Editor’s Note: A long time ago an academic whom I found intimidating challenged me to consider the possibility that I might not understand other people’s motivation better than they do; or that at least my certainty about their motivation was on shaky ground until I had more evidence, including the evidence of someone actually telling me their motivation. These days we see a lot of back-and-forth blaming, with the worst possible motivations being ascribed to each side in a given political debate. This is not new. But it isn’t helpful either. At The Porch we’re seeking to discern and tell a better story that both includes and transcends the most painful aspects of life, honoring them while letting them push us to noticing the possibilities of something more whole. How do we talk about life without sugarcoating suffering, and how do we talk about pain without making it the whole story? This essay from Ben Beard speaks about painful things, but also seeks to do something rare in the current cultural moment: to begin to understand the motivations and meanings experienced by folk who might be on the other side of an ideological conflict.
Like a lot of children, I was a strange mix of the holy and the deranged.
My mother raised me Southern Baptist. I went to church twice a week, and attended East Hill Christian School, where I had daily Bible lessons. Evangelical Christianity was everywhere stitched into the fabric of my life.
But the tentacles of pop culture were always creeping in at the edges. I believed in a literal Christ and a literal devil, but the concepts were filtered through my obsessive reading of comic books and trashy fantasy and sci fi novels.
And always music. Raunchy, drug-fueled, sex-obsessed rock music.
The holy part of me had tried to hold all of the ungodly stuff at arm’s length; the rest of me was ravenous for all this derangement.
My soul was a battleground.
And Jesus was losing.
***
When I was 13, I went on a summer church retreat to Panama City. It was 1989, the eighties were ending, and so was, according to the Christian eschatologists who surrounded me, the world.
The main speaker was a pastor named Rick Stanley.
Stanley wore golf apparel, the casual church-wear of the lower middle class, sports jackets on top of pastel collared shirts. His platinum-blond hair was stiffed into eighties villainy. His skin was bronzed into burnt umber. His eyes had that eggy glow I associate with day drinking. He was skinny, but his skin hung puffy and loose around his jawline. He was a good storyteller, funny and engaging.
He was also Elvis Presley’s step-brother.
We stayed in a junky blue and white motel on the Gulf - Panama City, powered by tourist cash, its hotels and motels and beach houses on a strip of land, an isthmus to nowhere. The beaches, when not dotted with crushed beer cans, broken liquor bottles, and ripped condom wrappers, are pristine, the powder-white quartz sand one of the most beautiful sights in the world.
***
My church had set up the retreat. My mom went along with it. I don’t know how much it cost. We took a bus. It was the East Brent Baptist crowd, mostly country types.
Each day would have beach-y events, such as volleyball, then Bible study, and periodic preaching from Stanley. The trip was two or three days, and included a visit to a water park. My buddy Jason was with me, so I was happy. Britt was there, too, but the enigmatic ending of that friendship is the subject for another essay.
***
Stanley used his celebrity-adjacent status to try and refashion Elvis as a Christian icon. His conversion story followed a familiar pattern. He was a druggy reprobate, a pill-head junkie who scored barbiturates for his rapacious, drug-addicted stepbrother. It was a wild life: hotels, women, booze, and the Memphis mafia, knock-around guys who sponged off the King while doing odd jobs, like scrounging for Seconal at 3 on a Sunday morning.
Stanley converted to Christianity the year I was born, way back in 1977. He got saved in Fort Walton, Panama City’s redneck neighbor. He used his proximity to fame to build a career as an itinerant preacher and public speaker, an evangelist with a sob story of an abusive, alcoholic father, a stint in a children’s home, coming through heroin addiction, and some top-shelf name dropping.
He sounds sleazy, but he wasn’t. He could lay it down as a preacher, and was throughout the weekend decent, funny, and caring, and a first-rate storyteller. He was sincere. He was also full of shit. This isn’t a knock on him. This combination is what made him memorable, as opposed to merely good.
I’ve seen a lot of pastors over the years. Stanley was better than most, giving just enough shame and guilt to sell the redemption and sobriety. He had a polished delivery and a performer’s ability to read a room. He didn’t dwell on his former misery; he luxuriated in his current exalted state.
But it was so very strange, this artificial blond man in the era right before the insta-celebrity, speaking to teenage children about the wonders of Elvis and God.
***
In my memories, we had workbooks, but I might be confusing this with the Bill Gothard seminar I attended in Atlanta. Or the First Baptist weekend retreats, where young teens would stay at a church-members’ house. During these retreats, we would have Bible study, “straight talk” about sex and other teen issues, and play silly ice-breaker games. All in a stranger’s house. It was less weird than it sounds, and although writing it now it sounds creepy, it really wasn’t. As far as church events went, it was kind of fun.
The church was big on the retreat concept. It’s different from a seminar—where you would re-enact an academic setting through close study and workbooks, and yes, they were awful—and a revival, which was really a soul-rattling emotional call to salvation. I went to both, but always preferred the pitch and timbre of the revivalists. They made me feel alive, like my very skin was aflame with holy fire.
***
Everyone loves a redemption narrative, and Rick’s was especially compelling. His hustle was getting girls, pills, and drugs for Elvis—who had an insatiable appetite for all three. Rick fell into the lifestyle himself, boozing and pill-popping.
A big part of his message involved the perils of Rock ’n Roll, which he represented as a drug-induced, occult-inflected sex show, a physical manifestation of man’s fallen nature.
The music itself was a big part of the problem. Rick wasn’t alone in his thinking; in the atmosphere of my childhood, there was a reflexive paranoia towards pop music—we called it secular music—and rock music in particular.
Rock music was the drumbeat of much of my childhood, the rhythm section of a adolescence incubated in the Southern Baptist tradition. This was right after the waves of Satanic panic roiled through America’s suburbs, and it was a complex mythology that involved coded language, heavy metal, baby sacrifice, perverse sex, and a documentary every child in every Southern Baptist church watched, most of us more than once: Hell’s Bells: The Dangers of Rock ’N’ Roll.
***
The evangelical community had lost the battle in the pop cultural landscape, and in 1989 they began to fight back. That’s the year Hell’s Bells was released, the same year I sat in a Panama City motel game room and listened, rapt, to Rick Stanley lay out his own battles with addiction.
The brainchild of Erik Hollander and Eric Holmberg, Hell’s Bells is an exposé on the dangers of rock music. More specifically, how thoroughly evil rock music is, in its Satanism, sex-death-scarification obsessions, and its willingness to sacrifice the minds of our children to the altar of hedonistic occultism. It is an epic assault of pop music, focusing mostly on heavy metal bands of the 1970s, but delving into ’80s pop stars, too.
So Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, yes, but also George Michael— a pro-sex advocate for monogamy (in at least one song), and a generous and charitable human being—and Madonna, who was a challenging artist using sexual imagery as her feminist battering ram. How these two ended up on Hell’s Bells is a mystery. Hell, even Richard Marx makes an appearance. Richard Marx? Really?
The film walks through album art, live performances, lyrics. It shows various musicians in the throes of live-music ecstasy, trance-like dancing, sexualized performances. It shows clips of music videos that eroticized young girls, portrayed violence and mayhem as fun, and mocked religious symbols.
***
A definition of the 21st Century hipster is a person who understands irony but not symbolism. That is, a 21st Century hipster often communicates through sarcasm, and understands the world through the meta-comedy of the self-aware real/not real comedy news and reality TV shows, and serious/not-serious meme culture that dominates the web. But they often misunderstand the importance of symbols, probably because we’ve stripped ritual out of our daily lives.
Evangelical Christians have the opposite problem: they understand symbolism—you could say they are obsessed with it, seeing cultural as being more weighted than they are, or have to be—but have no sense of irony, sarcasm, or intellectual dissonance.
Put another way: if Satan is real—if demons abound, tempting us with our most secret desires, dragging souls to hell for eternity—then Christians have a cosmic responsibility to reject the devil’s music.
They were fighting for our very souls. Still are.
***
So when the movie begins with a mulleted host with a killer ’80s mustache—Magnum P.I.-level impressive—walking us through a menagerie of heavy metal, rock, and pop music anecdotes, it isn’t amusing. There are few jokes in this 185-minute video.
And to my thirteen-year-old self, this is just as it should be.
I was terrified. I was attracted. MTV already had its hooks in me. I was into that secular music, big-time. But I knew it was wrong.
***
I watched Hell’s Bells enough times to forget it existed, the ideas and images seeping into my brain. The film ties rock music to suicide, sex, drug use, aggressive behavior, and the occult.
It was a thing, the notion that Satanism was the cause of much of America’s ennui, and that the suburban malaise and angst, with its accompanying boozing and fighting and juvenile delinquency, was caused by the heavy metal music blasting from boomboxes and car stereos. There were covens and cabals doing the most horrifying things to children. Teenage Satanists were communing with evil spirits and drawing up the dead and tapping into eldritch powers through pentagrams and incantations. People really believed this was happening en masse. People like my mother. And people like me.
Pensacola was rife with rumors, at least among the junior high set. We talked about Satanists a lot. Talk was that Sammy Davis, Jr. was a Satanist, as well as all the members of Duran Duran. Worries about Satanists and Satanism permeated the very air we breathed.
Jason read a book from the church library that told of a Satanist employing the devil’s powers, attempting to turn radio knobs with his mind and popping out both of his eyeballs instead.
We all heard a version of the urban legend of the black mass in the woods. Pensacola’s involved a group of wealthy adults decked out in robes roasting sacrifices over an open fire.
***
Demon-worshiping biker gangs. All kinds of terrible imaginings. Unearthly powers. The dark lord at home on this earth. The Apocalypse around every corner. The Anti-Christ alive at this very moment. The stuff of children’s nightmares.
We believed it. We believed it. We believed it.
***
Pensacola was a weird place, anyway. We had U.F.O. sightings, hurricanes, and the shooting of abortion doctors. We had teenage fight clubs and a couple of bowling alleys, movie theaters and malls, the Rum Shaker and the Boardwalk. We rocked a local pidgin dialect, half-hick, half-hippie. It was a mashup of California circa 1970 and 1955 Alabama. Pensacola is always a mashup of beachy, druggy, seedy west coast casual and zipped up, uptight, provincial Deep South.
It was upright and churchy. It was also worldly and filled with sin.
***
The flaw in the drug-orgy-excess pre-salvation memoir genre is the drug parts always sound like so much fun. They serve as advertisements for the rock n’ roll lifestyle.
But if you really listened to the music, you had glimpses of real human suffering. Ozzy Osbourne’s “Changes,” is an ice-cold evocation of bewilderment at the pain life inflicts on us; “Crazy Train,” offers a disorienting experience of mental instability; and “Close My Eyes Forever,” is a heart-breaking love song about loneliness and despair.
Osbourne aged out of the coked-up craziness, becoming a reality-TV star attempting to raise normal children in the suburbs. Evangelicals would have more success focusing on the middle-aged, often prematurely gray survivors. That would go a long way in curbing drug abuse.
***
The film introduced a whole generation of children to listening to rock songs backwards. There, the narrator tells us, the real message of much of the music often lies.
My cousin Keith and I did this with one of his neighbors. It was a Beatles’ album, and for the life of me I can’t remember which one. We didn’t get anything from Led Zeppelin. The neighbor had his parents’ old turntable and was spinning the records counter clockwise. We couldn’t make out much, until we heard—distinctly—Yoko Ono’s voice saying, “Look at me, Satan.”
I was rattled. I didn’t tell my mother or my friends. I locked this memory away. It came roaring back when I learned of Rick Stanley’s death.
Look at me, Satan.
It wasn’t funny at all, not then and not now.
***
Music wasn’t the only danger.
I was a devout child. I prayed every night. I was also an avid consumer of comic books, horror movies and trashy horror novels. I read Stephen King, Dean Koontz, William Peter Blatty, Peter Straub, and Dan Simmons. I read Koko. Koko with a green splatter face. Koko of Vietnam. Koko with its exotic locales and bizarre thrills. I was titillated. I was enthralled. I was drawn in by the darkness. It was feeding an invisible craving. For violence. For torment. For evil.
My mom didn’t notice the books I was reading. She was too nervous about the comics.
My faith was a bulwark, but it was also a millstone. I felt furtive in my own skin, ashamed of sexual longing, and incapable of saving the souls of my damned friends, or even my own father. It protected me from the traditional nihilism of teenage suburban ennui—the end of history in a place like Pensacola is nothing to sneeze at—but it haunted me with its thorny metaphysics and an implacable vision of hell.
I watched Headbanger’s Ball, alongside G.I. Joe and urban avenger movies on TBS and WGN. I inhabited a dark and miserable interior world, where the X-men fought sinister, otherworldly intelligences, often of a demonic nature. My church pastor presented an American culture in steep decline. Both hit me with the same message: the world was always ending. Both hipped me to the false promise of violence as a resolution. Both presented a world beset by supernatural dangers. Both terrified me with the true face of the world: a vicious, snarling grimace.
***
My dad was a government lawyer with a love for movies and a penchant for beer. My mom was a teetotaling churchgoer. I was hitting puberty at the end of the Cold War, at the height of MTV, in the wake of the Satanic panic.
I was confused. I was cogitating the dissonance of the age. I was trapped between my parents and their dueling belief systems. I couldn’t please them both. They stood on opposite sides of the cosmic conflict.
I learned to code-switch. Succumbing to the sweet siren’s song of pop culture with my dad. Rejecting the sinful temptations with my mom. I carried this conundrum as a humming cognitive dissonance. The push-pull discord opened up my writing pathways.
***
One of the paradoxes of evangelicals is the endless capacity we have to forgive ourselves, while excoriating others. Our Christian drug addicts are redemptive tales in the making, yet godless drug addicts are often spoken of as human scum. Our Christian philanderers are just lost. Godless philanderers are syphilitic monsters. It’s a classic in-group/out-group thing, bursting through the seams of forgiveness and Christ’s teachings.
This is not love for punks or metalheads, but disgust.
***
My mom was hip to some of the ever-present dangers. I was forbidden to mess with Ouija boards. That was inviting demons into your life.
I wasn’t interested anyway; I had seen too many horror movies. There’s always a gateway opening to the netherworld, and I had zero interest in opening it. Still, I had heard stories. Britt once told how his brother had played with a Ouija board at a party and all the doors and cabinets had slammed shut at the same time.
I didn’t drink in middle school. I was terrified of sex, unsure of how to speak to girls, and often bewildered by the world.
My love of pop culture distilled a special form of dissonance in me. My childhood self amalgamated these swirling opposites with a bizarre frisson. Jesus was a superhero. The metal bands I adored were just pretending. All that left-wing claptrap was a put-on. And even the hardest, vilest music was done in the spirit of satire.
I was selectively deaf. And the comic books had done their damage. I was susceptible to bizarro fantastical renderings of the devil as a lost creature from another dimension, or a dapper, pipe-smoking scoundrel who looked like Cary Grant.
The world of rock and hair metal, of Satanic orgies, it was all academic and abstract. I had my filters in place. I couldn’t see any of it as it was, and I didn’t want to.
This world was there, though, the world of Alice Cooper and Van Halen and Michael Jackson buying the skull of the elephant man at a curio shop in Pensacola.
I didn’t fool around with drugs either. I drank too much, but it was high school in the Florida panhandle, so not too uncommon there, but that was a year or two later.
Still, I kept my soul clean, or tried to. I prayed every night. I looked out for people. I tried to be good. I acted as a civilizing influence on my juvenile delinquent friends.
Booze loosened me up—when drunk I was a different creature. That was the point.
***
Hell’s Bells wasn’t some obscure release. I watched it in Pensacola. My cousin watched it in Atlanta. A decade later, I watched it again in Colorado. It was everywhere in evangelical circles, playing for years.
Hells Bells isn’t wrong about a lot of things. Metal uses Satanic imagery and inverted Christian iconography for transgression. Messing around with sacred symbols holds great power. Transgression is a way to express rejection of old models, old forms, old paradigms. It’s also an indiscriminate F-you. And what’s more punk than that?
And, yes, a lot of entertainers subscribe to a universalist or unitarian touchy-feely spirituality. Who cares? Christians do.
The music was rejecting morality. The musicians were often terrible people with weird beliefs. The Sex Pistols announce themselves in the opening of their most famous song: “I am the anti-Christ! I am an anarchist.”
***
What Hell’s Bells—and so many other Christian doomsaying commentators—misunderstands is that it was the rigorous ascetism of metal and hardcore that drew me in. Straight edge—a no drugs, no frills hardcore philosophy—matriculated through the hardest of the punk bands: Minor Threat. The element of metal that spoke to me the most was an extreme form of self-abnegation. I didn’t like the music because it made me want to drink and screw. No, I liked the music because it was muscular, strict, aggressive. It had a harsh, anti-capitalist vibe, without the rigorous dialectics of actual left-wing thought. I dug it. It channeled my whacked out anger, that tube of fire lodged somewhere in my chest.
***
The movie positions the pop culture terrain as a vast battlefield. On the one side you have Pan, the pied piper, Lucifer, Aleister Crowley, and some unnamed spirit of androgyny and sex. On the other you have Jesus Christ.
It’s David Bowie and Patti Smith and Robert Plant and Jim Morrison against your local pastor. Who did they really think was going to win?
***
Still, there is a lot to the metal music of the late ’70s and early ’80s that was disturbing. Death-obsessed hopheads and boozehounds were channeling undercurrents of America’s weirdness. Alice Cooper getting fake-beheaded during his stage show. An increase in youth violence. Bizarre self-mutilation, often incorporated into live shows. Endless songs about suicide. Endless songs about sexual violence, including some with lyrics that endorsed it. Songs about infanticide and eugenics. An often skipped over Teutonic Nazi thing. Dog whistling semi-hidden racism, women as sex objects, the black goat and the blood-red pentagram and, yes, MTV.
It was sex and drugs and parties and death, and it was also imaging the future. On the insert of Guns ’N Roses’ Appetite for Destruction, a cartoon woman is about to be violated by a robot.
***
In its decadent phase rock/metal turned treacly and mimetic, saccharine and silly, but that was part and parcel of the ’80s. Forget the music for a moment. The behavior of the big hair metal bands was deplorable. They were coked-out jerks who mistreated women, risked the lives of others and got away with everything. They were preaching a terrible message of unsustainable, misogynistic garbage—not just in their music, but with their lives—and we were listening.
***
The point: the film could have excised the Bible lessons and delivered a remarkable—and chilling—investigation into the sinister power of pop music.
But Christians are often lazy. Or, rather, they can’t not use the Bible. They can’t resist proselytizing. They can’t resist turning upsetting cultural trends into a portrait of the impending apocalypse and a call to prayer. They can’t not invoke Jesus.
It’s easy to mock this earnest, preachy, self-serious attack on the music the musicians themselves often didn’t take seriously. But there is worrying material here: sexism, depression, sexual violence, ritualized self-mutilation and a stunning belief in no future. These were signs of an unhealthy culture. Reagan’s America was dark, dumb, vicious, and institutionally uncaring. Of course pop music would reflect those trends. You can’t expect a society to be sick but its products to be healthy.
And this is precisely one of Hell’s Bells main points. You can tell America is falling into further sin by the music it’s producing. We’re in trouble, and have been for a long time.
The movie is right, but it’s also utterly wrong.
Christianity hits this note a lot. It’s the thing a lot of critics get wrong about the religion. The pop cultural landscape is a battlefield with the hearts and minds of the young as the ultimate prize.
***
I had my own reckoning. I had Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral on cd. I left the case on my desk. It is a foul, disturbed, and demented album. My mom found it. She read the lyrics. She was shaken, angry. In her worldview, I had invited demons into our house. I came home and she was waiting for me, sitting at the dining room table, her eyes red and wet with tears. I retreated. I threw the cd away. It wasn’t enough. I had drawn a shadow on my character.
She saw me as fallen. I saw her as crazy. We were both scared. I learned later that she almost threw me out of the house.
My dad had to intercede. He also fetched the cd out of the garbage and gave it back to me a few years later, but by then I wasn’t interested in it.
***
My Christianity was steeped in self-abnegation. The only way forward was to prostrate yourself before God and submit to his every whim. The “bad” parts of us—the human parts, the parts of us that make us, us, the very things pop music often revels in—had to be burned away before we could find Jesus. It was a devastating process to submit to. An erasure. A rebuttal.
The movie, Jacob’s Ladder—filmed in 1989, around the time I was sitting in that blue motel in Panama City—presents this in metaphorical terms, as the protagonist is subjected to terrors, visions, distress, and demons, but it’s all the longing for life fading away in a death rattle. I love this movie, and it got me right in the gut. By the film’s end, he’s saved, set free from the mortal coil.
But at what cost?
***
The evangelical Christians—as a group—feel aggrieved. They feel mocked by the larger culture, which they are, and want to punish the atheistic heathens in a variety of ways, which they do. During the 1980s, they embraced an unforgiving Jacobin mindset. They wanted purges. They wanted witch hunts. We have to protect our children by destroying everyone else.
We had been here before. We will go through this again.
***
We had invited Satan into our country, our bedrooms, our playgrounds, our daycare centers, and our schools. He was inside, in our music and movies and books and, worst of all, our hearts.
Now how could we get him out?
***
The Satanic Panic was a much larger force than just crazy suburbanites running amok. The Satanic Panic didn’t end. It just changed form. It trickled into our politics, our national discourse. The language of insinuation, the cascade of interlocking madness. An unsettling feeling. Of instability. Of creeping terror. Of atavistic religious yearning.
The rage and the fear. The rage and the fear. The rage and the fear.
***
I started writing this to explore the ways evangelicals defended themselves against pop culture. I thought it would be kind of funny, kind of sad, kind of interesting. A way for me to wander through my difficult feelings towards the Baptist church, while rooting around for the source of my inner darkness, the schism I had to hold in my heart.
But things took a bizarre turn.
Rick Stanley died a week before I started writing this essay, and I hadn’t thought about him in twenty years. And East Hill Christian Middle School is mentioned in the production notes of Hell’s Bells. I was a student there when this movie was released.
So, the filmmakers behind Hell’s Bells have some connection with my middle school. It’s weird, the way the world actually works, coincidences and connections forming invisible lattices.
And that’s our childhoods, right? An occult superstructure that dominates our thoughts through innuendo and patterns, some real, some imagined.
But that minor epiphany wasn’t enough. I wanted to know more.
I reached out to a writer, Stephen Deusner, who had written about the same video. I asked him if he knew about this connection. I asked him if he had communicated with the filmmakers. I also reached out to the Holmberg and Hollander.
Hollander and Holmberg ignored me. Days passed. I emailed them all again.
***
The paranoia, the fear, the suburbs, the sprawl, the hysteria, the cascade of suspicions—all of this predates me; it’s in the system I live in, and fighting against it is a daily struggle. I fight against it, but I can’t fix it. Still, I worry over the question that haunts me as I get older: why isn’t there more joy in the world?
***
There I am, in 1989—an almost teenager charged with the same hormones as everyone else, a tall, athletic, overly sensitive goofball with an inexplicable inner darkness no one saw but me—listening to Rick Stanley impart his hard-earned wisdom. About God. About suffering. About sex. About salvation.
I did what I always did in these settings; I drew superheroes, often battling massive octopoid creatures creeping at the edge of the page, and tried to pay attention to the redemption of my soul.
A girl began flirting with me, laughing and saying off-color jokes. It was nice. She had curly black hair and a big smile. But I was too shy to engage. I doodled my deranged heroes warding off massive tentacles. I pretended to absorb Stanley’s warnings, while stealing glimpses in her direction. I didn’t flirt back. I didn’t know how.
The girl got the message.
***
Deusner got back to me. He was friendly, generous, a kindred spirit, really, but had no inside information. He remembered that Hollander had lived in Northwest Florida somewhere. He then asked me what my angle was. I told him I didn’t have an angle, only a mystery. A minor one, to be sure, but it was important to me, perhaps paramount to deciphering some misunderstanding, some disruption, between my adult and my childhood selves. What is the source of my angst and anger? Why am I so discontented? Why am I drawn to horror?
Or, put another way: where did it all go wrong?
Holmberg was silent. I reached out again. Nothing. He must have sussed out my disbelief.
I emailed Hollander again. I knew it was a longshot. While I waited, I called my buddy, Jason to see what he remembered.
“Dude,” he said, “I have a great memory, and so do you, and I barely remember this at all.”
***
The 1980s ended. The 1990s began. That hinge, that arbitrary year, 1989, hangs out there a portent of false importance. Nothing happened, yet everything changed.
The days of rage, of metal and punk, shaved heads and mosh pits, were just around the corner.
***
Hell’s Bells runs through some of rock’s most famous casualties, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and, of course, the king of the cautionary tale, Elvis Presley.
Rick told us Elvis’s last words to him: “Rick, you need to get right with God.”
***
In 1992, Stanley published his memoir of his brother, Caught in a Trap, but I never read it. A pastor’s art is the spoken word, and this I already tasted at the retreat.
He worked as a pastor in Fort Walton, just down the way from Pensacola. He died of liver failure, just a week before I started working on this essay.
Like his brother—like me, like everyone—he was living inside an image he had crafted. He struggled with addiction his whole life, but kept the struggle hidden, so he could continue to preach his particular narrative of redemption. His story, he felt, was more important than the truth. And he wasn’t wrong. He understood symbolism, if not irony. He carried the weight of his addictions in private, so he could live as a shining example for others.
***
Stanley could hold contradictory things in his mind at the same time. About himself. About the world.
He accepted the paradox that rested at the core of his being. He would never escape the disease of addiction; he would make his living teaching about God’s grace in defeating the disease of addiction.
Rick Stanley preached abstinence from drugs and alcohol. His private addictions only augment his message.
He wasn’t living a lie. He just wasn’t trapped in binary thinking.
Maybe the contradiction is the point.
***
Maybe Stanley’s life offers us a model of thinking.
Two things can be true at the same time. Heavy metal music riles up our baser instincts and plays with powerful symbols in damaging ways. And, yet, heavy metal music also allows us to sublimate our aggression through harmless noise.
***
Pop culture commodifies our desires, selling us repackaged versions of our own hopes and dreams. Pop culture also celebrates the messy, fun, stupid, and wonderful feeling of being alive.
***
Evangelical Christianity creates divisions and instills guilt and fear. Evangelical Christianity also anchors communities and inculcates hope.
***
Perhaps our religions are too old, too rigid, to really speak to pop culture.
And maybe pop culture is too immature to grasp the importance of religion.
***
Satan is a lie, a boogie man created to scare children. Satan is also real, the name we give all the darkness and violence in the world.
***
And that darkness is in me, in all of us.
That’s the Christian message, and maybe, maybe, it’s both completely true, and utterly false.
***
I emailed the production company, but by this time I knew no one remembered and no one cared. The production company responded by saying they weren’t connected to the school in a terse, boiler-plate message. I was at a dead end. My little quest was over. My job and my children and my other writing projects were all getting snagged on this little logjam. I had to move along. The mystery would go unsolved. Or maybe there wasn’t any mystery at all. The brain is a reducing valve. I read that somewhere. It takes raw data and pushes it through a narrative sieve. This sieve is how we make sense of our lives. It’s essential, but it also doesn’t matter. Some hidden, inner self is doing the weaving. We each make our own story of our own lives. The story matters. Rick Stanley understood this. The story matters, the story we tell others, and the story we tell ourselves.
***
This is a half-broken story, of an inexplicably lonely child, listening to a sunburned former drug addict ruminate on the perils of hedonism, in one of the seediest Spring Break destinations in the world. The boy listens, he tries to make sense of the words, he has little frame of reference, he sits and worries over the fate of his soul, over the fate of the universe, the sun out the window is burning brightly, the indifferent waves of the rolling, rolling waters endlessly pounding the quartz sand that reflects a ball of fire back into the glassy blue sky, and he marvels at the power of inner darkness to blot out the outer light.
Ben Beard is a writer and librarian. He is the co-author of This Day in Civil Rights History and the author of Muhammad Ali: The Greatest and King Midas in Reverse. In the 2000s, Beard reviewed movies and wrote features for InSite Magazine, King Kudzu, and Filmmonthly.com, where he also worked as an editor. Beard, a native of Georgia who spent his formative years in the Florida Panhandle and Alabama, currently lives in Chicago with his wife and three children. His book The South Never Plays Itself is published by New South Books.