and a personal testimony. They should expect serious challenges to their truth claims and be prepared for the rough and tumble that comes of having their beliefs subjected to rational and unsympathetic scrutiny.

Evangelism can no longer afford to forego what might be called “pre-evangelism” — a consideration of the intellectual obstacles to belief and a rational defense of the essential tenets of a Christian worldview. If that worldview is not thus defensible, then one is left wondering why anyone should suppose that it is true.

Truth has nothing to fear from careful and honest inquiry.

Such preparation presupposes that they hold beliefs that fully engage the mind as well as the heart. This, in turn, calls for something radically different from the pragmatic turn that characterizes many ministers and church leaders.

The American church — particularly the American evangelical church — has a history of neglecting the life of the mind and thus espousing a religion that is largely anti-intellectual in nature.

Today, many evangelicals fiddle with Christian concerts, religious apparel and pop psychology, and congratulate themselves on their megachurches, all the while oblivious to the cultural conflagration around them.

Former Lebanese ambassador Charles Malik sounded an alarm nearly 30 years ago that has largely gone unheeded. His words are even more relevant today: “For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, Evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.”

[Mark Linville has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His defense of the moral argument for the existence of God appears in the forthcoming “Companion to Natural Theology” (Blackwell), edited by J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig. He lives in Fayette County.]

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simpleton's picture
Submitted by simpleton on Wed, 08/20/2008 - 2:02pm.

"the hidebound yin to pink tutu guy’s tights-swaddled yang" had me choking on my coffee.
Then I had a vivid mental picture of a tights-swaddled yang and began to feel rather sick.


muddle's picture
Submitted by muddle on Wed, 08/20/2008 - 3:18pm.

Caught the double entendre, then, did you?

____________________

Hodeehodeehodeeho


Shakespeare's picture
Submitted by Shakespeare on Wed, 08/20/2008 - 12:26pm.

During my formative years in madison as a skate punk, we used to dance with nancy(dave matthews) kind of fun really, a good memory of a ridiculous town. Sister pat was funny, she'd stand by the pillars located about 100 yards from the lake, near the philosophy department, and yodel her version of damnation. Didn't she attend a church near middleton? Her vision simplistic, her outlook was (is?)outlandish, but she meant well. Yet i for one, don't want to go down as simply "meaning well" Being a christian man, i believe in alot of what she had to say, but she(a fundamentalist) was proxy to jovial dillusions. It's kind of like having to bear the news of the alcoholic uncle that you work with week by week.He believes the same as you, does the same work, but there is embarassment involved in siding with him. Not his fault, nor is it of the fundamentalist. They simply can't resist the power they are abided by the feeling that they are right for eternity.


Tug13's picture
Submitted by Tug13 on Wed, 08/20/2008 - 10:23am.

A few weeks ago I saw a street preacher on highway 85 in Riverdale. She was standing on the corner at a traffic light, shaking her Bible and stomping her feet. It was steaming hot that day, but it didn't seem to bother her.

Several years ago there was a lady in Fayetteville who pushed a grocery buggy around filled with her treasures. The American flag always prominently displayed for everyone to see.

I wonder what happened to her. Anybody remember her?

Thanks Mark for another great column. Smiling


muddle's picture
Submitted by muddle on Wed, 08/20/2008 - 11:26am.

Thanks.

It was steaming hot that day, but it didn't seem to bother her.

Perhaps this is because she was upwind of the hot air?

(Oooo. This is just the sort of attempted humor that gets me in trouble.)

___________________

Hodeehodeehodeeho


Tug13's picture
Submitted by Tug13 on Wed, 08/20/2008 - 3:32pm.

I love your sense of humor Muddle. Smiling It's the lunatics that don't have a sense of humor that cause trouble!

Carry on!!
Tug Smiling


simpleton's picture
Submitted by simpleton on Wed, 08/20/2008 - 2:13pm.

"Full Of".

But you should be more careful. She might have connections and you might lose your...

....

Hm. Well I suppose she could always slash your tires.


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