Why Don’t Baptists Dance? Turns Out We Really Should

Natalie Angier, in an article for the New York Times, (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/science/27angi.html?pagewanted=print) describes her angst when, at Jewish weddings, everyone has to dance the hora, a Fiddler-on-the-Roof sort of interpretive movement set to the tune of “Hava Nagila.” She doesn’t like to do this, because she doesn’t do it well.

Or didn’t do it well; now she does. She went to a symposium at the University of Michigan where she heard a paper read by a neurobiologist and emerged as a born-again hoofer. Top that, Benny Hinn!

I feel Ms. Angier’s former pain. My older son and I once appeared in a production of Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” The director set it on a college campus in the ’50’s and the curtain call consisted of cast members doing the Stroll from the backdrop to the footlights. My ragged lurch, since it was the last thing I did each night, wiped out any good moments I’d had on stage. Night after night friends who came to the show could talk about nothing but how ridiculous - and uncomfortable - I looked. It’s not an athletic thing; I was a two-sport letterman in high school and played college football on a scholarship. It’s a Baptist thing. Garrison Keillor expresses it well:

The beat goes on but I can’t dance to it anymore. Of course, I never could dance at all, having grown up in a fundamentalist home, which you can tell by the way I move. We believed that any rhythmic physical movement would awaken our carnal desires, as surely as aspirin dissolves in a bottle of Coke, so we kids had to sit in study hall when they taught dancing in phys ed, couldn’t go to the dances, not even square ones, couldn’t even join marching band. I wanted to dance. Wanted girls to know that what I lacked in aptitude I made up for in sheer avid interest. Couldn’t dance because it would awaken carnal desire, which in my case was not only awake, it was dressed and down on the corner waiting for the bus. Those Sanctified Brethren are good people but they do leave a mark on a boy, and even today, when I sweep into a room holding a glass of Puillly-Fuisse, people see me sweep and say, “I didn’t know you were a Baptist.” I wasn’t. We considered Baptists loose.

Turns out, though, that dancing and faith - indeed, faith and the arts in general - have far more in common than we ham-footed fundamentalists ever suspected . . . and we’re a people who are good at suspicion.

See, the seminar Ms. Angier attended was about the evolutionary value of art. Prevailing scientific wisdom holds that graffiti and Beethoven’s fifth symphony and bobbleheads and Marvel Comics and Da Vinci’s Last Supper and all the rest of it are nothing more than a Darwinian bow-wave thrown off by the majestic prow of humanity’s supersized brain. We’re so smart that we get bored and start coloring on the walls. But emergent scientists like Ellen Dissanayake of the University of Washington in Seattle want to vote this one off the island because there’s no way an entire species would devote so much time to something entirely extra-curricular.

Another mainstream theory holds that humans use art the way a peacock uses its technicolor tailfeathers: to get chicks. Ms. Dissanayake rejects this one, too, and has a theory to explain why but I can bust this myth based on my own observation: who ever saw the first-chair violin in the high school orchestra awash in cheerleaders?

Ms. Dissanayake’s take on art is that humanity uses it to build the community necessary for surival. For most cultures (western individualism being the exception) art exists in communal forms: quilting bees, harvest dances, maybe even those cards everybody holds up at football games to spell out “Go Team!” or whatever. Through this kind of “artifying” (and no, I’m not quoting President Bush; the term is Ms. Dissanayake’s coinage) Ms. Angier claims that:

People can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world.

Indeed, of her own experience of learning to dance the hora with grace and confidence, she writes, “I felt free and exhilarated. I felt competent and loved. I felt like calling my mother.”

Which is where Baptists - and Christians in general - come in. Don’t these claims for art and dance sound like what we should be able to say about worship? The creation of community so that “more numerous are the children of the desolate than of the one who has a husband” (Galatians 4.27); the fusing of resources to “let the weak say, I am strong” (Joel 3.10), the creation of a new society that can turn the world upside down (Acts 17.6) - isn’t that what’s supposed to happen when God’s people gather to praise him? Worship should whirl broken souls into the choreography of devotion that we “restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers” (Malachi 4.6) and make them want to phone home.

So why don’t we dance? Sure, Salome danced before Herod and gave John the Baptist the mother of all headaches. But David jigged before the Lord with such abandon that his Dance of the Seven Skivvies scandalized his blue-blooded wife. Yes, yes, David eventually got bucked off the bull in the great Hormonal Rodeo, but that had to do with a bath, not a ballet. Should we ban bathing? And not only dancing, but the arts in general: why so many Philistines among the children of Israel?

But there’s no denying we don’t dance well, and I think the issue is more tempermental than theological. Dances are uncertain things that rely on timing and intuition and some form of telepathy between participants. We prefer to march: a regimented movement with predictable outlines and little room for personal innovation. Marches have their points, no denying: they provide safety and routine and wide moral margins. But they seldom make an estranged daughter want to pick up the phone and call her mom, or a pack of prodigal sons and daughters want to kneel down around the Bible and cry out to their Father.

This entry was posted on November 28, 2007 at 6:27 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.