One of the things I remember about my Dad’s sense of humor was when the boys would not get up promptly in the mornings, he had an unusual method for rousing us. While we were in bed and, usually on the coldest mornings, he would take a glass of cold water and raise the bed covers before throwing the water on our rear ends. As he would laugh at this, he would say, “Now you are a Quaker”. I don’t think that he ever thought of it as a baptismal ritual or that it was done in the religious sense. He just knew that it would work well in reawakening us by shaking and shivering us into getting us out of bed.
One of the first things I remember about going to church with my parents and some of neighbors occurred while living near Rising Star. We didn’t attend a church which had yearly revivals or reawakenings of our religious fervor so we had to make do with those of other denominations. I remember on at least a couple of occasions in getting into a car with family members and friends and driving to a near-by community to listen and watch church people in ‘brush arbor revivals’. I think that we were more interested in watching than in looking for spiritual renewal for ourselves. I remember seeing church members begin to talk in tongues (speaking in an unknown language during a religious worship and regarded as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit). Once, a female preacher (this would never happen in a Baptist Church) got the Holy Spirit and was going to climb the poles of the brush arbor and ascend to Heaven. While this was entertaining to the adults, it was kind of eerie to us young kids who watched.
I probably could not start thinking about my religious background without theorizing about my name and how I came to get it. Many people think that I must have received my name from the two great preacher/theologians of Baptist lore, Benajah Harvey Carroll (1843 – 1914) and George W. Truett (1867 – 1944) but it was not these two ministers for whom I was named. My parents used the name of their pastor, Carroll Truett Aly because they must have had great respect for him and his preaching ability and it was he who was probably named for the two Baptist preachers. I was never tempted to follow in their occupations but I never really cared for either of their names as I did not think of them as being masculine enough as I wished my name to be. I also felt that it would have been more appropriate for them to have named my next to older brother by my name, as it was he who became a Missionary and spent 20 years in Brazil working with the Baptist Publishing House.
This feeling of dislike of these Baptist standard bearers was amplified later in my reading of a book written by one of my Professors in the Education Department at Texas Western College in 1965. The book was “Southern White Protestantism in the the Twentieth Century”, by Dr. Kenneth Bailey, and it really was the beginning of my viewing religion as being fraught with political viewpoints, rather than with religious convictions. His book was documented from Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterians journals and contained snippets of sermons which clearly show the prejudices and thinking of these early day theologians. Most seemed to fail to perceive any relation between Christian morality and social or economic justice and showed little compassion toward the working masses. One of the analysis published in the Georgia Baptist Christian Index in 1900 stated:
”The majority of the poor, ‘the submerged tenth”, the begrimed masses who swarm in the slums and wretched tenement houses of our large cities, some of whom are also found in the smaller towns and even in the country, are dissipated, vicious, wicked and immoral. Many reformers of the day teach that, if you improve their surroundings and educate them, you can lift them up. For be it for me to discourage any efforts along this line of work; but what these people need is to be made over again. There is but one power in the world that can do this, and that is the gospel of the Son of God”.
In 1899, George W. Truett, pastor of the Dallas First Baptist Church and a renowned pulpit orator, belittled ministers who expounded “philosophy, or science, or culture, or worldly wisdom.” “Sooner far,” he declared, let us commend to the lips of a famished child a painted glass filled with painted water, , , or to a heartbroken mother a poem on the north pole, , , “He ridiculed “screaming voices which propose to adjust discordant elements in both church and state,” the great itch aboard in the land demanding ‘reform’ ” and insisted that the message of the church must be the simple message of personal redemption through Jesus Christ.
A Baptist Historian finds that the editors of the Baptist journals in the southwestern states failed during this era “to perceive any relation between Christian morality and economic justice” and showed little compassion toward industrial employees.”
My family came from a culture rooted in the poverty of poor farm workers and this did not set well with me and I never wanted to be associated with such backward thinking about those who were worse off economically, like us and many of our family members and friends. This really was the beginning of how my religious views began to morph into my present theological system of belief.