When I read the results of this amazing Gallup poll and I tried to interpret the results in religious terms, all I could think about was the spiritual reality of the destructiveness of human pain, especially when that pain is ignored. I think that all religions attempt to make sense of human life and the ubiquity of human pain. I often begin my class on Introduction to Theology with the statement, “Theology begins where the pain is.” I have no special insight into whether this is what the Gallup survey documents; but I do know that a long time ago, a teacher of African religions taught me that unappeased ancestors come back to haunt you. And I learned the basic reality of that in a church graveyard.

I learned the truth about ghosts and spirits as unburied human pain by walking around in the graveyard of my first pastorate in western North Carolina. Seminary did not prepare me for this experience; learning about African indigenous religions from an African professor did.

Rigobert Ladikapo, from a country in west Africa now called the Republic of Benin and Professor of African Religions, taught me that western Christianity barely touches the surface of the spiritual dimensions of religion and knows next to nothing about what harm is done by not acknowledging the ghosts of the past. For example, he said, in his village, everyone had been converted to Christianity by missionaries, but when the Christian pastor completed a funeral in the church, everyone also trooped out the graveyard and poured libations for the ancestors so they would not come back and haunt the village. Dead ancestors who are not appeased, he taught, come back and cause a lot of trouble.

As a student pastor in my first church in western North Carolina, I was floundering. No sooner had I arrived than the church was convulsed by conflict—there were rumors of past uproars, but it seemed that the novelty of a young woman pastor who was also a Yankee (!) had heated the congregation to the boiling point.

In despair over my failure to do anything constructive with this situation, I was walking in the graveyard adjacent to the church. I started reading the headstones. And then I started reading the headstones very carefully. The names, the dates and the dominance of one family began to form a pattern. The name Gouch appeared on many headstones. The living Mrs. Gouch was giving me fits—but the real problems and the unrecognized, unrequited pain still drifting over from the graveyard was the real cause. What the headstones in the graveyard showed me was that the spirits of these ancestors of the church had been unappeased for nearly a century. Dr. Ladikapo’s voice echoed in my head. I needed to find an acceptable way to lay at least some of these ghosts to rest.

I researched the Gouches and the other names on the headstones and I started a church history group inviting others, including the many Gouches, to join me in our search. We learned the stories and we honored the ancestors and we acknowledged the pain, the past hurts and the losses and we got some of these ancestors finally to stay in the ground at the graveyard where they belonged. But not all of them—undealt with pain that had persisted for 50 years and bled from one generation to the next did not, and indeed it cannot, fully succumb to a study group.

Take what you will from this ghostly polling data from Gallup, but I do know this. Pain lives on as harm from generation to generation and it literally haunts those who will not bury their dead.