A Civil War painting that inspires thoughts

I once exchanged e-mails with a humor columnist for a Civil War reenactors magazine. Humor is to be found in connection with any hobby, even one inspired by perhaps the most grim chapter in American history.
I met this fellow, who went by the pen name "Jonah Begone," in the early days of the Internet when its game-changing nature (in the world of communications) was just beginning to dawn on me. My jaw dropped one evening when I noticed he had taken a rather lengthy e-mail I had sent and presented it on a page within his website, dressed up with graphics in fact.
"Can he do that?" I thought to myself. Well, yes he could, and I came to realize the (really magnificent) free-for-all the world wide web is.
I got no flak as a result of this episode, even though I had a rather provocative sentence about how a certain Civil War author, from a writing family, may have had his first book ghostwritten. I had grounds for this suspicion but I didn't really wish to share this in a public way.
Mr. Begone had caught my interest because he wrote an absolute thigh-slapper about limited edition Civil War art. Such art was quite the genre at the time I discovered it, with new works being turned out continually by a circle of accepted artists in the field. It's an exclusive club, requiring initiation so to speak. Not only must you have the artistic touch, you must have tremendous knowledge of 19th century details.
At the time I followed the genre, the artist who seemed at the top of the field would shoot anyone out of the saddle who painted the tiniest detail out of whack - perhaps the wrong-shaped belt buckle. "Jonah" parodied this obsession, asserting that art is judged primarily by the emotional reaction of the viewer. An obsessive litmus test for accuracy really pertains more to "illustration" than "art," he astutely pointed out.
Hollywood was hopeless for many years, throwing together superficial symbols of that war and taking off with a (most likely) insipid plot. That was Hollywood then. It's more enlightened now as with the World War Two movie "Saving Private Ryan." I suspect that the Greatest Generation (dubbed by Tom Brokaw) is mystified about how such a realistic portrayal of war can be "entertainment."
Times change, just as with the advent of the Internet and how it is dramatically changing our lives. Mr. Begone was struck by a Mort Kunstler painting that showed Confederate generals in a church pew that also included a couple of children. The generals were on the verge of being summoned to major battlefield commitments. In church they were seeking divine guidance and inspiration to further their cause (which would have preserved slavery had it succeeded). Oh I know, the southern cause was more nuanced than that. But the church scene showed the seriousness in the southern mood - how the antebellum southerners wrapped their cause in righteousness.
But what struck Mr. Begone was the children in Kunstler's painting. "Wait a minute," he thought, "do kids really look this serious in church?"
He wrote that the one mood he associated with children in church is boredom. I laughed reading that. I suspect that we all remember when going to church seemed as much a chore as anything. At an age when we couldn't really internalize things.
I suspect we were mostly relieved to get home and take off the formal clothing. We were hard-pressed to stay quiet and attentive for an hour. We knew that church stood for the highest principles, but we puzzled over whey this weekly ritual was needed to remind us of it.
Well, lest any of us get complacent about it, Pastor Todd Mattson of First Lutheran Church reminded us all Sunday about the importance of going to church. This is a stock sermon, like the one about stewardship, that pastors pull out once in a while. Pastor Todd informed us that the First Lutheran rolls included 950 members of whom only a third attend church on a given Sunday.
"We're in good company," he said, as this is a typical state of affairs. "Two-thirds of the church membership doesn't attend, so how do we increase participation?"
This falls into the category of "preaching to the choir," of course, because he was speaking to the people who were actually in church.
I would point my finger at the parents who don't require their kids to attend church. This seems to be a generational thing. Us "boomers" when young would dutifully attend on Sunday, often sitting with friends in the pews instead of our families. We feigned fulfillment but for many of us (boys mainly?) it was compulsory, imposed by our parents. Our independent judgment might have been different, but we followed our elders' example for better or worse. I remember sitting next to a peer once, us getting the giggles and then being scolded by the grandfatherly visitation pastor as we exited the service. Today a pastor would be ill-advised scolding anyone who took the trouble to simply come to church.
"Pastor Todd" as we call him, does magnificently with a youth performing group called "New Wine," but I wonder to what extent he nudges these young people to attend Sunday services. I see almost no evidence of their participation.
So, are U.S. churches headed the way of their European counterparts, where the Sunday service has deteriorated to an almost vestigial state? This was discussed one morning on the "Morning Joe" TV program on MSNBC (popular to cite on "I Love Morris"). The panel noted how a typical U.S. church service is coming to be dominated by "white haired older people."
There are some very young families drawn into the fold too, Joe said, but that wide swath "in between" is woefully underrepresented. Those people in the middle fighting their week-to-week battles to cope, as represented by metaphor in the comic strip "Hagar the Horrible," figure that the ideals presented in church are beyond them. That's my theory, anyway, and I've been there.
The Greatest Generation that came out of World War Two to create our storied middle class kept stress at a manageable level. The idea was to work a 40-hour week and look forward to quality time with friends and family. They would joke about "knocking off early" on Friday.
Attending church on Sunday was a part of that whole credo. Boomers came along and cast some skepticism. My former boss says that "our generation never took to churchgoing." We had a tough time reconciling the church ritual with some of the horrible realities of the world as we were growing up. We were supposed to support our church missionaries who could hopefully find some converts to Christianity in the Third World. At the same time that the U.S. military, under our imprimatur, was inflicting unspeakable horror and deaths in Indochina and experiencing like misery and death. . .
So we drifted. The New Left thrived for a while and then sank like a rock as the boomers became "yuppies." Then they flocked to the stock market like lemmings in the go-go days of the 1990s.
Now I suspect many boomers are struggling, partly because of sheer age slowing us down (which we swore would never happen). And partly too because of technology advancing faster than we can adjust, relative to the young people of today.
Maybe the answer is to attend church again. Maybe it's a home base from which we can start over. Maybe we should reconsider all those church trappings that we once saw as "irrelevant" (a term that itself was born in the boomers' young heyday).
Maybe we should try to make church relevant again. Maybe we should look at the children in Mort Kunstler's painting and try to show rapt attention again. Maybe there is hope for us as we advance in our graying years, following the example of our parents. Maybe getting up for church on Sunday is the right example to follow, and Pastor Todd would surely appreciate it.
-Brian Williams - Morris Minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com