Southern By The Grace Of God

In the South, there's a God for white people and a God for black people.

And for most Southerners, the Sunday morning sermon remains the most segregated hour in public life.

The black God, and this is generality writ in bold, talks about social justice and equal rights.

The white God, as described by the political party in power nationally, sounds like a tedious scold, small and PO'd these days. U.S. senators remind people what kind of sex God considers cool. The Majority Whip of the U.S. House, a Texan, has a plaque in his office that reads: "This could be the day." He's talking about the rapture — Christ's return.

President Bush, meanwhile, seems to work Jesus into most speeches, right down to his pre-election claim that Christ was his favorite philosopher.

Talk of what God wants for his country isn't new, but the fact that most of the powerful people doing the talking are, by and large, from a specific part of the country and familiar with a particular type of religion, is. This down-home political/religious revival has its roots in the South, in the fundamentalist, evangelical movements — the soul-saved, upwardly mobile backbone of the GOP. The numbers point to it. In the 2002 elections, 41 percent of the Republican vote in the South came from frequent church-going white evangelicals. "And those folks voted in higher proportions than comparable people in other parts of the country," says Mark Silk, director of Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.

In the Southern evangelical religion embraced by the GOP, it seems, God and country are right back to a simple stereotype: concerned with the sin of the individual but thumb-twiddling when it comes to the sin and the suffering of society at large.

But the truth is that many white Southerners already live a religious life outside the media image of narrow-minded, pillar-of-salt, often intolerant churches.

"There certainly is a very long history of progressive evangelicalism in the South," says Nancy Ammerman, a Boston University professor who grew up in the Southern Baptist tradition. "Some people think those two words can't possibly go together, but in the South, they certainly do."

Just outside Americus, in southwest Georgia, for example, one of the boldest social experiments in the history of the Civil Rights Movements took place, seemingly unintentionally, in the 1940s and 1950s. In that same small town today, the largest Christian poverty homebuilders' organization in the world buzzes with about 400 employees.

Meanwhile, in conservative Rockdale County at the nondenominational Church in the Now, whites and blacks in equal numbers worship side by side.

These congregations and movements are part of a usually quiet minority, but as the right narrows its definition of what it finds acceptable, the opportunity for religious progressives to add members to their ranks grows. Whether these progressives can achieve the same political clout and attention as their conservative counterparts may depend on their ability to find and focus on a political message. In the meantime, though, history shows they can do just fine at changing the world without worrying too much about the politics.

In southwestern Georgia, you can find the legacy of Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farm — the North Star of what Christianity can be if the Bible is read as an inclusive document. Koinonia started as a simple, unintentionally radical Christian commune based on the quaint idea that all humans, created in God's image, are equal. The farm still survives just outside Americus, and for Loyd Allen, a professor of church history and spiritual formation at the McAfee School of Theology with Mercer University, it serves as a lesson of sorts: Judge influence instead of numbers.

Founded in 1942, Koinonia may well have been the most daring social experiment in the South during the last century — blacks and whites lived together on a farm, broke bread at the same table and got paid the same wages for the same work in the fields. It is impossible to overstate how extraordinary this project was.

It was first a barely noticed oddity. But as federal pressure for the end of segregation mounted — not to mention the fact that blacks getting the same wages as whites forced other local farmers to offer more money to their workers — Koinonia became the target of white anger. Their roadside produce stands were blown up, shots were fired into their homes and the entire town boycotted the commune. But Jordan persevered long enough to see Koinonia reinvigorated by the counterculture movement of the 1960s. And then he met Millard Fuller.

Fuller, a lawyer and entrepreneur, became a millionaire before he hit 30. But as his daughter Faith explains it, because of a crisis in his marriage, he "decided to give away all the money and just start over from scratch, because [the couple] just felt they had gotten off track, and the money was poisoning their relationship."

Together with Jordan, Fuller hatched the idea for Partnership Housing, an idea to build simple, decent homes for people who lived in the shacks of Sumter County. Jordan died as they neared completion of their first house in 1969, but from that friendship came Habitat for Humanity International. And from those first few homes in Americus, and still more in Africa, grew what Fuller thought could be a movement.

The group may be the single most powerful expression of Southern religious progressivism. Take the trip down Ga. Highway 49 and it's striking how both out of place and completely at home Habitat's downtown headquarters are. You pass church after church, the perfect white geometry of country Methodist spires, tattered, paint-thin Pentacostal houses and even a hand-painted sign that points to a group of trailer homes littering an orange, dirt yard. "Palabra de la Vida" the sign reads.

But you also pass countless yellow ribbons, old Georgia flags with their prominent confederate battle emblem and placard after placard reminding drivers to "Support our Troops."

Then you pull into the Habitat parking lot and it's all peace movement bumper stickers and even the occasional equals sign of the Human Rights Campaign. Inside the headquarters, two facades of simple country homes stare at one another above you as you enter the lobby. It's a Cracker Barrel-ish greeting, but the imposing red building on one of the town's main arteries is a symbol of Habitat's growth and power.

In 1984, former President Jimmy Carter got involved, raising the profile of the group, and a decade later, Habitat had a $47-million budget, was in 46 countries and had built 30,000 homes. This year, Habitat is in 89 countries, with 150,000 homes built and a budget of $190-million, and that doesn't count autonomous affiliates that bring the figure to somewhere between $500-million and $600-million.

In Habitat, you find what Guy Kent, pastor of Atlanta's Epworth United Methodist Church, describes as the devotion to social action as the way to bring the unbeliever to Christ.

"We have a policy that we don't condone proselytizing, which means that we don't encourage people in Habitat events … to try to convert someone else," says Robin Shell, senior vice president of programs for Habitat International. There is only a prayer service and the presentation of a Bible once a house is completed.

"If you take a poll of people who have been converted to Christ, particularly, say, people who were not raised in a Christian home … I'd think nine times out of 10 it's because of seeing actions or seeing the love of Christ in somebody else rather than being preached to," Shell contends.

Habitat is what's known as a Christian ecumenical organization, and it's open to all faiths and even non-believers. But Habitat hasn't been as successful recruiting volunteers among conservative evangelicals — maybe a hint at the core political differences that parking lot betrays — according to Chief Operating Officer David Williams.

"I think sometimes it's the language that we use," Williams says. "I think it's not being afraid to use the Scriptures to convey the message. Some of the most startling and striking parables Jesus ever told were about the poor, so as a Christian, how can you ignore that?"

He cites the parable of Lazarus: "Here's this rich man, and he's got this beggar, Lazarus, at his doorstep. There's nothing in that parable where Jesus said that the guy was the cause of the misery of Lazarus, that he kicked him every time he saw him, that he berated him. He didn't do any of those things. He just didn't see him.

"You know Christ talks so seldom about the judgment … but he gave a very graphic, detailed story of what it's going to look like, and it all had to do with 'When someone was hungry or thirsty or in prison or naked, whatever you did, you essentially did to me.' "

Shell emphasizes, though, that Habitat isn't a ministry that seeks to exclude or degrade the wealthy for having money — a class war argument often used in political battles by conservatives against liberals.

"Jesus emphasized … that the economically rich are equally important and equally loved by God as the poor … and we provide the economically rich with the opportunity to experience spiritual blessing by divesting themselves of what they don't need to help others," Shell says.

What Shell is talking about is crossing a traditional divide, one that Bishop Jim Earl Swilley talks about at his ministry in Rockdale County, east of Atlanta.Conyers, Ga., might be one of the last places you'd expect to find a congregation that's nearly evenly split between whites and blacks, but there it is. Out along I-20, Church in the Now, looking more like a skating rink or auditorium than a sanctuary — a design by design, Swilley says of his non-denominational house of worship.

He has the tan, blow-dried and perfectly pressed visual sharpness of a televangelist, which he is in a sense. The striking thing about Swilley's sermons is the audience that's paying rapt attention — a mix of all colors.

Swilley, who is consecrated by the International Communion of Charismatic Churches, has made racial reconciliation a point of his 18-year-old ministry. That has included being outspoken on the Georgia flag — a stand that, two weeks ago, cost him a sign in his church parking lot and some shrubs as a vandal drove into the canopy at the church.

"What Jesus talked about was the kingdom of God, which has now de-evolved into this thing we call Christianity, which is a mutant," Swilley says. "It's an aberration. It's not at all what Jesus came to do. He really challenged the religious system, brought about social change, made everybody on an equal plane, including women. … Now Paul definitely had sexist issues, but Jesus did not."

Swilley, whose church has about 2,500 members, says he feels like two Gods have developed, one for whites and one for blacks — a conservative Republican concerned only with morality for whites, and a crusader for social justice for blacks. His idea is that there's only one God.

"I don't feel like I'm some kind of racial activist," he says. "I feel like the ministry is supposed to change mindsets. What I like to say is that God has put us there to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

A statement like that makes Swilley your prototypical evangelical progressive. But what does that word — progressive — mean in a largely white, Protestant evangelical context?

It helps to consider its opposite. Conservative fundamentalism finds its roots in a reaction against the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, says Paul Harvey, a history professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and author of Redeeming the South. "It captures the older traditions of hierarchy. [That] without it, humans can't govern themselves."

Later, in the 1870s, conservative theologians reacting to the Social Gospel, Darwinian evolution and psychology better defined fundamentalism as they applied to the Bible. It was a particularly anti-intellectual reaction that has always found a receptive home in America.

These theologians held that "Jesus had truth in a solid block, which he passed to his disciples," Allen says. "The truth was static." And the truth was contained within the pages of the Bible, inerrant and infallible.

Evangelicalism itself is defined by the idea that converting the individual creates the moral society, as opposed to more "mainline" denominations that actually work with government to reform what already exists, says Kathleen Flake, a professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville.

The reason? It has to do with the conservative, inward-looking doctrine of the "spirituality of the church." This meant that "the concern of organized Christianity was with the salvation of the individual rather than with the social realm," Miami University of Ohio professor Peter Williams states. "The conservative political and cultural implications of this idea were profound" in that they reinforced the class and racial hierarchies.

"Progressive" proves somewhat more slippery when applied to religion. For some, it's an outlook that, unlike progressive politics, could still include anti-abortion and pro-death penalty views.

Scholars and ministers who are asked what it means generally have similar reactions. "In the case of Epworth, it means being accepting of everybody without question and reaching out to do things for people," says Kent, who opens up his sanctuary to a gay church on Sunday nights, among a number of outreach programs.

"Progressive theology is marked by a sense of openness to the way God is revealed in the world," says Christopher Copeland, associate pastor at Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, Ga., which the Southern Baptist Convention kicked out after the Georgia Baptists found that Oakhurst was too accepting of homosexuality. "It means that God may look different today than [God] looked 10 years ago."

There also seems to be a conviction that "people change more by seeing how we act than by beating them over the head with a Bible," Kent says, and that means a devotion to service to the poor and neglected.

But as noted before, conservative Christianity didn't just grow from the native Southern soil like some pine sapling. As Williams and Flake note, the Methodists and Baptists spilling down the Shenandoah Valley to convert the frontier in the early days of the Republic didn't hike into the Southland towing conservative, evangelical fundamentalism, Bibles in hand and the rationalization for slavery on their tongues. Indeed, "they associated [slavery] with aristocratic self-indulgence," Williams writes.But two things occurred as missionaries recruited souls for the church. One, to attract more adherents, the missionaries softened their positions on slavery. Two, "as … they converted more and more people, they were converting slaveholders," and they began tailoring their beliefs to accept slavery.

Eventually, clergy cherry-picked particular biblical passages to reinforce the hierarchy of white over black. They read "God's curse on Noah's son Ham and his descendents as condemning the black race to a perpetually inferior status (Genesis 9:25)," Williams states in America's Religions.

It was this teaching, the pro-slavery nod by religious institutions, that split the Protestant congregations by region — the Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists — in the middle of the 19th century. (The Methodists reunited in 1939, the Presbyterians in 1984, but the Baptists have remained fractured.)

But even this didn't happen without challenge. Flake notes a legal debate in the early 19th century over whether Methodist preachers should be allowed to preach to slaves, because it was seen as disruptive to the social order.

Later, there were people like ethics professor T.B. Maston at Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, who in the 1940s "was teaching a generation of people who would become the Southern Baptist leaders, the progressive leaders in the '60s, who would try to move the Southern Baptist Convention toward the civil rights agenda and eventually toward a more inclusive agenda overall and who, of course, got defeated," Ammerman says, of the denomination that only recently apologized for its counterproductive role in the Civil Rights Movement.

"It was seen as "Why rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic?" Harvey says. The end times were near anyway, or so the thinking went.

But that changed in the 1970s, with the rise of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. There's a line in Falwell's autobiography that echoes the sentiments of black preachers during the Civil Rights Movement who began to influence politics. He said that if black ministers can be politically active, he could do it, too, and "he was heavily criticized for it at first," Harvey says.

Then in 1979, the right wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest American Protestant denomination, with more than 16 million members and 42,000 churches, won the organization's presidency. They haven't lost it since, purging from its leadership, academic and missionary ranks, moderates and liberals who don't believe in the conditionless inerrancy of the Bible.

In 1990, the last moderate candidate to head the SBC, Daniel Vestal, ran and lost overwhelmingly. The defeat caused a split in the convention that continues to this day.

Vestal, formerly a believer in the inerrancy movement, who was simply willing to cooperate with more progressive thinkers in the church, now heads the growing Atlanta-based Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. It joins groups such as American Baptist Churches and the Baptist Joint Committee as liberal to conservative organizations that have broken from the rigidity of the SBC.

"It's always about who is unworthy, who needs to be excluded," says McAfee's Allen. The Southern Baptists made all of their missionaries sign a creed about their faith. "Baptists don't do creeds. Congregational polity has been the tradition, congregational autonomy."

Harvey, from the University of Colorado, says that the focus of fundamentalists is now on gender — Paul's admonishment that wives should submit to their husbands, for example. This doctrine has even turned up in the records of some judicial candidates appointed by George Bush. "In my mind, it's replaced race as the fundamental issue of hierarchy."

The one sure thing about the increased political strength and prominence of Southern-style religious conservatism nationally is that it will make progressives stand out in stark relief on their native soil.The new and ever narrowing brand of conservatism has "increased the overall availability of the kinds of people who would be religious progressives," Ammerman says. "One of the things that happened with the breakup of the SBC is that it sort of forced the progressives out of the closet, so to speak, and made it possible for some churches really to identify themselves rather explicitly as progressive churches."

The problem is that while religious conservatives continue to gain cohesiveness, partly because of the involvement of the Republican Party, progressive politicians largely ignore progressive evangelicals, unless, of course, they're black. Black ministers and urban churches remain an incredibly important organizing force for liberal and moderate candidates. But white, religious progressives remain a diffuse and oft-ignored group, despite their apparent affinity with a more liberal political agenda.

"It's not a strategic target for Democrats. That's true," says Donna Brazile, Al Gore's campaign manager in 2000, of white evangelicals. "Start with the pollsters and how the pollsters find that basically this is a Republican-leaning group. And the pollsters tell you that white, male hunters are a Republican-leaning group and nobody goes out and tries to talk to them unless they're hunters. The same is true of Christian evangelicals."

In a telling exception, the last two Democratic presidents, both from the South, didn't shy away from talking authentically about religion, although the Lewinsky affair tarnished Bill Clinton's message.

But perhaps cohesion of religious and political conviction will find expression in the sort of simple, universal message that helped draw Faith Fuller, Habitat founder Millard's daughter, back to work for her parents' organization. They call it the Theology of the Hammer.Faith Fuller, 36, might not be your typical Habitat employee. The former television reporter came back to Habitat to chronicle the building of homes in Africa during a self-imposed break in her career, and instead of moving on to a job as an anchor with a television station in West Virginia, Fuller decided to stay with her parents' organization. She recently completed a compelling documentary about Koinonia and the racial terrorism that plagued Jordan and the commune.

But Fuller doesn't share her father's profound beliefs in the divinity of Christ.

"I don't believe in the resurrection," Fuller says. "In the South, they just kind of make the assumption that you believe all these myths, these things that make no sense in your head, but somehow you're just supposed to go into church and put your stupid cap on and believe these things."

Still, she was drawn to the Christian group in a way that may prove prescient for religious progressives trying to connect to political secularists. She was looking for meaningful work.

"We might differ on everything theologically, socially, religiously … but the one thing that we can agree on is the hammer," Fuller explains. "Everybody can agree that you have a group of people falling through the cracks who need a good place to live. You've got children living in poverty, and they need help. Everybody can get together and say, 'Let's build this family a house.' You can be anywhere in your journey in life and agree on that.

"It kind of takes over people's hearts, it really churns up this idea that 'We really can change the world.' I mean, you can watch it happen in front of your own eyes. You can see a house go up. You can see a family being changed in front of your own eyes, and it sparks the imaginations of people. My father thinks that it's a movement. From everything that I've seen, that seems to be true."

Kevin Griffis is a staff writer for our sister paper in Atlanta, Creative Loafing, where this article first appeared.

This article appears in Jul 10-16, 2003.