Seeing Jesus through the pines

by Emilie Bahr (United States of America)

Making a local connection USA

Since I’ve known Beaux, I’ve spent a lot of time in Ruston, and found it to have its charms. I’d only known him a few months when he invited me there for our first Christmas together, a trip that also marked my first time to the city, and we had a lovely holiday in his parents’ beautiful, large home on wooded acreage, celebrating in idyllic fashion that reminded me of childhood gatherings at my grandmother’s. There was something comforting about spending time in a place where there wasn’t much going on outside of just settling in, being together, eating home-cooked meals, talking. Nothing to distract you, to make you feel like you were missing out, as was sometimes the case in bigger cities with unlimited opportunities for things to do. As we’ve returned to the city so many times since, one thing that stands out to me in this pine-tree-laden landscape whose geography contrasts so dramatically with the verdant, flat, marshy land from which I come, is Jesus. He is everywhere: on billboards along the interstate bisecting the city (“Beyond Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive!”); on delivery trucks with scripture casually printed on the rear (“John 3:16”) where one might expect to be asked “How am I driving?”; on the red toothbrush Beaux found in a drawer after his nephew threw up in the sink of a shared bathroom a bit too close to his old toothbrush for comfort. “Jesus Christ is Lord” was etched into the handle, just above “John Ward DDS,” the family dentist. To my secular sensibilities, the ubiquity and outward nature of the city’s religiosity is startling. Yet for my North Louisiana relatives, including my husband, it is my sense that this is part of the place that just fades into the background, like the vast megachurches that spread out along the highway occupying vast swaths of the city’s real estate, to them no more remarkable than all the big box stores. My inlaws aren’t especially religious. I would say my mother-in-law occupies a space on the spectrum closer to Buddhist than Baptist. But occasionally they attend services at the Methodist church just down the service road from their house. They’ve been going there for years, probably because it’s the place where my father-in-law attended church as a kid with his now 90-something-year-old parents who still attend services there. To them, the church is the sort of community hub one might get from other cities at the neighborhood park, or by being regulars at the local library or children’s museum, or through the school system, only this one has Jesus as its organizing principle. In Ruston, it seems to me, being a non-church-goer (to say nothing of being a nonbeliever) would be a challenging position in which to find oneself, but that is where my mother-in-law now stands. She recently stopped attending services at the Methodist church after the female preacher was fired. The preacher was up against steep odds as it was, given that she was hired to replace the popular, longtime male preacher who moved away. Some, including Beaux's grandmother, weren’t sure the place was ready for a woman leader in 2019. But the final straw was when it came to light that the preacher had signed on to a letter to the United Methodist Church in support of allowing same-sex marriage to be recognized by church authorities. A petition campaign was launched by a well-connected congregant and her tenure was swiftly concluded. The wealthy petitioner, it has since come to light, is the scion of a leading for-profit prison chain who has been in touch with Donald Trump's people about filling his beds with immigrant detainees after business has suffered with the spread of sentencing-reform measures.