Tenacious Stupidity

I recently watched the 1988 film Mississippi Burning, based on a true story about three civil rights workers who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964 for trying to help blacks register to vote. As one born and raised in the Deep South, much of this film hit all too close to home. One of the portrayals in the movie I thought most accurate were the sound-byte interviews with the common local people during the search for the three bodies. One man says something to the effect of, “I don’t think those boys were murdered, but if they were, they brought it on themselves.” Some might be quick to observe that helping American citizens exercise their right to vote wouldn’t be an outrageous enough act to warrant being murdered. But then citizens are actually people, and in the minds of many Southerners, those being helped were blacks, and thus not really people (remember the Three Fifths Compromise?), a point made all the more clear when one local woman describes blacks along these lines: “They ain’t like us. They don’t bathe regular and they stink.” Don't get me wrong, by no means do all Southerns hold to this view, but too many do, and it was exactly this type of thinking that created the moral crisis that culminated in the civil rights movement.

I now live in another part of the country and every now and then someone will ask me if many people in the South still think that way? —as if to say, “They don’t really, do they?” In response, I’m always tempted to quote the T-shirt I saw which said, “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in mass numbers,” but that would probably be too harsh in light of Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 5: 21-22, so I just say yes, some but not all, and comment on how tragic it is when people choose to think that way. I was reminded of this all the more when I went back to Alabama to visit family last Thanksgiving. I noticed on my way to the airport an elaborate new monument. Waving gallantly along I-65 between Montgomery and Birmingham was a Confederate flag. I couldn’t read the inscription at the base of the monument, but if it were authentic, I imagine it saying something like, “This Confederate flag monument is to commemorate and celebrate the aspect of our Southern heritage characterized by dehumanizing arrogance and utter stupidity.”

With all this in mind, the whole issue of racism in the South brings an extremely import ethical principle into focus, a principle centered on this question: Is right and wrong ultimately determined by one’s culture or by something greater—something to which (or to Whom) everyone in the culture is subject? (See the appendix of C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man for clarity on this) For Christians, the answer to this question should be as obvious as the sun, but somehow many of us have a hard time seeing it.

A former professor of mine graduated from Yale and later moved to Mississippi. He was, and is, a strong Evangelical Christian and was teaching a Sunday school class in his Mississippi church when he commented on the fact that regardless of racial dynamics in Southern culture, a Christian’s concern, of course, is not whether the man who marries his daughter is black or white (apparently it was an all white church), but whether or not he is a Christian. Mistakenly thinking those in the Sunday school class actually thought like Christians, he didn’t expect this to cause much of a controversy, but for some in the class, his point was not well received.

Keeping in mind that the term Samaritan was, to a Jew, probably more derogatory than the “n” word is today, apparently these dissenting people in the Sunday school class knew more than most about textual criticism and thought that Jesus’ shattering of the cultural norm by his encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4 was a section of Scripture added in to the text by evil scribes centuries after the fact, and thus shouldn’t be heeded. Maybe they thought the same about that part at the end of Galatians 3 where Paul says, in Christ, there are no more race and class distinctions, but all are one in him. Or maybe they just thought that even though Jesus is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe (Col. 1:15-20), allowing one’s thoughts and feelings to be conformed by him and his teaching would not be worth the awkwardness and discomfort of alienation from the culture.

To say that following Christ means one might be required to live at odds with popular culture is much like saying running for President means one might be required to do a lot of public speaking. And though the sentiment of pop culture (outside the South) is typically in agreement with Christians on the issue of racism, there are many moral issues on which the Christian view is anything but popular, and these issues are the points at which Christians decide who holds the ultimate moral authority.

MM