"Annihilating the Hillbilly:
        by Jim G. Branscome
      page 10
The churchmen, educators, welfare agents, independent do-gooders, journalists and novelists, and the institutions which pay their salaries--that is, those who have made an  extraordinarily good living trying to "understand" the mountain man--have studied the Appalachian not to learn from him, but rather to "teach" him, to "school" him, to "doctor" and "save" him by making him into what they already are:  Middle American, assimilated into the America of the television and Holiday Inn--the America which Tocqueville and  Faulkner warned was founded by those who sought not to escape from tyranny, but to establish one, in their own image and likeness.

Only in Appalachia, for example, have the mainline churches come upon a "Christian" religious expression which stands four-square against what they expect religion in America to "do."  The rejection of the "Christian century" by Appalachia has baffled and annoyed the mainline churches, their agencies, theologians and sociologists.  And because the Church in mainline America is unable to understand the Church in Appalachia, they have so far been unable to assimilate it.  They have failed, in other words, to make it over into another of the agencies of social welfare which stands alongside HEW, Social Security, the Council of the Southern Mountains, the Commission on Religion in Appalachia, the Home Mission Board(s), etc.  The mainline churches have tried to obliterate the Appalachian churches with demands for expressions which are "progressive," "rational," "contemporary" and "relevant".  What more haunting, and in many instances disgusting, examples of the philosopher's "ambiguity of reason" or the theologian's "original sin" could be asked for?  The liberal churchmen--Catholic and Protestant--insist that the snake-handling of the mountain man must come to a end (as must the "emotionalism" and "irrelevance" of the Black church).  And all the while the mainline, liberal Church ignores the more dangerous "snakehandling" which defines their very efforts to "save" "yesterday's people"-- a phenomena described precisely in the early years of this journal by the contemplative, the mystic, Thomas Merton, in "Events and Pseudo-Events:  Letter to a Southern Churchman" (Katallagete, Summer 1966).
next to page 11 (the end)