Title: The Reformation of Marli Meade
Author: Tracy Hewitt Meyer
Date: 2023
Publisher: BHC
ISBN: 978-1-64397-357-9
Length: 228 pages
Quote: "The church...nestled atop Ophidian Mount...Wound around the base of the cross was a snake."
There is no Ophidian Mount. There are no confirmed records of a snake-handling cult, in which believers waved snakes about in a belief that they were miraculously protected from any venom the snakes might or might not have had, in Virginia. There is no confirmed record of a church like Marli Meade's father's "Church on the Mountain" anywhere, at any time.
An ostensibly Christian church that never mentions Jesus, love, God, joy, or virtue, but focusses on the serpent in the Garden of Eden, is the stuff of which a snarky Flannery O'Connor novel or a wonderfully creepy Stephen King story might be made. Jessamyn West managed to make a story in which a man killed a snake deliciously spine-tingling, in Cress Delahanty, with only a series of suggestions that the man's allegedly Christian practice was guided only by his own troubled mind. Meyer seems to be promising readers something of that sort. This novel started out with a suggestion that it was going to be fun to read.
Well, it's not. Though the Ophidian Mount church is a creepy cult whose religious practices sound more satanic than Christian, Meyer is not writing horror or satire or even comedy. Nor is she writing with the kind of genuine empathy and good will for a character whose religion her author doesn't understand that M.E. Kerr showed in What I Really Think of You. No attempt at either a realistic, balanced view of a real cult like the Branch Davidian, or an exaggerated, satirical warning to real religious fanatics about Where That Sort Of Thing Might Lead, is being made. As I read, I became convinced that, although nothing like her fiction's setting and characters ever existed in the real world, Meyer wants to believe they do. Keeping it fiction absolves her of criminal charges for libel, but she wants people to imagine that every little rural church that's not paying tribute to the World Council of Churches is a satanic cult where murdered members' bodies are slowly decomposing on the spooky pale-lavender peaks of the Appalachian Mountains.
Hello? I live here. I've prayed and sung in little isolated "interdenominational community" churches, which flourished about a hundred years ago as people stabilized their farms enough to want churches but the population wasn't dense enough to accommodate every denomination. They are vulnerable to the same sins big-city churches are: gossip and snobbery among the congregation, egotism and competition for promotion among the staff, greed and embezzlement and lechery in the pastors. Just as most unvaccinated people do not actually have diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, polio, or smallpox, so most small-town churches are not heavily infested with any of those sins, but they are vulnerable.
/But they are not satanic cults. That comes from the twisted mind of a social worker who's trying to demonize all things rural, independent, unaffiliated, off the grid or out of the mainstream. It's a vile slander. This book is well written by academic standards--clear transitions, consistent storyline, good grammar and spelling. It even includes a few felicitous insights into the way a nervous teenager flattens spaghetti with the back of a fork. But I say its intentions are dishonest and unethical, and I call foul. Nobody should pay for this book. It has no other purpose or message than to demonize the independent rural churches.
You might reasonably say, "In a world where almost anything can happen, isn't it possible that an isolated, unaffiliated community might turn their little church into a satanic cult?" Yes, of course that's possible; as a horror motif it's been exploited by gifted writers in novels like Harvest Home or The Dark Tower. It's not actually recorded but people could get so wound up in their own troubled minds that members of a church might secretly practice human sacrifice, or members of religious community might become vampires. But Meyer tells Marli and readers matter-of-factly that there really is a whole network of crypto-satanist rural churches...blatantly libelling the rural churches that don't marry same-sex couples or pray for the success of the "World Health Organization" in taking over the world.
Somebody ought to write a novel about the way we oldfashioned "Bible Christians," with or without neighborhood nondenominational churches, out here in the backwoods really live. The simplicity. The freedom. The joy.
Meyer might do well to write a novel about the lucky escape of a teenager who's a ward, or more like a prisoner, of a tyrannical state that separated person from well-intentioned but flawed parents--addicts, likely--and placed them with modern-style abusive foster parents, who have them diagnosed and "medicated" for conditions they don't have, exploit their developing sexuality and, when they complain, try to sell them on "gender reassignment," and alienate them from friendship and life by keeping them doped on profitable pharmaceutical products. That's what I see actual teenagers in search of an escape from. A real nondenominational church, attended by people who make their own clothes and do other useful work, would seem like Paradise to such a child after the drug addiction wore off.
I hesitated to finish and review this book. My goal is to encourage writers--generally. When we know more about a particular topic than other writers do, we should educate them gently, with good will. But I don't believe it's possible for Meyer to have written a book as libellous as Marli Meade in honest ignorance. I think she needs a good punishing--not with an ordeal by exposure to venomous snakes followed by branding and/or whipping, but with the end of her literary career.
No comments:
Post a Comment