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DOOR INTERVIEW: Michael Graham By John Carney
Issue #189, September/October 2003

One of contributing editor John Carney’s co-workers heard a provocative interview about a book of political satire, Redneck Nation . When John checked it out, he was startled to find that he recognized the author — Michael Graham — because they had been contemporaries at (cue ominous music) Oral Roberts University in the early 1980s. Graham’s book describes ORU as “combining the intellectual rigor of a Sunday School picnic with the sound theological theories of a Sunday School séance.” John’s just happy he escaped with a diploma.....

...DOOR: Referring to religion, you write, “In contemporary America, glaring stupidity is the gold standard of the Christian realm.” How does this redneck quality evidence itself in Christianity?

GRAHAM: I’m a huge fan of (H.L.) Mencken. One of his greatest pieces of writing was his coverage of the Pentecostals outside Dayton, Tenn., during the Scopes Monkey Trial. What he saw there was a group of people who not only were behaving irrationally, as Mencken would judge it, but who had no fundamental belief in the concept that being reasonable, being rational, being intelligent was good. It was evil, as I learned at Oral Roberts University. Oral Roberts was fond of saying “If the Lord had meant you to think for yourself, he’d have given you a mind of your own, hallelujah!”

DOOR: Did he really say, “Hallelujah”?

GRAHAM: Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating slightly, but the fact is that the ethos of southern evangelicalism was that your mind is dangerous, and that you have to fight against the evil temptations of reason. The northern ethos, the kind of Episcopalian Methodist ethos that came down with the freedom riders and the Civil Rights movement, was that it is possible to merge your intellect with your faith, and that you can be very, very bright, and very, very devout at the same time. My family, and the people I grew up with, absolutely rejected that.

Today, in the United States, people with all kinds of metaphysical beliefs also reject that. So you have the bizarre situation of — and this actually happened to me — someone getting into an argument with me about Christianity, and about how any rational adult could believe in Christianity: “It’s ridiculous, it’s just a book. How could you possibly believe that?” The person who’s saying this is wearing a healing crystal, believes that they were a handmaiden to Cleopatra in a previous life, and watches TV psychic John Edward on a regular basis. I’m sorry — you’re an idiot. You happen to be an idiot about a different set of metaphysical constructs, but you’re still an idiot.

DOOR: You praise the northern tradition for having a reason-based faith, but you also say that, “Northern churchgoers believe in God, but not enough to bring it to anyone else’s attention.”...