Crashing the Idols

The Vocation of Will D. Campbell (and any other Christian for that matter)

Will D. Campbell, Richard C. Goode

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781606081273
  9781498211321
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621892977
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

If prophets are called to unveil and expose the illegitimacy of those principalities masquerading as "the right" and purportedly using their powers for "the good," then Will D. Campbell is one of the foremost prophets in American religious history. Like Clarence Jordan and Dorothy Day, Campbell incarnates the radical iconoclastic vocation of standing in contraposition to society, naming and smashing the racial, economic, and political idols that seduce and delude. Despite an action-packed life, Campbell is no activist seeking to control events and guarantee history's right outcomes. Rather, Campbell has committed his life to the proposition that Christ has already set things right. Irrespective of who one is, or what one has done, each human being is reconciled to God and one another, now and forever. History's most scandalous message is, therefore, "Be reconciled!" because once that imperative is taken seriously, social constructs like race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality are at best irrelevant and at worst idolatrous. Proclaiming that far too many disciples miss the genius of Christianity's good news (the kerygma) of reconciliation, this Ivy League-educated preacher boldly and joyfully affirms society's so-called least one, cultivating community with everyone from civil rights leaders and Ku Klux Klan militants, to the American literati and exiled convicts. Except for maybe the self-righteous, none is excluded from the beloved community. For the first time in nearly fifty years, Campbell's provocative Race and Renewal of the Church is here made available. Gayraud Wilmore called Campbell's foundational work "an unsettling reading experience," but one that articulates an unwavering "confidence in the victory which God can bring out of the weakness of the church."

Reconciled!

Richard C. Goode

In his 1983 novella, Cecelia’s Sin, Will Campbell chronicled the final days of Cecelia Geronymus, a sixteenth-century Dutch Chris-tian who is all too conscious of her inevitable arrest and subsequent martyrdom for her Anabaptist faith. Pressed by time and strangled by the tightening noose of persecution all about her, Cecelia labors night and day to complete a history of her Anabaptist community before it is too late. Although her calling, she believes, is to record for God and posterity a history of the Radical witness, almost daily the executioner complicates Cecelia’s mission by systematically extinguishing her living sources. In the very process of recording the narrative, however, Cecelia slowly experiences an epiphany, a revelation that the facts of the story she so zealously desires to save are nowhere near as important as the dynamic community itself. “Writing the story,” she learns, “is not the Story.”1 Her sin, we learn, is that of many writers, theologians, and especially historians. Too often we presume that our life, both individually and collectively, matters only to the extent that we make history. While we have breath, therefore, we strive to record, capture, and preserve our successes—to chronicle our accomplishments, establish our importance, and prove that we have made a difference. We made history. Should we fail to narrate our story, history will soon forget us, and we will be lost forever. “The writing of the story,” however, “is not the Story.”

The Formation of
an Iconoclast

On July 18, 1924, Will Davis Campbell was brought into the
world, one of four children of Lee Webb and Hancie Bea
“Ted” Parker Campbell. The Campbells’ sixty-acre cotton farm, located in the Piney Woods section of Amite County in southwest Mississippi, was near the county seat town of Liberty. Stretching back to the 1890s, the county had been the scene of two forms of poor, rural, white rebellion: on the one hand, the reactionary vigilante violence of the “whitecapping” terror against wealthy merchant and gentry creditors and their poor black workers; and, on the other, a more respectable economic and political agrarian reform movement led by the Southern Farmers’ Alliance and the Peoples’ Party. Populism was not above racism, however, and in the early and middle twentieth century, Amite County and the Piney Woods region of the state would also distinguish themselves as the scene of strong Ku Klux Klan activity—becoming perhaps the most racially repressive section of the most segregated state in the Union.

In that political setting, Will Campbell grew up in a milieu centered on kinship and a fighting spirit. One hundred years before Will’s birth, the East Fork Baptist Church—the home congregation of the Campbells—had been the site of the second organizing convention of the Mississippi Baptist Association, which opened with a sermon by Rev. Davis Collins from II Corinthians 10:4,

For the weapons of our warfare are not worldly, But have divine power to destroy strongholds.

One year after Will’s birth, the Ku Klux Klan visited the East Fork Church, providing not only a cash donation to the congregation’s work, but also a leather-bound Bible for the pulpit. Engraved into the Bible’s leather cover were the letters KKK. Eventually Will would preach from this Bible.

A sickly child, Will later suspected that around the age of five he had been dedicated to the gospel ministry by his family as part of a deal they struck with God when he narrowly averted death from pneumonia. Will has imagined his father bargaining with God in terms like, “Well, look at him [Will], he’s not worth anything so if you want to pull him through you can have him.”2 At the early age of seven, Will was baptized by immersion in the East Fork of the Amite River. Also, about this time, Will had a second conversion experience. Most of the boys in Campbell’s extended family played at Grandpa Bunt’s house. “I can still see him,” Campbell often recounts. “He always sat out on a tree stump, whittling and chewing Prince Albert tobacco.” One Sunday afternoon the Campbell boys were verbally taunting an elderly African-American gentleman, who had recently been released from prison. “Hi nigger, hi,” the boys jeered. “Grandpa Bunt called us all around him,” Campbell later recalled, “and very calmly said,

‘No Hon.’—he called everybody ‘Hon’—‘There ain’t no such thing as a nigger.’

‘Yeah, John Walker,’ the boys responded.

‘No, he’s a colored man.’

“And I never forgot that. Now, I don’t know why. My brothers and cousins and others, it didn’t seem to affect them. And I’m not saying that it was a Road to Damascus experience, but it was something I never forgot.”3

Along with his older brother and close friend, Joe, and the rest of his multi-generational extended family, Campbell grew up in Depression Era Mississippi. They may have been poor in material things, but they were rich in love and experience; in retrospect, neither “happy” nor “unhappy.” By the age of sixteen, Will had graduated from East Fork Consolidated High School and had experienced, in the Southern Baptist tradition, the “call to preach.” Although reared in a patriarchal tradition, he notes that the women in his life mediated his call to the ministry. He explored preaching while still a student in high school, but his formal recognition of “the call” came when he was seventeen. The East Fork Baptist Church ordained him to the ministry by the laying on of hands. This time the primary men in his life took center stage: his father, his uncle Luther Campbell, cousin D. Elisha Moore, and the local preacher. In retrospect, Campbell has always found this moment defining for his life. Years later he told Kenneth Gibble, “Hanging on my wall is a plain piece of paper full of misspelled words and typos that the Baptist preacher who ordained me typed up on that occasion.” Campbell noted that it “hangs on my kitchen wall, glued on top of my college and seminary degrees and other alleged honors.” “It’s signed by my daddy and uncle and cousin and the country preacher. And nobody can take that away from me,” Campbell asserts. “That piece of paper is my marching orders.”4 In 2008, those orders still hung on Campbell’s wall over the mantle of his fireplace. His ordination occurred, of course, only after he had satisfactorily answered a battery of questions concerning the verbal inspiration of Scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, the existence of a literal hell, and the plan of salvation. That he became a Baptist was no surprise, given that the denomination comprised the entire church-going population of Amite County. The county was so Baptist, in fact, that the principal of Will’s public school led a daily chapel, and on Fridays discussed the previous week’s lesson published by the Baptist Sunday School Board. Once a Holiness family came drifting through, Campbell recalled, but didn’t tarry long in the county.

Filling in one Sunday for a preacher in McComb, Mississippi, Will met Tom Sharp, an executive with Standard Oil, who almost unilaterally determined Campbell’s early postsecondary education. After hearing the young Campbell preach, Sharp simply called Dean Weathersby of Louisiana College and enrolled Will. Although he has confessed that he was “about as prepared for any kind of college work as a skunk is for a garden party,”5 in 1942 Will’s father and Uncle Pur drove him over to Louisiana College, a Southern Baptist institution at Pineville, Louisiana. Here Will got his first taste of higher education, studying at Louisiana College for about a year. During that academic year, Will financially supported himself by working at a clothing store and preaching on the side. Campbell also served as the business manager of The Wildcat, the college’s student newspaper. By 1942 the U.S. was, of course, fully involved in World War II, and Will’s brother Joe had already been drafted. In solidarity with Joe, and in a burst of patriotism, Will waived his 4-D draft deferment—which he considered a “classification for ministers, ex-cons, feeble-minded folk and so on”6—and enlisted in the Army. Although he envisioned himself charging headlong on to hotly contested battlefields, he actually spent his three years of military service as a surgical technician in the South Pacific Medic Corps, assigned to the 109th Special Hospital. Will remembers his initial joy when on August 6, 1945, his unit received word of the U.S. nuclear strike on Hiroshima. Having watched the Enola Gay depart only hours earlier from Saipan, Will had cheered the revelation of the bombing because—as he later recalled—he simply wanted to go home.

Campbell: A Pacifist?

As with many issues, Campbell’s position on this question is complex. In a 1976 interview, for example, Campbell admitted “I am not a pacifist; I am not a non-pacifist.” Either way, he is an Army veteran vocally critical of his one-time employer.

In 1974 Katallagete dedicated an issue to nonviolence. Introducing the collection, Campbell editorialized:

First, if we cannot find it possible to refrain from violence, we can at least refrain from celebrating it, from being proud of it. . . . We can make our national days of feasting and jubilation days of fasting and repentance. . . . To do otherwise is sure and certain blasphemy. Second, we of the Faith, we who claim to take our cue from the Christ, can cease to ask the State on every and on each occasion to tell us when our violence is permissible, when it is moral, ethical and all right. Even as we cease to do so, Caesar will say “But your Christ was not non-violent.” We do not say that Christ was non-violent, at least in our culturally defined use of the term. We say only that he was, and is, the Christ. “Ah, but your Messiah was no pacifist. He took a whip and drove folks out of the house of worship.” And so He did. We are not contending that the Messiah was a pacifist. Again, not as we have permitted “civilization as we know it” to define and interpret. We are contending only that He was, and is, the Messiah. And then, parenthetically, add that it is a long way for sure from a leather strap to chase chicken peddlers out of the church house to dropping forty thousand tons of bombs on a tragic little country on His birthday.

Although he would later become a staunch critic of the U.S. military, these years were formative for him. For the first time in his life Will saw beyond the hegemonic South and experienced authentic diversity. In the military he rubbed elbows with “everything from good solid Cajun boys from the bayous of Louisiana, to a Marxist type from Brooklyn.” He also frequently conversed with Chaplain Stephen Crary, a graduate of New York ...

Table of contents

• Start
• Crashing the Idols
• Preface
• Part 1: Reconciled!
• Part 2: Race and Renewal of the Church
• Part 3: Incarnating Radical Christianity in the American South: The Importance of Will D. Campbell
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index