Free Long Time Leaving by Roy Blount Jr. Page B

that if you were baptized as an infant, it didn't count. Having been sprinkled myself long before the age of consent, I find this tenet congenial.
    However, you will never catch me calling myself a Baptist. All the more so because Northerners assume that I am one, or at least used to be one (and was raised by a mammy), because I am Southern. Nope, I'm a firmly lapsed Methodist. But you can't call that religious either.
    So here's what I'm thinking of becoming: a contemplative Anabaptist. The example of this faith cited by
The Columbia Encyclopedia
is Hans Denck, who, before dying in 1527, “submitted to adult baptism but believed the presence of the inner Word in believers precluded any visible organization of the Christian life.”
    Because Denck did it, I hereby submit to adult baptism—retroactively, by proxy. The event occurred a couple of years ago when I saw the character Bunny Breckinridge, played by Bill Murray in the movie
Ed Wood,
allowing himself to be totally immersed in the interest of raising money from a religious group to finance one of Wood's ineffably terrible movies. Wood himself, played by Johnny Depp, also submits to baptism for this purpose (dip, Denck, dunk, Depp—you see how it all begins to come together), but Bunny—who keeps planning to go to Mexico for a sex-change operation but never quite pulls it off, so to speak—gets into the spirit of the thing most charmingly.
    “Do you renounce Satan and all his works?” Bunny is asked as he is about to be dunked. He shrugs winsomely and says in a soft, maidenly sort of voice, “Sure.”
    But what I like most about contemplative Anabaptism, as a living faith, is what comes after baptism: the avoidance of any visible organization.
    I will tell the Final Scorer

When my earthly race is run,

“I believed in it only

If I'd never seen it done.”

Don't Force It
An Introduction to
Up from Methodism
    F ew people have derived more vocational inspiration from church than Herbert Asbury, 1889-1963. The light he saw, however, was not the light intended. The hard-shell Methodism that Asbury grew up with in Farmington, Missouri, was all about sin—from harlotry to playing the phonograph on Sunday—and downright prodigal ways of repressing and suppressing it. “I was fallow ground for all these seeds of piety,” he writes, “for I was a highly emotional and excitable boy.”
    A descendant of historically eminent Methodists, he did not, as expected, grow up to become a bishop. His attitude toward that prospect was neutral until the revival-service night in his teens when the churchhumiliated him—seduced him with music and induced him with tugs and shoves and heavy blandishment (he renders the experience almost as a gang rape)—into coming tearfully forward unto the altar and offering his soul to salvation, when in his mind he knew he didn't mean it, didn't want it. Thereafter, writes Asbury, he regarded religion “with a tongue in my cheek and a sneer in my heart.” He became a newspaperman, which for many lapsed Methodists would have been louche enough, but in 1926 an excerpt from
Up from Methodism
made him scandalously famous.
    Asbury sent this memoir of his youth to H. L. Mencken, whom he idolized. Mencken was taken by the chapter “Hatrack,” about Farming-ton's treatment of its outstanding fallen woman. The woman in question, called Hatrack because she was so scrawny, lay with men in fields of stone for small amounts of money. As a character, she is young Asbury in reverse: She attends church longing to be saved, but the fold won't take her in. (Perhaps because who then would fill her civic function?) And so she sneers as he sneered, and turns herself out as the church did him. “Hatrack” appeared in Mencken's
American Mercury,
which delighted in mocking American sanctimony. The “Watch and “Ward Society, whose civic function was to keep sin out of Boston, took one look at “Hatrack” and banned that issue. Mencken made a point of