WHAT HAPPENS TO A CHURCH WHEN THE PASTOR PRAYS IN A MOSQUE? OR LONGS FOR A HINDU WOMAN? WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE MOSQUE, AND THEN THE CHURCH, COME UNDER FIRE? . . . REAL FIRE?
Holdout used to be a nice, quiet, whitebread American town in the New Jersey hinterland, a town of Boy Scout jamborees and dollar double features. A Christian town. Today it is a drum-thumping, horn-blasting, bangle jangling, red light-running South Asian immigrant enclave, home to new American dreamers of many faiths and countries of origin. The holdouts of Holdout are not happy. They liked their town just fine as it was in 1959. Reverend Dunstan Macadam, a veteran pastor who pinballs from overweening self-regard to private self-loathing to alcoholic self-medication and back again has been caring for his flock in all the traditional ways they expect for many years now, marrying them and burying them, while preaching the gospel of trust, empathy, and hospitality, and seeking to nudge them into a more welcoming, adaptive, even neighborly encounter with the new families in town, when a threatening letter from an apocalyptic fringe group arrives in Friday’s mail, and a mysterious stranger appears in church two days later and presents herself to receive Holy Communion. Not long afterwards, bullets fly after a mosque prayer meeting, and sparks fly, real ones, igniting the church. Reverend Dunce and his young protégé, a gay Muslim would-be fashion thief and unrepentant straight talker, who also serves as the Reverend’s driver, conscience and body man, must each reckon with the prejudices and violent predilections of his own faith community, while together endeavoring to assist people of good will in both communities to navigate these violent confrontations, and nudge a nervous American town into the twenty-first century.
