Speaking Episcopalian with a Baptist Accent
Long, long ago I studied French in grad school. It was strictly a “language requirement.” In class, I never had to speak a word of it. All I learned to do was translate French into English. Which has meant over the years that I am pretty good at reading road signs and menus, and very bad at conversation.
Last week I was in Quebec City, where French was chattering all around me and I was my usual mute. It always tickles me, though, to hear toddlers on the sidewalk speaking fluent French. You’re not even four years old, I want to say to them. How do you do that? I studied your language for a year, and I have to think before stuttering, bon jour and merci and toilette.
I’ve been told that unless you begin a foreign language before age seven, you’ll never pass as a native speaker. You’ll always have an “accent.” While I was in Quebec, my son-in-law, a fluent Spanish speaker, was doing an intensive immersion in Guatemala—trying, in one sense, to get rid of his accent.
Our native language is simply inseparable from our identity. We don’t “learn” it, we just inherit it, drink it with our mother’s milk. And our religion is like that, too. Whatever we inherit before age seven mixes with the blood in our veins, seeps into everything. We can ditch our native religion, but it never really leaves us. Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright who gave us “Waiting For Godot,” became an agnostic who couldn’t get God off his mind. Stevie Smith, the English poet, called herself a “lapsed atheist,” and wrote these beautiful, God-haunted lines:
There is a God in whom I do not believe
Yet to this God my love stretches.
Smith couldn’t lose her accent. Neither could Beckett.
Many of us haven’t ditched the faith of childhood and become agnostics or atheists. We’ve tried to convert to some other form of the faith, one with—in some cases—radically different fundamental principles. Forty-six years ago I decided to leave the Baptist church and become an Anglican. For 34 of those years I was even a priest, but I never quite passed as a native speaker. I always spoke Episcopalian with a Baptist accent. Not everyone enjoyed my sermons of course, but those who did often noted the Baptist accent and liked it. At first I wanted to lose my accent, but in time I came to cherish it. Without it, quite simply, I wouldn’t be who I am.
I know what you mean, David. I was baptized at fifteen in Merrymeeting lake by a wonderful Baptist minister. I’m grateful for my roots, grateful for my current faith home – and for the congregations and denominations in between.
That sounds so idyllic—I had to Google Merrymeeting Lake to find it there in New Hampshire, and see how beautiful it is. That’s a good beginning story. I’d keep that one if I were you.
I’m one of those who likes your Baptist accent very much. I don’t suppose I’ll ever return to the Baptist Religion I grew up in, but then I never fully left it. I’m deeply grateful that I had such a wonderful place to attempt to run away from.
Thanks for those lines from Stevie Smith. Reminds me a little of Penn Gilette’s essay about praying regularly to the God he doesn’t believe in.
“ … such a wonderful place to attempt to run away from.” Thank you for this.
David, David, this grabs me! Makes me smile. Makes me sigh.
So I’m a lapsed Baptist. For a while, I was a lapsed Episcopalian. And a lapsed Unitarian. And, if you can drop out before you jump in, a lapsed Mormon.
What do you call it when you stop lapsing? Un-Relapsing? Collapsing? Relaxing? Heaven?
Thank you for this one!
You tell the truth. With wit and grace and all with apparent ease.
Well of course we all lapse every day, if we’re honest. That’s why Benedict said, “Always we begin again.” Our faith often sheds its skin and takes another form. And each new expression of faith brings its own unique gifts. So you have many gifts to be grateful for, from many traditions.
Beautifully said! Love the “shedding our skin” metaphor.
David , this is great! I feel that way for sure even though I have ditched it. Yesterday I hiked on Mount Lemmon with a new young friend 30 years old. She’s recently started going to Saint Phillips.
She was raised in a very strictly conservative Presbyterian Church, the one that doesn’t allow women to do much at all, and she’s really having a hard time. She is really eager to move out and move away From all of that. But it is hard when her whole family is there and her father a leader in the conservative Christian church. I guess you call it fundamental Lester evangelical. The farther way I get from them the more I can hardly tell the difference.
Anyway, after our long conversation about all of this yesterday, I sent it to her 🙂 thank you for the post!
Thanks for passing this along to your friend. The church can and does wound people, just because human beings are involved. But the hope is, that after some years, perhaps, we can come home and be all right there even we have changed within. But that takes time and a lot of grace.
I seriously think we’re brothers (though I’m the Prodigal Son). I took French in high school with a southern twang and my crowning accomplishment was ordering a plane ticket ON THE PHONE in French from Paris to London…I couldn’t believe they understood my intentions!
Your sermons made me want to speak in tongues and do the worm down the aisle when they were over. I loved how you called out the truth and how uncomfortable it seemed to make some people. This all makes more sense now. It also strikes me that an inordinate amount of people at St Lukes in Darien CT are Southerners that truly get involved in the Church’s extracurriculars – just something I’ve noticed since I joined in 2002. I do have to thank my ex-wife for “converting me” to Episcopalian – how sad it makes me to think we may never have crossed paths.
We are brothers-in-bad-French for sure, Matt. And—thanks for suggesting that my sermons were worm worthy. 😅
I would pay money to see Matt doing the worm down the aisle after church. That visual just made my day! So glad you never lost your accent, David, and even more glad that we had the gift of hearing and being moved by your sermons for so many years. How lucky for us!
That visual made my day too!
Thank you for this, David. Your brother in Tucson shared it with me. So good to be reminded of my belonging in the family of faith, with others who also have an accent from their childhood churches, even when my sister thinks I’m not Christian enough. I now find Episcopal ritual feeds my soul more than the Evangelical dogma of my youth fed my sense of safety.
Thanks for reading, Sherry—and I like your emphasis on feeding your soul more than your need for some kind of imagined safety.
Good one, David! I can relate. I speak Presbyterian (USA) with a Southern Baptist accent. I’m most grateful for memories of my baptism and the legacy of faith from past generations in my story. Even if you join a new path – it’s all leading to the same place. Enjoyed all the comments, too!
Yes, our different paths are leading us in different ways to God.
Thank you David. Having to explain my Southern accent almost every day since I moved North, I’ve finally come to enjoy the question: “where are you from?” Likewise to appreciate my Methodist roots while loving my conversion to Episcopalian.
I’m glad you mentioned your Southern accent. That’s very much like Pam, who—when she moved North— had to explain her accent every time she opened her mouth! Of course I adore her accent.
My native tongue was Presbyterian (USA). I was never sure what that really meant. I have made brief forays throughout my years from wanting to be Catholic (after seeing the old movie “The Song of Bernadette”) to almost becoming Episcopalian. I have returned to the Congregational Church, which feels more familial to me, like vanilla ice cream (Presbyterian). Not that vanilla is boring! Just no ice cream add-ins like incense or kneeling.
On a different note I recommend David French’s article in the New York Times: “The Day My Church Cancelled Me Was a Very Sad Day”.
David, thank you for writing such excellent articles! I enjoy them as well as the responses!
This rings so true. I grew up Catholic, lapsed, then found Jesus in a Bible church in the Dallas area. We moved to NM and the church that fit us best is a Baptist church, although I never thought I could manage that. But it has been a great church home for us. We are attending a new(to us) non-denominational church in South Texas when we are wintering there. The pastor called something “Baptish” and I loved that. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for sharing the story of your “accent,” Nancy—it’s wonderful to see how God has led you to the place that’s right, even though you couldn’t quite imagine it this way.
David, you definitely knew I had to comment on this! As I always say, “I was Lutheran all my life until I joined the United Church of Christ in 2011.” I think I speak UCC with. Lutheran accent. And that does not include all the years working for the Episcopalians as well! High church, low church…
Well, organists and choir directors like you often work across denominational boundaries and bring the gifts and charisms of one tradition to another.