Richmond's Priests and Prophets: Race, Religion, and Social Change in the Civil Rights Era
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Richmond's Priests and Prophets: Race, Religion, and Social Change in the Civil Rights Era
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Overview
Douglas E. Thompson’s Richmond’s Priests and Prophets: Race, Religion, and Social Change in the Civil Rights Era presents a compelling study of religious leaders’ impact on the political progression of Richmond, Virginia, during the time of desegregation. Scrutinizing this city as an entry point into white Christians’ struggles with segregation during the 1950s, Thompson analyzes the internal tensions between ministers, the members of their churches, and an evolving world.
In the mid-twentieth-century American South, white Christians were challenged repeatedly by new ideas and social criteria. Neighborhood demographics were shifting, public schools were beginning to integrate, and ministers’ influence was expanding. Although many pastors supported the transition into desegregated society, the social pressure to keep life divided along racial lines placed Richmond’s ministers on a collision course with forces inside their own congregations. Thompson reveals that, to navigate the ideals of Christianity within a complex historical setting, white religious leaders adopted priestly and prophetic roles.
Moreover, the author argues that, until now, the historiography has not viewed white Christian churches with the nuance necessary to understand their diverse reactions to desegregation. His approach reveals the ways in which desegregationists attempted to change their communities’ minds, while also demonstrating why change came so slowly—highlighting the deeply emotional and intellectual dilemma of many southerners whose worldview was fundamentally structured by race and class hierarchies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817390792 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 06/06/2017 |
| Series: | Religion and American Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 690 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Richmond's Priests and Prophets
Race, Religion, and Social Change in the Civil Rights Era
By Douglas E. Thompson
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2017 University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1917-5
CHAPTER 1
THE GOSPEL WORKING OUT
"The happiest and most effective Christians," Rev. John H. Marion Jr. exhorted, "are those for whom, somewhere, Christianity has become a consuming love and a mastering passion." The preacher at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Richmond, had sojourned to Richmond from his native South Carolina by way of Charlotte, North Carolina, in the early 1940s and settled into a nearly two-decade ministry in local churches, as a denominational administrator, and as executive director of the Virginia Council on Human Relations (VCHR). The biblical text used for the sermon was Act of the Apostles (26:25), where a Roman official named Festus called Paul's behavior mad and Paul responded: "I am not mad, most noble Festus, but speak forth the words of truth and soberness." The sermon, preached during the early 1940s, used Lloyd Douglas's novel Magnificent Obsession, which by the time of the sermon had been turned into a successful Hollywood movie with Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor, to illustrate what Paul's response would be like in the twentieth century. Marion challenged his hearers to remember their loyalty to Christ above all other loyalties, including wealth and nation. Marion's use of both the novel and the biblical text revealed a southern minister willing to have the gospel work outward from personal piety to public engagement. In the context of this sermon, he did little to challenge his hearers beyond a typical Sunday morning sermon, but Marion left hints at his willingness to push against social norms, which he did for the remainder of his life.
Douglas's novel, published in 1929, centers on an ambitious young man setting out to make money and a name. His plans are interrupted when a stranger reveals that the secret to a happy life is to give everything — time, money, and talent — away. The secret was to do good works for others without their knowledge and allow those works to sustain the individual's spiritual life. Marion noted that the plan worked because the obsession "grips him, it fires him, it holds him, and, for the rest of his life, it animates and motivates all his actions." The young man developed "a magnificent obsession," one that the followers of Christ would do well to embrace. Given that Douglas's ministerial training and career as a pastor found expression in his novels, Marion's use of Magnificent Obsession to explain St. Paul's response to Festus revealed how in the second quarter of the twentieth century ministers were attempting to find a way forward for a social Christianity in the currents of American life and in southern forms of Christian practice. In a world at war and reliant on the consumption of things, Marion's call to a Christ-centered life that shunned reliance on war or money would have appeared odd.
The single line Marion emphasized from Acts comes after Festus claimed that the followers of Jesus were mad to believe that a person once dead was alive. Paul and early believers were struggling with religious movements within Judaism over how to interpret Jesus within God's plan. For the early church, their assertion that Jesus had risen from the dead and ascended to God ran counter to the belief system of those in control of the Temple and Jewish governing structure in Jerusalem, leaving the Romans to sort out whose interpretation was the least harmful approach to their empire. From the outside, Paul's logic about Jesus's resurrection appeared crazy to some Jewish leaders and almost all Romans. For those who agreed with Paul, his understanding of Jesus made perfect sense. Within the larger church, however, tensions arose over what following Jesus meant. As became clear in Acts and Paul's letters, Jesus's ministry meant different things to different groups. For more than two millennia the church has struggled with others and itself to make sense of what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus. In the twentieth century South those competing visions found expression in the question of racial segregation.
From the 1940s through the 1960s, there were many white preachers in the American South who worked to bring about a desegregated kingdom of God on earth. When ministers like John Marion talked about an obsession that resembled an all-consuming love of Jesus, they framed that love in terms of a desegregated society, including churches. Emphasizing a gospel that challenged southern norms, these preachers found themselves at risk in the larger community but also in their congregations. Every pastor struggles in that space between pushing a congregation to think differently about an issue and settling into the routine of church life. Starting in the 1940s, white ministers in Richmond questioned their congregations' and the larger community's embrace of a segregated society. The pushback from fellow ministers, laypeople, and the general public highlights a moment where white Christians struggled with interpreting what it meant to follow Jesus. The internal struggle over opening public schools and their own churches on a desegregated basis revealed Christianity's simultaneous ability to support segregation and provide the grounds for tearing down the scaffold of the region's social practice.
Marion's sermon then highlighted where the tension over challenges to racial norms could occur within the church, even when everyone agreed that Jesus was the risen Christ. Using Douglas's novel as a starting point to talk about how ambition and wealth can get in the way of following Christ, he challenged a financially comfortable congregation to consider their loyalties to careers, ambition, and national pride. The sermon envisioned a world dedicated to Christ's example of self-sacrifice and service to fellow humans. "In a world," he exclaimed, "that seems in many ways to have gone mad — destructively insane — what we need are more Christians who, possessed heart and soul by their faith, will be willing to seem fools in the world's eyes in order to speak forth effectively the healing words of truth and soberness." His obsession involved an outward expression of engagement with the world generated from the knowledge of God's love for humanity. Marion's sermon affirmed the starting point of evangelical faith as personal piety but encouraged that faith to have an outward expression.
Marion laid out an argument that suggested the world was in need of Christians so totally committed to Christ that their focus would burn bright the light of Christ's love. "No Christian heart," he pointed out, "can ever give its best to the world unless it be a burning heart." Marion envisioned a church universal so alive that it could "be an effective force in molding tomorrow's world," if and only if it had "men and women obsessed, as it were by a magnificent devotion to the church." He outlined in the sermon the power of personal piety to transform the soul, but Marion also believed that Christians were called to be agents of God's work in the world. He drew the line clearly for a socially engaged faith. "A strong, intelligent, faithful church," Marion challenged, "with its fingers on the world's pulse, its mind on the world's problems, and its hands set manfully to serve the world's need — that sort of church will be a towering cathedral to inspire and guide mankind." With references to Nazis in Germany and imperialists in Japan, he contextualized a faith that paid attention to the world around it and noted that obsessions in themselves were dangerous because anyone can be passionate, but Marion argued that following Christ's example channeled the obsession. He was also willing to challenge the congregants to question their own patriotism during a time of war.
In a telling moment in the sermon, Marion framed his belief in the power of a magnificent obsession with Christ in terms that would look prophetic years later. The power of national pride can be seductive, as the nation would learn in the 1950s with the spectacle of Joseph McCarthy, and the pastor warned of a nation bending its image of God into itself. "The war," Marion noted, "more and more is becoming for us all, I realize, a rather magnificent obsession. Our patriotic zeal is a rising fever. The aims and goals of our nation are consuming more and more of our time and interest. Millions are willing to be fools for our flag, and this by and large, I think, is all to the good." The problem occurred, he thought, when believers saw the vision of the nation overcoming the vision of God. "But fine as that [national] obsession may be," Marion stated, "it will be a sad day for our country and the world if we let it blot out or even weaken the still more magnificent obsession by when we are tied in loyalty and consecration to the Church of Christ." Marion, like Paul, saw the value of being a citizen of the state but allowed his faith to call into question its required loyalty. His willingness to challenge the congregation at a time of intense national pride revealed that in later years Marion would be willing to confront churches to think about other ways they may have been outside of God's vision.
After leaving Grace Covenant to become executive director of the Committee on Christian Relations for the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS), Marion published an article in the Yale Review titled "Farewell, My Lovely Magnolias." In the article he argued that by holding on to traditions that "stymied" a generation of young southern leaders to think more critically about issues like Christianity and racial norms those capable minds would leave the region. "Our racial pattern," he wrote, "is so rigid, its daily compulsions are so at variance with our principles and our finer human instincts, and the atmosphere it sets up is so pervasive, that its repressive and stultifying effects are felt in practically all areas of our social life, making it harder for the typical thinking Southerner to be avowedly unorthodox and liberal, about anything, than perhaps similar placed individuals elsewhere in the country." Though the article was a larger criticism of southerners and a call for them to think about why the region rejected dissenting voices that may have solutions to the South's problems, Marion's examples of why segregation harmed progress in the South suggested a white minster ready to take aim at the region's number one "bugaboo."
It was the beginning of a nearly two-decade battle Marion waged against segregation both in public arenas as well as denominational and church settings. As the director of the Committee on Christian Relations he formulated most of the Presbyterian Church in the United States' social relations statements. Beginning in the spring of 1949, those pronouncements attacked segregation directly and the Presbyterian Church's role in supporting the social practice. The Richmond News Leader noted the report and quoted its finding: "'discrimination ... is as doomed as human slavery,' according to a committee of Southern Presbyterian leaders." Marion's prophetic voice came through in the criticism for the Church to lead. "A church that tries to be neutral by keeping silent," the report stated, "or a church that resorts to compromise to save itself, will to that extent forfeit its redemptive power and influence among men." One year later, he called for the abolition of segregation. By 1957, Marion's ministerial cohort in the Richmond Ministers' Association (RMA), using language that Marion had used for almost a decade to condemn the practice, failed to give segregationists the most important justification they needed to continue to defend their position.
The "Magnificent Obsession" sermon held clues of his willingness to confront those who saw the world differently. Marion quizzed the congregation at Grace Covenant on the sanity of such an approach to blind faith. "Foolish," he asked them, "to put our Christianity first, come storm and fire? Foolish to believe the church can mold the world if only we dream and think and toil and pray?" The answer: "Perhaps! Yet that is the madness to which our Lord has commanded us." In a closing fit for the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Walter Rauschenbusch, Marion exclaimed, "For a mad world in which paganism has become an obsession for so many, nothing can be a true guide to social salvation but a church so great, so intense, so aflame for Christ and his way, that many about us will think us mad ever to have dreamed it." Using language of personal conversion and devotional piety, he shifted the end result away from inner spiritual peace, though that was a goal, to an outward manifestation of social engagement. Faith in God, Marion argued in his sermon, meant doing God's will, which for him meant a desegregated church in a desegregated South.
John Marion's ministerial life suggests how a prophetic witness works in local congregations. Within the decade of his arrival in Richmond, he had moved from the largest Presbyterian congregation (Grace Covenant) in the South to a significant denominational position, and then back to pastoring a different, smaller congregation in Richmond. Marion's outspokenness on desegregation within southern Presbyterianism appeared to have cost him the director position. In 1950 he became pastor of a 150-member church, Bon Air Presbyterian, which had a close relationship with Union Theological Seminary in Richmond where Marion's advocacy had a willing audience. By 1955, and as a response to segregationists forming the Defenders of Liberty and State Sovereignty, a group sympathetic to desegregation formed the Virginia Council on Human Relations (VCHR), which served as a state-level extension of work done through the Southern Regional Council. Marion became its first executive director. He left the VCHR in 1958 to begin work for the newly formed United Presbyterian Church in North America, covering the southern region, in the area of human relations with a focus on racial issues. In the early 1960s, he moved his family and headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee. Movement away from the local pastorate does not suggest that those congregations disapproved of his position on desegregation. In fact, his most pointed comment on the subject came in a committee report to the General Assembly that condemned the denomination for not doing more to desegregate churches shortly before he assumed his duties at Bon Air. Marion's continued commitment to racial reconciliation indicated that he did not waiver in his intent that racial segregation in churches be seen as morally wrong.
Marion had willing partners in people like Aubrey Brown, editor of the magazine the Presbyterian Outlook, who also resided in Richmond and advocated for a desegregated church. Like Brown, Marion could effect broader change beyond the local congregation. It also meant, however, that strong voices for bringing about change in actual congregations had moved away from the source. The tendency to push too hard meant that job security, regardless of denominational polity, was fragile. As Marion's trajectory suggested, it was easier to confront when some distance could be gained. It was also true that moving beyond a single community to find like-minded believers created success for these reformers. Both of these realities also revealed how hard it would be to bring about change in a segregated society. Highlighting Marion frames this story in terms of privileging the prophetic voice. The civil rights movement, the narrative arc typically told, was on the correct side of history. Marion was advocating this position prior to the success, so some white southerners were enlightened and progressive. While John Marion is worthy of a biography, why does the arc bend to progressive political outcomes? Or for that matter, why do we think of churches in political terms at all? Prophetic voices help to move churches beyond the cultural strains that can entrap the faithful in social norms they believe God had formed. For every prophet, however, priestly voices ground the congregations in tradition and help fend off false prophets. Churches live between these two voices. To answer the questions, we must examine how Gunnar Myrdal's emphasis on ideal forms of church influenced our understanding of white congregations.
Gunnar Myrdal and White Christians
At the very moment Marion was preaching and ministering at Grace Covenant, Gunnar Myrdal released his findings on how racial constructions in the United States hindered the power and the promise of the American Dream, particularly among black Americans. An American Dilemma outlined the ways that "all men are created equal" fell short in a society based on inequality. The victory of Allied forces against Germany and Japan almost a year after the publication of Myrdal's work also helped expose racial assumptions apparent in the United States. Fighting a war against the racism of the Nazi Party and Japanese notions of superiority, African Americans had served in a segregated military and had been treated as inferiors at home. The process, still peeling back layers today, became heightened in the decades following the end of the war.
As some African Americans were equally swept up in the expansion of the American economy, they began to exercise their economic clout and pushed back against the weight of the American contradiction of equality in the land of separation. Jim Crow, enforced by custom as much as law, created a category of second-class citizens. The power of what Myrdal termed the American Creed, a light of hope for generations, revealed the emptiness of the promise of a nation. This failure was not self-evident to white citizens in America. The dilemma suggested that the United States could only fulfill its potential when black Americans could experience the fruit of the nation's creed. As Myrdal noted, white Americans could and should have understood the power of racial constraints in the social structures that impeded progress for black citizens in a land of the free. Nowhere was this point more apparent to him than in white churches.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Richmond's Priests and Prophets by Douglas E. Thompson. Copyright © 2017 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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