Baptists do not dance.
When young people dance it leads to drinking and fornication, just ask the people of the little town of Footloose. Dance is, after all, primarily a matchmaking custom and is, therefore, quite vulgar. Even if you are not partner dancing it is still an immodest activity. Have you seen what ballet dancers wear? Those long legs and tight leotards are going to cause the whole audience to fall prey to sin; and thousands of parents take their children to The Nutcracker every year blissfully unaware of the danger, not to mention drinking and fornication, it will lead to. Never mind that David, the man after God’s own heart, is described as dancing so wildly that his clothing fell off. David did end up both drinking and having an affair though so maybe he is not a great example of the merits of dancing. The point is Baptists DO NOT dance. Not now. Not ever.
I grew up Baptist.
No, I did not just grow up Baptist. I ate, slept, and breathed at the whim of the American Baptist denomination. There’s a potluck this Sunday? I’ve got your deviled eggs right here. Hymn 400 in your hymnal? No, I don’t need he book, it is Are you washed in the blood and I’ve had it memorized longer than I’ve known my own name. My dad was a pastor, it comes with the territory along with the committee of good Christian bitches who thought it was their duty to decide whether or not my outfit was fit for church and the lasting hip damage that comes from sitting on wooden pews.
It may surprise you then to learn that I make a point of driving forty minutes into Seattle every Tuesday night to go dancing. Not just any dancing, Blues dancing, which is a slow, sensual dance style involving a lot of hip and a very close embrace. Like close enough that if you are going to insist on fitting a bible between me and my partner it is going to have to be a pocket new testament. Don’t worry, the Holy Spirit is within me, so I don’t need to leave any room.
(Or, maybe, you know me and are familiar with my work as a sarcastic trouble maker and are not surprised in the least.)
There are a lot of reasons that Baptists don’t dance, probably starting with the fact John the Baptist was murdered by a dancer and moving on to the fact that a lot of dancing takes place in bars and other drinking establishments, and the fact that, to an outside observer, a lot of couple dancing seems to simulate sexual movements. I am not naïve, I can see where those opinions come from.
I remember taking a few members of my small group Blues dancing with me. Samantha, who is a fully trained ballet dancer, looked out across the dance floor. “It looks easy, A LOT of hip movement.” She was not exactly wrong. One of my favorite dance partners when I first started dancing told me once in the middle of a dance, “when I don’t know what to do, I just wiggle for a few seconds. I can see how people could look out across a dance floor and see exactly that, people holding each other up and moving their hips.
“It’s really sexual,” Karen sat next to Samantha tapping her finger on her leg. “I don’t think I can dance like that with a stranger. I never even danced like that with Trevor.”
I looked out across the dance floor, but instead of seeing couples assessing each other as sexual partners I saw people figuring out how to listen and communicate with one another through touch and weight changes rather than words. I saw people accepting the suggestion and push of a movement from their lead while also taking freedom and liberty do and stylize those movements their own way. There is a lot to learn about relationships and communication through dance, perhaps that is why we see it as so much of a matchmaking custom, especially when you dance as a follow. Honestly, it is a shame that Baptists don’t dance because I have learned so much more about freewill and learning how to listen to and follow God in learning how to dance than I did in any theology or Sunday school class.
The first thing you need to know to be a good follow is how to listen, not with your ears but with your body. I struggle with this. It is extremely difficult for me to shut down my brain and let my body just do something. I can see the body mechanics when I am looking at it, I cannot make my body move the way others do. Beyond that, I want to make all of my own decisions. I get scared in partner dancing because I don’t know what my partner wants me to do and then I make my own decision which is inevitably wrong and I either do the wrong thing or I end up fighting with my partner for control of the dance, which is not being a good follow. And your lead is not going to tell you what to do… not with his words anyway. So, you have to learn how to listen with your body and you have to learn that not every lead is going to communicate the same move in the exact same way.
When you follow you listen with your hands and with your back. Your lead is going to put a hand on your back and a hand in yours and use subtle movements of offering you room and spaces to fill to ask you to do certain things. It took me a long time to figure out how to listen for this and sometimes I have to close my eyes, so I can listen without distractions.
Following God is very similar to that. It isn’t always easy to listen to God. You know God is doing something but maybe you are too distracted by what you expect God to be doing to pick up on the subtle difference; I do that a lot in dancing, I think my lead is doing one thing and they get mad at me because they were doing something different that I messed up. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention to the cues God has given me and suddenly I am pushed through a move that I wasn’t prepared for. Sometimes you have to close your eyes and really work on listening to the circumstances of the music and the cues God is giving you to move. It isn’t always easy, even when I close my eyes, I guess at what the move is because I cannot just stand there.
Dance is also about movement. When I go dancing in Seattle I am often asked if I want to lead or follow and I like to make the joke, “well I only know how to follow so if I lead, we’re just going to stand there.” It doesn’t get as many laughs as I would like. After that they always agree to lead because neither of us are there to just stand in the middle of the dance floor. When you are following, either in dance or God, you cannot just stand there, the book of James agrees with this, you have to move. Even if you are unsure of what the move you are supposed to be doing is or are certain you are going to do it wrong, you have to move. You can go through the turn as rigid as a robot if you want so long as you go through it. Note, you will have more fun if you don’t go through it rigid like a robot, again that applies both to walking in faith and to dancing. Sometimes, even when I am listening very carefully and feeling the music and the circumstances, I will come to a move that I am unsure what I am supposed to do. So, I move. Maybe I wiggle a little or do the turn I think my lead wants. I MOVE.
God wants us to move.
God also wants us to rest. Contradictory? I know. God gives us opportunities to rest and reset. One of the reasons I like Blues dancing over a lot of other kinds of dancing I have tried is because there are moments when you get to come back into your partner and sort of rest and feel where the beat and core of the music are. Those are the moments when my friend told me he just likes to wiggle a little. We get these moments in blues dancing that I haven’t experienced in other forms of dancing to just rest and decide what to do next. I am a firm believer that God gives us our relationships as reminders and broken funhouse mirrors of how our relationship with God is supposed to be. God rested and, occasionally, when following God, we get the opportunity within our purpose to rest and listen and find that core again.
The last way I can see how we are meant to follow God the same way we follow a lead in dancing is in styling. I struggle with styling. I do not know where the line is between doing the wrong move, doing the move wrong, and just adding a bit of flare, it comes from me not really knowing what my body is doing at any given moment. I love to watch girls who really know how to style their moves when they are dancing. They can make a very simple turn complicated or elegant or spicy by using the freedom they are given within a move to make it their own. Our lead may be moving us through a move they want to do but we have free movement within that. God may be moving us a certain place or putting us in a position but that doesn’t mean we don’t have freedom within those movements. We can move with joy or move stiffly or move in as beautiful and elegant a way as we can. While God is moving us we are moving with God.
So, you can look at dancing however you want. Baptists do not dance because for many of the Baptists I was surrounded by growing up it is a wicked and sinful act that can only lead more wicked and sinful things. To me it is a beautiful, albeit broken and distorted, image of what our relationship with God can look like and how we can follow God better.
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