Chaplains to the Imprisoned by Shaw Richard D.;Shaw Richard D.;

Author:Shaw, Richard D.;Shaw, Richard D.; [Richard Denis Shaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1596595
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

The Literature of Damnation

The darker, threatening side of this literature is evidenced in a typical tract, All My Friends Are Dead, by Reverend Freddie Gage. The title of his work refers to a number of people Gage had known who did not listen to his preaching and who are now forever damned. These include his grandfather (1986:23), a loving but irreligious man ("I watched him die without God and slip into Hell for all eternity."); a boy whose mother the Evangelist consoled at his funeral with the words (1986:20), "He didn't have to go to Hell, Mrs. Southerland. He chose to go to Hell. He chose sin, sex, drugs and alcohol. He chose to go with the Devil instead of Jesus." And there is his own drug addicted cousin (1986:20): "I preached my cousin's funeral. His little boy cried all the way to the cemetery and all the way home. He kept saying, 'My Daddy went to Hell.' That boy later developed emotional problems because of that experience. But the tragic truth in all of this is that my cousin chose to go to Hell" (1986:21). It never seemed to occur to the author that the boy's emotional problems might have had something to do with the funeral sermon he had preached.

This sort of colorful literature, along with the experience of declaring oneself "born again," is extremely popular with inmates who run on high emotions. Others often react strongly against the fundamentalist approach. Reverend Robert Rested, Jr., a Lutheran chaplain at a California prison, expressed disdain for their propensity to blast their way through a facility and then "leave to tell war stories about the men" (Taft, 1978:57).

The chasm between the mainline and fundamentalist camps also involves a question of turf. Official chaplains resent the free lancing, usually volunteer, fundamentalist groups (characterized by one mainline denomination chaplain in Taft's article as "religious nuts"), who, as Taft notes, make "inroads into their territory."

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