Muted Trumpets in Dixie

Retired Railroad Conductor Bryant of Lebanon Junction, Ky. is a troubled man. Last week in The Review and Expositor, journal of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, he told why.

"Throughout the first sixty years of my life," wrote Bryant, "I never questioned but that Peter's confession that 'God is no respecter of persons' referred exclusively to the differences among white persons. Neither did I question that segregation was Christian and that it referred to the separation of white and Negro people. Three years ago these views were completely transformed. I became convinced that God makes no distinctions among people whatever their race and that segregation is exclusively by God in the final judgment ... I am now wondering whether I am interpreting the Scriptures like Christ or like Satan . . .

"The things which have convinced me that I must surrender my conviction that integration is taught in the New Testament are: First, if the interpretation that I have made of the Scriptures were true, this truth would have been confessed in the churches from the time the New Testament was given to men, and integration would have been the common practice for hundreds of years.

"Second, my church and my community set themselves against my interpretation and they resisted integration. I talked about integration to people in my home, on the streets, and in prayer meetings in my church. Soon I was met by Christians with chilly silence, or a polite brushoff, or the warning that I was talking too much about the Negro question.

"Third, I looked about to see what ideas were held by individual Christians and churches in other places. I found no other laymen crusading for integration, no pastors making an issue of segregation in their sermons, no concerted action for integration on the part of churches, no clarion call for unity of races in the worship of Christ by the Southern Baptist Convention, and there is silence in the denominational papers."

Pressure on Your Preacher. Few trumpets indeed were sounding in the Southern churches last week. Most ministers were like Layman Bryant--troubled. But they found other things to talk about than the problem that plagued Bryant. Most of the vocal few were vocal on the side of the lily-white banner of segregation; Citizens' Council rallies could usually count on some Protestant clergyman to bless their gatherings. The Rev. Earl Anderson, for instance, 63-year-old pastor of Dallas' Munger Place Baptist Church, insisted that: "Now is the time for Citizens' Councils to put pressure on your preacher." And he propounded eight "reasons why it is not Christian" to invite Negroes into white churches: !) Negroes have their own churches, 2) Negroes don't invite whites to join them, 3) Whites should treat Negroes as Christian--in their own churches, 4) Negroes best serve God in their own churches, 5) Negroes who understand God's teachings don't want to mix with whites, 6) Negroes have as much right to a pure race, 7) Negroes believe mixing races is disobedient to the word of God, 8) an aim of Communism is to 'mongrelize the human race.' "

Occasionally the Protestant silence in the South is broken from the other side. The Southern Regional Council lists seven ministers as having lost their pastorates* because they were outspoken in favor of integration. There have been other firings and forced resignations that have not been publicized.

Ignored at the Local Level. The top levels of all the Protestant denominations have declared themselves in support of the Supreme Court's desegregation rulings, but their pronouncements are often blandly ignored or actively disregarded at the local level. The Roman Catholic Church, taking the unequivocal position that segregation is a continuing offense against Christian morality, has been the only church in the South to take open steps to enforce its position. But many Catholic priests, like Protestant ministers, prefer to move slowly, and Southern Catholics are not all taking kindly to their church's position. In New Orleans, where Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel has threatened to invoke the extreme power of excommunication to stem Catholic opposition to integration, newspaper ads appeared recently to announce a state-chartered Association of Catholic Laymen (annual dues, $1 or more), organized to fight the strong integrationism of the church. Mississippi's Presbyterian Synod has directly challenged the antisegregationist resolution of the Southern Presbyterians' 94th General Assembly. The "matter of segregation," said the synod, is a "highly controversial political issue."

This sort of rationalization has a wide adherence in Dixie today. Syndicated Southern Columnist John Temple Graves put it into words: "With the brotherhood of man under God so precious in religious faith, no one says men of God should fail to oppose hate, intolerance, injustice and discrimination. But many of us who think we, too, have religious faith look on ourselves as still children of God when we say race separation among the school masses of the South is a police, cultural and biological necessity and has nothing to do with brotherhood."

If all churches should be integrated tomorrow, there would undoubtedly be few Southern pastors who would not feel as though a great weight had been lifted from their shoulders. But, in the mean time, most feel that this good end would not best be served by such uncompromising means. Whether it is better to lead slowly or lose one's congregation by leading too fast is the question, and most take the answer to be: go slow.

But there is danger in such hanging back to let men of politics have a monopoly on a problem so rife with spiritual meaning, and there are some who recognize the danger. Said Dr. William A. Benfield of Louisville's Highland Presbyterian Church in a sermon recently:

"In some circles religion has become an opiate of the people. Present day Christianity is to many people tame and prosaic, prim and dull ... Too many of us have lost Christ's call to heroism and have grown comfortable and commonplace, small in our minds and imaginations. The Christian church has become too much an ambulance, dragging along behind, picking up the wounded, making bandages, and soothing hurt feelings, when the church should be out on the front line, getting hit in the face, but leading others and conquering the enemy."

Back last week from a short sojourn in the South was the Rev. Trevor Huddleston, Anglican priest of the Community of the Resurrection who has become a symbol and rallying point of resistance to apartheid in South Africa, where he has been stationed for twelve years. In Africa, whence his superiors have recently recalled him to England, white supremacists viewed him with alarm as a kamrboetie (roughly, nigger-lover) and predicted he would not be allowed to visit the U.S. Southern states, let alone be permitted to speak there. But Father Huddleston was able to travel and to talk with representatives of both sides in the South.

He found a major difference between the Southland and South Africa, a difference signified by the difference between the slogans "white supremacy" and "separate but equal." Huddleston marveled at some of the school facilities the South has provided its segregated Negroes in recent years in its attempt to prove that social justice is not necessarily involved in segregation. He found "an immeasurably greater educational and economic opportunity for the U.S. Negro." But many of the professed Christians he talked to reminded him of Christians among whom he lived in South Africa. "They had exactly the same kind of blindness," said Father Huddleston sadly.

* From Mississippi, a Methodist and a Presbyterian; from South Carolina, a Methodist and a Baptist; from Arkansas, a Baptist; from Virginia, a Campbellite; from Georgia, a Baptist.

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