Will D Campbell, born in Amite County, Mississippi, and educated in Yale Divinity School, is perhaps best known today as the archetype of the eccentric Reverend Will B. Dunn in Doug Marlette's syndicated comic strip, Kudzu. Will Campbell is eccentric indeed, in ways that no comic parody could begin to address, because he is a prophet and, often, more than a prophet. He is a Baptist preacher with no church and a taste for Jack Daniels. He is a friend of black radicals and Ku Klux Klanspeople, and a critic of both. He is no friend of hypocrisy. Should we attempt to imagine a Hebrew prophet incarnate in the American South, we should arrive, inexorably, at the figure of Will Campbell.
By 1962, having departed his chaplain's post at the University of Mississippi, Will Campbell is traveling throughout the South as an agent of the National Council of Churches, seeking the way to racial reconciliation. Out of his experience of the failure of the churches and the human political order to address the mounting terror and frustration of black and white alike, Will Campbell writes the first and perhaps most prophetic of all his works, Race and the Renewal of the Church. In that book he excoriates the churches for ceding the struggle to end American apartheid to the political order rather than seizing the initiative as an imperative of the Christian Gospel. He finds his text in a source that he knows his readers will consider unlikely, and presents it in a chapter that he calls "The Gods of Law and Order."
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962) 28-35.
The churches with dispatch adopted the dictum that the clear duty of the Christian is always to obey the law when, in 1954, the law became what the churches wanted it to be. Advising their people to desegregate because the law said to do so seemed less risky than taking a bold position based on the Christian doctrine of man, the Biblical imperative of justice, and the doctrine of the sovereignty of God.
But the worship of law proved quickly to be a two-edged sword. For the integrationist Christian it was pleasant to be able to say, "The law is on our side!" But the segregationist Christian was able to argue on the same basis. Particularly in the South, he had clear and unequivocal legislation at the state and local levels which explicitly forbade any form of racial mixing. He could argue convincingly that there is nothing in the Christian body of doctrine which holds that federal laws are any more sacred than state or local laws. The legal argument within the churches made for further confusion when those favoring desegregation began arguing for disobedience to law in the sit-in movement during 1959-1960. The General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., meeting in May, 1960, went on record as advocating a degree of civil disobedience when it said among other things: "Affirming that some laws and customs requiring racial discrimination are, in our judgment, such serious violations of the law [29] of God as to justify peaceable and orderly disobedience and disregard of these laws . . ." The National Council of the Protestant Episcopal Church and several other groups took similar positions. One could assume that this was a swing away from the "let us obey the law" position which developed immediately following the Supreme Court decision of 1954 and a stronger ground upon which to fight. but one week after the United Presbyterian General Assembly took its action in Cleveland, a spokesman for the White Citizens' Council in New Orleans strongly recommended and called for a campaign of civil disobedience (as a matter of conscience) to combat desegregation of the New Orleans public schools! On the other hand, in Montgomery, Alabama, when Negro demonstrators were rudely handled by state and city police and a group of citizens who had been quickly deputized as a mounted force to assist in the brutal dispersion of the demonstrators, the local ministerial alliance had the following to say:
The appeal to law is at best a confused picture within the churches. We must say quite frankly that it appears that the churches have often used it to evade their deeper responsibility. It has been the easy way. But the church has not always appealed to law for the rightness of its action. Here is another kind of statement regarding this problem:
[30]
Upon first glance this would appear to be just another statement among the reams of resolutions and pronouncements that have heated the presses for the past seven years. And it would surely be assumed that such a statement represents the view of the more liberal church bodies, for it moves far beyond schools, parks, and lunch counters; and it affirms without equivocation that if there are two congregations in one town because of race, one of them should be abandoned. Actually the statement comes from one of the most conservative groups in Protestantism. The man who wrote it was far from notorious for his social liberalism. He was David Lipscomb, a Church of Christ evangelist. He made the statement in an article on "Race Prejudice," in the February, 1878, issue of Gospel Advocate, when a Texas Church of Christ congregation objected to a Negro who sought to affiliate with the local church. David Lipscomb was one of the foremost leaders of that denomination, and one of its colleges (still segregated) bears his name today.
Lipscomb's statement is important for several reasons. In the first place it is generally thought that we have come a long way in race relations since 1878 and that if given time, patience, and understanding we will "work this thing out" in our churches. Yet in 1878 a spokesman for the most conservative group called it a sin to have separate congregations because of race, while almost a hundred years later in the most liberal groups we still have, not only racial congregations, but racial synods in the Presbyterian Church, the Central Jurisdiction for Negroes in the Methodist, separate judicatories in almost every communion, and a racial ministry in all.
But an even more remarkable feature of this statement, in the light of which we might re-examine our own positions, is that it made no appeal to harmony or to the law. Many church appeals and pronouncements today are based on one or another of these prime values. Lips-[31]comb's was not. With respect to harmony within the fellowship, he did not try to avoid conflict but seemed to think that harmony or its absence was irrelevant to the question at hand. In an almost casual manner he moved on to state what was for him the heart of the matter. Apparently to this spokesman of a group sometimes characterized as a "fringe sect," the problem of Christian behavior had nothing to do with what people wanted to do, or were ready to do, or with what did or did not violate the local mores. Like many before his time and since, Lipscomb recognized the test that the church faced by its double concern for conformity and loyalty to God. Implicit in his statement was what social scientists have indicated in our own time: there is a difference between prejudice and discrimination, between feeling and behavior. In effect,
Lipscomb said: Surely there is such a thing as race prejudice in all of us who are in the churches, and it will cause trouble. So what? His was the strange notion that Christian behavior had to do only with the uncompromising demands of Almighty God as revealed through the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.
Contrast this to our day when cardinal virtues are harmony within the fellowship, peace, good will, "tact" on the part of the preacher, dignity and respectability of approach, law and order, constitutions, status, preservation of public schools and property values. All these values are important to us and doubtless were to the group for whom Mr. Lipscomb spoke, but they did not seem primary. Lipscomb made no appeal to law, to the courts, to democracy, or to any politicalideology. His was a simple proclamation: "Thus saith the Lord." This despite the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation and the tumult of Reconstruction were as close to him and fully as controversial as recent Supreme Court decisions on civil rights are to us.
If arguments for law and order, peace and harmony, [32] are irrelevant to the church's concern on race, so are appeals to the social sciences and humanitarianism. These are all valuable and valid approaches, but they are not the distinctive approaches of the church. Law and order is the business of government, social science is the concern of the sociologists and anthropologists, and humanitarianism is the inspiration of thousands of dedicated men and women who spend their lives in alleviating human suffering. All of these have a place in the church; and the church, which has learned much from these sources, cannot ignore them. but the church must not be distracted by them. Its concern is more profound and more radical than any of these.
DL confirms for Will Campbell some things about
the relations of church, race, and the human political that he has had
to learn the hard way. It would surely be interesting to learn how Preacher
Will came to know DL. Will Campbell the prophet has more to say in this
chapter and in this book, and I commend it to the prayerful consideration
of every soul who is prepared to move beyond confession to correction of
the sin of racism. At the end of this chapter, on page 35, Will Campbell
speaks to American Christians of 1962 in the spirit of DL, in words that
DL himself could have written. Those who have ears, let them hear.