The Hills of Zion by H. L. Mencken


It was hot weather when they tried the infidel Scopes at Dayton, Tenn., but I 
went down there very willingly, for I was eager to see something of evangelical 
Christianity as a going concern. In the big cities of the Republic, despite the 
endless efforts of consecrated men, it is laid up with a wasting disease. The 
very Sunday-school superintendents, taking jazz from the stealthy radio, shake 
their fire-proof legs; their pupils, moving into adolescence, no longer respond 
to the proliferating hormones by enlisting for missionary service in Africa, but 
resort to necking instead. Even in Dayton, I found, though the mob was up to do 
execution upon Scopes, there was a strong smell of antinomianism. The nine 
churches of the village were all half-empty on Sunday, and weeds choked their 
yards. Only two or three of the resident pastors managed to sustain themselves 
by their ghostly science; the rest had to take orders for mail-order pantaloons 
or work in the adjacent strawberry fields; one, I heard, was a barber. On the 
courthouse green a score of sweating theologians debated the darker passages of 
Holy Writ day and night, but I soon found that they were all volunteers, and 
that the local faithful, while interested in their exegesis as an intellectual 
exercise, did not permit it to impede the indigenous debaucheries. Exactly 
twelve minutes after reaching the village I was taken in tow by a Christian man 
and introduced to the favorite tipple of the Cumberland Range: half corn liquor 
and half Coca-Cola. It seemed a dreadful dose to me, but I found that the Dayton 
illuminati got it down with gusto, rubbing their tummies and rolling their eyes. 
I include among them the chief local proponents of the Mosaic cosmogony. They 
were all hot for Genesis, but their faces were far too florid to belong to 
teetotalers, and when a pretty girl came tripping down the main street, which 
was very often, they reached for the places where their neckties should have 
been with all the amorous enterprise of movie actors. It seemed somehow strange. 

An amiable newspaper woman of Chattanooga, familiar with those uplands, 
presently enlightened me. Dayton, she explained, was simply a great capital like 
any other. That is to say, it was to Rhea county what Atlanta was to Georgia or 
Paris to France. That is to say, it was predominantly epicurean and sinful. A 
country girl from some remote valley of the county, coming into town for her 
semi-annual bottle of Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, shivered on 
approaching Robinson's drug-store quite as a country girl from up-State New York 
might shiver on approaching the Metropolitan Opera House. In every village lout 
she saw a potential white-slaver. The hard sidewalks hurt her feet. Temptations 
of the flesh bristled to all sides of her, luring her to Hell. The newspaper 
woman told me of a session with just such a visiter, holden a few days before. 
The latter waited outside one of the town hot-dog and Coca-Cola shops while her 
husband negotiated with a hardware merchant across the street. The newspaper 
woman, idling along and observing that the stranger was badly used by the heat, 
invited her to step into the shop for a glass of Coca-Cola. The invitation 
brought forth only a gurgle of terror. Coca-Cola, it quickly appeared, was 
prohibited by the country lady's pastor, as a levantine and Hell-sent narcotic. 
He also prohibited coffee and tea --- and pies! He had his doubts about white 
bread and boughten meat. The newspaper woman, interested, inquired about 
ice-cream. It was, she found, not specifically prohibited, but going into a 
Coca-Cola shop to get it would be clearly sinful. So she offered to get a saucer 
of it, and bring it out to the sidewalk. The visitor vacillated --- and came 
near to being lost. But God saved her in the nick of time. When the newspaper 
woman emerged from the place she was in full flight up the street. Later on her 
husband, mounted on a mule, overtook her four miles out the mountain pike.

This newspaper woman, whose kindness covered city infidels as well as Alpine 
Christians, offered to take me back in the hills to a place where the old-time 
religion was genuinely on tap. The Scopes jury, she explained, was composed 
mainly of its customers, with a few Dayton sophisticates added to leaven the 
mass. It would thus be instructive to climb the heights and observe the former 
at their ceremonies. The trip, fortunately, might be made by automobile. There 
was a road running out of Dayton to Morgantown, in the mountains to the 
westward, and thence beyond. But foreigners, it appeared, would have to approach 
the sacred grove cautiously, for the upland worshipers were very shy, and at the 
first sight of a strange face they would adjourn their orgy and slink into the 
forest. They were not to be feared, for God had long since forbidden them to 
practice assassination, or even assault, but if they were alarmed a rough trip 
would go for naught. So, after dreadful bumpings up a long and narrow road, we 
parked our car in a little woodpath a mile or two beyond the tiny village of 
Morgantown, and made the rest of the approach on foot, deployed like 
skirmishers. Far off in a dark, romantic glade a flickering light was visible, 
and out of the silence came the rumble of exhortation. We could distinguish the 
figure of the preacher only as a moving mote in the light: it was like looking 
down the tube of a dark-field microscope. Slowly and cautiously we crossed what 
seemed to be a pasture, and then we stealthily edged further and further. The 
light now grew larger and we could begin to make out what was going on. We went 
ahead on all fours, like snakes in the grass.

From the great limb of a might oak hung a couple of crude torches of the sort 
that car inspectors thrust under Pullman cars when a train pulls in at night. In 
the guttering glare was the preacher, and for a while we could see no on else. 
He was an immensely tall and thin mountaineer in blue jeans, his collarless 
shirt open at the neck and his hair a tousled mop. As he preached he paced up 
and down under the smoking flambeaux, and at each turn he thrust his arms into 
the air and yelled ``Glory to God!'' We crept nearer in the shadow of the 
cornfield, and began to hear more of his discourse. He was preaching on the Day 
of Judgement. The high kings of the earth, he roared, would all fall down and 
die; only the sanctified would stand up to receive the Lord God of Hosts. One of 
these kings he mentioned by name, the king of what he called Greece-y. The king 
of Greece-y, he said, was doomed to Hell. We crawled forward a few more yards 
and began to see the audience. It was seated on benches ranged round the 
preacher in a circle. Behind him sat a row of elders, men and women. In front 
were the younger folk. We crept on cautiously, and individuals rose out of the 
ghostly gloom. A young mother sat suckling her baby, rocking as the preacher 
paced up and down. Two scared little girls hugged each other, their pigtails 
down their backs. An immensely huge mountain woman, in a gingham dress, cut in 
one piece, rolled on her heels at every ``Glory to God!'' To one side, and but 
half visible, was what appeared to be a bed. We found afterward that half a 
dozen babies were asleep upon it.

The preacher stopped at least, and there arose out the darkness a woman with her 
hair pulled back into a little tight knot. She began so quickly we couldn't hear 
what she said, but soon her voice rose resonantly and we could follow her. She 
was denouncing the reading of books. Some wandering book agent, it appeared, had 
come to her cabin and tried to sell her a specimen of his wares. She refused to 
touch it. Why, indeed, read a book? If what was in it was true, then everything 
in it was already in the Bible. If it was false, then reading it would imperil 
the soul. This syllogism from the Caliph Omar complete, she sat down. There 
followed a hymn, led by a somewhat fat brother wearing silver-rimmed country 
spectacles. It droned on for half a dozen stanzas, and then the first speaker 
resumed the floor. He argued that the gift of tongues was real and that 
education was a snare. Once his children could read the Bible, he said, they had 
enough. Beyond lay only infidelity and damnation. Sin stalked the cities. Dayton 
itself was a Sodom. Even Morgantown had begun to forget God. He sat down, and a 
female aurochs in gingham got up. She began quietly, but was soon leaping and 
roaring, and it was hard to follow her. Under cover of the turmoil we sneaked a 
bit closer.

A couple of other discourses followed, and there were two or three hymns. 
Suddenly a change of mood began to make itself felt. The last hymn ran longer 
than the others, and dropped gradually into a monotonous, unintelligible chant. 
The leader beat time with his book. The faithful broke out with exultations. 
When the singing ended there was a brief palaver that we could not hear, and two 
of them men moved a bench into the circle of light directly under the flambeaux. 
Then a half-grown girl emerged from the darkness and threw herself upon it. We 
noticed with astonishment that she had bobbed hair. ``This sister,'' said the 
leader, ``has asked for prayers.'' We moved a bit closer. We could now see faces 
plainly, and hear every word. At a signal all the faithful crowded up to the 
bench and began to pray --- not in unison, but each for himself. At another they 
all fell on their knees, their arms over the penitent. The leader kneeled facing 
us, his head alternately thrown back dramatically or buried in his hands. Words 
spouted from his lips like bullets from a machine-gun --- appeals to God to pull 
the penitent back out of Hell, defiances of the demons of the air, a vast 
impassioned jargon of apocalyptic texts. Suddenly he rose to his feet and began 
to speak in the tongues --- blub-blub-blub, gurgle-gurgle-gurgle. His voice rose 
to a higher register. The climax was a shrill, inarticulate squawk, like that of 
a man throttled. He fell headlong across the pyramid of supplicants.

From the squirming and jabbering mass a young woman gradually detached herself 
--- a woman not uncomely, with a pathetic homemade cap on her head. Her head 
jerked back, the veins of her neck swelled, and her firsts went to her throat as 
if she were fighting for breath. She bent backward until she was like half a 
loop. The she suddenly snapped forward. We caught a flash of the whites of her 
eyes. Presently her whole body began to be convulsed --- great throes that began 
at the shoulders and ended at the hips. She would leap to her feet, thrust her 
arms in the air, and then hurl herself upon the heap. He praying flattened out 
into a mere delirious caterwauling. I describe the thing discreetly, and as a 
strict behaviorist. The lady's subjective sensations I leave to infidel 
pathologists, privy to the works of Ellis, Freud and Moll. Whatever they were, 
they were obviously not painful, for they were accompanied by vast heaving and 
gurgling of a joyful and even ecstatic nature. And they seemed to be contagious, 
too, for soon a second penitent, also female, joined the first, and then came a 
third, and fourth, and a fifth. The last one had an extraordinary violent 
attack. She began with mild enough jerks of the head, but in a moment she was 
bounding all over the place, like a chicken with its head cut off. Every time 
her head came up a stream of hosannas would issue out of it. Once she collided 
with a dark, undersized brother, hitherto silent and stolid. Contact with her 
set him off as if he had been kicked by a mule. He leaped into the air, threw 
back his head, and began to gargle as if with a mouthful of BB shot. Then he 
loosed one tremendous, stentorian sentence in the tongues, and collapsed.

By this time the performers were quite oblivious to the profane universe and so 
it was safe to go still closer. We left our hiding and came up to the little 
circle of light. We slipped into the vacant seats on one of the rickety benches. 
The heap of mourners was directly before us. They bounced into us as they 
cavorted. The smell that they radiated, sweating there in that obscene heap, 
half suffocated us. Not all of them, of course, did the thing in the grand 
manner. Some merely moaned and rolled their eyes. The female ox in gingham flung 
her great bulk on the ground and jabbered an unintelligible prayer. One of the 
men, in an interval between fits, put on his spectacles and read his Bible. 
Beside me on the bench sat the young mother and her baby. She suckled it through 
the whole orgy, obviously fascinated by what was going on, but never venturing 
to take any hand in it. On the bed just outside the light the half a dozen other 
babies slept peacefully. In the shadows, suddenly appearing and as suddenly 
going away, were vague figures, whether of believers or of scoffers I do not 
know. They seemed to come and go in couples. Now and then a couple at the 
ringside would step out and vanish into the black night. After a while some came 
back, the males looking somewhat sheepish. There was whispering outside the 
circle of vision. A couple of Model T Fords lurched up the road, cutting holes 
in the darkness with their lights. Once someone out of sight loosed a bray of 
laughter.

All this went on for an hour or so. The original penitent, by this time, was 
buried three deep beneath the heap. One caught a glimpse, now and then, of her 
yellow bobbed hair, but then she would vanish again. How she breathed down there 
I don't know; it was hard enough six feet away, with a strong five-cent cigar to 
help. When the praying brothers would rise up for a bout with the tongues their 
faces were streaming with perspiration. The fat harridan in gingham sweated like 
a longshoreman. Her hair got loose and fell down over her face. She fanned 
herself with her skirt. A powerful old gal she was, plainly equal in her day to 
a bout with obstetrics and a week's washing in the same morning, but this was 
worse than a week's washing. Finally, she fell into a heap, breathing in great, 
convulsive gasps.

Finally, we got tired of the show and returned to Dayton. It was nearly eleven 
o'clock --- an immensely late hour for those latitudes --- but the whole town 
was still gathered in the courthouse yard, listening to the disputes of 
theologians. The Scopes trial had brought them in from all directions. There was 
a friar wearing a sandwich sign announcing that he was the Bible champion of the 
world. There was a Seventh Day Adventist arguing that Clarence Darrow was the 
beast with seven heads and ten horns described in Revelations XIII, and that the 
end of the world was at hand. There was an evangelist made up like Andy Gump, 
with the news that the atheists in Cincinnati were preparing to descend upon 
Dayton, hang the eminent Judge Raulston, and burn the town. There was an ancient 
who maintained that no Catholic could be a Christian. There was the eloquent Dr. 
T. T. Martin, of Blue Mountain, Miss., come to town with a truck-load of torches 
and hymn-books to put Darwin in his place. There was a singing brother bellowing 
apocalyptic hymns. There was William Jennings Bryan, followed everywhere by a 
gaping crowd. Dayton was having a roaring time. It was better than the circus. 
But the note of devotion was simply not there; the Daytonians, after listening a 
while, would slip away to Robinson's drug-store to regale themselves with 
Coca-Cola, or to the lobby of the Aqua Hotel, where the learned Raulston sat in 
state, judicially picking his teeth. The real religion was not present. It began 
at the bridge over the town creek, where the road makes off for the hills.


From: Prejudices: Fifth Series. In its first form this was a dispatch to the 
Baltimore Evening Sun, in July 1925. I wrote it on a roaring hot Sunday 
afternoon in a Chattanooga hotel room, naked above the waist and with only a 
pair of BVDs below.'' --- HLM

Text taken from The Vintage Mencken (ed. Alistair Cooke), pp. 153--161.
Typed 16 March1996 [CRS]