AtD blurb - "false" religiosity?

[terrance fitzgerald]

“What could be more full of meaning? For the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world.” 
   
              Moby-Dick 
   
   
  And the popular preacher opened the way for Walt and Emily and for Herman too.  False religiosity blazes the trail for the novelist’s secular exploitation of religious images. Anyone who reads P knows he's gonna keep knocking on this one. 
   
  I believe that you 2 have something. Something that is basic, something that has been tested and something that all our people have, it lies submerged  in their talk and in their music and you are trying to bring it back but you will fail. Its the 1920s not 8000B.C. These are modern times. These are the last days of your roots and your conjure and your gris gris and your healing potions and love powder. I am building something that people will understand. This country is eclectic. The architecture the people the music the writing. The thing that works here will have a little bit of jive talk and alittle bit of Norh Africa, a fez -wearing mulatto in a pinstriped suit. A man who can say give me some skin as well as Asalamilakum. Haven't you heard? This sis the country where something is successful in direct proportion to how it's putover; how it's games. Look at the Mormons. Did they recruit 1000s of whites to their cause by conjuring the Druids? No, they used material the
 people were familiar with and added their own.  The most fundamental book of the Morman church , the Book of Morman, is a fraud. If we Blacks came up with something as corny as the Angel of Moroni, something as trite and phony as their story that book is the record of ancient Americans who came here in 600 B.C. and perished by A.D. 400, they would deride us with pejorative adjectival phrases like "so-called" and "would-be."   The would refuse to exempt our priests from the draft, a privlidge extended to every White hayseed's fruit stand which calls itself a Church. But regardless of the put-on, the hype, the Mormans got Utah, didn't they? Perhaps I will come up with something that will have a building shaped like a mosque, the interior furnishings Victorian, the priests dressed in Catholic garb, and soul food as offerings. What of it as long as it has popular appeal? This is the reason for Garvey's success with the people. 
   
  Mumbo Jumbo
   
   
   

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