Popular Christianity in Branson: Nebulous and Negligent?  A Review Essay of Aaron K. Ketchell’s

Published February 4, 2008

By Martin Mittelstadt 

I moved to Springfield, Missouri with my family in the summer of 2000. During the first few weeks after our arrival we heard the consistent refrain: “You have to go to Branson.”  We moved from Canada and had never heard of Branson, but after our first trip we were hooked. Only forty minutes south of our new locale, Branson provided immediate and endless opportunities for entertainment, recreation and leisure.  The scenic hills, amusement parks, and theatres provided a cultural orientation to life in the Ozarks.  We became familiar with the city and quickly felt right at home.  However, as time went on, I started to get a little edgy.  Something wasn’t right.  We continued our visits, but I starte d to feel restless with the rather nebulous religiosity of the community.  The blending of tourism and spirituality began to prove uncomfortable.  Don’t get me wrong!  I enjoyed Branson’s hospitality but I also felt conflicted by the convergence of Christianity with unqualified entertainment, consumption and nationalism.  Aaron Ketchell not only confirmed my uneasiness but helped to situate my perspective in Branson’s larger historical context.[1]  In this review essay, I echo Ketchell’s thesis with a synopsis and critique of Branson’s philosophy of religion and entertainment followed by brief implications for members of PCPF.  I believe Ketchell’s analysis of Branson provides a microcosm of a larger nebulous and negligent Gospel Americana.   

WELCOME TO BRANSON  

At a recent chamber of commerce meeting, city officials adopted a slogan that proclaims Branson as a perfect combination of “neon and nature” (104). While home to only 7,000 permanent residents, the community attracts some seven million tourists annually.  Ketchell compiles an impressive collection of facts concerning the city’s tourism ranking.   Branson is by several estimates the second most popular “drive-to” destination in the United States trailing only Orlando, Florida (xi, 92).  Branson ranks consistently as a top American destination point for motor-coach trips including a consecutive run as the number one destination from 1995-2001.  Stories concerning the Branson experience regularly find their way into countrywide magazines such as National Geographic and The Saturday Evening Post as well as television programs including 60 Minutes, The Today Show, Larry King Live, and Entertainment Tonight.[2]  In 1967, an early surge for Branson’s tourism industry came via the local filming of four episodes from The Beverly Hillbillies.  Peter Herschend, founder and owner of Silver Dollar City, boasts: “The Beverly Hillbillies moved Silver Dollar City, and therefore Branson, out of the regional business and into a national attraction. That was the change. That made the difference. And this community has never looked back since that time” (189). The rise of Silver Dollar City (SDC) illustrates the larger success of the entire Branson project.  At first glance, SDC looks like a typical theme/amusement park.  More than two million annual guests enjoy world class roller-coasters, Marvel Cave, craft shops and displays, southern cooking and daily musical and theatrical performances featuring nineteenth century Ozarkian life and culture.  But as guests stroll through the park consistent religious sentiments become apparent.  Visitors pass the on-site wilderness church with its full-time pastor.  The pastor hosts and organizes regular Sunday services and daily hymn sings.  Sacred music wafts gently throughout the grounds (xxiv).   SDC is a one of a kind theme park and part of the growing Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation that includes Celebration City, The Showboat Branson Belle (on Table Rock Lake), an additional Ozark cave, water parks, and a shopping center.  At each site, Christian values are integrated into leisure activities. [3]  Herschend seeks to retain a glimpse of rural pre-modernity through symbolic resistance of modern accretions of urbanization, technology, and secularized philosophies (xvii-xviii).  For the average guest, these venues become shrines for the merger of a nostalgic faith with frivolity, a nebulous variant of entertainment based evangelicalism for a consumer culture.  Branson residents, now well beyond the city’s centennial anniversary, learned early to capitalize upon this multifaceted fusion of recreation with religious sentiment.  The emergence of SDC and virtually all of the other tourism venues take their cue from the influential writings of local author Harold Bell Wright (1872-1944).  While numbers vary as to Wright’s ranking as a national icon, his impact on the Ozarks is unquestionable. Six of his books ranked as best sellers from 1911-1923.  In a 1910 advertisement, Sears promoted his works with the epithet “Dickens of the Rural Route” (2).  In Wright’s best known work, The Shepherd of the Hills, the protagonist glorifies the inherent majesty of Branson (and the Ozarks in general): “There is not only food and medicine for one’s body; there is also healing for the heart and strength for the soul in nature.  One gets very close to God… in these temples of God’s own building” (3). Wright draws consistently on a frontier genre where protagonists resist the decay of faith and culture under the spell of emergent modern life (11-12).  Ketchell points to Wright’s ongoing influence as the pioneer of this regional union of religion and creation. But Ketchell furthers this vulnerable relationship.  Ironically, while in pursuit of Wright’s quest for the “good old days”, Branson morphed through the convergence of its religious and ethical experience with the best (or worst) methodologies available to a complex culture (15). 

RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION IN BRANSON 

Ketchell traces this convergence of entertainment and religion throughout the various venues where locals boast of Branson’s Holy Hills, its divine destiny.  Richard Freihofer, publisher of the annual Branson Church Getaway Planner (PR sent to tens of thousands of churches nationwide), proclaims Branson’s “divine plan and purpose… a celebration of faith toward God”; a destiny for anyone in pursuit of a supernatural vacation experience (xxv).  Branson’s advertisers consistently herald that the city and its venues are inextricably connected with the divine and thereby elevate Wright’s understanding of Ozarkian topography to prophetic status.  Venues advertise and celebrate the city and its surrounding area as a land of promise, “a sanctified terrain” (26).[4]  Building upon this holy topography of the Ozark Mountains, the Branson business community takes religious expression to new elevations. Proponents of Branson’s popular Christianity equate this divine nostalgia toward the land as the backdrop for their carping against “churchianity”. According to Ketchell, Branson venues consistently take the church out of Christianity in order to promote a more popular religion that reenacts a folk-oriented expression of the religious impulses from the Ozark frontier period.  Branson’s churchianity follows Wright’s conviction that the most viable avenues for Christian belief and practice lay outside the parameters of the institutional church. Unfortunately, the result is a subtle popular “extra-ecclesiastical” religion outside of the guidance of the clergy, a faith community and formal church walls (XVI).  There may be no better declaration of this Branson axiom than the 1972 song “Jesus and Me” by Tom T. Hall. Hall croons “Me and Jesus got our own thing going on/ We don’t need anybody to tell us what it’s all about” (94).[5]             Sadly, Ketchell connects the current status of such a nebulous and negligent churchianity with the preponderance of Pentecostal and Southern Baptist influences in the region.  Ketchell references Grant Wacker’s Pentecostal “primitivism”, the attempt to return to a more pure and spiritual past with the parallel “pragmatic” impulse that focuses upon the use of modern methods to facilitate the spread of the gospel (72).  While Pentecostal pragmatism generally serves as a positive cultural adaptation for successful evangelism, Wacker does highlight dubious examples.  Unfortunately, Ketchell aptly interrogates not only regional Pentecostals but also Southern Baptists and Evangelicals for pragmatic churchianity that extends beyond biblical primitivism.[6]             If Branson’s popular religion builds upon a divine topography and churchianity, entertainment serves as the primary medium for the message.  Branson augments Nashville’s blend of secular and sacred entertainment through a myriad of variety show “theater-churches”.  Theses venues facilitate the delivery of a Christian message not only through anti-institutional liturgies, but also celebrity clergy, and pop culture evangelism (101).  Again, Ketchell provides countless examples.  According to the Branson Stars Booklet, “Jesus is ‘the greatest star’ in Branson… Christ is the fabric of the music and the message” (86).  A required credo for all Branson entertainers proclaims “Good Clean Family Entertainment”, a mix of “country and gospel tunes, nostalgic and patriotic melodies, and a patent vision of the virtuous nuclear family” (91).  Jan Rousseaux echoes these family values: “I think you can make the girls cute and even sexy without being seductive.  We are the home of the clean-cut, grass-root, American style” (93).  A final example: at the conclusion of Tony Orlando’s Christmas variety show “Santa & Me”, Santa hands a Nativity scene to the performer (108).  The use of innocent country and gospel music, the promotion of pre-modern nostalgia, civil religious patriotism, and the rhetoric of family values serve as the foundation for every tourism venue and lay beneath the nebulous banner of Christianity.  

RELIGION IN BRANSON: A CLOSER LOOK

Branson’s loaded mix of religion and tourism provides insatiable curb appeal for the average vacationer.  But Ketchell takes readers behind the scenes not only to a nebulous but also a negligent Christianity.  Ketchell interrogates Branson’s popular religion on multiple levels.   I limit my focus to the following: 1) unqualified consumption; 2) overzealous patriotism and 3) underlying racism.  First, Ketchell argues that Branson’s nostalgic pre-modern frontier no longer exists.  Any attempt at the perpetuation or re-creation of the glory days is now replaced with a thorough Christian-driven consumer culture.  The Branson entertainment industry greets tourists with insatiable opportunities for greed and materialism leaving little if any room for grappling with scriptural injunctions such as the merging of God and mammon. To the contrary, these seemingly insurmountable paradoxes are rationalized and gently assuaged by the industry and its audience.  Ketchell unveils a further irony by revisiting the classic sociological analysis of H. Richard Niebuhr.  In 1929, Niebuhr described born-again Christianity as the “religion of the disinherited” (228).[7]  Today, Evangelicals are no longer on “the other side of the tracks”.  Born-again Christianity is now mainstream; Evangelicals now equal or surpass the income and educational levels of the average American (228).  This ever increasing economic status of Evangelicals now feeds an increasing and undisciplined hunger for materialism. Ketchell’s second critique strikes at the intense patriotism imbued with uncritical religious sentiments.  Local motivational speaker Mike Radford contends: “We [Branson entertainers] don’t ‘promote’ patriotism — We are patriotism” (117).  Theatrical venues regularly conclude with rousing patriotic finales and mandatory tributes to veterans (115).  Branson has long targeted Veterans as a niche market and now hosts the nation’s largest Veterans Day Celebration drawing 150,000 soldiers and their families to a weeklong festival.  In 2000, Branson received the “Stewards of Freedom Award” by the National Flag Foundation as the most patriotic city in America.  In this same year, veterans and their family members constituted more than one-third of Branson’s seven million visitors.  Unfortunately, Ketchell cites numerous examples of the convergence of God and nation.  According to one performer: “You’re either a believer in this nation, and its tenets of God, family, and country, or you’re not. I was taught there’s only right and wrong. There’s no gray area” (117).  Such nationalism also includes an unabashed loyalty to all American war efforts.  In fact, any debate concerning the merits of military conflict is not only discouraged but rejected.  A common but slippery refrain misuses Jesus’ words: “No one has greater love than this, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).  In the same vein, I clipped the following quote from a recent entertainment ad: “Only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you: Jesus Christ and an American GI.” Ketchell’s final critique consists of a subtle racism. He traces Caucasian superiority to the mid-nineteenth century.  Pioneers in the region encountered remnants of the Cherokee nation as well as sizable populations of free blacks.  But in spite of this earlier racial and ethnic diversity, voices throughout the twentieth century frequently connected the Ozarks with a monolithic Anglo-Saxon heritage and, by association, praised the genuine and often sanctified whiteness of the hillbilly icon.  A local 1930 column featured a poem titled “The Hillbilly”: Hillbilly, Hillbilly / Who are you, / Dreaming and dreaming the / Whole day through? / Blood of the Cavalier / Bold and true / Blood of the Puritan / That is you! (196).  Sadly, an early missionary and preacher to the Ozarks (ca.1915) praised the region an Anglo-Saxon haven: “there is no melting pot in these mountains. Your people have maintained your integrity, habits and racial purity” (197-8).  Although these statements reflect their era, modern-day Branson remains virtually homogeneous.  Ketchell cites startling data: in the mid-1990s, out of a combined population of 44,000, only 14 in Taney County and 6 in Stone County were African-American. These figures increased somewhat by the 2000 census, but regional these counties stand at 96.2 and 97.6 % white respectively.  Like Ketchell, my time spent in Branson also reflects the racial construct of Branson visitors. During several visits to Branson with my Barbadian friend and his family, we not only noticed the small number of minority visitors, but also experienced some not so subtle looks in our direction.  These numbers also account for the dearth of nonwhite performers in the entertainment business.[8]   While most vacationers may not see or sense any subtle racism, Ketchell exposes the growing presence of local Christian Identity groups (200).  Proponents proclaim that whites are God’s chosen people, non-whites are pre-Adamic, and Jews are descendants of Satan. The FBI estimates Identity membership at fifty-thousand nationwide with the Arkansas-Missouri border as the center of the movement.  Thom Robb, the Grand Dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan lives only 30 miles south of Branson.  And preacher Ted R. Weiland, who proudly preaches in Branson “more than anywhere in the United States”, labels Jews the “enemies of Christ” (201).  Ketchell concludes that portrayal of an ambivalent Ozarkian hillbilly connotes, at best, a prideful local heritage, but at worst, an overt and contemptible racism (201).  

REFLECTIVE IMPLICATIONS  

PCPF affirms Jesus’ call to radical discipleship as normative for Christian life. PCPF strives to educate Pentecostals regarding the inconsistencies of excessive consumerism.  We exist as a counter-cultural prophetic movement committed to peace in light of militaristic nationalism and to a life of racial and ethnic inclusivity.  These (and other) shared values encourage PCPF members not only to wrestle with dubious expressions of religiosity, but also to breathe fresh life into our churches and communities. Reflection upon Ketchell’s Holy Hills brings us full circle.  Undoubtedly, Branson stands as one of the nation’s premier examples of popular religion.  But Ketchell’s analysis of Branson may also provide a microcosm of larger tendencies for the expression of the gospel in America (and elsewhere).[9]  His critique compels us to engage in reflective and active analysis of PCPF principles.  Do we really grapple with Jesus’ teaching on God and mammon?  Do we genuinely believe in the centrality of the value of the church (alongside effective parachurch ministries)? Are we attentive to the lure of an overzealous nationalism that replaces the call to live as citizens of heaven worthy of the gospel of Christ? (Phil 1:27).[10]  Are we sensitive to any form of dehumanization and marginalization that runs contrary to the inclusivity and equality of Pentecost?  Finally, are we able to discern the difference between popular religion and radical discipleship?  Whether next door to Branson or not, we always stand to benefit from studious engagement of our faith in a complex culture.[11]