Our spare little branch of this ancient religion had been skinned back to nothing from the overwrought Protestant theologies of the Reformation that complicated faith with systematic theologies and liturgies authored by men with too much education. We practiced the Occam’s razor hermeneutic: if they didn’t practice it in the first century AD of the New Testament, we didn’t practice it in the twentieth century AD of the American South, which is why you’d find neither infant baptism nor Romish creeds nor U.S. flags in our church, for we could find no records of baptized babies nor of popes in
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