In God We Trust

 By: Kiera Troy

I first encountered the phrase “God haunts the South” on a Tumblr post many years ago. The context was a European-born professor remarking on the religiosity of the American South, which must’ve been worth some scholarly exploration, given that an entire class was taught on the subject. It struck me as humorous that people went to school to learn about the cultural importance the church has in the South, when I and anyone else raised below the Mason-Dixon line could’ve told them for free. 

        Flannery O’Connor, one of the most prevalent Southern Gothic genre writers, coined the term “Christ-haunted” when describing the almost manic fervor that comes from the American South’s relationship with faith. It conjures up a feverish hallucination of Jesus Christ, bloody and freshly tortured from the Cross, joining the untold numbers of tormented souls that still linger in the soil. A wronged population seeking vengeance on those who wronged them, like the undead climbing out of their graves. Of course, this perspective on Him doesn’t hold true to Bible canon, but why is it such a common sentiment? There seems to be this unspoken agreement between Southerners that faith is the measure of good character, and to lack it is to condemn yourself both socially and after death. Lacking faith is met with punishment, whether it be from God or humanity. As it stands today, I’m much more afraid of mankind’s wrath than I am of an invisible God’s.

One of four cardinal directions, "south” is simply a means of describing a location in a given space. Geographically, Texas is located in the southern half of the United States, bordering our Mexican neighbors further south. Texas is where I have called home for my entire life, even though I’ve felt the urge to leave since I was a little girl. A proud member of the Sunbelt, Texas is baked every summer as the sun casts its inescapable heat like a blanket over the concrete megastructures of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Every summer, it felt like it wanted me out personally and did everything it could to remind me that I didn’t belong here. My skin is prone to burns, fish-belly white and practically glow-in-the-dark, which made me an easy target to find. Summer after summer was spent in the torturous loop of getting burned and healing and peeling, like I was a reptile shedding my skin. I eventually got the message and remained (mostly) indoors during the scorching Texas summer, out of view from the punishing sun.  

        Because Texas is a former slave-holding state, our collective history haunts us. It haunts us in classrooms and government buildings, in churches and faded “Whites Only” signs that you can still occasionally find outside of public bathrooms. I reckon the urge to flee stems from this belated realization, that the ghosts from our past have clawed their way out of the grave, dragging chains of unfinished business behind them, scoring the earth with their supernatural weight. It might seem strange to some that our violent history is intertwined with the beautiful message of Jesus Christ, but religion has always been weaponized. For the American South, it was used as justification for the enslavement of Africans, because without their masters, how would they hear that message? Jesus commands us to love the wretched, and what’s more loving than being promised a better life after being worked to death? Christ’s love is expressed through the wrong end of a whip and chains that bite ankles and wrists. Pain serves as a reminder, for He died for our sins. What better way to return the favor than by sending more souls into His eternal embrace? 

My personal encounters with God started when I was christened as a baby. There is a photo of me as a red-faced infant wearing a long, lacey white gown, being held by a priest, and looking very unimpressed with the whole affair. My father’s religion dictates that all babies must be baptized and given a Christian name to be welcomed into the church community. Being a good Catholic, he did so for all his children. But it was my mother who taught me how to pray. For the longest time, the voice of God was my mother’s, and I paid attention in church only to dazzle her with all the things I learned. My mom’s approval and validation were what I craved, to be adored as her little girl was the love I felt instead of the Lord’s. Even as a child, I had this understanding of how to perform knowledge and desire for our religion, because my mother directly controlled every facet of my life. My childhood reliance on her was as absolute as a disciple’s, and her word was essentially the word of God for how much it dictated my daily life. 

        So, one Sunday, after Communion, when my mother told me and my brothers to kneel on the green cushions next to the altar, I obeyed. She instructed us to pray for our father, who had been recently imprisoned for financial crimes he committed while working as an investment banker. Physically, I made sure to replicate the position I had seen my fellow congregants make when they prayed on the cushions. Knees tucked under hips, hands folded together, and head bowed at the exact right angle with my eyes closed. While the physical performance of my prayer was expertly crafted, my face became hot as I thought of the other churchgoers potentially watching my family at the front. I didn’t dare move, even though I wanted to glance back and meet those imaginary prying eyes with my own, but I was too scared to make myself an even bigger target than I already was. Instead, I stared at the darkness at the back of my eyelids, searching for the words to make a prayer suitable enough for an all-seeing God, but they never came. 

        It didn’t take long for the entire community to find out that my father had been arrested, but they were even quicker to distance themselves from us. The stolen glances and whispers that I suspected to be about us turned into deafening silence as many of the well-to-do families of the church stopped seeking us out after service. Only a small handful of friends and neighbors remained in our lives to help our family navigate the sudden absence of a husband and father, driving me and my siblings back and forth from school so my mom could make overtime at work. Reputation is a fickle thing in the South, because once it’s been tainted, there’s very little that can restore it. My mother, never one to care much about social approval, still told her children to lie about the whereabouts of our father. Lying is bad because God said so, but it’s fine if my mother tells me to do it. I got used to the space he left and waited for the warm presence of our Heavenly Father to fill it, but all I heard was my mother’s voice instructing me to say that Dad was on a business trip. Bedtime was when I would pray, hands clasped over my pillow as I stared at the driveway outside my window, the last place I had seen my father. Night after night was filled with earnest pleading to bring my father back from prison, because it was only under the cover of darkness that I felt comfortable to finally reach out to God. But either He couldn’t hear me, or He simply didn’t care, because no act of God released my father from being imprisoned in the criminal justice system of Texas. The silence was my confirmation, until one day I stopped praying altogether. 

        The words “In God We Trust” are printed on American currency, in a small font that does little to reward you for seeking it out. Our government trusts God enough to be on our money, a sentiment ironically reminiscent of my father’s criminal mishandling of other people’s life savings. If my father’s belief in a higher power walked with him as he followed the path of a petty thief, what could God do to stop anyone else from sinning? If the measure of good character is faith, as it’s widely believed in the South, why didn’t it stop my father from forging checks? And what good is having God on our money at all, if it’s one of the things that leads us into temptation? The Bible warns us about the dangers of insatiable greed; the sin my father came face to face with during his time on the inside. Afterwards, he would tell us how he “found” God again while in prison, that His divine hand guided him out of darkness and into the light. 

        I never understood the desire to step out into the light, especially since it had a nasty habit of burning me. I only ever found comfort under the cloak of darkness, where my reckoning with God, with myself, occurred with only the light of the moon in my dark room. Eventually, these midnight revelries turned into a prayer all on their own, where I would spit out broken fragments of poetry in my notes app and weep out what I had to hold in during the day. God, as I have come to realize, was never just a man in the sky looking down at us. Fragments of God exist within all of us, expressed differently according to the vessel that holds it. My mother was my first source of God, the one I loved with the most devotion. God appeared to me again when I was 17 and working the register at Kohl’s. A customer told me that I “had the light of the Lord shining through” as I scanned the items in her cart, making pleasant conversation over the din of a holiday rush. I met God again at 22 when a random child on the train drew a picture of a rainbow for me, hiding behind her father as he handed me the drawing. “She wants you to have this,” said the dad, leaning over as his daughter watched me carefully through her pink glasses. Strangers, somehow, appear to be the mouthpiece for a higher power in the most unexpected moments. I take that as more evidence of God when my faith in the divine wavers. 

        God haunts me, just as much as God haunts the South. He leaves a cold spot in my soul that can only be warmed by the omnipresent Texas sunshine that’s best tolerated with a glass of ice-cold tea. I don’t remember a time when it didn’t feel like I was running in place, cursed by the awareness of forces beyond my control. But growing up gives me a renewed appreciation for my circumstances, one that is intimately familiar with the unwelcome underbelly of mankind, disguised beneath the veneer of respectability. It looks like a middle-class suburban home with red and blue police lights flashing on the brick. It looks like an empty driveway, holding no physical reminder of the man that once stood there. It looks like a child kneeling on green cushions, pretending to pray. Perhaps the reason why we are Christ-haunted is because Christ himself understood the weight of being bound against your will. To represent an inconvenient truth, the shadowy side of humanity that we would prefer to forget. But we haven’t fully reckoned with our past, as Southerners, as Americans, and as people shaped by punishment and silence. If there’s one thing that life’s taught me, it’s that what I don’t talk about will only grow larger until it consumes me in a loveless, lightless void. Numbness is infinitely worse than darkness, and to speak is to be relieved. Looking eye to eye with the thing you can’t face may just be what saves you.

Kiera Troy is an English MA student at Texas Christian University. A few of her writing interests include creative nonfiction, rhetoric, and how we teach writing and literacy to the next generation. 

This is her first publication, but she has been writing CNF for a while now and she appreciates the genre as a way to explore her lived experiences and as a way to contribute embodied knowledge to the world.