The Devil Loves Air-conditioning

Caleb Stegall

One more post before I shove off for a while. I wanted to say something clearly positive about the Reformed tradition, and about my own beloved Covenanters in particular, lest I should be taken for cad and ingrate.

I do think many of these protestant particularisms, like the Covenanters, served as powerful bulwarks in the lives of ordinary Americans against the worst derailments and pathologies of modernity. I wrote the following back on the “Reactionary Radical” blog which I herewith repeat (we were picking for the reactionary radical hall of fame):

For my second pick, with unapologetic regional chauvinism, I will select John Steuart Curry. Not only because the great Kansan’s work exemplified the reactionary radical spirit of the Midwest—the beauty of the prairie, the virtues of self-sufficiency, the peaceful intercourse (though not without struggle) between man and the land, and the hardened edge of the farm laborer—but also because I share a heritage with him. Curry and his family hailed from Winchester, Kansas, a tiny farming hamlet of five-hundred, also my family’s (on my mother’s side) hometown (and just a few miles from where I now sit). My grandfather was the pastor of the Presbyterian church in Winchester, and several of their children were born in the parsonage down the street. The church itself is beautiful example of simple, hearty prairie architecture. White clapboard siding, large front porch (what good is a church without a front porch?!) high steeple (with a bell that can be heard all the way across town), big basement for church dinners and tornado avoidance, and cemetery out back. And still no air-conditioning! Reactionary radicals yet, God love them. The whole thing built in a time when people liked to, had to, hold their history close.

The Curry family went to this church, though as my Grandfather said with sadness, some had “fallen away.” I was never sure if this meant they had moved to the big city or simply quit coming to church; and perhaps I was never sure which was worse. We went to church there often, having settled ourselves in the “big city” of Lawrence a few miles away. One memorable Sunday one of the kids got too close to the big circular wall fan installed to cool the sanctuary on sizzling summer mornings. The three-foot fan blades were unguarded (no bended-knee to government safety regulators here!) and this curious boy put his head too close and got a bit of it whacked off. One of the men told us kids to run outside and find the missing piece of skull. I grew up believing that church was never dull.

Anyway, more often than not, we would picnic afterwards in the cemetery. Curry is buried there, along with most of his family, just a few yards down from where my Grandfather and several of my aunts are now buried. All the kids loved the gravestones for hide-and-seek, jumping and tumbling. Perfect days communing with God and with our dead. Other days we would go back to my grandparent’s house. In the living room was always hung a copy of Curry’s “Line Storm,” which he did in both oil and lithograph. The quite romance of that image—farmers on a hay wagon piled high racing to beat the coming storm—haunted me; still does.

That image of racing to beat the storm painted by the local prodigal-Covie, along with sweat-soaked psalm sings, are deeply imbedded as part of my conscious formation. This sense of loading the hay quickly and racing to shelter ahead of the coming storm is heavily with me. As is this simple country church’s resistance to air-conditioner (among other benefits, this rendered the sermons on hell somewhat more real and imaginable). There are many lessons to be learned here.