By Bill Leonard
In his recent book Moses, Jesus and the Trickster in the Evangelical South, University of Colorado history professor Paul Harvey describes the South “as a land of paradox and contradiction.”
“How else, for example, can one grasp the coexistence of barbaric rituals such as lynching and the efflorescence of literature as represented most notably by William Faulkner?” he poses. “How else can we explain that racial violence seemed especially vicious in counties dominated by evangelical piety?”
Harvey’s study documents the ways in which southern religionists — black and white — held contrasting, even contradictory, visions of slavery and liberation, salvation and religious liberty, and most of all about Jesus.
He concludes that, “Southern religious history centrally illustrates the broader story of American religious history: the powerfully and intensely paradoxical interplay of religious freedom/equality and religiously sanctioned un-freedom/inequality.”
Harvey’s insightful study builds on issues raised earlier in works such as John L. Eighmy’s Churches in Cultural Captivity, and Samuel Hill’s Southern Churches in Crisis, books that documented the cultural dilemma of southern churches in both title and content.
Reflecting on southern Protestantism, Hill concluded as early as 1966: “The future may well seem ominous to a conservative and culturally pampered institution as it confronts a new social order and climate of opinion.”
Hill’s prediction is Harvey’s present reality. Responding to that reality now requires not changeless repetition but renewed intentionality.
First, we must be intentional in refusing to acquiesce to enduring racial divisions. The Southern Baptist Convention recently took such a step in electing their first African-American president.
Contemplating that action I recalled a Sunday morning in the spring of 1968 when the pastor of the Texas Baptist church where I was youth minister offered his sermonic response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It was a tragedy, he acknowledged, but since King’s methods and beliefs were terribly misguided, few should be surprised by events in Memphis.
He then launched into a homiletical attack on the civil-rights movement. Amid those remarks, one of the young people rose from his seat near the front and walked out on the sermon. In my memory I can still hear his steps sounding above the preacher’s voice. We all knew that his departure was intentional, not incidental. He refused to support racism with his presence, a courageous act in that place in those days.
Following the service the pastor called me to his office and denounced the young man’s action. Shaking his fist in my face and using a racist epithet, the minister declared, “You and the youth group have turned into a bunch of ________ lovers.”
If that was true, then words spoken in anger became their own blessing, a revelation symbolized in the intentionality of one courageous young man. Such intentionality in combating implicit or explicit racism remains a challenge for all of us.
Second, religious institutions must be intentional in their efforts to extend racial inclusion through organizational leadership. Good intentions demand deliberate action.
Such institutional intentionality was present in 1968 when the American Baptist Churches, USA, appointed the Study Committee on Denominational Structure aimed at reorganizing that old guard Protestant denomination. The committee’s recommendations, approved in 1972, included the proposal that “a proportionate number of men and women, clergy and laity, ethnic groups, youth, and any other minorities would be represented on the General Board, by electing representatives-at-large as needed to provide balance.”
So 40 years ago, American Baptists were intentional about “balance,” appointing diverse gender, racial and age groups to their denominational leadership. Critics shouted “quotas” and dismissed the effort. But the ABC/USA persevered and today may be the most racially and ethnically diverse denomination in the United States, a true sign that inclusivity can occur with sufficient intentionality, participation, time and patience.
Third, intentionality toward racial inclusion is no “quick fix.” It requires long-term commitment.
In 1979 conservatives in the SBC instigated efforts to elect a series of presidents who would use their appointive powers to move the denomination in more theologically rightward directions, what they called a “course correction.” After a decade of election victories, conservatives gained complete control of convention mechanisms, influencing the departure of certain moderate-oriented individuals and churches.
This time around, if a succession of “presidents of color” would use their appointive powers for inclusion rather than exclusion, the SBC would be the better for it. The test of the recent SBC election depends on the intentionality of denominational leaders to share leadership and determine whether non-white presidents will have essential or only symbolic voice in denominational affairs for years to come. Other white-majority Baptist entities might consider similar long-term intentionality.
Though long outside the SBC, I celebrate this intentionally reconciling moment from a distance, still repenting of my own failure to walk out on that Texas preacher in the turbulent spring of 1968.