Bar Keep or Circuit Rider

The American Experience bred a different kind of Christian than is found in the rest of the world. Our cultural retardation comes from the American West, where two great institutions collided - the Saloon and the Church.

The Saloon pre-dated the Church on the frontier: the danger of Indians and outlaws on the fringe of expansion encouraged husbands to leave their families behind as they forged a new identity, hundreds or a thousand miles from wife and children. Working cattle drives and life on a ranch were occupations that discouraged normal family life; mining was long,tough work that made brave men hard; all this played out in a dangerous environment, where crime and violence were all-to-present realities.

The Saloon was a refuge for men alone on future's edge. They could drink freely, and to excess. They could gamble, blowing their monthly wages on crooked tables. They could dance all night, stopping occasionally to expectorate the juice of their chaw into omnipresent spittoons. They could watch burlesque on large stages inside the saloons, and bone the chorus girls afterwards, because the Saloons were almost always brothels as well as watering holes.

Frontier preachers - aka Circuit Riders - saw the depravity of the moving edge of America and arrived in numbers to minister to its lost souls. They were received with indifference until wives and children arrived from back East, and when now reassured families settled there. The Church was the second institution established in Dodge City, Ogalalla, Silver City and Tombstone, and the battle between the Church and the Saloon was on.

There was no question who would win, at least in the immediate run. If there are stages of settlement, and there certainly are, the danger of original conquest is followed by pacification. The railroad wanted peace and predictability. The Federal Government wanted an end to Indian wars. Small business owners didn't want cowboys shooting up their store fronts every two weeks.

Churches were the instruments of pacification - in towns, with church meetings and events and the establishment of schools; on the reservation, with missionaries who "civilized the savages."
The Saloon had reduced influence on the frontier after the arrival of the Church, and eventually it was shut down by Prohibition.* The American Church continued to vilify the Saloon and made its attributes the main enemies of faith; i.e., the aforementioned WOLBI Statement of Conduct - no drinking or smoking; no card playing; no social dancing; no shows/movies. This was all about Saloons, not New Book teaching.

After WOLBI, I was shocked to learn that C.S. Lewis, probably the pre-eminent theologian of the 20th Century, drank Scotch, freely and openly - with no guilt - and that Charles Spurgeon, the great English preacher, smoked cigars "to the glory of God. But these were European Christians, never under the spell of the Saloon, so never needing to discard it.

They realized that you don't break the power of something by attacking its components. The problem with the Saloon was how it existed as an agent for "Spiritual Wickedness in High Places," not the drinking, smoking, card playing, dancing and shows that flourished there. These things didn't make the Saloon. They were merely present there, and if you think smoking in my office, having a beer at a sporting event, playing Bridge in my parlor, square dancing at the Elks Lodge and going to see the Chronicles of Narnia at the movies speaks to my spirituality one bit, you are deluded and deceived, and drunk on the need to legalistically judge others.

"You ain't going to make it with anyone, anyhow" - the Beatles once more. Oh my god, the Beatles? Were they believers?


* Bars came back after Prohibition, but Saloons, with their expansive reach and influence, didn't. We have specialized places of relaxation now: strip clubs, dance clubs, dinner theater; all selling alcohol and, in the past, encouraging smoking, but few places (Las Vegas Hotels?) that do it all.