Faith amid violence
One of the best books on American religion from the last 25 years is Dennis Covington’s “Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia,” which has served many writers as a template since it was first published in the mid-1990s. Neither a straightforward account of conversion (though Covington does join the snake handlers for a while) nor a detached observer’s report, the book is wildly personal, compassionate but unsentimental, at times outrageously funny, and ambivalent at its core.
At first glance, Covington’s new book, “Revelation: A Search for Faith in a Violent Religious World,” might seem to be joining the heated conversation about the intersection between religion and violence. The subtitle suggests as much, an assumption underlined by the description of the book on the front flap and amplified by the opening of Chapter 1: “My search for faith in a violent religious world began in a most unlikely place.” But before you get very far in the book itself, you’ll realize that this impression is misleading. Covington certainly visits a lot of violent places, including Juarez, Mexico, and Syria during the still ongoing civil war. But for the most part he isn’t particularly concerned with the degree to which the violence might be said to be religiously motivated. What interests him, as he explains in the prologue, is “places where people are subject to extremity.”
Why? Two answers are offered in the book, recurring several times in different forms. Neither one is what you might you have expected. In his prologue, Covington talks about the years after “Sand Moun- tain” with self-lacerating candor. He and his wife, Vicki, set about to write a memoir together. “The book,” he recalls, “was to be about our search for what Jesus had called ‘living water.’ … We thought we could find this spiritual water by leading a team from our church to hand-drill a well to literal water in a desperately poor village in El Salvador.” They did that, but in the meantime, “Vicki and I had fallen in love with other people, so our book about spiritual renewal (‘Cleaving,’ it was called) became instead a confession of sin without the requisite plea for forgiveness at the end.”
Asked to step down from his “leadership role” in their church, he ended up leaving, convinced that his inability to find a lasting home there was “the result of doctrine, dogma, a regimen of oft-repeated beliefs, as though the very recitation of them could somehow fill the dark hole at the center of my heart.” Instead — inspired, he says, by verses in Hebrews and James — he needed to “reimagine faith as an action rather than a set of beliefs, as something that anyone, believer or not, could initiate if only given the time and the means.”
Understand this: Covington is saying he is going to Juarez or to Syria in order to help suffering people there, as various relief workers, pastors and others he encounters are attempting. Rather, he is going as a witness, a writer; thereby, he says, he will “do what Jesus expected his disciples to do when he asked them to go as witnesses to his suffering on the Cross.”
That’s the first answer he gives to the “why” question, and it’s repeated with variations. The second answer is hinted at several times; it’s implicit rather than explicit. So, for example, right at the outset, Covington recounts a conversation he had with the writer Charles Bowden: “I told him I’d loved (Bowden’s book) ‘Murder City,’ even though it gave me the willies.” Then Covington adds:
“Particularly what happened to Miss Sinaloa,” I said. In the book, he’d reported that a former beauty queen had been gang-raped by Mexican soldiers or police. Lost her mind because of that.
But this time Bowden didn’t respond. Maybe I’d touched a raw nerve.
What comes through here and elsewhere is the dark side of “witnessing” people in extremity, a frisson that becomes addictive and that confers on the writer a sense of belonging to an elite: those who are willing to look at the dark heart of things.
As to the outcome of Covington’s personal quest for faith, I don’t want to give that away. You’ll have to read the book yourself. But don’t expect a revelation.