In 1963, eight white clergy wrote a letter to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., counseling a delay in the demonstrations he and others had planned for Birmingham, Alabama. It is of particular importance that these were sympathetic, at least to integration, and not ardent critics of King, nor were they people spewing hate from their pulpits. Quite the opposite. Biographers and journalists have noted how several of them were known to have preached to their congregations in order to support civil rights. All eight had written an open letter to Governor George Wallace the preceding January to chastise him for inflammatory rhetoric. (For more information about these clergy, see this story on AL.com).

A cross section of Birmingham’s white religious leaders, the eight clergy were: Rabbi Milton Grafman of Temple Emanu-El, Catholic Bishop Joseph A. Durick, Methodist Bishop Nolan Harmon, Episcopal Bishop Charles C.J. Carpenter, Episcopal Bishop Coadjutor George M. Murray, Methodist Bishop Paul Hardin, and the Rev. Ed Ramage of First Presbyterian Church. A number of these men continued to work in favor of civil rights after the famous exchange of letters. Influenced by King, Durick became a well-known advocate for civil rights who cared for the poor when he was Bishop of  Nashville between 1969 and 1975 (see his obituary here). In regard to Charles Carpenter, the Bishop of Alabama, Brandt Montgomery has written for Covenant about his stance on civil rights.

In the AL.com story, reporter Greg Garrison interviews biographer Doug Carpenter, Bishop Carpenter’s son. Samford University professor Jonathan Bass notes that the eight signers were “widely hailed for being among the most progressive religious leaders in the South. … They got a ton of hate mail from segregationists. All of them were harassed because of that statement [against Wallace].” The fact that the letter writers were supporters of civil rights, or were at least not against desegregation, is helpful to highlight the broader social problem encountered by the church and other religious institutions. The presence of a rabbi among the authors shouldn’t be ignored, in that it demonstrates the hold that the narrative of threatened violence had on well-intentioned white leaders.

While their letter demonstrates this problem, it also inspired the better-known reply of Dr. King in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” A superficial reading of this context and King’s reply can make it seem as though the eight clergy were against the goal of integration. They were not. They were, however, concerned with the violence that they believed the demonstrations could spark. As reported by Garrison, “Grafman said the eight clergy were among Birmingham’s moderate leaders who were working for civil rights. But they feared demonstrations would lead to violence and felt the newly elected city government could achieve progress peacefully.”

It is important to acknowledge the reality of the society in which the eight clergy found themselves. Would they have felt the need to counsel caution and a go-slow approach to justice if their institutions had not in significant ways, been held captive to the unjust society for generations? I have been struck by the revealing assessments of the preaching of white clergy at the time by two black clergy and civil rights leaders from Birmingham. “I saw tremendous pain and agony in the white pulpit. The pressure was on them pretty heavily,” said the Rev. John T. Porter, pastor of Sixth Avenue Baptist Church from 1961 to 1999 and a friend of King’s. “I’m sure they never thought they would provoke the reaction they did.” He added: “They were not liberals by anybody’s measurement. … They were moderates; they weren’t liberals. But they were not bigots in the raw term.” Garrison reports further:

White clergy were often trapped by the social pressure to conform to expectations, just as blacks were expected to conform to strict segregation, Porter said. Ultimately it’s clear that King was right, that the demonstrations needed to go forward, he said. “There was no time to waste,” Porter said.

Another leader, who was known to speak in an explicitly prophetic and challenging voice, was the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, pastor of Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist Church and a cofounder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was also the cofounder and president of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which took up the work of the NAACP after Alabama outlawed the group in 1956. Shuttlesworth’s biographer, Andrew Manis, examines Shuttlesworth’s damning evaluation of the white church, quoting his words from 1962, in the year before the exchange of letters between the eight moderate clergy and King. Perhaps the difference in tone is prompted by Porter looking back on that time, while Shuttlesworth’s words were nearly contemporaneous to the two letters. Shuttlesworth writes that “Men who occupy seats of power appear to use passion and madness rather than calmness and reason. They continue to misread history and misjudge the future. … Perhaps the worst part of this madness is that the white church is for the most part an incubator of classism and racism” (Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, 317). Manis adds:

Shuttlesworth especially despised the timidity of the white clergy. “The white pulpit is captive,” he chided, “afraid to stand and speak to men’s hearts on the issues of freedom, justice, equality, and brotherhood.”

These contrasting and complementary assessments of the white pulpits of the day invite reflection. Porter says he saw the pulpits in pain, the clergy wrestling with how best to present the gospel and its demands to a people who may not have been pleased to hear it. But what was the source of the pain? Perhaps it was the captivity that Shuttlesworth saw. Rather than offering divergent observations, Porter and Shuttlesworth were driving to a singular truth: the church had been made subservient to society on the issue of race, and even when the demands of the gospel were recognized, it was a challenge for white clergy to declare them wholeheartedly. The great irony may well be that it was King, rather than the eight moderates, who could most readily articulate the source of their difficulty, even while he chastised them for acquiescing, and for attempting to divert the movement he was championing in their city.

While it was not understood as such at the time — Bishop Durick said in 1969 that “the real message of the letter didn’t hit home until later” — King’s letter has only grown in importance over the years, and it stands as one of the most enduring public challenges to the racially violent culture of the South, and particularly the complicity of white Southern Christians. The letter demonstrates a clear understanding of the ways in which violence was always present and ready to be uncoiled. King recognized the central reality, which seems to have been far less apparent to the clergy he was responding to, that in a society built on injustice and the need for conformity, which enlists its citizens to police its boundaries, violence could be sparked by slow-going movements as easily as rapid ones. The drive to reassert the racial balance would happen either way. And beyond that, the threat of potential violence was consistently being used to support the continuation of current violence. King writes:

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in non-violent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out into the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.

King’s letter was clear in challenging the arguments of the moderate clergy who continued to counsel patience over confrontation. More than simply challenging them and countering their arguments however, King’s letter effectively shamed the moderates for their position.

It is criticism such as King’s, from Christian to Christian and from faith leader to faith leader, while pointing at the very public and undeniable images of abuse, that allowed white Southern Christians to recognize the shame of not living up to the ideals of their faith. King has strong words of criticism and lament for the church. He attacks the way the people of God have been content not only to do nothing against abuse, but to prop up injustice. “There was a time when the church was very powerful,” he writes. “It was during that period that the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that records the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that transformed the mores of society.”

Before closing, King writes:

I am impelled to mention one other point in your statement that troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” I don’t believe you would have so warmly commended the Birmingham police force if you had seen its angry violent dogs literally biting six unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I don’t believe you would so quickly commend the policemen if you would observe their ugly and inhuman treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you would watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you would see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys, if you would observe them, as they did on two occasions, refusing to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I’m sorry that I can’t join you in your praise for the police department.

King’s letter, which was dated April 16, 1963, had, by the end of August, been published under various titles in multiple publications, religious and secular, including the American Friends Service Committee, Liberation, The Christian Century, The New Leader, The Progressive, and The Atlantic Monthly. The media’s chilling images of police turning dogs and fire hoses on protesters pricked the consciences of some citizens, with the effect of shaming as conviction for some white Christian Southerners, and Americans more broadly.

The letter and the subsequent media coverage of abuses were particularly effective to the extent they instigated a shift in the self-regard of white Southerners. Those Southerners could begin to see themselves — the society in which they lived and participated — truthfully, through the eyes of the oppressed, in a way that could no longer be countered or papered over, allowing life to go on as before. “A growing white awareness of the shamefulness of racial shaming signaled a decreasing need to define whiteness through honor and a decreasing need to define honor as collective racial purity” (David Leverenz, Honor Bound, 54). In this letter, which illustrated his efforts to gain equality, King held a mirror before the white religious establishment, showed them what they looked like, and said, “Does this look like Jesus to you?”

To the degree that deep change occurred, it was precisely the shared biblical and Christian language of black and white Southerners, when coupled with the mirror of modern media reflecting the reality of white supremacist brutality, that made the shame and inconsistency of such brutality impossible to avoid, and motivated change. Subsequent years have complicated this narrative. How was it, precisely, that some things had changed and improved — the late congressman and civil rights pioneer John Lewis was clear on that — but in other areas, the past decade has revealed that far less progress has been made than we assumed. And, to paraphrase Lewis, there are always people and forces that want to reverse course. What accounts for the unevenness and the shallowness of some change? In part, the question comes down to two divergent types of shame — one that might be better called conviction, which I will tackle at some length in the next installment. Another question, related to how Christians can be inspired to reject wicked social practices, concerns how the church can resist evil and form people in a way that they can not only resist evil, but foster the coherence and stability of society for the common good.

In part four we will reflect on the difference between deep-rooted versus superficial change in these challenging areas, and consider what the church can do to foment deeper change within itself and society. The good news is, this will not be the first time Christians have had to work toward a dramatic shift in our society in order to right a wrong for which we ourselves — as members of the church — bear a good deal of responsibility.

Jackson Wu, whose comments about sharing the gospel in honor-shame cultures sparked the thoughts for the first essay, offers this instructive Chinese idiom to explain issues of “face”: “People want ‘face’ like a tree wants bark.” Consider what benefit bark is to a tree. Bark protects the tree and makes it identifiable. Likewise, face or honor serves to protect the more vulnerable aspects of personality. Wu writes: “One’s ‘face’ refers to how people value him or her.” So honor and respect do what we would readily conceive, i.e. bringing praise to the person who receives them, but they also do something we might not expect: they offer protection of some sort for our deepest selves. Consider how this reflexive need for self-protection might play out in an honor-shame culture like the American South, with the issues of race added to the mix.

In part one, I shared Gary Ciuba’s observation that “Honor made self-estimation into nothing but an imitation of how the southerner was esteemed by others. And since southerners desired such mimetic validation, they copied the desires of the other so that they would regard themselves as especially well-favored in the looking-glass of communal approval. The result was that the community of honor was a network in which each member was at once a model for everyone else and a disciple of everyone else” (Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction, 21). The construction of this community of honor required that everyone’s behavior, and especially behavior touching upon race, was tightly controlled with transgressions triggering violent responses.

It is disheartening enough that Christians would be caught up in such a system, an even greater condemnation that the Church — in its Southern institutional forms including through its clergy — would perpetuate the system for the same reason that a person such as the overseer in 12 Years a Slave might respond with violence to a perceived insult: out of fear of loss of station, or in order to avoid being subject to violence. As Ciuba notes, “in seeking to ‘curtail violence,’ the upheaval that might come if churches undermined the social order, southern religion served as a bulwark for a culture founded on violence” (Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction, 39). This leads to the challenging question of how the South might move from being Christ-haunted to being Christ-transformed, and by extension, how some of the tools unearthed in such a process might be used in other contexts, helping other Christians to truly wrestle with the realities of our national sins, past and present.

Recognizing the sins of our past and addressing the challenges of our present begins with recognizing the humanity of others, that they are loved by God and created in the divine image, and are therefore of infinite worth. Such recognition can inspire repentance for past sins, the rejection of present injustice, and both the willingness and ability to carve out spaces where people of divergent beliefs and opinions can acknowledge their differences and disagreements without fear of reprisal or dehumanization. Christians must focus on the creation of two such spaces, with the recognition that others will emerge organically whenever the second is achieved and nourished: a church that can endure and thrive in disagreement (sometimes called “contestation”) — even over serious matters — without denying the Christian faith of others, and the creation or maintenance of a pluralistic democracy in which such a church can faithfully function.

An environment in which the church can most fully and faithfully honor its commitments will necessarily be one in which citizens of all faiths or none can freely engage their fellow citizens and government. It may be a particular genius of the Anglo-American democratic tradition that needs to be revived and nourished, with its basis in common law, wherein healthy religious, cultural, ethnic, and other organizations form a third space that buffers the individual citizen from the weight of a flattened and flattening state, while in turn the pluralistic liberal state protects the rights of the individual from infringement, whether by the government, other individuals, or communities and entities to which the individual belongs. We speak a lot about checks and balances in our system, but the checks and balances offered by a robust civic space are too little discussed or advocated.

Having mentioned the necessity of a broad church that embraces disagreement, as well as the importance of a pluralistic public square where ideas freely mingle — and are expressed by individuals, as well as by collections of citizens, including those formed around philosophical or religious ideals, some of which will find expression in diverse ways of living — it seems important to lay down markers for ideas that can’t be fully explored here. Namely, in regard to a church that can bear disagreement in the manner required to inculcate the necessary habits to resist society-wide evil that dehumanizes those who disagree or who are otherwise different, which, as we will see later, requires the ability to be a community that is good at disagreement. This means putting some value over and above shared ideas as constitutive of identity. George Lindbeck argued that Christians could learn something from our Jewish siblings, in that they have something about belonging to teach Christians. It is, of course, a distinctive characteristic of the Christian faith that one does not have to be born into it. That’s essential to our identity because it is central to the expansiveness of the gospel. However, that doesn’t exhaust what it means to be a Christian.

Sometimes Christians have been too quick to de-church each other over doctrinal and intellectual disagreements — to say nothing of cultural disagreements that don’t touch on doctrine. Lindbeck writes: “What Christians need is an Israel-like sense of common peoplehood sufficient to sustain the loyal oppositions that make possible the persistence through time of those continuing and often bitter arguments without which otherwise divided communities do not survive” (“What of the Future? A Christian Response” in Christianity in Jewish Terms, ed. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Signer [Westview Press, 2000], 364, cited in “The Church and Israel”).

Regaining the church as a people formed by God rather than by humanity may be a beginning. Jesus says to us, “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (John 15:16). We do not receive a veto over who Christ calls and chooses. We are simply called to abide together and deal with one another. This perspective is a corollary to what is referred to as the cultural-linguistic turn that Lindbeck (along with Episcopal priest Hans Frei) advocated, and which has been shot through the various elements of the post-liberal or Narrative Theology movement. It is part and parcel of reflecting on the nature of Church-as-Israel, not in a way that supersedes the Jewish people, but as wild branches grafted onto the one people of God, Jewish and Gentile.

In regard to forming the sort of state capable of this sort of resistance to widespread systemic evil, it must be pluralistic not simply to be welcoming but in order that power may be diffuse and located with individuals, institutions, and communities that exist within the state as a whole — and significantly, sometimes, across the boundaries of various states — which then hold the state and each other to account. Such a thick civic culture is consistent with the positive aspects of the vision of America’s founders, and has the happy consequence of helping us resist oppression in measure relative to how many individuals, groups, and communities enjoy equal access to the public square, public space, and public institutions. At its best, the Anglican tradition is both well suited to, and particularly interested in, nurturing both of these realities for the common good of all.

This provides a glimpse of the direction we need to go. But we cannot get there without looking back and unearthing the reality of our historic wrongs. Ephraim Radner notes the importance of acknowledging the wrongs in which the church is or has been complicit as the church, because people have made decisions — even wicked ones — as Christians. In A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church, which wrestles in part with the Rwandan genocide, he notes the way that Pope John Paul II’s refusal to say that the church was responsible as an institution arguably undercut its legitimacy and authority. “In the eyes of many, if the Church will not accept responsibility, in some concrete and identifiable way, then her religion itself is suspect.” Playing this reality out means that “If religious violence is a myth, then so is Christian blessing” (A Brutal Unity, Kindle Location 780 and 882).

Despite the evident success of the church in America, much of it has been built on a deeply flawed unwillingness to address the national sins of slavery and its descendant racialized ideologies. It is not too great a jump to wonder if the clay feet that have lately been revealed across almost all majority white denominations are in fact a result of, and perhaps a judgment on, this unwillingness and complicity. Not long ago, some denominations contented — or even commended — themselves with the idea that it was a progressive/conservative divide that explained the decline of the church in the United States. The decline was confined to the old mainline denominations that were losing adherents and influence because of their Laodicean temperament and cultural liberalism. Ultimately, however, the culture wars have been little more than an extension of and a distraction from these foundational fissures in the American character. The early enlistment of the various churches of the South in the perpetuation of evil, in the name of avoiding violence by maintaining an unjust equilibrium, continued through the civil rights movement — and it is worth asking how such actions may continue today, as a result of the moral captivity of the church. And it is here that I shall pick up tomorrow.

Historians know this feeling. One mentor of mine was fond of saying, “Late antiquity: it’s always later than you think.” Or there are the uses of the term long for the “long” centuries — periods of time that extend from one century into the beginning of another.  Some of us who had occasion to look at family photos over Christmas may have noticed how the early nineties seemingly beg to be termed the “long 80s.”

There are many aspects of this time of year that could help us recognize the porous or murky reality, the multivalent nature, of things we think of as clear cut.

Sometimes this sense could be mundane and hardly worth noting — the moment of realization when you write the wrong year on a letter — at others the sense could be more encompassing. The pandemic seems to have only worsened this latter tendency. In our household, time seems to have dilated and contracted multiple times. Sometimes it has managed both simultaneously, in different arenas of life.

Over Christmas we visited my mother, and during one conversation my wife noted that she hadn’t had any Facebook memories pop up for Christmas 2020. I realized I hadn’t seen any either. The realization about why came to me as soon as she noted their absence, memories flooding back as she finished her statement, “…and then I remembered why.” The why was the 2020 Christmas Day bombing in Nashville. “Was that really only a little more than a year ago?” I thought, also thinking “Could it really be that long ago?” Sentiments brought to you by some mixture of the odd, shocking, and tragic nature of the event, and the realities of two years of pandemic life.

This points us to the essential thing as we look forward into 2022. The thing that people are reaching for through repetitive memes that hold out hope that there is reason to hope following a long December, to say nothing of a long two years, “there’s reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last.”

Upon what can we found such hope at a time when, as an article in the Washington Post put it on Christmas Eve, “Across the United States, an alarming number of people are lashing out in aggressive and often cruel ways in response to policies or behavior they dislike”?

I wish I could say that the angst behind these behaviors were limited to the outrageous instances seen on the news. But in reality, we’re all feeling the wear.  Those who study the effects of extended trauma on our physiology tell us this shouldn’t be surprising. We simply weren’t made for extended use of the physiological resources that get us through crisis. This means that we’re feeling the wear — and showing it — in our homes, at work, between family members, friends, peers, co-workers, and yes between parishioners, and between parishioners and clergy.

I have not been in parish ministry during COVID, but working with parish clergy and lay leaders has shown me that there is intense pressure to get back to normal, or to find a new normal. Indeed, more recently I’ve seen and heard colleagues discuss the challenges of dealing with the pandemic, in late 2021 headed into 2022, and note that it’s even more challenging than during 2020 because we now have all the challenges of evaluation and reevaluation, the extra work taken on during the pandemic (Priests-cum-tech-support anyone?) coupled with the belief/expectation that in other ways the pandemic is over and there’s a return to something claiming the title of normalcy. I have felt this tension myself. And it’s exacerbated by the intense particularity of everyone’s situation. Everyone is making and must make their own calls about safety because it is impossible for one size to fit all.

Maybe the realization that everyone, every family unit, is in a particular situation and has to evaluate their decisions for themselves could provide some relief. Some setting of expectations for those who are in positions of planning for others, for communities.  Maybe. But it’s not sufficient. The push-me-pull-me of parish decision making that exists in the best of times remains, with increased intensity, and drawing out greater and more intense passions.

The one, and most essential piece, of advice I can offer is to encourage you with the reality that encourages me. As we enter the new year, with so much weighing us down, I feel a more intense need than usual to focus on the person of Jesus, the grace of God revealed in him, and the promise of his total victory, still being realized.  The reality of that already, and the anticipation of that not yet.

It is easy to be pulled into a pattern of judging ourselves by what we accomplish, or by that we can’t accomplish but others assume we can or should. In the church — even in one as allergic to evangelism as the Episcopal Church sometimes seems — there is a tendency to focus on numbers and other traditional barometers of success. For some it might be whether or not the fall bake sale happened. Others might be advocating for a springtime parish event that requires many volunteers — without anticipating their own availability to assist. And clergy — I know from my own experience, and from talking to many of you — you may be looking at the attendance week by week, and the pledge cards coming and find yourself discouraged when the numbers don’t meet your expectations, or anxious when it looks like difficult financial decisions will have to be made. As understandable as these desires and concerns may be — and they are understandable! We are called to live by a different set of standards, focused on fidelity, empowered by what Christ has already accomplished for us.

I know that, particularly when it comes to parishes on the edge of financial viability, this is easy to say and hard to do. I understand. I have experienced the uncertainty in my life before that can prompt one of two responses: a continued descent into doubt, anxiety, and fretfulness, or the moment when you look at your spouse and say “We’ll be okay, as long as we are together, whatever comes.” Or you look at your Wardens and say “It looks grim now, and we may have to make difficult decisions. But let’s give our concern, as much as we can, over to God, and prepare ourselves for those decisions, even while we pray and hope that the need will never come.”

For me, this overflowing grace of Christ was highlighted recently in the words of the carol “The Apple Tree.” It was used as an anthem at the funeral of the late Bishop William E. Sanders, and I was struck by its lyrics in a way I’d never been before.  Perhaps it was the context of the liturgy for the Burial of the Dead, but several of the verses stood out. I share them below with some comments and thoughts:

The tree of life my soul hath seen,
Laden with fruit and always green;
The trees of nature fruitless be,
Compared with Christ the Apple Tree.

His beauty doth all things excel,
By faith I know but ne’er can tell
The glory which I now can see,
In Jesus Christ the Apple tree.

The comparison of Christ with a fruit tree that is always green, and always bearing, especially in comparison with the “trees of nature” that “fruitless be,” stood out.  I take this not as a criticism of nature, but of the act of putting inappropriate hope in nature alone. Nature is wonderful. Real apple trees are something to be thankful for — but they bear for a season, live, like us, for a time. If we want a Honeycrisp, we can go to the grocery store. If we want an heirloom variety, we can find an orchard. If we want the fruit that leads to eternal life, we must come to Jesus.

Indeed, as we hear in the second verse, if we search for our security in anything or any person, anything finite, we will ultimately be unsatisfied. In contrast, Christ’s beauty, beyond all things, is something that can be experienced, but never suitably described with human speech — nevertheless, we must try.

In seminary, our pastoral theology professor, the Rev. Dr. Julia Gatta, offered the reflection that pastoral ministry could be a lot like the end of Moses’s ministry. Not that we would be leading people out of the wilderness, but in the sense that most of us would likely toil in congregations without any broad recognition. Indeed, there was no guarantee that we might not till the soil faithfully for years, only to see limited signs of growth, even limited vibrance, only to have a successor — if we’re lucky — come to lead the congregation into a fruitful phase of its life.

I made a commitment to myself then, which I think I’ve largely kept, to take the majority of satisfaction not from the numbers of people in church (not that I didn’t notice), or from the number of items of the parish’s or my resume, but in individual interactions: the opportunities to baptize, an infant or an adult, the grace displayed when a family invites you to the bedside of a dying loved one, the opportunity to pray with people in moments of crisis, or to give thanks with them in moments of celebration. In my position now, even as I don’t work directly in a parish, I still take satisfaction primarily from interactions with individual colleagues, and with the lay leaders in parish and diocesan endeavors with whom I work.

I see that recognition, as well as recognition of the fleeting reality of earthly delights of other sorts, in this verse:

[Quote]For happiness I long have sought
And pleasure dearly I have bought;
I missed of all but now I see
‘Tis found in Christ the Apple tree.[/End]

Regardless of the high or low ebbs of other measures, the opportunities mentioned above present themselves, by the grace of God, and are the essential things of ministry. And because God meets us first with grace in every circumstance, we can rest secure (though I’m not denying the effort to remember it!). We can set aside the anxieties prompted by other barometers, and be encouraged by the more common, less mercurial elements of parish life and Christian relationships, and the life of the church more broadly. Because it is these that are most closely rooted to our Lord’s mercy — which we are called to witness to precisely in these moments. It is the crux of ministry to be renewed by the very elements which call us to most directly witness to the mercy of God in Jesus Christ. The repetitive yet always new feeding of God’s people with God’s flesh, and finding ourselves in the never-failing moments that present us with the chance to share the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ.

It may be that we become weary with the toil of faithful ministry, but often, I think, it is really all that surrounds and confounds the essential tasks of pastoral care that tire us out. The words of the carol, again, may speak to this sense:

I’m weary with my former toil –
Here I will sit and rest awhile,
Under the shadow I will be,
Of Jesus Christ the Apple tree.

With great delight I’ll make my stay,
There’s none shall fright my soul away;
Among the sons of men I see
There’s none like Christ the Apple tree.

I’ll sit and eat this fruit divine,
It cheers my heart like spirit’al wine;
And now this fruit is sweet to me,
That grows on Christ the Apple tree.

This fruit doth make my soul to thrive,
It keeps my dying faith alive;
Which makes my soul in haste to be
With Jesus Christ the Apple tree.

As we enter the new year with it’s uncertainties, and as we await the buds of spring, and pray for the return of parishioners who have yet to return, and strive to set aside the internalized voices of criticism for somehow not accomplishing more, let us rest in the knowledge that we are “frail children of dust, and feeble as frail,” and therefore God has given us only one task: to see Jesus and receive God’s grace and mercy. We are naturally limited. That should not be a depressing realization. It simply means that when our own or others’ expectations drive us to somehow manifest fruit out of a soul that feels worn thin, parched, and dry, we can remember that this fruit is only God’s, we can remember who the tree of life is: “The tree of life my soul hath seen, Laden with fruit and always green.”

Trains, Jesus and Murder: The Gospel According to Johnny Cash

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“We are from Germany and we are looking for the grave of Johnny Cash.” I was bemused when the visitors outside our church office said these words to me, but it was not the last time I would hear them.

In 2010, I was called to serve St. Joseph of Arimathea in Hendersonville Tennessee. The church sits at the corner of Country Club Drive and East Main Street. But that stretch of Tennessee 31E has another name in Hendersonville: Johnny Cash Parkway. Cash was a storied resident of the community and arguably his fame has spread — or at least deepened — since his death in 2003. By the time I moved to Hendersonville, his grave, which is six tenths of a mile from the church, had become a pilgrimage site for many people, remarkably for some from Germany and Eastern Europe, as well as others.

I’ve been a fan of Cash since I picked up American II: Unchained in my senior year of high school. Over the years it’s been intriguing to see the staying power of his music. I’ve observed younger people find their way to it, as I did, and then work their way backwards in his catalogue. You never know who’ll say “I love Johnny Cash.”

In Trains, Jesus, and Murder: The Gospel According to Johnny Cash Richard Beck reflects on what makes Cash’s music enduring, but more specifically, how his music embodies and furthers a particular understanding of the gospel. Beck, a professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University who also studies and writes theology, finds Cash’s gospel faithful, attractive, and relevant for people today.

Beck’s affinity for Cash is experiential. From the beginning of the book, it is clear that Beck and Cash are connected by their concern for and ministry to those in prison. Beck leads a weekly Bible Study for inmates at a maximum-security prison. This prompted him to purchase his first Cash album, At Folsom Prison,“figuring it would be a great thing to listen to as [he] drove out of town on country roads toward the prison each week”

Trains, Jesus, and Murder is divided into four parts, treating the themes family and faith (part 1), sinners and solidarity (part 2), nation and nostalgia (part 3), and suffering and salvation (part 4). An epilogue, “The Gospel Road” closes out the book. The themes lifted up in the four sections are examined in fifteen chapters, each titled with the name of a Cash song, which provides a scaffolding for the chapter. Songs introduce opportunities to reflect on Cash’s personal history, the song origins, and the ways that Cash’s writing was inspired by and reflected on his faith. Beck also offers interesting parallels between Cash’s songs and scripture. Beck unearths from Cash’s music and life, a series of recurring themes, including a focus on regret, solidarity and compassion, the dangers of nostalgia, and most significantly, the deep hope of faith in Jesus.

One flaw in Beck’s analysis is that he overestimates Cash’s uniqueness in writing songs shaped both by Gospel hymns and murder ballads. I immediately thought about the recently released podcast Dolly Parton’s America, in which this other legend of country music characterizes many of her early works as “sad-ass songs.” Some of those, including murder ballads, were traditional, while others are original compositions. I think that’s a fair appellation for much of Cash’s music as well. Indeed, “trains, Jesus, and murder” could summarize swaths of bluegrass, old time, folk and Americana music. And yet, Beck does have a point. Cash may not be the only artist to sing about these things, but as an artist he’s more fully defined by them than anyone else, distilling, and perhaps perfecting, this broader lyrical tradition.

Cash’s association with these themes evokes a kind of nostalgia, but one shot through with solidarity, and pointing toward the Christian hope. Parton and Cash are different in this. Dolly mostly left behind her “sad-ass songs,” connecting with new audiences through a more jubilant vision of hope. But as his life and career advanced, Cash seemed to double down on the tradition. He delved ever deeper, especially in his late career revival with American Recordings, plumbing his history, his identity, roots and place, and especially his faith, offering a sometimes apocalyptic hope from within that context.

In Dolly Parton’s America, Dolly is asked by the host Jan Abumrad where home is. Her answer (paraphrased) is that she lives all over — that the world is her home. It’s hard to imagine Johnny Cash offering the same response. Both Parton’s and Cash’s work seems to pour forth like a spring from the rocks of the places where they’re from, but the streams flow in different directions. And yet, Germans and Poles still show up in Hendersonville looking for Johnny Cash’s grave. For all its rootedness, Cash’s music clearly tapped into deep human experience.

Jody Howard is canon to the ordinary of the Diocese of Tennessee.

In his recent piece for Covenant, George Sumner offers a reflection on an imminently reasonable question before the church: Why not get out of the (legal) marriage business altogether? Bishop Sumner’s reflection was prompted by Beto O’Rourke’s ill-considered and even less well-informed remarks about doing away with tax-exempt status for religious organizations that don’t toe the current preferred public policy line. But it is a question that has been considered for many years, even before the current questions relating to same-sex marriage were before us.

So why not “go European,” as Bishop Sumner puts it? Why not amend our canons so that clergy do not sign marriage licenses and only bless the unions of people already in possession of a valid marriage certificate from the secular authorities? Currently, of course, this would require that they get married by a justice of the peace. A complete shift to the system Sumner describes would take a change in the law in most if not all states.

I concede that the proposal may indeed be the most practical way forward for the Church. That doesn’t mean I like it, but I’ve given up on the pretense that I have to like something in order for it to be the case. This proposal, and indeed the more extreme proposal that churches lose tax-exempt status, either as a result of their beliefs or wholesale through a revocation of the idea of religious tax exemption itself, might actually be beneficial to the overall health of the Church. In the case of marriage, removing the legal question would likely take some of the heat from debates around marriage in the various communions, because only the most religiously committed would even see the point of having a priest bless their union.

In the case of the revocation of religious tax-exempt status, I think that this sort of clear demarcation between church and state might be the best medicine to help American Christians realize that neither patriotism nor, especially, nationalism is part of our faith, and that our baptismal certificate is our most significant citizenship document.

Despite the hope I would hold out that such clarity would be a gift and a means to combat a very clear sickness in the church in the United States, I cannot neglect to pay heed to the fact that it would likely mean the closing of numerous smaller congregations, or at the very least a major shift in the way we do ministry.

Even more importantly, I hear the words of Jeremiah ringing in my head to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile…” (Jer. 29:7). I cannot in good conscience support such a shift in our canons, or a policy shift in our nation to do away with religious tax exemption altogether, for the same reason: it will damage one of the most honorable and wondrous aspects of civic life in the United States: a “thick” civic culture that helps mediate between the sphere of government and the sphere of the private and individual.

I still recall the first time I thoughtfully considered the positive role of government in society, and in securing the rights of the individual. I was in a college philosophy course and the question of religious liberty came up. I was arguing a hardcore religious liberty point, lifting up the freedom of a religious body over against the coerciveness of the state. The professor brought up the case of Wisconsin v. Yoder. This was the court case that established that Amish communities are required to send their children to school through the eighth grade.

At first, I thought this was a clear violation of religious freedom: how could the government compel this religious community to raise their children in a particular way? Then my professor made this point: while Amish adolescents are traditionally given the opportunity to commit themselves to the community or not, that choice, absent at least some guaranteed education, is only really a choice for males, boys being raised with more easily marketable skills in construction and other trades than are Amish girls for the most part. In requiring a minimum education, the state was advocating for the rights of some of its citizens over and against the rights of a communal organization of its citizens. My mind was changed, and I began to see other instances where state curtailment of religious freedom in favor of individual welfare and liberty was desirable. (Another example would be requiring blood transfusions for Jehovah’s Witness children in a life-threatening situation.)

This situation highlights the role of the state as an arbiter not only between the competing rights and claims of individual citizens, but between various groups of citizens. The pluralistic liberal democracy, at its best, is a government that adjudicates between individual citizens and bodies of citizens for the common good and welfare of all. A key aspect of promoting this general welfare is the recognition that a flat relationship between the individual and the government in every situation is, in fact, oppressive and detrimental to social cohesion. Rather than trying to do away with the differences between communities, the state functions best when it encourages communities to be as healthy as possible, while monitoring the welfare of individuals within them.

While he took a tremendous amount of criticism for his lecture on this topic, then Archbishop Rowan Williams’ lecture Civil and Religious law in England: a religious perspective is a good example of a move in the right direction: the recognition of intermediary communities to govern themselves with the overarching law of the community setting outside boundaries, and the state ensuring that the individual liberty and choice of its citizens are respected.

But how does this vision of a thick civic culture relate first to the policy of allowing for religious tax exemption, and then to the question of whether churches ought to allow their clergy to sign marriage licenses?

First, whether the organizations are religious or not, our tax code recognizes the tax-exempt status of organizations that are seen as contributing to the common good of society, and to the freedom of its citizens, in such a way that the state would want to encourage their activities. By encouraging civic groups, including religious organizations, to function without taxing them, the government is practicing a type of subsidiarity. Ad hoc associations of citizens who share common beliefs and goals are empowered to work together for the welfare of their wider communities without the interference of the mechanisms of the state, and without money leaving the local community only to be funneled back in much less efficient manners.

Additionally, encouraging such community engagement through civic organizations, especially religious organizations, has other benefits: they become schools of civic practices and even civic virtue which can then be carried on into involvement in all levels of government. People who serve on vestries and become familiar with the basics of Robert’s Rules are better equipped to go to meetings of county commissions and city councils. People who have negotiated the personal politics of an auxiliary of their church, synagogue, or mosque, are more equipped to deal with the politics of their local communities without succumbing to frustration. At a time when our culture is fragmenting, we need the sort of cohesiveness and practical skill inculcated by such groups more than ever.

Finally, there is one important aspect of religious communities in particular that should not be overlooked in this age of aberrant and extreme ideology. Religious commitment, when coupled with real life connection and community engagement, is an important antidote to extremist ideologies and — especially — to the recruitment of alienated individuals by online extremists. Archbishop Justin Welby memorably called in the House of Lord’s for a better ideology as a key antidote to the murderous ideology of the Islamic State, remarks which he then expanded on in an article in Prospect. The same is true if we hope to combat the ideologies that attract people such as Dylan Roof. The reality is that extremists use the internet to attract people who already feel bitter and alienated from their real-world community, and to normalize extremist ideology while providing a new, virtual community that calls people to believe in and commit evil.

In my state, Tennessee, there have been various periods of limited (thankfully) public outcry against the construction of mosques. The rhetoric was that people were fearful that the mosques would become a place of extremism. Statistically and rationally the reverse is true: if we want fewer people attracted to extremist Islamist ideologies, we should encourage the construction of mosques, and be grateful for the relationships their existence encourages with the broader community. Likewise with churches and synagogues. Our society would be much better off all around if we were finding ways to encourage and expand the existence of local civic organizations, with religious organizations being a special subcategory.

Which brings me back to the question of signing the marriage license as a priest. While I understand the reasoning behind the arguments of my colleagues who say that they will not sign marriage licenses because it makes them agents of the state, I do not believe it is either correct nor the best thing for our society.

It is not correct because the state does not deputize the clergy to perform a function that originates with the state, but instead recognizes what is taking place within a particular community of its citizens as satisfying the legal requirements of civil marriage. The direction is reversed. Rather than saying “go forth and do what the state does,” the state is saying “We see what you’re doing and recognize it.”  Any given religious community may be saying more in articulating the relationship between the two people than the state requires, but they are not saying less. Secondly, if we want a state that rightly encourages a deep and rich civic life, it should be well prepared to recognize the actions of communities of faith within it, rather than flattening everything to a contractual exchange between individuals and the government.

It may well be that we are in an era where the changes Bishop Sumner suggests are indeed the most practical, and perhaps inevitable. If they are, I think we would do well to be aware of what other changes may be on the way, and how those changes may even be good for the Church, but bad for the overall welfare of the city where we sojourn.

Fr. Jody Howard is Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of Tennessee.