Saints and Sinners by Lawrence Wright — Read

A friend of mine, a psychologist and university professor, undertook a study of fundamentalist Christians in a small town in West Texas. Once a month he would drive from Austin to spend several days observing church services and interviewing informants. Like me, he was interested in the phenomenon of the growth of primitivism. There has always been, in America, a profound and curious duality between the impulse toward progress and modernity, on the one hand, and a yearning for the restoration of an earlier, ideal time, on the other. The Puritans, the Quakers, the Baptists, the early Episcopalians and Methodists, the Amish and the Mennonites, the Mormons, the Churches of Christ, and the modern-day Pentecostals are all expressions of this latter sentiment. Perhaps because we are verging on the millennium, there has been an explosion of growth in primitivist churches, which seek a return to the simpler and holier days of the first church. But what was the nature of the primitivist appeal? And what kind of people are drawn to these Holy Roller–type churches? Those were the questions my friend sought to address through his scholarly study.

He is a gracious and intelligent man, and he quickly made himself welcome in the congregations of this small community. Most of the churchgoers were farm families and country people; they couldn't be more different from this learned professor who brought his tape recorder to their services. They were, in his eyes, fanatics. They represented another America, a country that until now he knew about only vaguely, through television documentaries and the occasional monograph. He himself was not a believer; like me, he was more a student of belief. Now that he was getting to know them, however, he saw that they were not fools. He came to appreciate the genuineness of their faith; he may even have felt a little envious (after all, what had motivated this study in the first place? ). After two years of weekly visitations, certain barriers inside him that held him apart from the people he was studying began to dissolve.