Church of Christ

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Loretta Lynn: A tough, trailblazing woman whose edgy art included doses of grit and faith

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Loretta Lynn: A tough, trailblazing woman whose edgy art included doses of grit and faith

If you know Nashville, then you probably know that there is nothing new about major country music stars also being Christian believers. In fact, it’s probably worthy of a headline or two if and when superstars send signals that they’re NOT at home in the Bible Belt.

That being said, I am still amazed when journalists produce stories about country artists and edit out the details in their lives and music that point toward faith. It happens all the time.

I’m not just talking about musicians putting a gospel song or two in their set lists when touring, as a kind of music-history exercise. I’m talking about reporters missing revelations in autobiographies, social-media statements to fans or mini-sermons on stage. I’m talking about passing up chances to talk with pastors who have known performers for years.

This brings me to the death of honky-tonk angel herself, Loretta Lynn — the matriarch for a generation or more of female artists in guitar town. As you would expect, the obits following her death stressed — with good cause, let me stress — her daring hit songs about blue-collar American life, with strong doses of reality about hard times, troubled homes, cracked marriages and lots of other sobering subjects.

Which is why, to cut to the chase, it’s even more important that this legend turned to Christian faith as an adult, in the midst of all that gritty stuff. Hold that thought. Here is a chunk of the Associated Press report that will appear in most American newspapers:

The Country Music Hall of Famer wrote fearlessly about sex and love, cheating husbands, divorce and birth control and sometimes got in trouble with radio programmers for material from which even rock performers once shied away.

Her biggest hits came in the 1960s and ’70s, including “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” “The Pill,” “Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” “Rated X” and “You’re Looking at Country.” ...

Lynn knew that her songs were trailblazing, especially for country music, but she was just writing the truth that so many rural women like her experienced.

“I could see that other women was goin’ through the same thing, ‘cause I worked the clubs. I wasn’t the only one that was livin’ that life and I’m not the only one that’s gonna be livin’ today what I’m writin’,” she told The AP in 1995.

All true.


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Plug-in: History Repeats itself as Little Rock Central hero's great-grandson shows courage

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In 1957, the white mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas, showed courage by standing up for nine black students trying to integrate Central High School.

Defying segregationist Gov. Orval Faubus and an angry white mob, Mayor Woodrow Wilson Mann urged President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send U.S. soldiers to quell the violence.

“Situation is out of control and police cannot disperse the mob,” Mann said in a telegram to Eisenhower. “I am pleading to you as president of the United States in the interest of humanity, law and order and because of democracy worldwide to provide the necessary federal troops within several hours.”

To enforce the school’s desegregation, Eisenhower sent 1,200 members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division and federalized the Arkansas National Guard.

But Mann paid a steep price.

He endured hate mail and death threats. White supremacists burned crosses on his family’s lawn. He lost his insurance business and any hope of a political future in Arkansas.

Sean Richardson, youth minister for the Bammel Church of Christ in Houston, recalled Mann’s experience as he preached on the Sunday after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis police custody on May 25.

“See, typically in history when people have chosen to side with those who are oppressed, they themselves get treated as those who have been oppressed,” Richardson said in the video sermon, which came amid national outrage over Floyd’s death and coast-to-coast protests against racial injustice.

The black youth minister’s mention of Mann, who moved to Houston in 1961 and lived there until his death in 2002 at age 85, was no mere historical footnote.

Richardson traced the late mayor’s lineage to the present day — to an 18-year-old Bammel youth group member named Trevor Mann.

No doubt, Trevor’s place in American history — at least at this point in his life — pales in comparison to that of his great-grandfather, whom he met as a baby.

But Trevor, too, showed courage in the face of racial prejudice.

Read the rest of the story.


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Inside Higher Ed does best job of explaining a college president and a controversial meal

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When I was in Tennessee two weeks ago, one of the fun things my daughter and I did was wade among some cotton plants, which we had not seen since we'd moved to the Pacific Northwest three years ago. You see them all the time in the Volunteer State this time of year. They’re kind of pretty, actually, if you don’t cut yourself on the sharp bracts that result when the boll has burst open and dried.

Even so, they can serve as an inexpensive table centerpiece were you trying to entertain a crowd, which is what drew me to the news about the president of a Christian college in Nashville who did just that.

But the black students who were his guests one night felt the cotton arrangements were a racist statement, according to the New York Daily News.

But note: If you look for any hints of the religious background of this Nashville college in this story, you will find none:

A dinner intended to give African-American students at a Tennessee university the opportunity to discuss their experience at the private liberal arts school left attendees shocked after tables were decorated with cotton stalk centerpieces.
Lipscomb University president Randy Lowry invited black students to his Nashville home Friday night for a dinner, but many of the students deemed the tableware and menu offensive.


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Merle Haggard's Church of Christ mama tried to raise him better, and he embraced Jesus as Lord

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Despite all my Sunday learning
Towards the bad I kept on turning
Till Mama couldn't hold me anymore
And I turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole
No one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading I denied
That leaves only me to blame 'cause Mama tried
— "Mama Tried," No. 1 hit by Merle Haggard released in July 1968

Merle Haggard's friend Johnny Cash only sang at San Quentin State Prison in California.

Haggard — who died Wednesday as he turned 79 — actually served three years at San Quentin on a burglary conviction and spent his 21st birthday in solitary confinement, as The New York Times pointed out in today's front-page obituary.

Cash's performance prompted Haggard to form a prison band, noted the Los Angeles Times:

This real-life narrative would become a classic trope of country music. “Mama Tried,” considered by some critics to be Haggard's greatest song, is a fairly straight autobiographical account of his road to San Quentin.
Its indelible chorus — “I turned 21 in prison doin' life without parole” — exaggerates his sentence; paroled after less than three years, Haggard was able to unfurl his musical gifts under state supervision.

Reading mainstream media coverage of the county music legend's death, I see no mention of his self-proclaimed Christian faith. Did I miss this anywhere?

But the New York Times does reference Haggard's religious upbringing:

Merle Ronald Haggard was born on April 6, 1937, in Oildale, Calif. His first years were spent in the abandoned boxcar that his father, James, a railroad carpenter, had converted into a home for his family. James Haggard died of a stroke in 1946, after which Mr. Haggard’s mother, the former Flossie Mae Harp, a strict and pious member of the ultraconservative Church of Christ, took a bookkeeping job to provide for her three children.

A strict and pious member of the ultraconservative Church of Christ. Please, tell me more.

On the one hand — as a lifelong Church of Christ member — I kind of understand what the irreligious and radically liberal Old Gray Lady is saying.


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Believe it or not: a holy ghost in New York Post exclusive on Jeffrey Dahmer's killer

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On its front page Tuesday, the New York Post touted an exclusive interview with the fellow inmate who killed serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer two decades ago.

Yes, I know it's shocking to hear that the Post produced a piece of tabloid journalism. And somewhere today, a dog bit a mailman.

But stick with me for a moment, and I'll explain my reason for highlighting this story. There really is a GetReligion angle. Promise.

First, let me share the Post's graphic lede:

Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was done in by his uncontrollable lust for human flesh, the man who whacked him in prison 20 years ago told The Post, revealing for the first time why the cannibal had to die.
Christopher Scarver — who fatally beat the serial killer and another inmate in 1994 — said he grew to despise Dahmer because he would fashion severed limbs out of prison food to taunt the other inmates.
He’d drizzle on packets of ketchup as blood.
It was very unnerving.
“He would put them in places where people would be,” Scarver, 45, recalled in a low, gravelly voice.
“He crossed the line with some people — prisoners, prison staff. Some people who are in prison are repentant — but he was not one of them.”


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A Scottish tabloid libels the Churches of Christ

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Tabloids will always be with us. Few will admit to taking Jesus-shaped potato chips, astrology, Elvis and UFO sightings and Kardashian stories printed by The National Enquirer, the Star, The Globe, the National Examiner and the Weekly World News seriously — but American Media Inc. does quite well for itself by feeding the guilty pleasures of the American public.


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Guess which sin makes church discipline newsworthy?

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Every week, in churches around the world, Christians engage in a peculiar practice in which they confront and correct fellow believers on a range of issues, which are often lumped into a general category called “sins.” The process for this practice was first outlined by a popular religious leader named Jesus and recorded in a book known as the Gospel of Matthew:


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