The 1997 coffee table book “Sunday in America,” which I obtained last year at a thrift store in Virginia for the hefty price of $2.00, is a gorgeous chronicle of faith and family in the United States at the end of the millennium. It shows scenes from around the country and from almost every major denomination. It’s one of those books you might look through with a melancholy heart and remember “a simpler time.” But of course, those times weren’t simple, and no time really is. In many ways, my life is much more peaceful now than it was then, but I can’t help looking at reminders of that era and wishing that somehow, some way, we could get it back. The romantic, reactionary pull of looking at the past through a veil of roses is strong.
Part of what I love about this book is the fashion. It’s full of perfect manicures, Sunday straw hats, linen and rayon dresses, flimsy windbreakers, and feathered hair. It’s also full of some pretty gnarly-looking food. The kind of food that makes a 2024 brain recoil at how chemical it seems. Quarts and quarts of sugary sodas sit next to gobs of heavy potatoes. In all honesty, it looks delicious. It reminds me that one of my cousins called the organic trend “a bunch of hogwash.” Maybe he’s right.
I’d sit next to these Kentucky Mennonites anytime. So many of the images in “Sunday in America” remind me of another, more recent book: Chris Arnade’s “Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America,” published in 2019. “Dignity” is about the underbelly of American optimism and ingenuity: drug addiction, sorrow, hopelessness, and economic ruin. But it is also about faith and community.
One can detect a deep root of spirituality in this country, still alive in this decade, one whose intensity has not been diminished by the cultural domination of secularists. If anything, belief seems to have grown, along with hunger for it, and despite the unceasing insistence of the New York Times comments section that religion is an anachronism and should be done away with, it is precisely this faith that gives people the courage to emigrate, to get out of a gang, to stay sober. While traveling through America, Arnade found plentiful “churches in spaces originally designed for something else — a re-purposed fast-food franchise, a former shoe store in a strip mall, or an old wooden home gutted and filled with an altar.” Though economically disadvantaged, many of the people in this America do not suffer from the alienation often found in their high-achieving counterparts who live in major population centers. “We may not have a million dollars, praise God, but we have each other,” a woman named Jeanette preaches while Arnade listens. In fact, belonging to a spiritual community — a synagogue, a parish, a twelve-step recovery group — is the natural solution to the terrible loneliness plaguing so many. In a certain sense, the more fucked up you are, the higher your hope is of seizing that desperation that leads a person to church or to seek help. It’s moderate, simmering malaise, veiled by comfort and functionality, that’s often hardest to bear.
A recent essay by journalist Rosie Spinks that caught aflame recounts the social poverty of people like her sister in San Francisco, who says that “despite knowing many people who live nearby and share her particular life stage, she can barely get someone to commit to something as casual as a walk with a coffee later in the week.” A similar fact is shared by a 60-something woman in a New York Times piece from December: “Over the course of four months she asked more than 60 people if they could serve as her medical escort after a procedure. Nobody was available.”
The world depicted by Spinks is stomach-curdling. Although the people she knows are “talented” and “connected,” able to “text our therapist, and have a person go to the grocery store for us when we don’t feel like it,” they don’t have the deep solidarity of those in “Dignity” who supposedly have nothing. “For us the religious community means everything. The Lord has made us happy,” say Martha and Randy, two of Arnade’s subjects selling baked goods in front of a Walmart.
Many of the people he talks to have been disappointed by “the rehab clinics, the welfare office … and even some of the nonprofits” — what Arnade describes as “that cold, secular world of the well-intentioned.” But at church, they “understand the streets, understand everyone is a sinner and everyone fails.” He starts to realize that despite being “steeped in rationality,” he too is capable of seeing that “perhaps religion was right, or at least as right as anything could be.”
Of course, no faith community is perfect. And the millennial dream of communal living, borne of individualist heartache and the emptiness of self-care, is often ignorant of the realities that pervade every human collective enterprise. In the utopian or radical living situations I’ve witnessed, whether artist communes, punk houses, or agrarian hippie clusters, there was never any shortage of drama, gossip, or power dynamics.
One Christian I like to observe online, who sticks with her faith despite being disappointed by the people within it, is an Ohoian named Clawed Beauty (email handle: emochristian101). She has almost 300,000 followers on Instagram and over four million on TikTok, and looks like she emerged from a 2008 Hot Topic time capsule. As a youngster she was told that her way of dressing was unacceptable in a place of worship.
Nevertheless she persisted, and today explains that she sometimes can’t even call herself a Christian because of her disagreements with other Christians, but calls herself a Christ follower instead.
In a remarkable essay on the resurgence of religion, Paul Kingsnorth explains that when he was growing up, he was taught to treat traditional faith as “something both primitive and obsolete. Simply a bunch of fairy stories invented by the ignorant. Simply a mechanism of social control.” But since joining a church three years ago, he now sees himself as one of the many who “are beginning to take faith seriously again.” In what he calls a “failing materialist culture,” he understands the value of being drawn “away from the world and into the wilderness.” “Our instincts are trying to return to their source,” he writes. “At root, humans are fundamentally spiritual animals … The future, like the past, will be religious.” Of prayer, he says, “we have always done it. We always will.”
Because this is an aesthetic post and more of a reflection than a polemic, I am going to leave you with several visual inspirations. The first one is a 1994 black-and-white portrait of one of my favorite writers, Katie Roiphe.
Part of the wisdom of the Catholic tradition is the acknowledgment that we need saints, role models, people who have trod the path we might like to dip our toe into, and Roiphe is one of those artistic saints for me. If you haven’t read her masterpiece essay collection “In Praise of Messy Lives,” you should. I feel like I can see so much of Roiphe’s charism in this picture: her refusal to swallow the platitudes of contemporary feminism, her ability to parse the ambiguities of human relationships, and a sort of skeptical nature. I also just love the relaxed minimalism of the shot.
In beautiful Christian interiors, I offer you this: a room at Le Monastère des Augustines, a wellness hotel (lol) in Québec. I love everything about this space: the light, the wooden crucifix, the antique items on the nightstand, and the absence of anything plastic.
And finally, a Marian fireplace from the living room of creative director Pia Baroncini. Happy New Year.