Garrison Keillor: The Pied Piper of liberal Mainline nostalgia

Garrison Keillor is still on the road at 83. From 1974 to 2016, he was on the radio practically every Saturday night at 5:00 Central Time. The show was called A Prairie Home Companion.

If you’ve read this far, you probably remember the news from Lake Wobegon, the Chatterbox Café, the Sidetrack Tap, Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, Our Mother of Perpetual Responsibility Catholic Church, Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church, and the Sanctified Brethren. You remember the faux commercials for Powder Milk Biscuits (in the big blue box), Bebop-a-Reebop Rhubarb Pie, and the Ketchup Advisory Board. You remember Guy Noir, Private Eye, and The Lives of the Cowboys.

Keillor’s guided tours of mythical Lake Wobegon almost always involved an evaluation of religious people — Lutherans in particular. Lutherans were undemonstrative and disinclined to talk about their emotions. If they were angry or sexually aroused, it was hard to tell. They valued group cohesion over individual expression. They hated show-offs and were uncomfortable talking about their desires or even their preferences.

The folks in Lake Wobegon don’t expect too much from life. At the breakfast table, a wife asks her husband how he’s feeling and he says, “Well enough for the purpose, I suppose.” Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery captured the Lutheran preference for understatement. You could even catch the Lutheran outlook in the commercials. “Bebop-a-Reebop Rhubarb Pie, sweetening the sour taste of failure through the generations.” Or, “Powder Milk Biscuits, giving shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done.”

Family legacy

Keillor grew up in the Plymouth Brethren, a group known for their preoccupation with the end of days and the importance of living in separation from a sinful society. Several times a week, his family would load up the car and drive from Anoka, their home town, into Saint Paul for meetings. Because his parents regarded television as a conduit for sinful secular amusements, Keillor made do with radio. These were the dying days of radio variety shows, comedies and dramatic performances (often with a Hammond organ in the background). A young Garrison was transfixed.

“Because his parents regarded television as a conduit for sinful secular amusements, Keillor made do with radio.”

The moment he left home for the University of Minnesota, Keillor made a clean break with his fundamentalist past. He had a burning ambition to write novels, poetry and satirical pieces. He was so impressed by a visit to Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry in 1969 that he pitched a story idea to The New Yorker. He was impressed by the likes of Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe and Marty Robbins. But it was Minnie Pearl’s stories about her childhood in Grinder’s Switch that really got his attention.

Back home in Saint Paul, Keillor pitched the idea for a Grand Ole Opry-like radio program to a producer at Minnesota Public Radio, and the rest is history.

A common songbook

A Prairie Home Companion alternated satirical sketches and fake commercials with lots and lots of music. Some of Keillor’s musical guests were famous (Chet Atkins, Alison Krauss, the Everly Brothers, Brandi Carlile, Wilco, Mark Knopfler); others were up-and-comers. But the music, even when original, had a familiar sound. Keillor featured the acoustic musical genre known as “Americana” — a blend of blues, gospel, bluegrass and country. Sometimes he would put his own doggerel compositions to familiar tunes.

Beginning in 1975, Keillor formed the Hopeful Gospel Quartet with Kate MacKenzie and Robin and Linda Williams. They performed the kind of old-time gospel tunes they all grew up with. This wasn’t satirical kitsch; they sang it straight.

Keillor loved harmony singing. Before each show, and again during the intermission, he would descend into the audience, microphone in hand, and lead an acapella medley of familiar songs: “You are My Sunshine,” “Love Me Tender,” “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” “The Sloop John B.,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Amazing Grace,” “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder,” “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” “Shall We Gather at the River” and “It is Well with My Soul.” He often would start things off with “The Star Spangled Banner” or “America the Beautiful.”

“They’re singing it a cappella, there’s no band playing,” Keillor told a reporter in 2015. “It’s just people’s voices around you, in the dark. The point of all this — so obvious that you don’t even need to point it out — is that we are one country, and this is the basis of everything.”

When Keillor got his start in 1974, Americans could choose between three television stations, Mainline Protestant churches were culturally dominant, children were taught the old songs Keillor loves in school and at summer camp, and most teenagers listened to the same top-40 music stations.

In a recent blog post, Keillor lamented the loss of a common musical heritage. “Thanks to the religion of sports, which is slowly devouring Sundays, Protestantism is fading fast in America and in a decade or two, when the churches are turned into condos except a few that become museums and my people are meeting in caves as they did back in the Roman Empire, you won’t ever find a thousand people like the crowd in Michigan that knew the words to ‘It Is Well With My Soul.’ In fact, soon there will be no common musical culture.”

“The Mainline liberals who attend Keillor’s performances don’t sing the old gospel songs any more either, but most are old enough to know the words by heart.”

Keillor has been attending Saint Michaels Episcopal Church in Manhattan since he left Minnesota in 2016. He describes it as a low-church parish, but I suspect the congregation prefers a steady diet of traditional Anglican hymns and, even if they don’t, that’s what they get. The Mainline liberals who attend Keillor’s performances don’t sing the old gospel songs any more either, but most are old enough to know the words by heart.

The Mainline

Since 58% of Mainline Protestants voted for Donald Trump in 2024, we are not dealing with a liberal religious monolith. The conservative faction within Mainline life varies by denomination with Episcopalians and the United Church of Christ being more liberal, and the American Baptists and the Disciples of Christ shading more conservative. Rural Mainline congregations, especially in the South and Midwest, can be heavily influenced by the dominant evangelical subculture. You might even hear them singing evangelical praise choruses (albeit, a bit out of date), or discussing end-times books written from a dispensational perspective (think Hal Lindsey or Tim LaHaye).

Many Mainline congregations are evenly split between liberal and conservative parishioners, a reality that frustrates serious Bible study and theological reflection. Other Mainline congregations, especially in urban areas where people have more ecclesiastical options, are self-consciously and proudly liberal in theology and social outlook.

Keillor appreciates many aspects of his fundamentalist upbringing, particularly the music. He likes the traditional hymns they sing at Saint Michaels, but they don’t give him the same nostalgic glow he gets from the old gospel tunes.

“Keillor sings the old songs (regardless of genre) because they give him pleasure.”

Keillor sings the old songs (regardless of genre) because they give him pleasure. Part of that pleasure comes from knowing that group singing injects a sense of shared identity into the room. As he sings, he is casting a spell.

A university education liberated Keillor from his fundamentalist past, and many of the liberal Mainline folk who flock to his performances have walked a similar path. The man from Lake Wobegon makes jokes about higher education, particularly the humanities, and most particularly, English majors.

“I was in the humanities, where existentialism was very big back then though nobody knew what it was exactly nor even approximately,” he tells his audience. “Which made it possible for even an ignorant twerp to expound upon it.”

These jokes work best for college graduates, especially those who graduated in the 1960s and early 1970s before post-modern deconstruction took hold. Although he identifies as a liberal Democrat, Keillor has little patience for the “political correctness” which, in his estimation, has divided America into brawling camps.

“Soon there will be no common musical culture,” he laments. “Schools have eliminated all American folk songs that contain violence or show bias or are militaristic or elitist or that marginalize or alienize or disparage or fail to address systemic inequality, which eliminates all the songs we loved to sing in grade school, so the younger generation only knows the music of its favorite pop stars, Melvin T or Bon Ami or the Philistines, but there is no band like the Beatles that touches a broad demographic.”

Trouble in Lake Wobegon

In common with most liberal Mainline congregations, the vibe of A Prairie Home Companion is overwhelmingly white. African American and Hispanic influences are hard to find. Like most liberal Mainline folk, Keillor celebrates the reforms of the 1960s, the gay rights movement and old-school feminism.

But Keillor’s response to accusations of sexual misconduct in 2017 was disturbingly flat-footed. He had been engaged in an affair (primarily conducted via steamy emails) with a woman who had done some freelance work for A Prairie Home Companion. The primary accusation was that Keillor had abused the power differential between himself and an employee who was dependent on his good favor. You can flirt up, the new rules implied, but you can’t flirt down.

Keillor flatly denied that he viewed his accuser as a subordinate. The very concept of a power differential appeared to elude him. He dismissed the Me Too movement as a puritanical tantrum. His mind hasn’t changed.

“He dismissed the Me Too movement as a puritanical tantrum. His mind hasn’t changed.”

The critical analysis of white male power that has emerged from the American academy in recent decades has profoundly impacted the progressive understanding of power dynamics, particularly regarding sexual ethics, racial justice issues and geo-politics. Young liberals, for instance, are far more likely to protest Israel’s behavior in Gaza than are older liberals.

Most of the liberal Mainline Protestants who tuned in to A Prairie Home Companion are now either senior adults or in the late phase of middle age. According to a 2024 Pew study, 62% of political liberals identified as Christian in 2007; now it’s just 37%, a drop of 25 percentage points in just 17 years.

For decades, Mainline denominations have done a poor job of retaining their young people and are now the oldest religious demographic in America. As a consequence, there is a growing generational gap between the kind of liberals you find in Mainline Protestant churches and the younger component of the American Left.

In the early 1970s, according to sociologist Ryan Burge, members of the Protestant Mainline between 18 and 35 comprised 10% of General Social Survey participants; now it’s just 1.5%. Are Mainline denominations losing their young people because the churches are too liberal; or is it because they represent an outmoded variety of liberalism?

I have been listening to Garrison Keillor since he first emerged as a public radio superstar. I knew the old songs by heart and enjoyed hearing them sung with genuine gusto. He talked about religion as an insider with a flair for irony, pathos and wit. When he told us David Ingqvist, the longtime pastor of Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church, was so discouraged that he had driven to Saint Cloud to research a career in real estate, I almost cried. It was remarkable to hear the travails of the Protestant pastor handled with such delicacy — and on public radio, for God’s sake.

I still like listening to Keillor (he has a podcast if you’re interested). Yet his ham-fisted response to allegations of sexual abuse have dampened my enthusiasm. But I have not come to praise or bury the man from Lake Wobegon. Keillor speaks for a generation of liberal Mainline Protestants (of which I am one) that is rapidly sinking into irrelevance. He knows it. I know it. I suspect you know it, too.

Young people don’t know the comforts of a world in which most people knew the same songs, tuned into All in the Family, and listened to Walter Cronkite read the news. Our world has fractured into a dozen warring camps, each speaking a distinct moral language.

So, what are aging liberal Mainline Protestants to do? Above all, we need to shut up and listen to our kids, whether they are still attending worship or not. We own the past; they own the future. Since the people in our congregations who fund the budget and make the big decisions are generally of retirement age, we may assume younger generations will passively wait their turn at the helm. They won’t.

Garrison Keillor connects us with our past, and we are grateful; but he can’t lead us into the future.

 

Alan Bean leads the nonprofit Friends of Justice and lives in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attends Broadway Baptist Church.