Steps Topics

Natives of another hemisphere, they beheld, with curiosity, all the pleasing features of the American forest. The landscape before them was fair, if it was strange and rude. The little flower which at this season stars our woods and roadsides with its profuse blooms, might attract even eyes as stern as theirs with its humble beauty. The useful pine lifted its cones into the frosty air. The maple, which is already making the forest gay with its orange hues, reddened over those houseless men. The majestic summits of Wachusett and Monadnoc towering in the horizon, invited the steps of the adventure westward.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath, instead of a church, when I would have gone farther than he to hear a true word spoken on that or any day. He declared that I was “breaking the Lord’s fourth commandment,” and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the Sabbath. He really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. The country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a village, the church, not only really but from association, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall ere long cease to deform the landscape. There are few things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day. You fancy him to have taken off his coat, as when men are about to do hot and dirty work.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

The most condensed format of the conversionist motif is the TV commercial, which has become essential to both network and religious broadcasting. Embedded in its structure are sentiments from our religious and political heritage: salvation and choice. Newness of life can now be associated with a change of heart about politics, the purchase of a new car, or the selection of a beverage. A Pepsi commercial, for example, designed to fit the charismatic personality and gifts of singer Michael Jackson, became an invitation to make a decision and join in. Images and sounds of the soft-drink ad drew viewers into a growing throng of happy, dancing people following the steps of a dynamic cultural hero. Even couch potatoes might have been roused, vicariously at least, to skip lightly behind the agile Jackson as he led his ecstatic followers to the right choice. The conversionist call in this instance is to come on up to the good life through Pepsi. Nonetheless it plays upon the persuasive motifs of turning around and becoming a part of something larger.
—Gregor T. Goethals (b. 1926)