Looking For Salvation at the Dairy Queen

Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen explores the Christian concept of salvation as a personal journey toward self-acceptance and belonging, rather than a singular religious act. Protagonist Catherine Grace Cline initially frames her desire to escape her small town of Ringgold, Georgia in explicitly religious terms. She prays nightly for deliverance and views her eventual departure as a biblically inspired exodus from a place that feels like captivity. Her formal baptism in Nottely Lake is presented as a key step toward spiritual salvation because she has been taught that this public commitment to the Lord will set her on the right path. However, this traditional religious sacrament proves insufficient. (She pushes Emma Sue Huckstep into the lake before her baptism—which conveys Catherine Grace’s inability to abide by her religion’s standards of piety, self-control, and submission.) The pivotal moments of her journey occur in secular spaces instead of traditional ecclesiastical settings, which suggests that Catherine Grace’s true salvation will lie outside of established Southern Baptist doctrine. The local Dairy Queen, for instance, is the sanctuary where she and her sister Martha Ann Cline spend “every Saturday afternoon sitting on the […] only picnic table” and “thinking about a world the kids in the 4-H club couldn’t even begin to imagine” (8-9).