Thoughts on how original / intended meanings get turned upside down.
I’ve been busy the past few weeks with a project that I hope has meaning. In the process of producing music and gathering musicians to play a couple of hours of Sunday matinee – I encountered a deeper understanding of how the meaning of a message is diffused. Untruth starts to creep in. One of the important, nefarious methods of deceit is to steal the emblems of Truth.
Please pardon the clumsy prose… Writing is really just a stream of thoughts this morning.
In my youth my parents hauled us across many miles to visit family. Sunday dinner after country church was one of those sacred events. In our case hours of driving sketchy dirt tracks and church with strangers, ended in the yards of farms and ranches. I wasn’t aware of it then, but the sense of remote isolation was powerful. Danger. My parents paid far more attention to what kind of trouble we kids were getting into when we were on the ranch than they ever would while we were at home in the city.
Ultimately 2:00 would arrive and we’d be called in to wash hands and clean up, get ready to sit to dinner. When the food was served we heard the adults talking about missing members, and their empty chairs. They were places for our uncles and cousins, older than us.
There were a couple of reasons that the seats would be unoccupied. Sometimes there was trouble with cows or horses, or water in the trough, etc. Other times the absence was disappointing. These fellows hadn’t made it home from Saturday night in town.
We were told that they were attending “Cowboy Church.” Which was an unrehearsed metaphor for being stuck at the saloon or at somebody’s arena calf roping, drinking and smoking – being who they were in spirit. The term was derogatory, served with a bit of a wink. Everybody knew that blowing off steam was part of the cowboy way. These folks worked terribly hard and they played with gusto. They’d be up at 5:00 Monday morning and hard at the business of keeping their places going.
“One of the important, nefarious methods of deceit is to steal the emblems of Truth”
To me, “Cowboy Church” has been appropriated by a swath of conservative evangelical country wanna-bees. Their convention of taking church services and all of the ritual and dogma into the barn is just lipstick. In my humble opinion.
There are other examples.
This same sort of larceny has impacted the US Flag. We see the Stars and stripes festooned from trucks covered in political lies and tacked up on walls of Churches. Churches where they have also stolen the Pledge of Allegiance and applied it as a litmus test of membership. Theft of patriotism in the service of hate and false doctrine spewed from pulpits is a genuine abomination.
Other symbols have been appropriated and used for what is interpreted by evangelicals in defamation. The rainbow is an example. But think about it.
LGBTQ people assert the meaningfulness of membership – across every persuasion – in their ranks by pointing to the rainbow’s full spectrum of colors.
Evangelicals will teach that it’s a prostitution of God’s meaning for that symbol. It seems the “Rainbow Coalition” is correct. Their purpose being “an anti-racist, anti-class multicultural movement…” sounds Godly, doesn’t it?
So we started the “Cowboy Church Project” to offset the hyper-otherism of Sunday Church.
Come in, have a beer and rest your weary soul.
Narrow Way Cafe 