The Condimental Divide gerrymeanders through America. On one side, a bottle of Cholula hot sauce stands proud on the restaurant counter. On the other, one can expect a blank look upon asking for it when one needs to spice up a bland plate of fried eggs with biscuits and gravy.
The Condimental Divide is nothing like the stark horizontal of the Mason-Dixon Line. Nor does it resemble the Continental Divide, that wiggly vertical that marks the fate of a random raindrop that might end up in the Pacific or in the Gulf of Mexico. By contrast, the Condimental Divide runs in loops and blips and bloops, in and across and through America.
Last night I returned to Los Angeles after four days in the South, wandering the front and back roads in a rented car. No Cholula on offer at the complimentary breakfast at the motel in Greenville, South Carolina: no hot sauce of any kind. I drove up into the Appalachians, past side roads posted as "hollers". It was a Cholula desert of glorious greenery covering misty hills. But at the very top, in the little burg of Hot Springs, North Carolina, I chanced upon a a Mexican food counter inside a general store. "O Beulah land, sweet Beulah land! As on thy highest mount I stand," runs the old camp meeting hymn. There I was, in Cholula Land again, surrounded by Beulah Land.
Which goes to show: pretty near everything and everybody is everywhere - if not in plain view, then not that far out of spittin' distance. Because there's a Condimental Divide running not far from you, if you squint your eyes and poke around a bit. It corresponds with the political and cultural ones that so animate our national discourse (rant?) today. It's not about red states or blue. Condiments are smearier and messier than that. Fact is, Trumpians are picketed and pocketed all over the land, as are Dystrumpians. To be sure, there are more "Jesus Saves" signs on the roads of South Carolina than on those of southern California. But on my sojourn in the South, I met atheistic hillbillies and holler Hillaryites. Everybody is everywhere, just in different concentrations.
At Hot Springs, I spoke on the subject of my book, MINDFUL CHRISTIANITY, at the annual Wild Goose Festival. It is a sort of Coachella for disaffected evangelical Christians. 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016. "The Goose" is the convention for the other 19%. I was there to help forge an alliance between Wild Goose and ProgressiveChristianity.org, advancing a meeting of the minds and hearts of recovering evangelicals and theologically and socially liberal mainline Protestants.
After my talk, one of my listeners told me she was from a little town not far away in the mountains of Tennessee. She told me she felt like the only progressive Christian anywhere nearby. "You're not as lonesome as you feel," I reassured her. "You're in good and big company with others scattered in small towns all over the country."
The old Gaelic word for the Holy Spirit translates in English as Wild Goose. This spirited festival draws about a thousand folks, mostly from the Southeast but flavored liberally with others from a "fur piece" away. It was founded by people from the "emergent" or "convergent" or "open" branch of the evangelical world who wanted to spice up their mostly white, mildly orthodox scene with folks from on or beyond their fringes: black church folks, post-orthodox progressives like myself, religion-friendly atheists like my pal and USC colleague, Bart Campolo, and New Agers such as the Urantians. Call this crew Cholula Christians and friends: a heady, hearty, and very sweaty mix of the frocked and the dreadlocked.
It was a tent meeting revival for a youthful-tilting demographic, drenched in hot humidity, thundering with good news of justice and reconciliation preached by NAACP leader Rev. William Barber and Obama's Chicago pastor, Rev. Otis Moss. From the main stage, Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber gesticulated with her tattooed arms as she described her ministry of "beer and hymns". I could hardly see through my steamed-up eyeglasses, but always in my fuzzy vision was a big, muddy, happy cloud of witnesses to hope, faith, and action for a kinder, gentler America.
The Condimental Divide can't keep us apart. Together, we are the salsa of the earth (Burklo Non-Standard Version of Matthew 5:13.) We are the Cholula of America. May the spiciness evident at the Wild Goose Festival smear far and wide, across all divides, until we meet again... Amen!
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG Weblog: MUSINGS Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
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Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California