‘Crazy Lorenzo’ joins other fictional Methodists

Key points:

• A new novel, “The Deliverance of Barker McRae,” is set in the world of circuit preaching in the early 19th century.
• The author of the book is Stacia Pelletier, a graduate of United Methodist-related Candler School of Theology at Emory University.
• The fictional character Lorenzo McRae is based on real-life evangelist Lorenzo Dow, who was rejected by the Methodist church for ordination because of his appearance and speaking.

The most famous Methodist in popular culture is arguably Superman, but Lorenzo McRae has something the man of steel doesn’t have: a real-life Methodist as inspiration.

Superman, at least in some of the origin stories in DC Comics, attended a Methodist church in Smallville while identifying as mild-mannered teenager Clark Kent.

In “The Deliverance of Barker McRae,” the inspiration for Lorenzo McRae is real-life 19th century evangelist Lorenzo Dow. He was sometimes referred to as “Crazy Lorenzo” or “Crazy Dow.”

Neither the fictional McRae nor the historical Dow would be described as mild mannered.

Lorenzo Dow was unkempt and filthy, said Mark Shenise, associate archivist at the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History.

“He looked like John the Baptist coming out of the wilderness,” Shenise said. “Every sermon … was this cajoling in different ways — screaming, shouting, crying, begging, flattering, insulting, to challenge to come to Jesus, to have that experience.”

Lorenzo McRae, the fictional character in “The Deliverance of Barker McRae,” the new novel by Stacia Pelletier, has all of these qualities. 

“They call him ‘Crazy Lorenzo,’” says an innkeeper describing Lorenzo McRae in the novel.

Also from the novel: “Crowds had gathered to hear this man deliver a sermon and gawk at the strange sight, a waterborne missionary shouting out the Gospel to hearers back on dry land, pacing on a floating platform, the raft secured to a nearby tree so it wouldn’t float him and his words downriver. … He paced and swore up there; he sang and wept also.”

Remind you of anyone?

“I knew about (Lorenzo Dow) from my years in grad school,” Pelletier said in an interview with United Methodist News. “I was pretty familiar with him as one of the standouts of early American itinerant preaching and the revival movements, and I had always found him an interesting character.

“So, he was an inspiration for Barker’s father,” she said. “It’s not a one-to-one comparison by any means, but he inspired loosely the idea of a man who’s so bound and caught up to his relationship with God and to his cause, that sometimes he loses sight of the people around him, namely his daughter.”

The book is chiefly about the evangelist’s daughter, Barker McRae, who goes on a journey with an unlikely companion to find Crazy Lorenzo, her father. The elder McRae is often spoken of but not seen until the end of the novel.

“I had always in the back of my mind that I really wanted to write about a young girl who wanted to be a preacher,” Pelletier said. “I think some of that comes from my years in seminary and then grad school studying religion. … I’ve always been interested in women’s voices in our American religious story.”

A graduate of United Methodist-related Candler School of Theology at Emory University, Pelletier is not United Methodist.

“I had been raised in a robustly evangelical Protestant home,” she said. “I went to seminary because I was breaking out of that more conservative kind of religious background but was still deeply interested in questions of faith, theology, my own faith and sort of how to make sense of the world.”

She never planned to seek ordination.

“I went to learn,” she said. “But it turned out that most of my best friends wanted to be ordained ministers, or have become that since, so I became steeped in that world for three years and then went on and studied history of religion at Emory.”

Both the real-life Lorenzo Dow and fictional Lorenzo McRae started out as Methodist evangelists but were rejected for ordination because of their sometimes-unhinged speaking and appearance.

“He probably preached to more people than any other preacher or minister during his lifetime,” Shenise said. “Oftentimes, he had assemblies of at least 10,000 people in open-air situations.”

Dow attempted to get ordained in the Methodist church in 1796, and he was given probationary status.

“So fellow clergy said, ‘Wait a minute here. We’re exuberant, but this is beyond it and scary,’” Shenise said. “So basically, what happens is they bounce him out of the ordination process.”

Still, Dow believed in Methodist doctrine, and it continued to shape his views his whole career, Shenise said.

The plot of “The Deliverance of Barker McRae” follows the preacher’s teenage daughter as she travels to find her father with help from a surprising ally. Her goal is to follow his footsteps and become a preacher.

The story shares some elements with “True Grit,” a novel by Charles Portis that has spawned two successful films, one starring John Wayne.

“I read it years ago and loved it, so I’m honored by the comparison,” Pelletier said. “If somebody would take this book and do a movie, that might help my situation.”

Pelletier has worked as a speechwriter, fundraiser, magazine freelancer and communications representative in addition to writing novels, which include “The Half Wives” and “Accidents of Providence.” She is currently director of corporate foundation relations with Wake Forest University.

“I get up at 4 in the morning and I (write) before I go into work, and I use my vacation time for writing,” she said. “It’s such a hard market, but once I started writing creatively, something aligned for me.

“To borrow from Parker Palmer, I found ‘Where the world’s need and your gift coincide.’”

Patterson is a UM News reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. Contact him at 615-742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.