Gimme That Old Time Religion Pt. 1 - The Church and "Bonnie and Clyde"

When I was nine years old, my older sister and I were baptized.  Yes, nine, and beforehand, we were obliged to sit down and discuss our faith with the minister at our church at the time – because it was what is known as “believer’s baptism.”  That’s baptism by full immersion in water, not a mere sprinkling on the head of an infant.  It is, as Baptist tradition teaches, the way Jesus himself was drenched in the waters of the Jordan by John the Baptist.  Ideally, it’s supposed to symbolize many things, but most of all, a conscious choice – a death, a burial, a resurrection, a cleansing, and a new life and new covenant with God. 
               

It wasn't this dramatic.  Too bad.

We see a scene like this represented in “Bonnie and Clyde” – the character Buck, Clyde’s brother, is baptized while a preacher sings (in classic gospel style, backed by a choir) that “God’s arms are always open” to welcome sinners – right before Buck gives himself up to the law.  It’s a great scene in which we see Buck trying to make a go of the straight and narrow (and honor his wife’s wishes), while Clyde reaps the benefits of his chosen path until apprehended.  I’d argue that “Bonnie and Clyde” is rife with many more of these musical and dramatic “baptisms,” conscious choices where the characters are awash in reveling in – and committing to – their choices.

Do they, however, have as much agency as they think, though?  In the second act, the preacher sings about how the mixed bag that is American glamour, greed and broken promises gave birth to Bonnie and Clyde – they didn’t happen in a vacuum, the two were natural offspring of the turmoil of the depression and dust bowl.  It’s that push and pull between the characters’ agency and ability to act and their being caught in the jaws of something larger and out of their control, whether it be their passion or their poverty.



Ned and the kids get cleansed by the
Holy Spirit.

I honestly don’t know how much choice I had in my baptism.  While I don’t really regret it, I was just a kid doing what I thought I should do, my parents, my big sis and my grandma thought was the thing to do.  I felt obliged to do it, so I did it, much like Buck.  As he notes bitterly from prison, it didn’t make much of a difference in what came after.   While I’m not disillusioned with what’s at the very heart of wanting to be a good person in the “Christian” sense and a follower of Christ at its best – being the face of Christ and love for others, the idea that God is love, the "last commandment" of loving one another – I later became more interested in the “church” as an institution and a cultural touchstone than I did in the act of unquestioning churchgoing - and I really don't go much any more, though not out of bitterness.   Buck, Bonnie and Clyde sense  the empty promises that religion often offers for themselves (Blanche, Buck's wife, is cut from slightly different cloth, while she follows her husband, she's terribly distraught at living a life of crime) that what they’ve been told growing up ain’t necessarily so, and that in the absence of a caring God’s presence, they’ll have to make their own way any way they can - and they do.