Why Liberals Should Pay Attention to the "Duck Dynasty" Kerfuffle

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A UM Insight Exclusive

Recent TV Newscasts have been full of stories about Phil Robertson, the “Patriarch” of the “family” in A&E’s TV show, “Duck Dynasty.” He was quoted as making some very racist, sexist, and anti-gay comments in an interview, so he was “suspended” from being part of that TV show by its producers.

That story, combined with a couple of other news items that have come to my attention in the last few weeks, tells me that there is much we in The United Methodist Church either don’t know, or if we know it, are ignoring it. I believe we do this at our peril.

A few weeks back, a news program showed a map of how the 2012 elections went. However, this time, it didn’t show the results by state. It showed them by County. What struck me was that what we saw was a vast sea of red, with blue islands---all of which actually were showing major urban clusters.

An article I read described the TV viewership reports given to the television industry by the A.C. Neilsen Company. That company no longer sends out logs on which a viewer is supposed to record the channel and time one was watching specific TV channels, that many of us remember. Now, they rely on telephonic reports from only the 40 largest urban areas---the ones that cover about 2/3 of the population. Those reports admittedly ignore the rural areas altogether. Television producers and broadcast networks use those reports to determine which shows, and when, they will broadcast, either on over-the-air legacy stations, or cable channels.

The bottom line: virtually all the television shows on the air show middle-class to upper-class urban folks talking about issues in their cultures which have little or no relationship to the lives of people who live in rural communities. Political campaigns cannot afford (outside of Iowa and New Hampshire) to send candidates (or even campaign speakers) to small towns in America, so those folks get little political attention. Is it any surprise that the rural counties in the U.S. tend to vote for conservative politicians? We liberals are guilty of failing to speak to the rural population, in their language, in their cultural terms, outside of one cable channel most of us have never even heard of: RFDTV. It broadcasts such things as rural rodeos, cattle auctions, and news of what is happening in rural states, etc. Among the non-big-name cable channels, it has one of the highest viewerships in the country.

So along comes a TV show like “Duck Dynasty,” a program that portrays a group which admits to being lower-class White. (They even call themselves “White Trash”). This show has a large audience, the majority of it rural. I watched some newscasters on a news channel as they were telling about their reaction to the suspension of its “patriarch” star with snickers---and then they all admitted they’d never even watched that TV show!

So here we are, in The United Methodist Church, a denomination that clearly has rural roots, and one that has sought to have at least one chartered UM congregation in every County in the United States. Most of those churches are small, most share a pastor with one to three other similar churches in their area, often end up with Student Pastors or Local Pastors, and rarely do any of their lay numbers get elected to go as voting delegates to General or Jurisdictional Conferences. Sadly, we who have a liberal theological point of view, like politicians and television producers, mostly are not listening to those folks because they are quite some distance from where we comfortably live in our urban and suburban communities. The producers of Duck Dynasty are listening to at least one clan of them, but then are surprised when its star utters comments that, while considered normal if not wholly true in those rural communities, certainly are politically incorrect for urban audiences.

I grew up as a boy in a community like that, over 50 years ago. It was a rural, agricultural town, surrounded by 4 military bases. It was what passed, in California in the fifties, for a “small town.” In that decade, the town grew from 10,000 to 20,000 in population. My family associated mostly with middle-class folks at our UM congregation, so I didn’t see the poor, or those who lived and worked on farms. However, because of the military presence, we had kids coming and going out of school as their fathers in the Navy and Air Force were assigned and re-assigned. Most of those kids were not middle-class. I was surprised, as a boy, to learn that even in the relatively homogeneous fifties, some kids had a very different point of view than I did.

I did my student pastorate in a small, rural agricultural town in northern Illinois, only 90 miles SW of Chicago. Most of the people who lived there had not been to Chicago since WWII, a war that, by then, was over a quarter-century earlier. They didn’t care about the latest in Biblical scholarship, or the newest theological concepts that were part of my life in seminary. They really only wanted to read the Bible as if it related no more than three generations of people in history, and to be able to understand it as it was written in English, with no care for historical nuance or reference to theological concept. They wanted to have good weather and for the corn and soybean prices to stay up. Their favorite television program was “Hee Haw.” They were good people. I was the one who didn’t fit in.

It is just these kinds of people whom our present culture ignores. That goes, too, for us liberals in The United Methodist Church.

Because the majority of our members are now mostly in the urban and suburban areas, and because we have an historical interest in post-high school education, we organize our programs and materials around a middle- to upper-middle-class urban populations, preferably those which are college-educated. We value a full graduate seminary education for our clergy, most of whom have not come out of small-town America. I even recall commenting, when I served churches that had a children’s Sunday School, that the Cokesbury Sunday School materials came across to me as having been tested in Nashville area congregations with kids who lived in homes with highly-educated parents. What the materials suggested often was totally alien to the lives of people in rural small towns.

Now, rural folks watch “Duck Dynasty” and get their political ideas from syndicated conservative newspaper columnists, radio or TV commentators, or out of values that come from their own experience, rather than that which we deem to be “politically correct” today. It’s no one’s fault but of political parties, our denomination, and ourselves: we rarely hear from those folks; if we do hear from them we think it may be déclassé; and they remain outside of our experience.

For the most part, our secular political activities (liberal or conservative) are held in groups of folks who agree with us. I recently watched a political campaign to recall a public official---where ultimately not enough signatures were gathered to recall the targeted politician. Why? Because most of those who supported the recall went to places where folks like themselves would hang out---such as in front of libraries and at liberal political and social gatherings. I asked, and got a surprising yet what should have been predictable answer: it never occurred to them to walk through their own neighborhoods, ring doorbells on the houses of their own neighbors, and ask them if they would sign a petition.

This, in spite of the fact that in this season we celebrate the coming of Christ as God’s self-revelation in human terms, on OUR terms, in OUR language, in OUR culture, and in OUR communities. In so believing, we forget that Jesus’ revelation came not just for us, but those folks who live lives that may be at least slightly alien to our own lives—just as Jesus did in his own earthly lifetime.

If we want to keep our church one that responds to the needs and desires of the “all” to whom our church signs say “are welcome,” we need to learn to reach out to the folks who would watch “Duck Dynasty” without laughing either at the program or those who watch it. We need to learn how to reach out to people who don’t live close to us, and talk to and to listen to their concerns. We need to learn how to reach out, with respect, to folks who don’t share our political or theological values. What we’ll find are people whose needs and yearnings are much the same as our own. Those needs just are expressed in a different way. The more we talk with each other, the more we’ll find all the things we have in common, and discover how we can work together. In so doing, we may find ways in which we can honor the needs of all populations, particularly of those who are, in the appropriate translation of the Biblical word transliterated as “Gentile,” “…not like us.”

If indeed, “Perfect Love casts out all fear,” we need to get over our fear of others, liberals of conservatives, conservatives of liberals, urban and suburban folks of rural folks, rural folks of urban and suburban folks. We all need to realize and admit that the racial differences in this country are no longer solely that of Black and White. (In my Annual Conference, on any given Sunday morning, we have congregations worshipping in 14 different languages!) We need to respect each other’s thoughtful theological points of view as legitimate, often beliefs which have a long and honorable heritage within the Christian traditions.

We need to get to know others in our own neighborhoods. In churches with predominantly older members, we need to help them learn how to go out and meet their own neighbors, particularly the ones who haven’t been on their street for more than 20 years. We need to help those in rural communities understand the realities of living in larger urban communities.

Until we can learn to do that, we will continue to see vast divisions in the Church of Jesus Christ, in the politics within our own nation, and yes, unfortunately, divisions within The United Methodist Church.

I don’t think those separations are how Christ called us to live.

The Rev. Thomas H. Griffith of Chandler, Ariz., is a retired clergy member of the California-Pacific Annual Conference.