Robert Flynn

The Wittenburg Door Interview: Bob Flynn

Issue #199, May/June 2005

It's a short distance from Erasmus to irascible. Bob Flynn covers the waterfront. The author of our popular series on tiny Chillicothe, Texas, (yes, Virginia, there is a Chillicothe and yes, Bob did grow up there) is something of a publishing renaissance man. Without the cod piece. He's the author of eight novels, including North to Yesterday (a New York Times Best Book of the Year), Wanderer Springs (winner of a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America), and others. He's written about his long stay in Vietnam. He's a playwright. Yada yada yada. But mostly, Bob Flynn is a funny, insightful guy. He's the author of two laugh-out-loud collections of humor, Growing Up Sullen Baptist and Other Lies and Slouching Towards Zion and More Lies (both from the University of North Texas Press). Like Ole's close personal friend Erasmus of Rotterdam, author of Encomium Morae (In Praise of Folly) in 1509, Bob's humor usually contains that short, sudden gasp of recognition that comes when you see yourself in satire.

WITTENBURG DOOR: What's it mean to be a "sullen Baptist"?
ROBERT FLYNN: I want to believe that Baptists know the same kind of joy that other Christians know and many do, but some Baptists pride themselves on being uncooperative, resentful of the spiritual fulfillment and enlightenment of non-Baptists, greedy for power and prestige.
Christians have been no more successful at transcending the culture of their country than other religions. American Christians have been no better than Irish or Italian or French Christians at transcending nationalism. Many Baptists are Americans first, Baptists second and Christians third, and they'll go to war on that basis. I have been one of those Baptists. Most of the people who have expressed admiration for Sullen Baptist have told me they were once Baptist and it was the exclusiveness, the factionalism, suspicion and intrigue that drove them to other churches.
Much of that sullenness comes from fear of change, fear of the future, fear that God is not the creator and not in control of the universe. We don't have a crisis of courage, we have a crisis of faith. If you believe in God the creator, what difference does it make how God chose to do it? The world has always been a frightening place and humans have created gods to give them some power over their fear. The future has always been frightening and humans have resisted change. Humans now have the power to destroy life as we know it. We have the power through cloning to re-invent ourselves. So we make a god of some imagined peaceful and perfect past. The world needs leaders who believe the future is in God's hands to guide invention and information in positive ways. God gave us the power of creation and destruction and God's people cannot be in the rear leading a retreat to some imagined idyllic past where the church controlled truth and men controlled women. We cannot make a god of the future or of the past.
DOOR: How do you "slouch towards Zion"?
FLYNN: The title was originally "Marching to Zion" because I loved the old song, "We're marching to Zion, beautiful, beautiful Zion." But the image is of ranks of Christians marching together with purpose, heads up, shoulders back, chins in. Slouching is fists up, heads down, chins out, everyone against everyone else, greedy for power and the privileges associated with it. It's also a reference to W.B. Yeats poem, Second Coming. "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold" is often quoted. What is less familiar is the ending, "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" After "twenty centuries of stony sleep," are Christians ready to be born or to be replaced by some bestial civilization?
DOOR: Southern Baptists seem to be your favorite targets. What makes them so darn inviting?
FLYNN: I was taught that before you criticize someone else, you first criticize yourself. Before you criticize someone else's religion, race, country, employer, you criticize your own. Examining everything critically, clearly, impartially in order to distinguish between true and false, good and bad, was taught at home, in the Marines and in college, in religion classes as well as literature classes. At some point the rules changed. You can criticize anyone, any religion, any country, any employer except your own. Viewing your own group impartially invites punishment for disloyalty. "Love it or leave it." If you love it you try to save it and you can't save anything by denying its faults.
I choose to be Baptist. It's a choice I make every day. It seems only fair that I criticize Baptists before picking on Mormons or Hindus. Perhaps Baptists seem inviting because I know them from the inside. Baptists have no hierarchy, no pope who can point out error in others while being free from error himself. There is always a struggle for power, for authority in Baptist ranks to tell others what to do and what to believe and that leads to demogaguery and personality cults. The same struggle exists in democratic societies but to me it is most reprehensible in Baptists who are supposed to believe that in Christ everyone is prophet, priest and king. Except women, of course.
DOOR: Dang, there go our remaining subscribers in Waco.
FLYNN: In college, a ministerial student told me his ambition was to prove that a Baptist could be a Christian. I am less ambitious. I would like to prove that a Baptist can be a Baptist. As a Baptist I have not only a right, I have an obligation to point out what I see as hypocrisy, shortcomings, failure in belief and deportment to live as a representative of the love of God as found in Jesus Christ. No one has an obligation to listen or to believe what I say but they have an obligation to point out errors in my thinking and my behavior. With kindness, of course, especially when examining me. And without the smugness of moral superiority.
DOOR: Catholics seem to be your second favorite targets. How come they're not #1?
FLYNN: My Flynn family was isolated in Texas when my grandfather was murdered in 1896 leaving a widow and three sons. My father's two brothers became Methodists. My father's religion was the Masonic Lodge. My other Flynn relatives are Irish Catholics. But I thought my number two target was Methodists because there are Methodists on both sides of my family. And because when I was a child Baptists and Methodists were so similar they had to invent differences. In Chillicothe we dismissed Sunday services to attend their revivals and they did the same for our revivals.
I suppose I target Catholics because in many ways they are so similar to Baptists. They have archbishops and popes. We have pretend-to-be archbishops and popes. They have tradition that assumes an authority like that of the Bible. We deny such a tradition but whatever was believed in the past has to be true now and whatever was practiced in the past has to be correct now and we will pervert the Scriptures to prove it.
DOOR: And yet, your Islamic characters are surprisingly sympathetic. Why?
FLYNN: My wife and I entered Israel from Jordan. When we saw the Israeli flag we cheered, to the dismay of our Jordanian driver. We had so identified with Israel that we felt we were coming home in some spiritual way. I even—I say this with shame—daydreamed about fighting for Israel against Islamic hordes. On the way to Jerusalem, we passed deserted Palestinian villages, the houses shattered by shellfire, and sparkling Israeli settlements and I saw Northern Ireland in my memory. Children born in those settlements will forever consider that ground their home. I saw more guns in Jerusalem than I saw in Saigon or Da Nang during that war.
I have Muslim friends, not enough to generalize about them but those I know are good people. I have traveled in Islamic countries—Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Morocco. I found them to be very open, generous, courteous people; I suspect much more so than we were to them even before 9/11. India has a large Islamic population and there is strife between the Muslims and Hindus but even where Muslims were oppressed, they were kind to me.
Muslims believe the Ten Commandments as fervently as Baptists and come closer to our interpretation of those commandments than Catholics do. They have a stern morality in areas they control, much like Baptists do, and much of that morality comes from the Old Testament. The strictest Muslims follow Old Testament precepts such as polygamy and stoning homosexuals and disobedient daughters. Muslims also believe that Jesus was born of a virgin and will come again. They don't forbid alcohol because they think it is bad but because they are required to pray five times a day and alcohol would interfere with that devotion.
Islam has its version of KKK, Christian Identity, white supremacy and other hate groups. They no more represent Islam than the KKK represents Christianity. It was the Christians who organized pogroms against the Jews, Christians who put Hitler in power, Christians who looked the other way during the Holocaust. Southern Baptist leaders had good things to say about Hitler because he extolled family values and claimed he was on a mission from God to destroy evil. He identified evil as the Jews, homosexuals, liberals, the mentally and physically handicapped. Exchange Muslims for Jews and you have the current Christian hit list. The present difficulty between Jews and Muslim began when largely Christian powers decided to recompense the Jews for Christian persecution by giving them a homeland in territory that had been inhabited by Arabs far longer than by Jews.
DOOR: Why do Baptists like Paul so much and have so much trouble with that Jesus guy?
FLYNN: Jesus did not intend anyone to believe they were righteous. Righteousness comes only through Him. Jesus particularly condemned those who believed themselves righteous, the Scribes and Pharisees. He called on His followers to renounce wealth, power and violence. Jesus is not a nice guy who is easy to live with. No one wants Him for a roommate. Pray for your enemies and you will be considered unpatriotic. Give your enemy your cloak and you'll be charged with treason.
Paul didn't intend believers to feel righteous either but he named some sins and that permitted believers to create a hierarchy of sins in order to overlook their own by pointing fingers at those guilty of greater ones. Paul wrote that homosexuals would not inherit the kingdom of God; he said the same thing about the greedy. But it's not the greedy person he condemns; it's the American lifestyle. Paul also included those who were impure, jealous, sowed discord and created dissension and/or factions. Anyone who can exempt himself from that list is likely to be truly damned. But it gives those of us who envy wealth and power, even wealth and power gained by violence, a chance to feel righteous by condemning homosexuals.
DOOR: Can anything good come out of Chillicothe?
FLYNN: A wonderful thing about God's creation and God's grace is that good can come from Chillicothe, Nazareth, Beirut, Mosul or New York. It's easier for me to believe that good can come from places like Nazareth than from cities like Jerusalem, New York or Ninevah.
DOOR: Is it hard to be an idealist in a red state?
FLYNN: It's hard to be an idealist anywhere. I think it's hardest in the United States because we are supposed to be idealists but we are as cynical as most other places and the most materialistic society on earth. And that materialism is seen as ideal, even by people who claim this to be a Christian nation. Questions of ethics revolve around how much it will cost. How much will it cost to provide children with clean air and water or health care? Too much. Profit trumps people, with the consent of the governed.
I think we want so much to be thought good, we have such pride in being good and rich and powerful that we refuse to see what our riches and power do to others. Only the grace of God can save an idealist from cynicism.
DOOR: You hint a couple of times in your books about your time in Vietnam. Did that experience change you? If so, how?
FLYNN: I'm not sure to this day that I know how Vietnam changed me. I think I am less militant. I have tended to see violence as a way of improving the world. Permit me to kill five or six people and overnight I can improve the world. I was a child during the "Good War," a term I detest. We had been attacked by a foreign power and it was every Christian's duty to make them pay for it. During that war, I discovered a German officer's belt that my father had brought home from World War One. On the belt buckle were the words "Gott mit uns." God with us. How could God be on the side of people who tried to kill my father, people my father killed?
DOOR: That's a sobering question.
FLYNN: I dropped out of college to enlist in the Marines during the Korean War, seeing it as much a duty to my faith as duty to my country. I thought going to Korea, killing Commies for Christ would give me authority, like being a Baylor University football player or cheerleader, and that people would listen to me. I didn't go to Korea. I gave up that dream of being a Baptist pope. More than a dream, it was a sin. I wanted the power to renounce power and claim humility.
Unlike the Navy or Air Force, it's hard to believe you are an authentic Marine if you have never been shot at. I went to Vietnam as a reporter because I did not understand what was happening there. I lost some faith in the government but even more faith in the media. I am astonished by people who think they know what war is like because they saw the movie. I am overwhelmed by how little I know about anything and how much of the little that I do know is based on the interpretation of others. I travel as much as I can and read as many foreign newspapers as I can to understand the information that they have and who shapes it.
DOOR: And your conclusion from all of this?
FLYNN: It took me a long time to accept that God loves Saddam Hussein as much as he loves me, Osama bin Laden as much as he loves George Bush. God help my unbelief.
I have far less faith that violence can save the world or improve it—although the temptation is still there. I still revere military heroes who fight to the death for what they believe, but I revere spiritual heroes more. And I believe moral and spiritual heroism takes more courage. Dietrick Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Will Campbell have replaced Audie Murphy. Also the families of the Marines who died in the battle for Falluja who have donated $600,000 to the refugees from that city. I see Christ in their lives whether they are Christian or not.

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