Presbyterian Author Looks
For Truth In Unusual Places

by Ray Waddle

Nashvillian David Dark, 35, knows how to face an audience. He's a school teacher, author, Presbyterian elder, father of three, occasional C-SPAN TV guest — and a rising young Christian commentator on the pop culture scene.

But his most invigorating audience is the homeless people he encounters at Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville.

"The homeless know their biblical references better than any group I can think of," Dark says.

"They're eager for an exchange, a conversation."

Dark delivers short sermons to a homeless congregation on periodic Wednesdays during the regular homeless lunch program at Downtown Presbyterian. He takes their prayer requests and theological questions (last week, the meaning of hell), researches answers and gets back to them the next week.

David Dark

Connecting with the homeless is one way Dark keeps his faith real and his heart engaged. It's part of his vocation to find redemption in the hard details of everyday life — also in the broader culture of TV, music, movies and books, as well as in people he might disagree with.

An itch to find the face of Christianity in unexpected places has fueled his two books.

The first was called Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons and Other Pop Culture Icons (Brazos Press, 2002).

His new book, The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea (Westminster John Knox Press), makes a patriotic plea for an unfashionable idea: Let's stop the knee-jerk objections to everybody we find objectionable. Let's pay attention and see if they might be bearers of truth. If we're going to be One Nation Under God let's act like it.

"All truth is a kind of altar call," Dark says.

"Take hip-hop, for instance. We might not like what they're telling us. But is it truthful? And if it is, what are we going to do now? I would challenge people to stop labeling something as 'objectionable subject matter' just because of the number of bad words they hear and try instead to hear the person's story. The truth is, we could all be labeled 'objectionable subject matter.' "

Every page of Dark's books is crammed with quotes and references from his wide, enthusiastic reading. Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, Flannery O'Connor, Whitman, Sonic Youth, Faulkner, Kris Kristofferson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Twilight Zone all seem equally at home with Dark.

Partly this ease of reference is the habit of a high school English teacher (Dark teaches at Christ Presbyterian Academy), but it also comes second nature. His eclectic tastes were nurtured by parents who encouraged his early reading interests. His father, the late Joel Dark Sr., taught him to see that " 'religion' is always 'politics' under a different name (and vice versa)," and the Bible towers over everything. The Bible is everybody's book but nobody's monopoly. God's justice leaves no one standing. The only way out is repentance, forgiveness, grace, truth-telling and a sense of humor.

One of his heroes is Tennessee minister/author Will Campbell, who is prominently quoted in The Gospel According to America. Campbell's declaration — "One who understands the nature of tragedy can never take sides" — might serve as a motto of Dark's book and outlook.

In his early 20s, Dark was shaped by his experience as a summer activities instructor at a YMCAin Northern Ireland, working with Protestant and Catholic teens. From that communal experience, he learned that Christianity should never be merely a privatized faith. It's essential to stay plugged into a church, the more diverse the better, face the tensions between people and learn some honest peacemaking.

"After Northern Ireland, I never wanted to be too far from a community-driven culture," says Dark, who is married to singer-songwriter Sarah Masen. "It's important to see people you might disagree with, people to talk through problems with."

In recent years, Dark says, he has tried to take more seriously a famous prayer he's known all his church-going life — the Lord's Prayer, especially "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as in heaven." God's kingdom must leave its mark on earth.

Serious ramifications flow from that, Dark realized. It means treating people as real human beings, not labels. It means looking for truth in unusual places, not sealing off our imaginations from the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable.

"We can't speak of people or politics without speaking of the eternal," he writes.

"It's all religion whether we like it or not."

(Ray Waddle, former religion editor at The Tennessean, is an author and columnist in Nashville.)