When it came to church, my family was made up of interesting people, especially when it came to going to church. We didn’t go to church very often (at least until my mother came along,) but when we did, and when we were in Palm Beach, this is where we went: Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Palm Beach, FL.
Although these shots (with one exception) were taken many years after my departure, the church is on the National Register of Historical places, so there have been few changes (although they have messed around with a few things since this millennium began…)
Do not love the world or what the world can offer. When any one loves the world, there is no love for the Father in him; for all that the world can offer–the gratification of the earthly nature, the gratification of the eye, the pretentious life–belongs, not to the Father, but to the world. (1 John 2:15-16)
Bethesda, looking towards the bell tower.
Today the Anglican Communion in the U.S. is in dire straits. But the forces that have brought things to their present state are nothing new; almost all of them were present in the Bethesda I grew up in. Bethesda is, in some ways, an outsized example of how we got where we are.
As we note elsewhere, people can come to church primarily because they agree with what the church teaches, or they can come for other reasons: social, aesthetic, etc. Episcopal churches in general and Bethesda in particular simply have too many of the latter in their pews. This makes it easy for liberals to come in and take command; if they can keep up appearances, they can keep things going even when the church’s core message has totally changed. This is not to say that everyone went along with this; the Episcopal church lost a million members in the 1960’s and 1970’s in the process of its radicalisation, and is in the process of repeating that feat again.
Coupled with the social membership are demographics. The Episcopal church’s membership income distribution is simply too skewed into the upper reaches of our society. This wasn’t the original intent; when Henry VIII took charge of the church in England, his idea was that the Church of England be the church of every Englishman, from himself to the ploughboy. The Nonconformists chipped away at that in the mother country, but in the American colonies they proceeded to blow Anglican churches out of the water for the bulk of the populace. They were so successful that they were able to oust the Episcopal church as the state church in the Southern colonies in the wake of the American Revolution.
This brings me to an important point–people talk about an “inclusive” vs. “exclusive” church but with churches like Bethesda we have to ask: inclusive or exclusive of what? Or whom? Bethesda, like most Episcopal churches, prides itself in being “inclusive” but the reality is that the church was built and is sustained on being “exclusive” in a socio-economic way, much like a country club. This situation is an opportunity to reach a difficult group with the Gospel, but as long as the liberals are in dominance the church will lack a message worth bringing.
But everything isn’t negative here. Bethesda is a beautiful church, and it’s hard to be impressed with anything else. Ultimately, though, the chief objective is, as it always really was, to carry out the main mission: “The Son of Man has come to ‘search for those who are lost’ and to save them.” (Luke 19:10)
Above: the opening ceremony during Field Day at Palm Beach Day School, 20 April 1968. For intramural competition the school was divided into two teams, the “Pelicans” (blue uniforms) and “Flamingoes” (yellow uniforms.) Both my brother and I were in the latter.
Note also the closeness of the buildings behind the field. Palm Beach’s real estate is expensive and used very efficiently, more so now than when we lived there.
A “tug of war” during Field Day. This wasn’t the only competition to be lost at Palm Beach Day School; the students were never shy about reminding me that I was on the bottom of the social scale as well. Few things belie the whole “compassionate” nature of liberalism more than their sloth in dealing with students persecuting their fellows whom they think are inferior, “anti-bullying” programs notwithstanding. Being on either the receiving or the giving end of this kind of thing is a lifelong lesson that most in our society don’t want others to learn.
“There’s a hole in my bucket…” Fourth graders at Palm Beach Day School perform a satire on “hillbillies” called “Appalachian Legend” during Stunt Night 1969. Attitudes from the “coasts” about “flyover country” in the U.S. have been deep seated for a long time; stage productions like this only reinforced that. It’s fair to say that, if the “Religious Right” had fully grasped the contempt they were held in when the movement first got going in the late 1970’s they would not have started the Moral Majority: they would have started a revolution.
Thirty years later, a friend coached a lacrosse team up the coast. The one school they would not allow their kids to eat lunch at was Palm Beach Day School, on account of the harassment by the “home team.” PBDS kids would even shout obscenities at the visitors as they got on the bus to leave.
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Our home in Palm Beach. It was located on the old “Dodge Estate,” one of the last of the large estates to be broken up (Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is an example of one that is still intact.) Built in the late 1950’s, it survived the hurricanes that were reasonably frequent during the years we lived in Palm Beach (we experienced two the first summer we lived there.) All of the windows were fitted with shutters (as shown here) or had a metal shield that could be fitted for a blow. This obviated the need to strip forests for plywood every time a hurricane arrived. Note also the ficus hedge running along the street. Using a hedge to both close in the yard and to obscure the view of the property (they’re generally higher now than they were then) is fairly common in Palm Beach. After living with this, being forced into the “open yard” mould so common in the U.S. (especially in the South) just doesn’t quite cut it.
The back of the house. Note that the driveway actually slopes upwards. This is unexceptional in most places but in flat South Florida it is worthy of note. Our street sloped upward from the ocean end to the lake end. The reality is that most of the “barrier islands” in South Florida are on top of a coral ridge, as opposed to being just sand spits. Much of Palm Beach is at least five metres above sea level, and it is the closest point on the U.S. coast to the Continental Shelf, which helps to mitigate storm surge. All of these make parts of Palm Beach a reasonable place to ride out a storm if you can stand the loss of power (ours was out four days after the first hurricane we went through.)
The advertisement on the right for James Pike’s “If This Be Heresy” appeared in the Saturday, 2 March 1968 issue of the Palm Beach Daily News. It appeared directly below the ad for Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, and would have effectively precluded attendance at their Evening Prayer service.
In holding his lecture in West Palm Beach, Pike was invading what was for him “enemy territory.” In an article in the July 2006 issue of Chronicles magazine, author Tom Landess reminded us of the following:
In 1966, a group led by Henry I. Louttit, bishop of the Central Archdeanery of South Florida, demanded that Pike be tried for heresy.
John Hines, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, met with Louttit and a small delegation in New York and told them he had polled key figures in the mass media, who had declared unanimously that a heresy trial would severely, disastrously damage the Church’s image.
Most of the bishops agreed. The Bishop of New York expressed the feelings of the majority: “Of all the methods of dealing with Bishop Pike’s views, the very worst is surely a heresy trial! Whatever the result, the good name of the church will be greatly injured.”
Hines asked Louttit and his cohorts to allow an ad hoc committee to address the problem more informally, less visibly. Louttit reluctantly agreed. Members of the committee met, engaged in a great deal of hand-wringing, and came back with a report that said in part:
It is the opinion that this proposed trial would not solve the problem presented to the church by this minister, but in fact would be detrimental to the church’s mission and witness…This heresy trial would be widely viewed as a “throw back” to centuries when the law in church and state sought to repress and penalize unacceptable opinions…it would spread abroad a “repressive image” of the church and suggest to many that we were more concerned with traditional propositions about God than with the faith as the response of the whole man to God.
At Wheeling, West Virginia, the House of Bishops adopted this statement by an overwhelming vote, though they also agreed to “censure” Bishop Pike – a small, dry bone tossed to Christian orthodoxy. In the above passage, two phrases — “acceptable opinions” and “repressive image” – revealed what was really going on.
Henry Louttit was a frightful bore from the pulpit, but he was right: it was heresy, and frankly it still is. People such as Pike detonated the jerk to the left that caused the Episcopal Church to lose a third of its membership in the 1970’s. Once again the Pharaohs on the left are making their move and once again God’s children are forced into exodus. But now there is a Promised Land.
Ah, the good life: Palm Beacher Fred Tod Ketcham relaxes in style. It’s an affectation for many, but Tod was the real article. A scion of the du Ponts, he attended Palm Beach Day School and graduated from St. Andrew’s in Boca Raton with me. I saw him once after gradation in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was a superb photographer. But alas, the good life was fleeting: Tod struggled with asthma, finally succumbing in death in 1981 at the age of 26.
I’ve posted elsewhere on my prep school, and it was a pleasure to hear that someone else thought enough to do the same: Tico Vogt, two years my senior, has done so in his post Renouncing Privilege. There’s a lot of ground to cover here; I’ll try to be as succinct as possible.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that two people will look at the same experience and come to different conclusions. There is a definite POV difference here, a product of the different paths each of us took to the St. Andrew’s School. But there are also some differences in the school itself. St. Andrew’s, in the years 1967-73 (covering our combined times there) was in the midst of its own transformation. Some of that he describes in his piece and was influenced by the decisions of his class. A major one took place in the fall after he graduated, when women were admitted to the school for the first time. The school was also in transition to becoming predominantly a day school, which I took advantage of my last year there.
In any case, let’s begin with the response:
The class of ’71 stands low on a curve that anthropologist Robert Putnam used to determine “social capital” and civic engagement. I have long noticed that names of my high school (and college) class members occupy little ink in the alumni news and on the lists of donors. We represent the trend of decreasing hands-on participation in, and affiliation with, religion, civic, fraternal, and parent-teacher organizations.
I heard faculty members comment in the wake of their graduation that the Class of 1971 was an outstanding class, and that it went downhill from there! The issue of civic engagement is one we still wrestle with: is the recession of those institutions which encourage civic engagement a good or bad thing for the country?
My parents likely felt that public school wouldn’t provide me with the horizons they expected for me, or the character building discipline. I would soon come to understand a spectrum of motives for kids to be sent away there; icy cold parent/child disaffection, class aspiration, behavioral correction, divorce, and in one shocking case, the sudden death of both parents in a plane crash.
The school property was physically remote, set in the palmetto scrub lands away from roads and neighborhoods and famously chosen by NFL teams as a spy-proof practice location prior to the Super Bowl. It was its own universe.
Warrington men had been sent away to school since the start of the twentieth century, so it was the tradition. Sometimes the results were unpredictable: my grandfather Chet went AWOL from Army and Navy Prep, forcing other arrangements. My brother did the military school thing. I didn’t skip the Northeastern schools because of grades (as was the case with Vogt) but because my mother, seared by my poor health before we moved to Florida, insisted on keeping me in South Florida.
St. Andrew’s School, Spring 1973. A view across the central lake to Dorm III, the “Senior Dorm” with the privileges ascribed thereto.
My next meeting with fellow students was with a group of four African-American freshmen standing on the sidewalk in front of the dorm. I can look back now and see what an important moment it was. Jim Crow laws had ended only three years before with passage of the Civil Rights Act. A prominent member of the Board of Trustees (a two-time mayor of the city and staunch segregationist) had strongly opposed the decision to allow black students to enter in 1967. He withdrew his son and enrolled him in the rival school.
I never thought of St. Andrew’s as a particularly “Southern” school, just as I never thought of South Florida as Southern either. (The Northerners there were certainly capable of gutter racism that rivals and exceeds anything seen in the South.) In the early years the school–and certainly when Vogt entered as a freshman–had a distinctly Southern stamp on it; many of the boarding students came from the Old Confederacy. One of Vogt’s classmates described himself as “SA’s only reconstructed southerner.” That was yet another transition the school was undergoing.
As for myself, I liked the black students that came to SA. The really deeper transformational moment for me and race came during my years in the Church of God. To join an institution like that, however, requires giving up more privilege than most prep school products are prepared to do.
A fundamental life change set in with the ringing of the chapel bell on the quarter hour, beginning at dawn, the electronic peeling that echoed over the pond, penetrated buildings, and spread across athletic fields. Church bells, factory whistles, alarm clocks, and the school hallway bells of junior high were familiar to me, but they existed in independent realms of my life, never an inescapable constant.
Tico chafed at the regimentation of life at SA. Having grown up in a very disciplined home environment, I didn’t have the problems with it that people like Vogt had. (If I had my doubts, I could always think of my brother at Admiral Farragut Academy!)
A certain amount of rough and tumble, callous behavior is “normal” with boys and young men, I’ll grant. Bringing things to a personal level, the following are not examples of the abuse I witnessed (those stories are for others to tell) just mindless and casual pranks, but they left strong impressions on my psyche.
Evans “Dutch” Meinecke, from the 1973 Tartan, St. Andrew’s yearbook.
I can say that I experienced hazing as he did. In general, however, SA was a relief after the bullying I put up with at Palm Beach Day School (and thankfully the PBDS people we got at SA were some of the better ones.) The social system loosened with each year and that loosening accelerated after I became a day student. I did manage to become SA’s first documented victim of sexual harassment at the hands (literally) of Evans “Dutch” Meinecke. Sometime I plan to outline that experience in more detail.
Saturday was a school day through lunch. A high Episcopal mass was held on Sunday evening after the dinner meal. As a Roman Catholic, Sunday morning, which could have been the one time to sleep in, was denied me and I went in a van to mass in the city (the double dose of Christianity still wasn’t enough to convince me).
Vogt attempts to put SA in the same boat as other Christian schools. Having been raised an Episcopalian, I felt it was a nice religion but not a very demanding one. SA’s own relationship with the Diocese of South Florida wasn’t the tightest, that by design. Between the two SA didn’t have much of a “Christian school” feel to it, as opposed to those being established in other parts of the country by denominations with more “starch in their shirts.” (Some of the faculty, inculcated by the spirit of the age, only strengthened that secular feel, such as the one that told my parents that “the geniuses commit suicide.”) Both of the school chaplains we had were fairly liberal, the latter of which helped give me the shove to “swim the Tiber” my senior year, which was a form of rebellion.
Speaking of rebellion, I suppose it’s time to deal with the centerpiece of Vogt’s narrative: the strike that his class instigated at the dismissal of a popular faculty member. I’ll leave it to him to describe the details; my guess is that this, more than anything else, enhanced his class’ reputation, at least in the short term.
Not all privilege is worth having. The health and well being of the community trumps the right to individual power. We felt a responsibility to change an abusive system and this was our small contribution.
Although that sounds like something you’d hear these days, it’s a sentiment that actually goes back to the day; it actually appears on one of God Unlimited’s albums. The problem with it is that it opens society to the replacement of one authoritarian structure by another, something that George Orwell pointed out in Animal Farm.
What else but cultivating restraint can change the fatal course of homo sapiens? To decide that temporary power, convenience, and gain must give way to long term considerations is a conscious act of renunciation. It’s not something they teach you in school.
Renouncing privilege is easier said than done. One of Vogt’s classmates, whom he mentions approvingly, is now a successful real estate agent in Palm Beach. Now I like this guy too, but growing up in Palm Beach tells me that this line of work isn’t “renouncing privilege.”
My own attempt to get away from privilege ran into trouble when the word got out that I was going to Texas A&M and not the Ivy League. That produced blowback from faculty and classmate alike, and soured my relationship with the school until well into the last decade. The school’s motivation in their disappointment was simple: they wanted to enhance the school’s reputation by the college admissions of the graduates, never mind that my choice was in part to keep the family business as an option. (Another part was to give me a independent living after the first degree, but as it happened that only lasted fifteen months.)
Also, by the end of my years at SA, I wanted to get past the 60’s/elite paradigm of the place. In that I was wildly successful at Texas A&M; I finally found the life I was looking for:
And with that I’ll close with the words of John McKenzie, whose book The Power and the Wisdom was recommended to me by my first parish priest:
A revolution is always an excessive response. A revolution does not occur until a situation has become intolerable, and it destroys the entire situation, even the elements which ought to be preserved. Revolution does not exhibit man at the height of his rationality, but rather elicits all his ugly passions. The revolution does not replace what it destroys with a stable structure; this is left to postrevolutionary activity, which presumably can be carried on with more calmness and deliberation.
Yet the gospel is in some ways revolutionary, and no other word seems to do it justice. Efforts to conventionalize the gospel and to curb its dynamism take away much of its effect. In the preceding exposition we have by choice dwelt upon just those elements of the gospel which are in direct contradiction to accepted beliefs and ideas. The world, we said, both of men at large and the individual person, is irreparably altered by the Christian event. This suggests revolution. The old man of sin dies, and his world dies; this also suggests revolution. Even the element of violence is not lacking from the Christian event, although the violence comes from the death struggles of the dying world and not from the Christian event. The Christian event occurs when the situation has become intolerable, with the difference that the situation has never been tolerable…
Man’s resistance to the inbreak of God creates a situation compared to which most revolutions are playful. Man resists it because he cannot grasp the direction of the Christian revolution. It moves to give man something, not to take anything away; and man is so incredulous in the presence of such a paradoxical event that he resists it with all his strength. Man is not yet ready for love. He never has been.
