Huck Finn Goes to Church

At one point in Huckleberry Finn, Huck's raft is smashed by a riverboat (or so he thinks), and he swims ashore. He ends up being taken in by a family named Grangerford. He lives with them for an extended time in a small community that is dominated by a 30-year-old feud between the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons. [Huck] No one remembers what the fight is about or who started it, but both clans are fully committed to perpetuating the feud. As far as Grangerfords are concerned, Shepherdsons are good only for one thing: killin'. And vice versa. Age and gender are no matter.

Except on Sunday. See, the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons attend the same church and allow just enough of a truce each week to enable them to "worship" together.

It seems it's a Calvinistic gathering, too. Huck describes his visit to the church:

Next Sunday we all went to church, about three mile, everybody a-horseback. The men took their guns along, so did Buck, and kept them between their knees or stood them handy against the wall. The Shepherdsons done the same. It was pretty ornery preaching—all about brotherly love, and such-like tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such a powerful lot to say about faith and good works and free grace and preforeordestination, and I don't know what all, that it did seem to me to be one of the roughest Sundays I had run across yet.

"Free grace and preforeordestination." The preacher reads our blog, apparently.

Phil Johnson