Straight-shooting Christianity

Straight-shooting Christianity

The March 11, 2003 edition of USA Today reports on a new approach to religious faith in certain churches: worship based in the values and mores of the American West. “Straight-shooting emphasis on Christianity spurs a growing trend,” reads the headline (Grossman D1). A church named, with no needed irony, “Cross Trails” is reported to baptize new believers “in an 8-foot circular, blue plastic horse trough” (Grossman D1). This is a trail to belief that is stripped-down, back-to-basics, a religious attitude that reflects the lives of the ranchers and farmers it appeals to. Cathy Lynn Grossman writes:

This is cowboy church - straight-shooter, sinner-saved-by-grace theology throwing a rope out to the lost, the lonely and those who long for an unvarnished faith. No fancy duds. No politicized preaching. No denominational hair-splitting. It’s come as you are in spirit, spurs and Stetsons. It’s bucking bulls and plumbing Bibles in a dusty arena or dropping a hard-won dollar in a boot on the back table after a punchy sermon. (D1)

The notion Grossman sculpts in her article is part Frederick Remington, part Sea of Galilee. Indeed, “[f]undamentally, it’s an attitude, whether you ride a bronc or a computer keyboard“ (Grossman 1D). The cowboy church movement seems to cut in on a growing herd of believers in America who seem to think that the values of the church as it should be are undermined by the very urbanity, the very sophistication that has come to characterize modern life and popular culture. They seek their solace in The West, in a picture - however mythological it may be - of a simpler way of life. This is a phenomenon, after all, that exists simultaneously with ranchers who hang cell phones where their six-shooter used to be, who use multi-tools to mend fences and all-terrain vehicles to run down stray livestock.

It is an attitude more than anything else. But that attitude is not without some provenance. Grossman quotes pastor Perry Smith, the leader of Living for the Brand, a cowboy church next to the fairground arena in Athens, Texas: ”The cowboy walk in life is parallel with the lifestyle of Jesus - doing right and living by your word” (D2). Likewise, cowboy churches themselves seem to be fulfilling the same roles that Jesus did to his followers. The cowboy church movement, for instance, packages its message especially for its audience, much in the same way Jesus used parables because “they seeing see not; and hearing they know not, neither do they understand” (Matt.