Dream Bigger
Finally, some clubs that will have me
I’m surprised it took this long, but I was in Stephenville for 15 days before someone asked if I’d like to go to church with her. I grew up in the deep South, so I know that’s a near-reflexive offer made by any resident of a small, Southern town to a newcomer (and Stephenville feels as Southern as it does Western). It made me wonder exactly how many churches can be found in Stephenville. Then I wondered how many bars there are.
That wasn’t a random connection, of course. Churches and bars are the yin and yang of any small town’s soul. At any given moment, one or the other seems to have the edge. Right now, I’d give a slight edge to the bars (meaning drinking in general). Until earlier this year, Stephenville and Erath County were “dry” — or at least in theory. What that meant in practice was you couldn’t buy alcohol in places like grocery stores and take it elsewhere to drink.
I'm a member!
But there have long been bars around, and you also could have a drink in many restaurants. You had to be a member, however (and still do).
Now that I’m a member of many such organizations, I’m familiar with the qualifications. You must be (1) human, (2) over 21, and (3) in possession of a drivers license. That’s it. You’re in.
In fact, I suspect there were saloons in Stephenville before there were churches. I wouldn’t take the mural painted on the rear wall of city hall as the final historical authority, but I suspect it gives a good sense of what the town was like in the 1870s. There’s no church visible but there’s this saloon, right in the foreground:
Then again, there is no shortage of churches. The local Chamber of Commerce maintains a list of places of worship, and it’s impressively long. I counted 44 churches with a Stephenville address, along with a ministry “serving Christians in the work place.” (Sort of a modern-day circuit rider, I guess.) There are 17,000 people here, so simple math tells me that’s one church for every 386 residents.
In comparison, the South — which according to this study has the nation’s highest concentration of churches per capita — claims 15.4 churches for every 10,000 residents. That’s one church for every 649 people. In other words, Stephenville is slapping the devil with more vigor than almost any place in the U.S., statistically speaking.
So if drinking has an edge, it’s small and maybe only temporary. After all, yin never overwhelms yang. Nor vice versa.
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