“The one persecuting us then, now preaches the faith he destroyed” (Gal 1:23)

Listening to the current public debate about the proper course of action to be taken by or regarding the governor and the attorney general of Virginia, both of whom admit to having worn black-face in the 1980’s, I am struck by a failure to examine the situation in terms of the complex history of white culture in the South in the era immediately following the huge gains of the Civil Rights movement of the late 1950’s and 1960’s. This failure represents a missed opportunity to appreciate the dynamic process involved in “unlearning” racism. That is, the public discussion assumes a binary framework for the behavior of Southern white men born in the last years of the Jim Crow South: strictly racist or absolutely pure. In turn, this failure deprives the culture at large of insights into how the conversion of American society must and can be continued.

I am particularly sensitive to the issues presented by this topic because I am roughly the same age as the two men at the center of the controversy. Like them, I was born at a time and in a place endemically racist.  Racism was almost literally in the segregated water we drank. As I have discussed briefly in another entry in this blog (“Tireless Exertions” 1/16/17), with the few exceptions of those whose parents had already undergone this transformation, as Southerners in my generation came to moral consciousness, inertia alone could have propelled us all to continue the attitudes and behaviors of previous generations. Some of us, however, and to various degrees, began to recognize the contradictions between racial discrimination and the Gospel message that Christ died for all. Looking back on myself, I do not remember when my thinking began to diverge from the prejudices and assumptions of my parent’s generation. I know that by the time that I entered high school, my basic convictions concerning the equality of all human beings, all children of the one God, had set.

Christian theology teaches that conversion begins at some point but continues (“sanctification”) throughout one’s life.  That is, one does not suddenly, at a single moment, take on the image of Christ; one matures and develops toward that image, never fully reaching it in this life (for the mathematically-minded, an asymptote, as it were). As it turned out in my life, racial prejudice is one area in which I had, and probably still have, yet to further mature. I never wore black-face, but I remember painfully an occasion in my late twenties when I casually, unthinkingly, justified an action by declaring myself to be “free, white, and twenty-one,” an expression I had heard all my life. On this occasion, however, hearing myself say these words, it dawned on me that I had just claimed the right to act because I was not “slave, black, and underage.” I am quite certain that other expressions, assumptions, and potential reactions lie buried somewhere in my psyche, unexamined, waiting to surface and remind me that I have not yet attained my goal.

Early in his career, Saul of Tarsus, later to be known as the Apostle Paul, out of zeal for his Jewish faith, persecuted members of the early church (see Acts 8-9), securing the imprisonment of men and women because of their faith in Jesus Christ. On the road to Damascus, where he intended to continue his program of persecution, Paul encountered the Risen Lord.  Thereafter, he became, not just an apostle, but the apostle to the Gentiles. Once zealous to maintain the purity of Judaism, he now preached that even Gentiles had access to God’s grace. Indeed, he proclaimed the Good News of “one body and one Spirit…one hope…one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all…” (Eph 4:4-6).

I do not intend to express an opinion about whether Virginia’s governor and attorney general should resign from office, but I think it is important to consider that virtually any Southerner born in the 1950’s or 60’s who is not now positively racist will have chosen to reject the attitudes that dominated the South during his or her youth. These people “converted,” but, like me, still had to undergo “sanctification.” Like me, they may still have opportunities for growth.

I hope that, as a society, we do not waste the opportunities this discussion presents to us. First, we can admit that, even though great strides have been made in race relations in this country, the events of the mid-1960’s (our national “conversion,” if you will) did not bring us to full maturity. Indeed, as recent events in Charlottesville (ironically, also in Virginia), for example, have shown, whole segments of our society remain unrepentant, unconverted. Second, I would wager that very few of us – regardless of race – can boast of perfect pasts, absolutely clean of racial slur, insensitive remark, or ill-conceived comedy. Third, we can recommit ourselves to individual and national “sanctification” as a process of growth and not of purification by purging. Who of us can cast the first stone?