Dignity (ii)

What Arnade does in Dignity, that neither Vance nor Osnos do, is venture out into the world of faith and religion, although Arnade, like Vance, ambles along much closer to a genre that is personal memoir than does Osnos. What we get in Dignity is an appraisal of faith I found almost shocking blessedly. I shouldn't have, but I did. It's difficult, I think, to find other similar books that venture into an analysis of the effects of the Christian faith in people's lives, but Arnade casts no doubt about his mission: he wants badly to find dignity in the lives of absolutely everyone he meets. One place he finds it is in church.

And here's why he's looking. "We need everyone--those in the back row, those in the front row--to listen to one another," he says, "and try to understand one another and understand what they value and try to be less judgmental." That's what he's about. That's what he's up to.

"Front row/back row" is a prevalent metaphor throughout. What he's describing thereby is a kind of church--front row folks, as you can imagine, are those who've been handed the keys to the kingdom, who know the rules, who've determined their lives will be greatly improved by education, who rule with authority and even occasionally with justice. I am in the front row.

The back row, on the other hand, includes those who barely make it into church at all, men and women who do not play starring rules in our lives--except perhaps in the headline-grabbing crimes they commit. They try--and most often fail--to get clean. They turn tricks. They wear black fishnet and ply themselves on street corners. The imbibe drugs, have for years, and occasionally turn to sales if and when they need money. If your seat is in the front row, you've got to turn all the way around and look away from what's happening up front in order to even realize that the back row is occupied.

Arnade dutifully measures his own church background: he was raised Catholic by parents who were happy to have him in church occasionally but didn't bother much with the faith themselves. When he went off to college, he says he took up faith in science and therefore simply walked away from whatever commitment he may have had a boy. He became, he says, not surprisingly, an atheist.

The four years it took him to corral the interviews he thought he needed for this book didn't change his faith commitment. He isn't off to seminary. He says that today he is more of an agnostic than an atheist because what he's come to see is the immense strength the church affords, not the Roman Catholic church per se or some suburban mega-church, but the run-down, miserable Pentecostal churches whose members are as embarrassing as the worship shenanigans they flop through every last Sunday they attend.

What he comes to learn, he says, is that the Christian faith sustains the people he's met, that it's the place where their otherwise sordid existences somehow find strength and even power to go on. The church, their faith in God and the risen Christ, is a significant source of their dignity.

The tragedy of  the streets means few can delude themselves into thinking they have it under control. You cannot ignore death there, and you cannot ignore human fallibility. It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is moral. It is easier to see that there are things just too deep, too important, or too great for us to know. It is far easier to recognize that one must come to peace with the idea that "we don't and never will have this under control." It is far easier to see religion not just a useful but as true.   

Dignity is not about Donald Trump, although the pathways it creates into our times and culture inevitably lead us into the neighborhood of the ex-President whose character dominates our lives and times. Dignity is  all about its title, about human dignity, specifically how some of us, the ones in the back row, seek to find it, and how some of us do by way of the Christian faith.

The unavoidable question I had when following the seamy lives Arnade explores is, "is my religious sensibility big enough, wide enough to admit Arnade's people, to love men and women who seem to make themselves unlovable?" 

My goodness, I was raised on the Beatitudes. I cut my teeth on the love of God. I wrote a book about grace. The most radical direction Arnade takes is old-line biblical cliche--"to love God above all and my neighbor as myself. On these two commandments. . ." well, you know.

Dignity isn't primarily about our church, our congregation, our confession or immediate faith family; it's about us, about me, about how I judge others, or condemn them, about who I consider to be children of God and who I consider to be beyond the reach even of the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

I received Dignity as a Christmas gift this season from my son, a very precious gift.