By Hamil R. Harris

For nearly 50 years, Robert B. Grogan has ignored howling winds and frigid temperatures to climb hundreds of steps up into the tower of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and manually play, with his fists and his feet, 56 carillon bells, as he will do after Tuesday’s noon choral Mass for Christmas.

Whether it has been to celebrate the arrivals of Pope John Paul or Pope Benedict, or to remember the 26 children and adults who died Dec. 14 in the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., or to entertain the faithful arriving Monday on Christmas Eve for midnight Mass, Grogan has never missed a major event as the basilica’s carillonneur.

There are other bells in the tower that can be played electronically from below, but not the bronze carillons.

“You can’t play with your fingers on the carillon keyboard because the bell action is too heavy,” said Grogan, 73, a resident of Silver Spring, who donned an overcoat Monday as he climbed 208 steps up a spiral staircase to the “playing cabin.” He’s been making the winding ascent since 1964.

For 34 years, he was also the organist at the basilica, but he retired from that post in 2008. (He still plays organ at Masses during the week and teaches organ in the music department at Catholic University.)

“What I do is rather unique, and I enjoy it for its musical and spiritual interest,” said Grogan, explaining that an hour of “really athletic” music on the carillons can be draining.

“When I say I am a carillonneur, most people might think that it is an electronic instrument with loudspeakers in the tower, but what you have here is very physical,” Grogan said. “To chime the bells requires sounds made from a wooden keyboard with levers for the hands and feet, and the loudest of the sound depends on how hard I strike the lever.”

There are two chambers for the carillons, one at 172 feet and the other at 223 feet above the ground. Grogan’s frigid playing cabin sits at 200 feet. To get there, he must take an elevator to the sixth floor of the bell tower, walk up a ladder and climb through a trap door before he even reaches the spiral staircase.

The largest of the carillons, called the Virgin Mary, weighs 31 / 2 tons. The basilica’s carillons were cast in Annecy, France, shortly before they were installed in 1963. For carillon aficionados, the basilica’s French bells sound different from the National Cathedral’s English carillons and Arlington National Cemetery’s Dutch set.

Grogan, who learned how to play the bells as a music major at the University of Kansas, can certainly hear the difference. He’s stayed at the basilica all these years because he loves the bells, and he enjoys the variety of his other musical vocations, be it playing organ now for weekday Masses or teaching organ at the university.

There’s a familiarity to the Christmas season, and yet there are events he can never anticipate. Grogan fought back tears last week after he sounded the 31 / 2-ton Virgin Mary 26 times for the children and adults killed in Newtown. “As a grandfather with seven grandchildren,” Grogan said, “I thought about what an ordeal these people went through, and this horrible event.”

Tuesday’s Christmas carols will be joyous — and not too difficult. With his overcoat on, he’ll hardly break a sweat.

December 22, 2012
One Nation Under God?
By MOLLY WORTHEN

THIS week millions of “Chreasters” — Americans who attend church only on Christmas and Easter — will crowd into pews to sing carols and renew their vague relationship with the Christian God. This year, there may be fewer Chreasters than ever. A growing number of “nones” live in our midst: those who say they have no religious affiliation at all. An October Pew Research Center poll revealed that they now account for 20 percent of the population, up from 16 percent in 2008.

Avoiding church does not excuse Americans from marking the birth of Jesus, however. Most of us have no choice but to stay home from work or school — and if you complain about this glaring exception to the separation between church and state, you must be a scrooge with no heart for tradition. Christmas has been a federal holiday for 142 years.

Yet Christianity’s preferential place in our culture and civil law came under fire this year, and not simply because more Americans reject institutional religion. The Obama administration subtly worked to expand the scope of protected civil rights to include access to legal marriage and birth control. Catholic bishops and evangelical activists declared that Washington was running roughshod over religious liberty and abandoning the country’s founding values, while their opponents accused them of imposing one set of religious prejudices on an increasingly pluralistic population. The Christian consensus that long governed our public square is disintegrating. American secularism is at a crossroads.

The narrative on the right is this: Once upon a time, Americans honored the Lord, and he commissioned their nation to welcome all faiths while commanding them to uphold Christian values. But in recent decades, the Supreme Court ruled against prayer in public schools, and legalized abortion, while politicians declared “war on Christmas” and kowtowed to the “homosexual lobby.” Conservative activists insist that they protest these developments not to defend special privileges for Christianity, but to respect the founders’ desire for universal religious liberty — rooted, they say, in the Christian tradition.

The controversial activist David Barton has devoted his career to popularizing this “forgotten history” through lectures, books and home-school curriculums. Mr. Barton insists that “biblical Christianity in America produced many of the cherished traditions still enjoyed today,” including “protection for religious toleration and the rights of conscience.”

Bryan Fischer, spokesman for the American Family Association, told me that he saw the “nones” as proof that “the foundations of our culture are crumbling.” The Pew poll, he said, “is one of the signs.” A couple of weeks after we spoke, he told a radio audience that God did not protect the children killed in the Newtown, Conn., massacre because of the Supreme Court decisions banning prayer and Bible reading in public schools. “God is not going to go where he is not wanted,” Mr. Fischer said.

How accurate is this story of decline into godlessness? Is America, supposedly God’s last bastion in the Western world, rejecting faith and endangering religious liberty?

The truth is that “nones” are nothing new. Religion has been a feature of human society since Neanderthal times, but so has religious indifference. Our illusions of the past as a golden age of faith tend to cloud our assessment of today’s religious landscape. We think of atheism and religious apathy as uniquely modern spiritual options, ideas that Voltaire and Hume devised in a coffee house one rainy afternoon sometime in the 18th century. Before the Enlightenment, legend has it, peasants hurried to church every week and princes bowed and scraped before priests.

Historians have yet to unearth Pew studies from the 13th century, but it is safe to say that we frequently overestimate medieval piety. Ordinary people often skipped church and had a feeble grasp of basic Christian dogma. Many priests barely understood the Latin they chanted — and many parishes lacked any priest at all. Bishops complained about towns that used their cathedrals mainly as indoor markets or granaries. Lest Protestants blame this irreverence on Catholic corruption, the evidence suggests that it continued after Martin Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenberg church door. In 1584, census takers in Antwerp discovered that the city had a larger proportion of “nones” than 21st-century America: a full third of residents claimed no religious affiliation.

When conservative activists claim that America stands apart from godless Europe, they are not entirely wrong. The colonies were relatively unchurched, but European visitors to the early republic marveled at Americans’ fervent piety. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1840 that the absence of an established state church nurtured a society in which “Christian sects are infinitely diversified and perpetually modified; but Christianity itself is a fact so irresistibly established that no one undertakes either to attack or to defend it.”

De Tocqueville visited during a wave of religious revival, but he underestimated the degree to which some Americans held Christianity at arm’s length: the “infidel” Abraham Lincoln declined to join a church, and his wife invited spiritualists to hold séances in the White House.

Nevertheless, America’s rates of church affiliation have long been higher than those of Europe — perhaps because of the First Amendment, which permitted a religious “free market” that encouraged innovation and competition between spiritual entrepreneurs. Yet membership, as every exasperated parson knows, is not the same as showing up on Sunday morning. Rates of church attendance have never been as sterling as the Christian Right’s fable of national decline suggests. Before the Civil War, regular attendance probably never exceeded 30 percent, rising to a high of 40 percent around 1965 and declining to under 30 percent in recent years — even as 77 percent still identify as Christians and 69 percent say they are “very” or “moderately” religious, according to a 2012 Gallup survey.

We know, then, that the good old days were not so good after all, even in God’s New Israel. Today’s spiritual independents are not unprecedented. What is new is their increasing visibility. “I like the fact that we’re getting more ‘nones’ because it helps Christians realize that they’re different,” Stanley Hauerwas, a Protestant theologian at Duke Divinity School, said when I asked for his thoughts on the Pew poll. “That’s a crucial development. America produces people that say, ‘I believe Jesus is Lord, but that’s just my personal opinion.’ ”

The temple of “my personal opinion” may be the real “established church” in modern America. Three decades ago, one “none” named Sheila Larson told the sociologist Robert Bellah and his collaborators that she called her faith “Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” Americans are drifting out of the grip of institutionalized religion, just as they are drifting from institutional authority in general.

THIS trend, made famous by books like Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone,” has encouraged both the theological mushiness of those who say they are “spiritual, not religious” as well as the unfiltered fury that has come to characterize both ends of the political spectrum. “It seems like we live in a Manichaean universe, with vitriolic extremes,” said Kathryn Lofton, associate professor of American studies and religious studies at Yale. “That’s not unrelated to the lack of tempering authority. ‘Religious authority’ is no longer clergy in the pulpit saying ‘Vote for Eisenhower,’ but forwarded URL links or gossip exchanges in chat rooms. There is no referee.”

For a very long time, Protestant leaders were those referees. If individual impiety flourished in centuries past, churches still wielded significant control over civic culture: the symbols, standards and sexual mores that most of the populace respected in public, if not always in private. Today, more and more Americans openly accept extramarital sex, homosexuality and other outrages to traditional Christian morality. They question the Protestant civil religion that has undergirded our common life for so long.

The idea of Protestant civil religion sounds strange in a country that prides itself on secularism and religious tolerance. However, America’s religious free market has never been entirely free. The founding fathers prized freedom of conscience, but they did not intend to purge society of Protestant influence (they had deep suspicions of Catholicism). Most believed that churches helped to restrain the excesses of mob democracy. Since then, theology has shaped American laws regarding marriage, public oaths and the bounds of free speech. For most of our history, the loudest defenders of the separation of church and state were not rogue atheists, but Protestants worried about Catholics seeking financing for parochial schools or scheming their way into public office to take orders only from mitered masters in Rome.

Activists on both the left and the right tend to forget this irony of the First Amendment: it has been as much a weapon of religious oppression as a safeguard for liberty. In the 19th and early 20th century, when public school teachers read from a Protestant translation of the Bible in class, many Americans saw benign reinforcement of American values. If Catholic parents complained, officials told them that their Roman dogma was their own private concern. The underlying logic here was not religious neutrality.

The Protestant bias of the American public sphere has mellowed over time, but it still depends on “Christian secularism,” said Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a political scientist at Northwestern University. This is a “political stance” premised on a “chiefly Protestant notion of religion understood as private assent to a set of propositional beliefs,” she told me. Other traditions, such as Judaism and Islam and to some degree Catholicism, do not frame faith in such rationalist terms, or accept the same distinction between internal conviction and public argument. The very idea that it is possible to cordon off personal religious beliefs from a secular town square depends on Protestant assumptions about what counts as “religion,” even if we now mask these sectarian foundations with labels like “Judeo-Christian.”

Conservative Christian activists hold those sectarian foundations more dearly than they admit, and they are challenging the Obama administration’s efforts to frame access to contraception and same-sex marriage as civil rights immune to the veto of “private” conscience. Alan Sears, president of the legal advocacy organization Alliance Defending Freedom, sees an unprecedented threat to religious liberty in the harsh fines facing employers who refuse to cover contraception in their insurance programs. “It is a death penalty. It is a radical change,” he told me. “It’s one thing when you’re debating about public space, but it’s another when you say, if you don’t surrender your conscience, you’re out of business.”

Barry Lynn, the director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (an organization that until 1972 was named, tellingly, Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State), sees things differently. He worries about what might happen if an unpredictable Supreme Court agrees to hear conservative Christians’ challenges to the contraception mandate, or their pleas for exemptions for charities that accept federal grants but discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring. “The court could create something vastly more dangerous than corporate free speech: a ‘corporate conscience’ claim,” Mr. Lynn, a lawyer and an ordained minister, told me. “These cases could become as significant for the redefinition of religious liberty as Roe v. Wade was a rearticulation of the right to privacy.”

These legal efforts are less an attempt to redefine religious liberty than a campaign to preserve Christians’ historic right to police the boundary between secular principles and religious beliefs. Only now that conservative Christians have less control over organs of public power, they cannot rely on the political process. Now that the “nones” are declaring themselves, and more Americans — including many Christians — see birth control as a medical necessity rather than a sin, Mr. Sears sees a stark course of action for the Catholic and evangelical business owners he represents: “Litigation is all that our clients have.” Their problem, however, is more fundamental than legal precedent. Their problem is that America’s Christian consensus is fragmenting. We are left groping for something far messier: an evolving, this-worldly, compromise.

Molly Worthen is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

In Rust Belt, a teenager’s climb from poverty

By Anne Hull, Published: December 8

Week after week, the mailman climbed the steep hill of Shenango Street to the house with the busted porch steps. “Dear Miss Rouzzo,” the letters began, or “Dear Tabitha Rouzzo.” The college catalogues barely fit in the mailbox. They stuck out like gift-wrapped presents against white aluminum siding gone dingy from decades of wear. On the porch were three new Linen Breeze decorative candles — a nice try, thought the actual Tabitha Rouzzo, who came walking up the hill every afternoon with her mind on the mailbox.

The 11th-grader seldom brought anyone home, and when she did she would sort of draw in a breath and say, “Well, here it is.”

Her Victoria’s Secret bag was crammed with track clothes and school papers. At 17, with dark hair and dark eyes, she was a version of the actress Anne Hathaway if Anne Hathaway had stars tattooed on her hip, chipped blue nail polish and lived two blocks from the projects.

Tabi shared the rental house with her mother and sometimes her mother’s boyfriend. Her four older siblings were grown. None of them had graduated from high school. They wore headsets and hairnets to jobs that were so futureless that getting pregnant at 20 seemed an enriching diversion. Born too late to witness the blue-collar stability that had once been possible, they occupied the bottom of the U.S. economy.

“I’m running from everything they are,” she said.

The question was whether Tabi could outrun the odds against her.

She knew that colleges sent out millions of letters to 11th-graders who took the Princeton Review prep course. The whole Dear Tabitha campaign was about as personal as fliers from Tire Express. But nearing the end of her junior year of high school, without a single item of value to secure her future — not even a $50 U.S. savings bond from a departed relative — the mail was all she had.

So she sweated it out the old-fashioned way, joining Spanish Club, Chess Club, Bible Club, Art Club and the track team, where she may have been the worst pole-vaulter in the Pennsylvania-Ohio border region. On Wednesday nights, she was at church waving her praise hands in the air, and on Friday night, it was a school production of “No, No, Nanette.”

With no working vehicle at home, she had to walk most places. You could see her hoofing across the industrial landscape, her pink bag slung over her shoulder.

Tabi kept the college mail upstairs in her bedroom. She wrote back to 22 schools that offered biochemistry programs. Her goal was to be a forensic scientist in North Carolina. “It seems nice,” Tabi said, though she had never been. She had never flown on an airplane. Her laptop was a secondhand PC she bought from a guy for $60. Her bedroom window overlooked a field strewn with Filet-O-Fish wrappers and Keystone Ice empties and, lower in the valley, the stacks at Ellwood Quality Steels chugging smoke.

***



Long before the recession, New Castle was a place of vanishing opportunity. It was 50 miles from Pittsburgh but felt farther, and while Steelers banners hung from awnings, the hard hat was a remnant of the past. Retail and food service jobs now outnumbered manufacturing jobs in the county. The top three employers were the hospital, state government and Liberty Mutual insurance company. Number seven was Wal-Mart, where Tabi’s older brother worked in dairy until he was fired for stealing an energy drink.

Tabi heard stories about the olden days. She came from welders and ceramic production workers. But, to Tabi, the sprawling Shenango China factory where her grandfather and great-grandfather worked was just a boarded-up place on the way to Wal-Mart.

Her New Castle was the one that existed now: white, working class, with poverty that had deepened into the second and third generations. Nearly three-fourths of the students in Tabi’s school qualified for free or reduced-price lunches, and one-third of New Castle families with children younger than 18 had incomes beneath the poverty level.

During the 2012 election, the campaigns of President Obama and Mitt Romney visited Pennsylvania a combined 38 times. With Ohio next door, the candidates and their wives barnstormed the region like few other places, focused almost entirely on the economy and strengthening the middle class. After the election, New Castle was still a hard town to be young and poor in.

They had $50 prepaid phones and $5 Day-Glo earbuds with the Chinese innards spilling out. They went to Township Tan for the 15-minute prom special. But the backwash of America’s affluence was a dim substitute for the promise of the middle class, which had moved farther from their reach. The decline in economic mobility has made the bottom more difficult to climb up from.

Unlike her counterparts in higher ranges, prepped for ascension, Tabi Rouzzo had only herself.

At 13, she started working in a deer slaughterhouse. Her friend Gloria told her about it, and Gloria’s mom drove them out there. They were greeted by a cold room with kerosene heaters. For $10 an hour, Tabi was to stand at a table cutting butterfly filets.

With a bloody knife in her hand and a circular saw whining behind her, labor laws being violated by the minute, Tabi decided on the spot that work offered freedom. She went back the next two winters, through 10th grade. Off-season, she cleaned rental properties, clerked in a mini-mart and baled hay at a farm.

In 11th grade, Tabi needed a job she could walk to and found Splitstone Entertainment, a storefront that sold used electronics, along with a selection of stun guns, nunchucks, ninja throwing stars and factory-boxed Star Wars collectibles. People brought in their Xboxes and PlayStations to unload, and Tabi cleaned them for resale.

“The controllers are real greasy,” she said one Saturday afternoon, pulling back her hair for the task. She was not complaining. Even describing the slaughterhouse, she sounded like a butcher and not a squee girl. “I’m a grown man,” she joked. It was somehow true. She had not a line on her porcelain face but a weariness was already in her.

After work that night, she met Gloria at Sheetz for dinner. Gloria was working midnights at the Subway inside the Pilot gas station for $8.60 an hour and was no longer in school.

“This town is dragging everyone down,” Tabi said a few days later.

The mailbox at home remained a repository of hope. Tabi’s mother brought the mail in every day. “She’s got colleges all the way from Texas wanting her,” said Patricia Edmonds, bragging about her daughter.

Tabi didn’t spend much energy correcting the record. School, and her future, had always been hers to figure out.

Her mother had five kids and no husband at age 23. Tabi, the last born, was a welfare and WIC baby who grew up with evictions and lights getting cut off. Her 39-year-old mother remembers it differently.

“I tried to give them everything,” Patricia said. “You wouldn’t find one of my kids without a matching bed set.”

Monthly income for Tabi and her mother at the house on Shenango Street was an $824 check from Social Security, food stamps and survivor’s benefits for Tabi from the death of her father, a welder who died of an overdose. Patricia spent a lot of time on Facebook, posting shout-outs to her four grown children, “I’m cookin’ sauce, you comin’ home or what?” She listed herself as a “Stay at home mom” with a qualifier — “QueenBitch.”

Tabi thought her mother should get a job. “I don’t ever want to sit on my butt, waiting on hand and foot for someone to help me,” Tabi said.

It was her greatest motivation. The college mail reminded her how badly she wanted to escape her mother’s destiny. And yet the glossy pictures of emerald campuses revealed how far away that green world was.

***



Tabi’s alarm for school went off at 5:45 a.m. It sounded like a firehouse bell, as if to stress the urgency of the moment. Tabi used to share the room with her older sister. One morning, Tabi’s sister decided not to get up, and that was that for high school. Tabi pulled herself from bed.

The crowded halls of New Castle Junior/Senior High School enveloped her. “Yo, Tabs,” a teammate from track called. Tabi wore khakis and ballet flats. The hard protective shell Tabi wore at home was gone.

Despite her aspirations, Tabi was not pushing herself at school. She rarely brought work home. Some of her teachers used class time to let students complete their assignments. If Tabi had extra homework, she blew through it at lunch. Even so, she maintained a 3.0 GPA while taking honors courses.

Four and five decades ago, when New Castle High was full of factory workers’ kids, the school taught Chinese, Latin, German, Spanish, French and Italian. Now it was Spanish, French and Italian. As students became poorer, standards dropped lower. Tabi’s junior year, the average SAT score was almost 200 points below the national average. To boost scores, the school has made the Princeton Review college prep course free for all sophomores during class hours. Private tutors are luxuries of a different solar system.

Tabi planned to take the SAT before the school year ended. She kept reminding herself to sign up.

She worked other angles. The annual science competition was coming up. In the ninth and 10th grade, Tabi made it to the final round, and she was hoping for a repeat performance and a trip to Penn State.

“The main campus,” Tabi said, as if speaking confidentially. “Maybe someone will see my project and help me get a scholarship.”

What would have been nice was to be her friend Matt. He had an iPhone and two parents. They recently took Matt to visit Robert Morris University, a small liberal arts school outside Pittsburgh, and invited Tabi to come along.

A week later, in her school cafeteria, she was still talking about the trip. The campus tour was beautiful, and afterward, they met with an admissions counselor who estimated the cost of one year was $34,000. Tabi jumped in to warn Matt.

“I said, ‘Matt, you’re going to be paying off the loan for the rest of your life!’ ” she recounted at lunch. “His dad said, ‘I think I got it covered.’ ”

There was more. On the way back to New Castle, they stopped for dinner at Olive Garden. Tabi couldn’t help noticing the bill. “It was like $70!” Tabi said. “And it was no sweat off their back.”

In the cafeteria, she went back to her free lunch and packed up for pre-calculus.

She needed to stop by the guidance office. At New Castle High, the office was the make-or-break room. It’s where college-bound seniors stopped for applications — for loans, waivers, scholarships and grants. Mrs. Gibson, the senior guidance counselor, helped them fill out the paperwork. She also arranged etiquette dinners that taught proper grooming, eating and the do’s and don’ts of dressing professionally.

But decorating the ceiling of the guidance counseling office was her most inspired idea.

It was a patchwork of college T-shirts. They were stapled across the entire ceiling. Each was autographed by a New Castle High grad who had gone on to glory: Slippery Rock University, Youngstown State University, Robert Morris University, Butler Community College, St. Vincent’s College, Clarion University, Penn State and Pitt. The parachute hovered like a subliminal cloud: You can do it.

The deadline to sign up for the SAT came and went. Distracted, Tabi forgot.

***



Every Wednesday night, Tabi got a break from the hand-over-hand climbing that consumed her life.

She usually sat in the same spot: the front row, closest to the preacher. When Pastor Shawn told Tabi she would look back in 20 years and be blown away by all the things God had done for her, she hoped he was right.

But on one night, the chairs were cleared out. An inspirational thrash metal band was performing live at First Assembly of God. Half the teenagers in New Castle seemed to be going, Jesus-loving or not.

For years, Tabi rode the church bus that swept through New Castle’s threadbare neighborhoods picking up poor kids. On the night of the concert, Tabi got an upgrade. Her friend Miranda gave her a ride. Traveling by private coach was the way to go.

Not a single space was left in the parking lot as the arrivals poured in — Tabi by car and the poor kids by bus. They tumbled down the stairs in a cloud of Sexiest Fantasies Body Spray. One girl was holding her MP3 player in the air like a transistor, the tiny rattling of Mindless Behavior’s “Valentine’s Girl” piping out through the 1-by-1-inch speaker.

Inside the church, God’s abundance overflowed. Pastor Shawn had ordered enough pizzas and nachos to feed the Rust Belt. Shawn Galla, the 26-year-old youth pastor, had convinced church elders that a night of metal music and free prizes was more likely to bring in New Castle’s teenagers than praise music and juice boxes.

Having grown up in working-class Pittsburgh with a single mother, Pastor Shawn thought he knew his audience when he took the job in New Castle in 2008, until he launched a fundraising drive for his kids and found their parents selling the Auntie Anne’s pretzels for cash for themselves.

Tabi had inched her way to the front of the crowd when the lights went down and the screaming started. Pastor Shawn was on stage ready to start flinging CDs and McDonald’s gift cards into the crowd.

“We’re giving away free stuff!” he yelled. “EVEN JESUS!”

The band Icon For Hire was pierced and mohawked. “WHAT’S UP, NEW CASTLE!” the lead singer shouted, and the head banging commenced. The evening’s motivational speaker, Seth Franco, a former Harlem Globetrotter, told his story of injury and comeback and invited anyone to raise their hands and come forward if they wanted to accept Jesus Christ.

“There’s more to life than nothing,” Seth said, as the electric keyboard softly lulled and the lights dimmed. “There’s more to life than this town.”

Words to Tabi’s ears. She was not exceptionally pious and she had made her share of transgressions, but she always felt better at this moment when she closed her eyes and let go. The kids from the bus had their heads bowed, too. Some were wiping away tears, a few were sobbing, their shoulders heaving in the darkness of the church.

Then the lights blasted back on and Pastor Shawn was onstage, holding something small in his hand.

“WHO WANTS AN IPOD?”

***



The silver sporty coupe arriving at Tabi’s one Saturday night was so polished and punctual that it made the sagging house sag a little more. The Dodge Stratus idled at the curb. Tabi came down the busted porch steps in a skirt.

In Deric Lewis she had a boyfriend with the right mix of qualities. “He has goals,” Tabi said. “He’s kinda smart. He works. He’s always there five minutes early.”

But he was also a source of tension in the house and had stopped going inside. Tabi’s mother said Deric was a snob and was turning Tabi against her family. Tabi said that Deric was the best thing that ever happened to her. Opening the car door, she left her mother and “Storage Wars” behind.

Deric was 19 and smelled of soap. He worked full time at Castle Cheese, where he wore a hairnet in 100-degree heat reaching into milky buckets of mozzarella for $9.65 an hour. His dad was a scrap-metal worker. Determined to have an office job someday, Deric was a full-time student at the community college.

He and Tabi were headed for the outlet mall in Grove City, 30 miles away, to see if Deric could use a $20-off coupon he had at Aeropostale. Tabi leaned in close as he drove, until he yawned, and she punched him in the arm.

“Hey!” he said, laughing. He reminded her of his 6 a.m. shift that day. Tabi pointed out that she had also worked eight hours that day.

They were the oldest teenagers in America.

All around them in the rural dark, energy companies were buying up land for natural gas exploration. Deric heard in class that Shell Oil was building a $3 billion refinery site in Beaver County. There were millwright jobs across the border in Youngstown. Deric wondered if he was doing the right thing pursuing a business degree, which would take three more years of killing himself at the cheese plant.

Tabi thought school was the answer, and they should stick to the plan.

“We’re lucky; we both work,” she said, as they arrived at the outlet mall. “We have the advantage that others don’t.”

They held hands as they walked to Aeropostale. Deric didn’t find anything. He folded the coupon and put it back in his wallet. Tabi took an armful of clothes into a dressing room. It was nice to try on new things.

“How’d those work out for you?” a saleswoman asked. Aeropostale would not be getting a dime of Tabi’s money. The $124 in her purse — she was a fanatic about counting her cash — was going toward a trip to Chicago with the Spanish Club. She returned every item.

Back in New Castle, they drove around, killing time. High on a hill, the lights of the city blinked below, and in the pockets of darkness were the abandoned mausoleums of industry.

“They say money doesn’t buy happiness, but I would love to be crying in my Porsche,” Deric said.

Tabi’s phone flashed with a text. Keys in the mailbox.

“Well, mom’s going out,” Tabi said, sounding both annoyed and apprehensive.

Later that night, Deric brought Tabi home to her dark patch of Shenango Street. She was almost to her front door when she heard her name being called. The woman was vaguely familiar, a neighbor, someone her mother maybe knew. She asked to borrow Tabi’s phone. Then the woman asked for a glass of water. Tabi put her stuff down and went to the kitchen.

When she came back with the water, the woman was gone and so was Tabi’s purse.

***



With crystal force, the stolen purse exposed the tension between Tabi and her mother, proven out in the weeks that followed.

Tabi partly blamed herself for responding to someone on the street at 1 in the morning. But she also blamed her mother for living in a neighborhood where people needed money at 1 in the morning.

For years, Tabi hid her cash in small stacks around her bedroom. Tabi was more flush than her mother. If her mom asked for a loan, Tabi charged 20 percent interest. Once, when her mom ran out of food stamps, Tabi, as if to impart a lesson, went out to eat.

Patricia Edmonds felt her daughter’s judgment. Tabi was different from her other four. Patricia marveled at her as a spectator would, watching something rare and unexpected.

“She wants so much for herself,” Patricia said.

Patricia hung Tabi’s awards on the living room wall. The sprawling constellation gave Patricia a tangible sense of accomplishment.

In her face and spirit were traces of the cheerleader who got pregnant in the eighth grade. Patricia’s father was a welder and her mother a nurse’s aide. The love of her life was a dark-haired welder named Frankie Rouzzo, Tabi’s father. They had two daughters and Tabi on the way when they split. He died when Tabi was 10, and since then Patricia had maintained a fragile livelihood on the survivor’s benefits for her three daughters.

She tried pleasing her vegetarian daughter, buying Tabi her favorite chocolate soy milk and making special trips to Wal-Mart for the bags of lettuce Tabi liked. “I made her Taco Bell Grande with tofu meat,” Patricia said.

But Tabi had withdrawn. She came home from track practice, poured some lettuce on a plate, doused it in ranch and took her dinner upstairs.

The explosion happened on a Saturday night. Patricia was bigger, badder and louder than Tabi. But Tabi had resentment that went back years.

She said Deric hadn’t brainwashed her against her family; the feelings were entirely her own. There was a difference between bad luck and bad choices, Tabi said, and she had grown up captive of her mother’s choices.

“You think you’re better then me, don’t you?” Patricia yelled. “I had five kids!”

“Mom,” Tabi yelled back, “you quit school. Does it dawn on you after your first [child] not to have a second one?”

It was a lethal blow, as only a teenage girl could deliver. Patricia got pregnant in the eighth grade, the same age Tabi was when she started at the slaughterhouse.

Patricia grounded Tabi for a month. She confiscated her phone — which Deric had paid for — and banned all activities except school and work.

One day after school, Tabi went to see her Uncle Bill about moving in with him. He worked at the jail and was a steady presence. When Tabi was 10, she went to stay with him when her mom was in a period of chaos. He took her to violin lessons.

Standing on the sidewalk at Uncle Bill’s, the sun beat down. Tabi and her uncle and his wife were quiet.

“What are you gonna do?” Bill said, still in his jail uniform.

“It’s up to you, Tab,” Sybil said.

Tabi left their house on foot. She took the broken sidewalk that led her downtown. The beige mannequins and the Coney Island, the old motor lodge and legal disability clinic, Tabi hardly looked up.

“If I move out, my mom would lose the check, lose everything,” Tabi said, weighed down by the decision.

When she reached home, it was different. Pine scent wafted. Folded stacks of laundry sat on the couch. The cleaning spree went on all week. Patricia went room to room, carrying out bags to the curb and posting her progress on Facebook. She was serious about taking a course in emergency medical technician training.

Patricia declared she was turning it around. Tabi had heard it before. But this time, her mother made a promise and extracted one from Tabi — she had to break up with Deric.

Wanting to believe, Tabi agreed.

***

On a Saturday morning in June, Tabi walked to school to take the SAT. She had remembered to sign up for this one. Five interminable hours later, it was over, and Tabi went to work.

Summer without Deric was empty. There were grimy Xboxes to clean at Splitstone and swimming at the rock quarry. On Friday nights, Tabi and a friend hung out at a convenience store where a handwritten sign on the beverage station said, in friendly curlicue, “Smoothies, Slushies and Fountain pops cannot be bought with food stamps!”

Tabi got her first plane ride — a church mission to Guatemala.

When school started in the fall, senior year felt different. An hourglass had been turned and the sand was falling. The college buzz greeted Tabi in the hallways, and it gave her the feeling that she was somehow already behind.

“Everybody’s asking, ‘Where are you going?’ ” Tabi said. “That worries me I don’t have it figured out.”

Applications to fill out, deadlines to meet — it all hovered. Her SAT results were not what she hoped. They were above the average score at New Castle but well shy of the national median.

But Tabi, a master of contingency, already had a Plan B. On top of school, she started night classes to get certified as an EMT. True to her promise, her mother enrolled, too, and they sat side by side, sharing Tabi’s textbook.

Patricia, who had not been in a classroom since eighth grade, spent afternoons at the public library. She and Tabi left Shenango Street for a new rental house, funded with help from Patricia’s boyfriend.

Buried in school, work and EMT training, Tabi began to recalibrate.

The Navy recruiter was in the cafeteria at school when a 17-year-old girl approached. She was ready to sign her name — Tabitha Rouzzo. She didn’t want to hear a pitch. Tabi had learned enough online about a reservist’s pay and travel. College could wait. When it did start, tuition would be on the Navy and Tabi would be gone from New Castle.

One night every December, students at tiny Taylor University pack the school's gymnasium and participate in a phenomenon that's completely out of place in modern sports: silence.

The fans in the standing-room-only crowd are as loud as a library for as long as it takes Taylor's basketball team to score 10 points. But once that happens, there's no shushing them. As soon as Taylor hits double digits, the students erupt into bedlam, and they don't stop screaming and dancing until it's time for the post-game Christmas party on campus.

Friday's racket known as "Silent Night"—the game ends with a student singalong of the Christmas carol—is very, very quietly a tradition unlike any other. What began as a lark is now a holiday in its own right at this evangelical Christian school about two hours and a world of college sports away from Indiana's top-ranked hoops team.

"Other than a game-winning shot," said former Indiana player and coach Dan Dakich, "I think it's the coolest thing out there."

Silent Night is so admired that the concept recently spread to big-time college sports. When Illinois hired Taylor alumnus John Groce as its basketball coach this season, the student section normally known as the "Orange Krush" welcomed him by briefly renaming itself the "Orange Hush" and keeping quiet for the first four minutes and two seconds of his Nov. 9 debut. "It's a little bit of an eerie feeling when you're waiting in stone-cold silence and could hear a pin drop," Groce said.

Timothy P. Riethmiller The Taylor University basketball team huddles in front of a quiet crowd before last year's Silent Night game.

The novelty of Silent Night, which falls on Friday when Taylor plays Akron-Wayne, goes beyond just attending a college-basketball game and not uttering a peep. Silent Night drew 2,265 fans last year, by far the most of the season for the Upland, Ind., university with fewer than 2,000 undergraduates that competes in the NAIA, a rung below the NCAA. Taylor coach Paul Patterson celebrates Silent Night by going barefoot to raise money for charity. Afterward, the wild rumpus continues in the school's dining hall, where Taylor students sing carols, eat holiday cookies and make ginger-bread houses. And this unorthodox tradition belongs to a deeply conservative school where students agree to abstain from drunkenness, gossip, premarital sex, "homosexual behavior" and "social dancing," according to Taylor's student code of conduct.

Taylor officials trace Silent Night back to 1995. Steve Brooks, an assistant coach at the time, was previously the men's basketball coach at Houghton College, and he recalls coaching on a snowy night against Geneva College's version of Silent Night, which he says included pennies and milk jugs. "It wasn't done like it is at Taylor," Brooks said.

Former Geneva coach Jerry Slocum, who now coaches at Youngstown State, remembers the crowd standing until Geneva scored but not remaining quiet. Either way, Brooks brought the concept to Taylor as a way to increase attendance at games.

Silent Night was combined then with the school president's annual Christmas bash—now called Habecker's Holipalooza after current president Eugene Habecker—as a way for students to unwind on the last day of fall-semester classes. The game's sponsor is similarly wholesome: Silent Night coincides with the Ivanhoe Classic, a basketball tournament put on for the last 29 years by Ivanhoes, an Upland restaurant with 100 types of ice-cream sundaes and shakes.

Over time, as Taylor students settled on 10 points as the tipping point for chaos, Silent Night festivities took on a life of their own. In the last two years, as videos and photos of Silent Night went viral through social media, the rest of the world noticed Taylor's little ritual. Now what happens around the court is a bigger deal than the basketball. "It's almost like the Leviathan," said Taylor spokesman Jim Garringer. "You're just waiting for the thing to come to life."

The student section during Silent Night, after it finally erupts, is a moving mishmash of neons, pastels and Christmas colors. Underneath the baskets are elaborate nativity scenes. Some people dress up in pajamas and togas, others in penguin costumes and elf regalia. Last year, a pack of gorillas chased a banana during a timeout. At halftime, a flash mob from a women's dormitory line-danced to "Drummer Boy," Justin Bieber's version of the holiday classic, and the teenage heartthrob tweeted a link of the YouTube clip to his millions of followers.

Taylor University Taylor fans break their silence during the 2010 game.

Taylor's players admit they rewind the Silent Night film—not to watch the game and break down their performance but to spot the wackiest getups around the gym. Patterson, the Taylor coach, doesn't notice the shenanigans, either.

"I'm two heartbeats away from a stroke most of the time during a game," he said.

The patron saint of Silent Night is Taylor guard Casey Coons, who had never heard of the tradition before he arrived on campus and only learned about the pandemonium when Patterson made his players watch film of previous Silent Nights. The 10th point in the last three Silent Nights came the same way: with Coons at the free-throw line. "It's not like a pressure where you win or lose on the free throw," Coons said. "But there's definitely some added pressure."

Coons wasn't the only one taken aback by his first Silent Night experience. It can also be disorienting for the visiting team—especially when the opponent has no idea an impromptu carnival is coming.

Last year, Ohio Mid-Western College coach Ricardo Hill couldn't figure out why Taylor's gym was so mobbed and so muted. He had even less of an idea how long the blissful silence would last. "I definitely went in blind, so it was a real eye-opener," Hill said. A year later, despite losing the game, Ohio Mid-Western players still tout videos of their opponent's ritual to visiting recruits.

"Out of all the places I've played or coached," Hill said, "that was by far the most electric atmosphere I've ever been in."

Silent Night is a one-night-only affair. Taylor inevitably plays its next game in front of a small crowd unconcerned with how loud it cheers. All is calm. All is bright. "Saturday is almost 180 degrees different," Patterson said.

But that next game is part of the Silent Night routine in a way. There's a reason why Patterson's team always makes it to the championship round of the Ivanhoe Classic on Saturday: Taylor has never lost on Silent Night.

Write to Ben Cohen at [email protected]

A version of this article appeared December 7, 2012, on page D4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Quietest Tradition in Sports.