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I used to do readings at mass as a student at Saint Mary’s. I was the best in the biz. “This young man reads for the back pew!” Father Stafford used to say. I had no clue what these readings were about. Corinthians. Galatians. Ephesians. Elegant tribes of a dead world. They wore robes, probably. That their ancient accounts of miracles in a faraway desert had made it all the way to the tongue of a chubby kid wearing a clip-on tie in Lawton, Oklahoma, is interesting to me today, but was banal to me then. I didn’t think God was listening. I liked compliments.
My suspicion was that I lived in an un-sacred world. I accepted what the nuns told me about God, out of politeness, but privately found it implausible that the great “I AM WHO AM!” coexisted with K-Mart, IHOP, and Ford dealerships. This was just a gut feeling. “Did God create buildings?” I once asked Sister Tiolinda, while contemplating Walgreens Pharmacy. “The materials to make them,” she replied sagely. So indeed there was a disconnect.
These “buildings” that weren’t quite of God ruled my daily life and were interconnected by a drab network of roads and highways. Together, these entities submitted a more legible, honest reality than the one proposed by Saint Mary’s. Take from us our Sunday mass, we’d have gotten by just fine. Take from us our Dodge Durango, we’d have been totally helpless. How would we have gotten to Golden Corral?
I guess I felt there was something profane about being a customer, which after all is what being an American is. These two things were at odds: America and the Holy. Maybe I still feel that way. What might a reading from the Book of Americans sound like, coming out of the mouth of a clueless child reading for the back pew? What miracles, what holy fire, what baroque tales of angels and salvation might such a text recount, were it written this afternoon on Starbucks wifi? U.S. Representative Byron Donalds of Florida offers us this:
“In college, I worked at Cracker Barrel in Tallahassee. I even gave my life to Christ in their parking lot. Their logo was iconic and their unique restaurants were a fixture of American culture. No one asked for this woke rebrand. It’s time to Make Cracker Barrel Great Again.”
This text, posted to social media, has been roundly mocked, and I understand why. A kid with the haziest understanding of theology knew! His face on your morning toast? Maybe. But Jesus Christ is certainly not in the Cracker Barrel parking lot, you big dummy.
Still, part of me, what remains of the Believer, can’t help but be moved by the scene Rep. Donalds presents. It’s the most American thing I’ve read maybe ever: A man, sitting alone in his car in Tallahassee, proffers his entire being to a Jew from Galilee; the interstate his River Jordan, America his Levant, Cracker Barrel his temple. How gorgeous and absurd. Did the Gentle Carpenter hear him? If not (I suspect not), are we doomed? My knees shake! Wow.
It’s important that we Americans be given false little wars to fight every few days, else we start to forget who’s who and what’s what. Or we might even start to think about our actual wars, which makes us sad or guilty or frustrated, and we start talking about how complicated everything is.
These lesser culture clashes, meanwhile, are uncomplicated, and often have at their thin center some corporate product. Beers. Barbies. Jeans. I write here on August 23rd, 2025. This week’s call to the opposite of prayer invokes Cracker Barrel, a restaurant chain headquartered in Lebanon, TN. I don’t doubt that by the time another pair of eyes reads this, the controversy will have dwindled considerably, if it’s not already been extinguished and replaced on the national pyre.
Today, though, ever the good citizen, I think about Cracker Barrel. Cracker Barrels dot our Interstate Highway System, catering to truckers, transients, the elderly, and divorced parents doing terse child custody exchanges in parking lots. Those who grew up in the South or Midwest no doubt have memories of Cracker Barrel, of playing the colorful peg game on the little wooden triangle, of browsing the Old Country Store, the themed gift shop, while waiting for dumplings or chicken tendies to arrive.
Cracker Barrel was designed to inspire nostalgia, an ode to the America the 60s stole from us. There’s a porch with rocking chairs. The store sells vintage candies in mason jars—One imagines an affable shopkeeper in a candy-striped apron sliding you an extra saltwater taffy at checkout, because he knows you’re a swell kid. It feels like you’re supposed to pay in loose change. Pennies, even. There are fat biscuits in baskets and Old West paraphernalia on the walls; wagon wheels, yokes. This all plays out under the providence of Uncle Herschel, the overalled man on the logo, otherwise known as Old Timer, whose views on interracial marriage are not known to us and who I’m to believe anyone gave a shit about prior to a few days ago.
Right! The war: Cracker Barrel changed their logo. They removed Old Timer, his rocking chair, and his barrel. The new logo is simple and app-friendly, like most logos these days. Cracker Barrel does have an app. It has a 4.9-star rating and 64,607 reviews. Right-wingers, primed to see the removal of any white man from any context whatsoever as an act of genocide, are naturally working themselves into a fine lather. But Cracker Barrel’s cosmetic shift is obviously less to do with a clumsy gesture toward progress, and all to do with the corporate machine that eventually sandpapers every brand identity down to a smooth button that, when pressed, dutifully releases the loose porridge of the brand’s contents. Said machine presently enjoys bipartisan support, so it’s all a bit silly left-to-right.
There are times when the regimented national war-pageant is believable, when the stakes feel real and worthy. Then there are times such as these, when you can practically see the actors shuffling around backstage and chatting amongst themselves while stage techs augment the lighting and acoustics. It’s in these lucid moments of failed theater that one might snap to.
I used to have moments like these while kneeling in church, when I was a kid. Sometimes I’d get bored while the priest was going on and on, and my eyes would float to the stained glass window or the intricately painted ceiling or the dying, bleeding man floating over my head, and I’d dabble in the soft blasphemy of private questions.
Surely, they’d not go through all this trouble if…?
In 1969, a gas station employee in Tennessee named Dan Evins took note of America’s burgeoning young Interstate Highway System and got the idea to open a business: a gas station that also offered home-cooked meals to the weary travelers he saw on the road. This Evins did, and he built his business in Lebanon, TN, and named it Cracker Barrel, in homage to the old custom of southerners gathering around soda cracker barrels to share stories and play checkers.
But a different type of barrel in a faraway desert was to put a wrinkle in Evins’ plans. Following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) instituted a ban on exporting oil to any country that had supported Israel, which included the United States. America, the Great Customer, was put in a bind. There were gasoline shortages, as well as energy rationing, and many American dreams, dependent as they are on crude, were laid to rest.
Evins, however, was undeterred. He abandoned the filling station angle to focus on novelty. In lieu of petroleum, there’s always kitsch.
I feel very American on the highway.
I’m not alone in feeling this way. Did you know that in the Czech Republic, that landlocked country with memories of the Iron Curtain, there’s a Route 66 Association (Česká Asociace Route 66)? Yes, every year, several Czechs flock to Mother Road to celebrate freedom itself, freedom as embodied by the 2,448 miles of concrete and asphalt stretching from Chicago to Santa Monica.
Route 66, which still exists, though it was decommissioned in the 80s and replaced by interstates, reminds people of cowboys. It conjures the wind in your hair as you vrroooom past dusty pink landscapes and retro diners and dead armadillos. Okies might think of the Dust Bowl, that horrible disaster of our own making, the fruit of our ignorance about soil, and of The Grapes of Wrath, that arduous journey to the promised land of California. This mass migration presented ample business opportunities for roadside lodging, gas stations, and cafes.
The twin forces of advertising and automobiles have shaped many fates. Whole towns have risen and fallen. A personal example: 39th street in Oklahoma City was once a part of Route 66. The steady stream of transients gave rise to what we call the Strip, a string of bars, the most prominent of which was the Habana Inn. Built in 1968, the complex had 170 rooms, two pools, and a restaurant called the Copa, in keeping with its anemically Latin theme. The Habana Inn carried on like this until the early 80s, when traffic dried up. Mother Road wasn’t paying the Habana Inn enough attention, so it fell in with a different sort of crowd. Its clientele became mostly homosexuals who liked that they could book a room and make a weekend of flitting around and fucking on the Strip without worrying about being seen. In 2012, I made my first pilgrimage there, and had many revelations pertaining to identity, eros, and anatomy.
The Highway, whether we admit it or not, is sacred to Americans. For all our prattling about Jesus, Christianity only wishes it could instill the perfect devotion that cars have in this country, can only aspire to shape the everyday intimacies of human lives in such an all-encompassing way that it breaks the binary of belief, achieving an influence so ubiquitous that it renders non-belief as moot, as like not believing in the wind. Americans hate quiet, and I think driving long distances on The Highway is the closest many Americans get to actual prayer. What goes through the American mind on The Highway? If not shushing their kids or delivering a pop performance or contemplating the murder of the driver in front of or directly behind them, people drive in a sort of trance. Mouths droop. Eyes stare into blue oblivion, as if in meditation in a gas-propelled nave.
This is an optimal time to receive cosmic messages, which arrive coded on vanity license plates and mile markers and such. It’s also a prime time to receive advertisements, either on signage or on the radio. These things, the cosmic messages and the advertisements, blur and become each other on The Highway. There’s a flow state. Pitbull, Mr. Worldwide himself, is putting on a concert at the casino. Injured? Give us a call. REPENT. Angel number 831. Let our girls give you a show you’ll never forget, clad only in their cowgirl boots! TIME’S ALMOST UP. ARE YOU FORGIVEN?
It’s no wonder, given the practical and spiritual significance of the Road, that highway advertisements, their colors and shapes and calculated nostalgia, have become synonymous with Americana, that they’ve been coded into our collective subconscious, and that we might look at them fondly and mistake them for “the past.” Confusing advertisements for “the past” is something we do quite often. We’re doing it today with Cracker Barrel, which has always been a corporate imitation of hyperlocal mom & pop shops from a half-remembered country, shops that Cracker Barrel would be all too happy to slurp down like its own chicken and dumplings if it meant nourishing itself for even a few months longer.
There’s good news for Rep. Donalds in there, though. I see no reason after all why a Cracker Barrel parking lot, any parking lot, those quiet, reflective expanses on the peripheries of commerce, couldn’t be considered sacred in such a society.
Faith is a terrible thing for a human being to lack. Not having faith can make you anxious. Maybe that’s why Rep. Donalds’ scene struck me so. Maybe I’m anxious, or a little jealous. Maybe I ought to make more use of this “freedom of religion” thing. That’s the American way, right? I suppose I could come up with something on my own, take a crack at it.
A Reading from the Book of Americans:
I believe in American Moses. I believe that his mother will tuck him away in the back of a stranger’s Toyota Corolla in Ciudad Juárez, and he’ll be carried on a river of asphalt past CBP to El Paso, and after conferring with God in the form of a talking Blooming Onion at the last remaining Outback Steakhouse, he will accept his destiny as a prophet.
I believe I will subscribe to the new Elijah, wreathed in athleisure, who will continue the work of American Moses and lay the groundwork for our Savior, who will be baptized by his buddy John in a hot tub in the back of an Airbnb. We’ll murder him, of course. Don’t you worry about that, sugar! We’ll get him good. But not before he quits his job as a DoorDash delivery guy, and tells us, “Give unto Bezos what belongs to Bezos,” or whoever happens to be bald and wealthy at the time, and he’ll overturn the tables in this wicked temple, and deliver us.
"It’s important that we Americans be given false little wars to fight every few days, else we start to forget who’s who and what’s what, or we start to think about our actual wars, which makes us sad or guilty or frustrated, and we start talking about how complicated everything is."
That's as good a summary of American history as any!
this article should be a Sam Shepard play.