Good Ole Boys and Neopaganism
Joseph L. Maxwell III
October 1, 1997
Pagans. The first ones I knew were fraternity brothers of mine from the Mississippi Delta. They were good-ole-boy pagans—akin to William Faulkner's Sutpin in Absalom, Absalom, with lots of money but little brains; lots of lusts, but little restraint. They did what they wanted, when they damn-well wanted. When poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt, in Satan Absolved, describes man as "that lewd, bare-buttocked ape" whom God prefers less than virgin nature, I wonder if he knew my Delta friends.
So, I dedicate this issue of re:generation quarterly to all those college friends of mine who were so ahead of their time. It took the rest of the country years more to flesh out what these guys lived instinctually at Ole Miss—the fact that, apart from God, humans might as well live like animals. To be fair, my Delta friends did exhibit—almost uniformly—one magnanimous pagan trait: they loved nature. They would not be caught dead in a church building, yet they flocked to the woods whenever possible, abandoning studies and women and beer, answering their creaturely cravings. They—and I, too—felt a kinship with ducks cackling on a frozen lake; appreciated a purple, rain-mocked sunrise as a sort of sneak preview to a new day's dawning; heard coyotes howl at the moon and gutturally desired to join in. If I had a dollar for every time one of these friends told me he could worship 'God better on a lake in a bass boat than in a church, I could buy a new bass boat!
What is my point? Simply that this neopagan thing now amok in the 1990s makes so much sense. If I were not a follower of Christ, I would logically and instinctually move toward neopagan circles. Why not gratify the lust of the flesh if there is no higher moral ...
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