Last summer, on the 10th anniversary of Elvis’ death, a reporter called to ask the usual question: What does it all mean? Ah, that took me back.

To be precise, it took me back to August of 1977. We were living in England when Elvis died, and I noticed at the time that the BBC didn’t ring up the local sociologists for foolish observations about the meaning of it all; they turned instead to South London vicars. When it comes to ancient, expensive havens for shabby-genteel idlers (usually left-wing) who will bloviate about the larger significance of any subject whatsoever, universities don’t have a patch on the Church of England. But since lazy American journalists have no underemployed Establishment clergymen at hand, they have to turn to—well, to people like me, which strikes me as one of the many arguments for rethinking the establishment clause, but never mind.

In a single day recently I had two of these callers. One wanted to know why Friday the 13th, Part 6 was doing so well at the box office; the other asked what the doubling of vanity license plate sales tells us about life in North Carolina today. I should have said that both phenomena suggest that North Carolinians have more money than is good for them, but I merely referred these seekers to younger colleagues who haven’t learned yet how silly you look in print when you answer questions like these off the cuff.

The call about Elvis shouldn’t have surprised me, but I wasn’t ready for it. I couldn’t even remember what those parsons had said back in ’77—just something about “bringing us together,” and I think “Lord of the Dance” was mentioned—so I referred the reporter to my buddy Charles, an Old Miss historian, who once wrote a wonderful piece on Bear Bryant’s funeral (q.v.: South Atlantic Quarterly, Summer 1987). Charles also keeps a vial of Elvis’ sweat in his office, so I thought he’d do.

After the reporter rang off, I got to thinking about that sweat. I also thought about another friend, a Memphis pathologist who told me once after a couple of drinks that he has a fragment of liver. Relics.

At Graceland, in the garden where Elvis is buried with his parents, candles burn, pilgrims pray, tears flow. On the wall of the public men’s room, there are (I swear it) messages to Elvis. Votives, honest.

On my wall is a picture of Elvis, ascending a golden staircase to a heavenly Graceland where his mother waits for him and Hank Williams extends a hand in greeting. An icon of the apotheosis.

And—are you ready for this?—a book published last summer catalogs the apparitions since 1977.

Listen, if this were the Middle Ages, there’d be a cult. Heck, there is a cult: what more does it take?

The license plates in the Graceland parking lot suggest that this craziness is not exclusively or even mostly a Southern phenomenon. When I was there, at least. Southern plates were a decided minority. Lots of us down here are fond of Elvis, but he’s a home boy—one of us—and certainly no saint. We find Elvisolatry amusing and try to figure a way to make some money off of it, as I’m doing right now. (One of my favorite efforts is an amazing song by a former North Carolina Bible-college student named Mojo Nixon; call your local radio station and request “Elvis Is Everywhere,” because I can’t even begin to summarize it.)

Besides, Evangelical Protestantism is rather stern in these matters. Some time ago, the Gallup Poll showed that Southerners are less likely than other Americans to believe that it’s possible to communicate with the dead, despite the fact that we’re more likely to believe in an afterlife in the first place. Pilgrimages, relics, shrines, apparitions—no, this isn’t really our kind of thing.

But orthodox Catholics (if there are any left) probably aren’t heavily represented among Elvis’ more extreme devotees either. With the mellow wisdom of the ages, their church takes all this stuff in stride, but Rome has routinized it, organized it, introduced some quality control.

A few years ago, a group of us, Episcopalians and Roman Catholics, got together to read and discuss a highly touted book called A Common Catechism, written by an ecumenical group of Continental theologians. It quickly became clear that the important distinction in our group was not between Protestants and Catholics but between those who were orthodox and proud of it, or unorthodox and ashamed of it, or who-knows-how-orthodox but committed to the proposition that orthodoxy exists and the church should teach it, and those (call them “liberals”) who felt that truth is in the seeking, or is whatever works for you, or is something we all have a piece of—those, in other words, who found the concept of orthodoxy quaint, if not alarming.

Now the interesting thing is that these liberals have far less reason than traditionalists to make fun of the credulous. When Tennessee country folk see the Holy Face on the side of a freezer, or a mother tells the tabloid Star that “Rock Hudson’s Ghost Cured My Son of AIDS,” or some poor soul thinks Elvis answers prayers written on a men’s room wall, liberals have no basis for ridicule other than intellectual snobbery. On what grounds can they say these people are not just tacky, but wrong? How do they know? If it’s every man for himself in matters of belief, why shouldn’t some Middle-Americans beatify a small-town Southern boy who liked peanut butter and banana sandwiches? Hey, it works for them.

We’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing. As Flannery O’Connor tactfully implied from time to time, the absence of ecclesiastical authority means the efflorescence of creedal and devotional extravagance, not its absence. And someone, probably Chesterton, has observed that in a secular age people don’t believe nothing, they believe anything. The book our group was supposed to be discussing began with a great deal of blather about what “modern man” would and would not believe. Its version of modern man was heavily influenced by 19th-century scientism; he looked, as a matter of fact, rather like a Continental theologian. But I’ve got news for the book’s authors. Last I heard, modern man was out on the West Coast waiting for the harmonic convergence.

The decay of orthodoxy leaves a vacuum that certainly can’t be filled by the desiccated rationalism of the Common Catechism. And the amorphous, nonjudgmental, sentimental quasireligion of my liberal friends can’t say why it shouldn’t be filled by the cult of St. Elvis.