"NICKEL AND DIMED"

 “NICKEL AND DIMED”

Barbara Ehrenreich died earlier this month at the age of 80.  She was a prolific and profound writer, and I read several of her books.  The most famous of her books – and the one that stuck the most with me – was “Nickel and Dimed,” published in 2001.  In it she went undercover to work in low wage jobs in America to expose the self-interest of the wealthy in indoctrinating people in this country to work in such jobs.  She did her research in the “boom” years of the late 1990’s, and her work proved to be prescient, being as contemporary as possible in a re-reading here in late 2022.

Having grown up in the South, I was very familiar with the subjects and outline of her research, but what I remembered the most from “Nickel and Dimed” was her description of her attending a tent revival not in the South but in Maine.  In the chapter entitled “Scrubbing in Maine,” she indicated that in Maine, it would be easy to go undercover, because most of the low-wage workers were classified as “white,” as she was.  One Saturday night, boredom drove her to a tent revival in a small town there, I’ll turn over the rest of the story to her, in these quotes from that narrative.

“The marquee  in front of the church is advertising a Saturday night “tent revival,” which sounds like the perfect entertainment for an atheist out on her own. Unfortunately, from an entertainment point of view, only about 60 of the approximately 300 folding chairs are populated.  I count three or four people of color – African and, I would guess, Mexican Americans; everyone else is a tragic-looking hillbilly type, my very own people, genetically speaking (Ehrenreich is a name acquired through marriage; my birth name, Alexander, derives directly from Kentucky).

But before anything interesting can happen, the preaching commences.  A man in shirtsleeves tells us what a marvelous book the Bible is and bemoans the fact that people buy so many inferior books when you really need just one……Next a Mexican American fellow takes over the mike, shuts his eyes tight, and delivers a rapid fire summary of our debt to the crucified Christ..  Then it’s an older white guy attacking “this wicked city” for its heretically inadequate contribution of souls to the revival – which costs money you know, this tent didn’t just put itself up……

The preaching goes on, interrupted with dutiful “amens.” It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage.  But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse -the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say.  Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again, so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.

I would like to stay around for the speaking in tongues, should it occur, but the mosquitoes, worked into a frenzy by all this talk of His blood, are launching a full scale attack.  I get up to leave, timing my exit for when the preacher’s metronomic head movements have him looking the other way, and walk out to search for my car, half expecting to find Jesus out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole.”

So, thanks Barbara Ehrenreich for your life and witness, for all your work, and especially for this pithy and precise insight to 400 years of white American Christianity.  An angry, death-dealing God whose only interest in human life is the corpse of Jesus. A powerful summary of how American Christianity - imbibed by slavery, neo-slavery, white supremacy, patriarchy, and consumer capitalism – is seeking to make its comeback in a narcissist like Donald Trump and crass power mongers like Mitch McConnell and Ron DiSantis.