There is much to love about southern white religion, and I have loved it most of my life. Except for a decade in Pittsburgh, two years in St. Louis, and one year abroad, I have lived my life among religious people of the American South, white people, that is.
Mostly I have loved it. I love the music, including gospel music and mountain ballads. I was saved on the Thursday night of a two-week revival and announced my call to gospel work on another Thursday night meeting five years later. I’ve been to summer camps and Bible Schools and youth prayer meetings. I like the Wednesday night church dinners more than Sunday morning Communion. I have a stack of church hymnals in my home and can play all of it on the piano.
Southern Religion has been good to me. It taught me to read the Bible and love Jesus and pray for the salvation of my friends. It helped me renounce all the worldly vices, which included cigarettes, alcohol, and dancing.
What it also did was encase me in a culture of racial superiority. It was years before I understood that my religion had embraced slavery and segregation. This became clear as I watched us push back against the Civil Rights Movement. Not then, not now, not ever have my people—white southern Christians—repented of the wickedness we bestowed upon our black neighbors.
Which settled this question deep in my soul: how could a religious culture so precious to me and powerful in me tolerate such systemic wickedness? How could we be so adamant about dancing and so indifferent to racism?
Three books helped me escape.
I read these three books before the age of 16 and I don’t know why. Charles Sheldon wrote In His Steps and published it first in serial form in the local newspaper of Topeka, Kansas. Once it reached book form in 1896, it began to sell and 50 million sales later is still going strong. The book popularized the question “What Would Jesus Do?” perhaps the most basic question arising from the red-letter Jesus. Even decades of salvation appeals and theological conversations have been unable to erase this question from my soul.
Sometime later, The Seven Storey Mountain came my way, and this is the greatest mystery. There was a very small Catholic church in our town, and nothing served to unite all the other Christians like the conviction that, for sure, the Catholics were all going to hell. Then along came Thomas Merton and his testimony. He blew up all my cultural prejudices about Roman Catholics. I never got over it. And I never figured out how that book came into my hands and settled into my imagination.
The third book I know. Actually, there were two, and together they functioned as a double-barreled blow to so much of my white southern religious prejudiced. John Doe, Disciple and Mr. Jones, Meet the Master, both from the pen of the famous Scottish preacher at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington DC and later Chaplain of the United States Senate. Some elderly lady in our church began designating money for me to buy books, after I announced my ministerial intentions. I never knew who it was, but I started spending and these are two books that entered my library early on. They were books of sermons and prayers, manuscripts of both, uncommon in my tradition.
These books, such unlikely interruptions of my white southern religious culture, I now credit with showing me a way forward. I have never regretted how they set my feet on a different path. And now, as I watch the religion of my youth move from white supremacy into Trumpism, I am triply grateful for whatever it was, perhaps these books, perhaps more, that helped me escape the fundamentalism that lurked behind every pulpit and under every pew of my church life.
Nothing illustrates the difference this made like the death this week of the famous and influential West Coast preacher, John MacArthur. “I am grateful,” I posted on Facebook, “that I was never interested in, nor influenced by, John MacArthur.” Even a hurried reading of this commentary on his life (by another resident of Greenville County, South Carolina) will make you also thankful that his distorted understanding of the life and love of Jesus never dominated the assemblies and assertions where you learned how to follow Jesus.
I am glad I got out, and I give undue credit to the books that God brought into my hands while I was still a teenager. I have never stopped reading. And I have taken up the ministry of putting good books into the hands and hearts of those whom the Lord brings into my life. Thanks be unto God.
There is much to love about southern white religion, and I have loved it most of my life. Except for a decade in Pittsburgh, two years in St. Louis, and one year abroad, I have lived my life among religious people of the American South, white people, that is.
Mostly I have loved it. I love the music, including gospel music and mountain ballads. I was saved on the Thursday night of a two-week revival and announced my call to gospel work on another Thursday night meeting five years later. I’ve been to summer camps and Bible Schools and youth prayer meetings. I like the Wednesday night church dinners more than Sunday morning Communion. I have a stack of church hymnals in my home and can play all of it on the piano.
Southern Religion has been good to me. It taught me to read the Bible and love Jesus and pray for the salvation of my friends. It helped me renounce all the worldly vices, which included cigarettes, alcohol, and dancing.
What it also did was encase me in a culture of racial superiority. It was years before I understood that my religion had embraced slavery and segregation. This became clear as I watched us push back against the Civil Rights Movement. Not then, not now, not ever have my people—white southern Christians—repented of the wickedness we bestowed upon our black neighbors.
Which settled this question deep in my soul: how could a religious culture so precious to me and powerful in me tolerate such systemic wickedness? How could we be so adamant about dancing and so indifferent to racism?
Three books helped me escape.
I read these three books before the age of 16 and I don’t know why. Charles Sheldon wrote In His Steps and published it first in serial form in the local newspaper of Topeka, Kansas. Once it reached book form in 1896, it began to sell and 50 million sales later is still going strong. The book popularized the question “What Would Jesus Do?” perhaps the most basic question arising from the red-letter Jesus. Even decades of salvation appeals and theological conversations have been unable to erase this question from my soul.
Sometime later, The Seven Storey Mountain came my way, and this is the greatest mystery. There was a very small Catholic church in our town, and nothing served to unite all the other Christians like the conviction that, for sure, the Catholics were all going to hell. Then along came Thomas Merton and his testimony. He blew up all my cultural prejudices about Roman Catholics. I never got over it. And I never figured out how that book came into my hands and settled into my imagination.
The third book I know. Actually, there were two, and together they functioned as a double-barreled blow to so much of my white southern religious prejudiced. John Doe, Disciple and Mr. Jones, Meet the Master, both from the pen of the famous Scottish preacher at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington DC and later Chaplain of the United States Senate. Some elderly lady in our church began designating money for me to buy books, after I announced my ministerial intentions. I never knew who it was, but I started spending and these are two books that entered my library early on. They were books of sermons and prayers, manuscripts of both, uncommon in my tradition.
These books, such unlikely interruptions of my white southern religious culture, I now credit with showing me a way forward. I have never regretted how they set my feet on a different path. And now, as I watch the religion of my youth move from white supremacy into Trumpism, I am triply grateful for whatever it was, perhaps these books, perhaps more, that helped me escape the fundamentalism that lurked behind every pulpit and under every pew of my church life.
Nothing illustrates the difference this made like the death this week of the famous and influential West Coast preacher, John MacArthur. “I am grateful,” I posted on Facebook, “that I was never interested in, nor influenced by, John MacArthur.” Even a hurried reading of this commentary on his life (by another resident of Greenville County, South Carolina) will make you also thankful that his distorted understanding of the life and love of Jesus never dominated the assemblies and assertions where you learned how to follow Jesus.
I am glad I got out, and I give undue credit to the books that God brought into my hands while I was still a teenager. I have never stopped reading. And I have taken up the ministry of putting good books into the hands and hearts of those whom the Lord brings into my life. Thanks be unto God.
Recent Posts
Related Posts
A Pandemic of Violence
The Triumph of Greed
What Would Revival Look Like?
Was This My Last Sermon?