BLOG 5/26/14. “HOW DID YOU BECOME SO PROGRESSIVE?”
On this Memorial Day, I got asked the question again: “How did guy such as you, with your essentially traditional and conservative Christian-theological beliefs, and a product of the segregated South, become so progressive in your social, economic, and political understanding? How did you get that way?” That question was one that provoked the writing my memoirs recently and was asked by a much-admired civil rights leader and friend of mine. But it was first asked some fifty years ago by a Davidson College contemporary of mine, who had become the president of a prestigious theological institution in the northeastern United States—that, after our modest and somewhat unimpressive neighborhood church in Durham had become racially integrated and engaged in significant ministries among folk struggling with poverty.
His question was asked in the context of our mutually accepted friendship, and without any intent of belittlement: “Bob, I don’t understand how a ‘fundamentalist’ church, such as yours, can have almost the only significant social action ministries in our synod [regional Presbyterian structure]. How do you explain that?” By that time I had begun to realize that I was on a different track than so many of my conservative friends, and there were reasons for that.
I was ordained as a Presbyterian pastor sixty years ago this summer, which was shortly after the Brown-vs.-the Board of Education deliverance by the Supreme Court. I was ordained to become the campus minister for the Presbyterian Church at North Carolina State College (not yet a university). North Carolina State was, at that 1954 date, still an all-male and segregated institution (though there were many internationals there). The deliverance was fine with the mid-western Ag school faculty, but difficult for most of the southern-bred faculty. It was all new to me.
So what transpired in me to form me into what I presently am? It could be partly because students ask all the difficult questions and they questioned segregation. It could be because of some incidents on campus that caused me to make decisions based upon my Christian conscience. It could be that in planning for our synod conferences for university students, which synod included several all-Black schools, that we had a difficult time finding a church conference center that allowed for integrated meetings. It may have been that students pushed me into reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer as he struggled with the “religious Christianity” conformity of the German church to the Hitler regime, or it may have been the more provoked by some of the international students who came from the middle-East and had been told that America was a racist nation by some of their Communist influences in their homelands.
Whatever it was, it had the cumulative effect of causing me to see what I had never had eyes to see and understand. I had never known any African-American adults on a friendship level until I was in my mid-twenties. But even more, my own Reformed (even Puritan) conviction about the centrality of Jesus Christ in history, and about the authority of the Bible as God’s revelation of himself and his will … and my role as a teacher of those very scriptures, brought me face to face with God’s passion for justice, for the care of strangers, for the poor and oppressed, and for the sick and homeless, together, caused me maybe “to be hoist on my own petard.” So that by the time I arrived as the pastor of the church in Durham it was Jesus and the scriptures that became my expression of leading the congregation in areas of racial segregation, and in the troublesome issue of the Vietnam War. It has gotten more wild in the years since.
So as primarily a citizen of God’s kingdom, I am also a voting and tax-paying citizen of these United States, which means that issues such as minimum wage, immigration, health care, etc. are those issues to which my faith speaks. Such is my answer to the questions of my “progressivism.” [If these Blogs are helpful to you, invite your friends to subscribe.]
