I was born and raised in the South. I’m glad to be a Southern. I think y’all is a great word–not a stupid slang term like you’uns. The literature of the South is better than it is everywhere else. But I hate stories like this:
[Dad] must have been about thirty years old at the time, a young man, sitting in that room with all his elders, trying to be respectful. But finally he said, “This church doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to Jesus Christ. And I don’t think he would keep anyone from joining because of their skin color.” And the man who had chaired the search committee looked at my dad and said, “Son, I don’t know what kind of religion they taught you in seminary, but we’ve only got one kind of religion here, and it’s that good old Southern religion.”
Pastor Jim Somerville writes about his father’s brief stint as a pastor of a Presbyterian church in Alabama sometime in the ’70s. How could so many goats fill the churches in southern states back then? What blindness do we have today, if lies like racism can live freely among God’s people at any given time?
I have a suspicion there are more and more reconciliation stories as time goes on.
Great question, one that I wonder about frequently. Lewis advocates for reading old books in part to help us with this, to be less overwhlmed by the prevailing winds.
I think, like many others, matters of biblical mahood and womanhood are even more out of whack now (hurting people) and we are so immersed we don’t see it.
That’s a good one to point out. There are also issues which are not in our neighborhoods or small communities, so we don’t care about them, issues like trafficking or immigration laws which are big problems, but too removed or complicated for many Christians to pick up and run with.
I tend to doubt those kinds of stories, partly because I don’t want them to be true and also because in my experience the racism was more subtle. Of course, I grew up in the sixties and seventies, probably later than this the time in which this story takes place. In my day, the elder would have said something like, “Don’t you know, son, that they feel more comfortable in their own churches with their own kind, and we are better off sticking with our own?”
Racial tension wasn’t the same throughout the country. This place in Alabama may have been a bad spot. I’m told Mississippi was very closed-minded about this. It’s hard to know for me. I don’t see it.