Missouri may have one of the strangest state nicknames. Legend has it that in 1899, a Democratic congressman (a species that now borders on extinction) named William Duncan Vandiver said, “I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I’m from Missouri. You’ve got to show me.”
The nickname stuck, embraced by Missourians as a badge of their straightforwardness, skepticism and self-reliance.
Perhaps no one embodied that spirit more fully than the writer Mark Twain. I recently finished Ron Chernow’s extensive and magisterial biography of Twain. Born Samuel Clemens and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, alongside the Mississippi River, Twain was a man of deep contradictions and convictions.
I resonated with many of his impressions. I, too, grew up along the Mississippi River—though further south, near Cape Girardeau. My teenage years were often spent at Cape’s riverfront park, where I sputtered through my first cigarette, marveled with friends at the passing barge, and stayed up until 3:00 a.m. on a first date with the girl I would later marry.
The Mississippi’s churning, muddy waters evoked both dread and wonder. Twain once said, “The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.” He spoke of the river with reverence, as if it had a divine will of its own.
Religion, however, was another matter. Twain’s skepticism of organized religion is legendary.
He once quipped, “Nothing agrees with me. If I drink coffee, it gives me dyspepsia; if I drink wine, it gives me the gout; if I go to church, it gives me dysentery.” His sharp tongue spared neither preacher nor pulpit.
But Twain’s spiritual crankiness wasn’t simple cynicism. His critiques of religion came not from hatred, but from disappointment. His target wasn’t faith itself, but the failure of American Christians to live it out.
In “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Twain ridicules the spectacle of two feuding families—the Shepherdsons and Grangerfords—who go to church in the morning and resume killing each other in the afternoon. That contradiction haunted Twain’s view of religion.
Nowhere is his disappointment more searing than in his writings about racism in post-Reconstruction America. While not a modern progressive, Twain had a keen sense of moral clarity.
Responding to news of atrocities abroad, Twain wrote, “They are not worse than our Christian Ku-Klux gangs of a former time, nor than our church-going lynch mobs of today.” In his 1901 essay “The United States of Lyncherdom,” Twain wrote, “In America, nearly all black men, and some white men, are afraid of white Christians. And with good reason.”
Decades later, James Baldwin would echo this sentiment in “The Fire Next Time”:
“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. I cannot believe in the Christianity of most white people, because they do not believe in it themselves.”
Yet, Twain wasn’t immune to faith. One of his closest friends was Rev. Joseph Twichell, a Congregational minister.
After attending one of Twichell’s sermons, Twain teased, “Joe, that’s a clever trick of yours to pound the pulpit extra hard when you haven’t anything to say.” Twichell laughed and replied, “Mark, it was clever of you to discover it.”
Twain later admitted regret that he had been too forceful in his dismissal of faith, particularly toward his wife Olivia. After her death, he wrote, “I took Livy’s religion away from her, and gave her nothing—worse than nothing—in return.”
He even spoke with fondness about the Presbyterian congregation of his childhood. His funeral was held in a Presbyterian church.
Whether Twain could have ever come to peace with calling himself a Christian is anyone’s guess. Maybe the racism he saw in his youth “showed him” too much hypocrisy for any seed of faith to grow.
Still, his crankiness is a gift if we’re willing to receive it. It’s a call to integrity—a prophetic summons to an embodied, incarnational, and transformative faith.
Another cranky Missourian—Walter Brueggemann —once wrote: “The crisis in the U.S. church has almost nothing to do with being liberal or conservative. It has everything to do with giving up on the faith and discipline of our Christian baptism and settling for a common, generic U.S. identity that is part patriotism, part consumerism, part violence, and part affluence.”
We need cranky voices. Not just to critique, but to call us back. To challenge the church not to settle for comfort, but to take up the costly cross of Christ.
We practice our faith in a time when families are being separated by deportation policies. We practice our faith in a time when uncomfortable truths in American history are being erased. We practice our faith in a time when bigotry wears the mask of virtue.
You say you’re a Christian? Well, I’m from Missouri. You’ve got to show me.
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Tyler Tankersley is Senior Pastor at Ardmore Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
