SWT: Introduction

In this blog, I intend to collect and analyze the stories that have framed and informed the Church of God, a pentecostal Christian denomination originating in the mountains of western North Carolina as the Nineteenth century melted into the Twentieth. My family worshipped in this denomination. My father was a Church of God minister for all of his adult life and my mother a minister's wife. I was the oldest of five preacher's kids (PKs) who were born into and grew up in this faith family. The stories of the Church of God have framed my understanding of the world and shaped my trajectory through it. I think that understanding those stories will help me understand myself and will help me write the novel that I'm writing about the rise of the Church of God in middle Georgia during the Twentieth century. The avatars of my family figure prominently.

I should, then, begin by exploring my narrative theory. What is it about narratives that makes them so important?

Of course, as a student and teacher of writing and literature, I have worked with narratives all my professional life, but I have not been a careful scholar of narrative theory. So I begin by tracing the broad outlines of narrative theory and then placing myself within that theory. I'm curious up front to see how my years of reading complexity theory will inform my reading of narrative theory.

But as I mentioned, I'm also writing a novel. I'm some fifty pages in, and it's emerging as a trilogy, but we'll see. This novel has been on my mind for years, but I've finally been spurred to write it by my confusion about why my family and their wider communities largely support Donald Trump. Most of my family is still worshipping in the Church of God or similar congregations, and all of them were raised in this faith, as I was. I know these people, or thought I did until they began following Donald Trump. I can think of no person who is less a southern pentecostal evangelical than Donald Trump, and yet many of my family believe him to have been elected and selected by God to be President and save the United States from disaster, if not destruction (they are seldom clear about what will happen to the rest of the world if the US is saved, but that may be part of the story).

I confess that I do not know, or understand, my people.

I do not know how Donald Trump, who strikes me as Jabba the Hut, became Obi-Wan Kenobi for evangelicals such as my family, but I want to. The only thing I know to do is to read and write my way into the issue until I can get through it. I can also try to listen. I'm trying to stop arguing about Trump and to listen to the stories that my family and evangelical friends tell me about Trump. To learn those stories, I have to be willing to listen for understanding rather than for positioning, and I have to convince them that I am truly trying to understand. Getting too close to the kool-aid is, of course, risky — especially for someone raised in the kool-aid bowl — but I have some faith that as I shift from the hard edges of rhetorical reason and logic to the softer, more fluid edges of narrative that the incoherent shall become coherent. I think I can learn both why they believe in Trump and why I don't.

But first I have to let go of trying to convert them. That is so evangelical of me.