In Billings, Montana, I ran into a lovely lady named Stephanie Abney, an evangelical Christian who let me hang out at her house, take a shower, and do some laundry. (This, after her husband had recently warned her not to pick up strangers. I guess I just look really harmless.)
We had an interesting conversation about the culture of the Rocky Mountain states, the future of the America church, and lots of other depressing things.
Stephanie is a social worker who tries to integrate Christian teachings into her work, and she says that she is faced with lot of prejudice. In her work, she is faced with secularists who don’t think religion has a place in the system, and Christians who weigh down the people they are trying to help with too much focus on the sin they are trying to escape. “Everyone thinks they have it right,” she says, and that’s a big problem.
But, that’s Billings for you.
I don’t know much about this town, but judging by what she says (and the little I’ve seen), it’s not somewhere I’d want to live. Stephanie says that there’s a huge problem with crystal meth addiction here, and it’s quite evident. At all hours of the day, people with glassy eyes and vacant expressions are wandering the sidewalks, asking for change and cigarettes.
But it goes deeper than that. Remember how in Wyoming I was constantly faced with people who would judge me without knowing the first thing about me? According to Stephanie, that’s a big part of small-town mountain-state culture.
She has a ten-year-old son who she takes to drum lessons and gymnastics. He wanted to pierce his ears, so she let him. Now, wherever he goes, she says he is faced with adults who constantly make fun of him. “You get shot with a BB gun?” they chortle – it’s the same joke every time.
But she says the bias isn’t innocent and just related to small things. As part of her job, she has to travel a lot, and recently went to Memphis, Tennessee. When she arrived, she was amazed at how many black people there were there and how nice they were to her. “With the way African Americans are treated by the white majority in Billings, I expected them to be much meaner,” Stephanie says. “I wash shocked. Everyone was all ‘How are you?’ No one asks how you are in Montana. People like to keep to themselves.”
Maybe that’s just how the states out here are. I certainly noticed that people aren’t as outwardly friendly (genuine or not). And I certainly don’t generally feel as welcome.
But anyhow, there are similar trends in Stephanie’s views on Mountain State culture and religion that I find interesting. Stephanie has left a few churches because she didn’t feel that people were open-minded to thoughts she had. And Stephanie is by no means a hard-core liberal.
She says she just likes to think things over, and the churches she’s been to often don’t like anything questioned. They feel they’ve found the perfect interpretation, and take any intellectual discussion of it as an attack. So often, Stephanie says she feels like a ship without a harbor, attacked at every port.
Stephanie has lived in Montana all her life, but she is gong to move somewhere more cosmopolitan and friendly, like Denver or Boise. She feels like an outsider in a place that doesn’t like outsiders.
I don’t think she’s alone.
