Keillor’s account is an immensely entertaining read, not surprising considering he’s the mind behind the genius A Prairie Home Companion. Lake Wobegon Days is his novelization of several parts of the radio show, written more like a series of short stories with re-occurring characters than as a cohesive narrative. The piece satirizes secessionist movements in religious groups, starting with the secession of twenty-one gentlemen who left the Anglican Church in 1865 and founded the Sanctified Brethren, which then began to immediately break up into more and more, smaller and smaller denominations. The church members do not believe in any sort of hierarchy, so any individual has the chance to proclaim revealed truth. Such a structure gives way to trouble when different individuals have different ideas of how the Church should be run and its constituents behave.
The reasons for the severances in the Church are ludicrously minor – can women wear pants, should you take hot or cold baths, when can you listen to the radio, etc. Even after the reasons vanished – the speaker’s family started taking hot baths after all – the different groups would refuse to come to terms with each other. There was even chance of a division within their own family, as his two uncles disagreed intensely on whether or not speaking in tongues was still a blessing from the Holy Spirit present in the world today.
Even though it’s written to be humorous, the situation illustrates a few points about some of the reasons behind religious. The fact that the faith doesn’t have a set hierarchy of officials who have special access to divine knowledge definitely makes it more likely that there will be inter-faith turmoil, as any individual could claim to have greater or more true divine revelation and acquire followers. This individual and his followers would see themselves as the only true adherents to the original church – they are staying true to the path while the others diverge. It is secession seen as preservation instead of divergence.
The fact that individuals are willing to split with their brethren over things that seem so intensely minor, such as the proper temperature of one’s bath, makes more sense when considering that for these individuals, even the smallest detail of your life can affect the status of your eternal existence. Running a bath risks the soul.
Thus, a lack of organized hierarchy and the eternity-affecting importance given to even the smallest interpretations of Scripture creates a perfect situation for religious division. Each individual believes he has access to the truth that will save everyone he knows, but they must follow it exactly. Obviously, religious divisions happen in groups with hierarchies (often as a response to them), and not every religious group divides over minutiae, but it’s a funny and astute look at how such splits take place.