KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Although the social revolution led by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. grew out of the black church, from even the earliest days of the movement there were white foot soldiers, too. King initially came to national prominence while leading the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, where he was serving in his first job as a local pastor, and working closely with him there was a young white pastor named Robert Graetz.

REV. ROBERT GRAETZ: We were here because God brought us here, and in a very real sense this changed the character of the movement here, because it was not totally black then from that point on.

LAWTON: Graetz is now 82 years old and still active in the Montgomery community.

GRAETZ: Fifty years ago we were a praying people…

LAWTON: On this day, he’s participating in the unveiling of a new sign marking a site that was important during the bus boycott. He and his wife, Jean, still work for civil rights, reconciliation, and a vision that began more than 50 years ago, a vision they shared with King called “the beloved community.”

GRAETZ: We are all different, but we are still all together in this one relationship, and the key to that kind of a relationship was respect, which means I look at you and I say, you know, “I know that you have value. God put value in you.” You look at me and you say the same thing.

LAWTON: Graetz had grown up in an all-white Lutheran community in West Virginia. While he was in college in Ohio, he become aware of the injustices faced by African Americans and had what he calls his “race relations awakening.” Graetz and his wife got involved in ministries in black communities, and when he finished seminary, Lutheran officials asked him to pastor an all-black congregation in Montgomery.

GRAETZ: We had very few black pastors because we require the seminary training for all pastors. That’s why they needed some white pastors like me to serve in largely black congregations.

LAWTON: The young Graetz family arrived in Montgomery in 1955 and began their work at Trinity Lutheran Church. They soon met a neighbor named Rosa Parks.

GRAETZ: When we got into town she was one of the first people outside of the congregation that we met. She was the adult advisor to the NAACP youth council which met in our church, so we saw her regularly.

LAWTON: Graetz was also introduced to another new pastor, King, who had arrived the year before.

GRAETZ: I decided that anybody who sounded as smart as he was and was articulate as he was, and had the name Martin Luther, I had to get to know him better.

LAWTON: He also came to know the struggles of his congregation because of segregation and discrimination on every front, including the public transportation system.

GRAETZ: If you wanted to find one aspect of life here in Montgomery, and probably many other cities in the South, where people were really troubled about the way they were treated, it would be the buses. Everybody either experienced bad treatment on the buses or knew people who had been treated badly.

LAWTON: Several local activists, including the Women’s Political Council, had been talking about staging a boycott. Then came the final catalyst: the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat. When a boycott was called for the following Monday, Graetz says he faced an ethical dilemma because of concerns about what his denominational leaders might think.

GRAETZ: The church officials knew that I had been involved in things like this, and they said, “We want you to go to Montgomery, but you have to promise not to start trouble,” and so the question was, would my taking part in the bus boycott be starting trouble? Jeannie and I prayed about that a lot and finally decided the only way that I could continue to be the pastor here was to take part in the activities that our members were taking part in, and from that point on we were totally a part of what was happening.

LAWTON: On Sunday morning, Graetz stood before his church and expressed full support for the boycott.

GRAETZ: And I said, “I want you all to stay off the buses. I’ll be out in my car all day long. If you need a ride, I’ll be glad to come and take you wherever you need to go.” So I spent the whole day just driving people around, picking people up on the street, whatever.

LAWTON: Community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to oversee the boycott. King was the chairman, and executive committee members included Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, as well as one white member—Robert Graetz. Graetz says it was exhilarating to be part of it all.

GRAETZ: The feeling among the people across the community was that we were doing something that was changing the world.

DR. HOWARD ROBINSON (Archivist, National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture at Alabama State University): The Graetzs were really like one of the very few white people in Montgomery who took a very overt, obvious position in support of the boycott, and they suffered because of it.

LAWTON: The Graetz family became targets of the Ku Klux Klan.

GRAETZ: People would call us up and say, “I see your children out in the yard there. Are you sure they’re okay out there?” And the children would be in the yard, so that we knew that there were people who were looking at what was going on.

JEAN GRAETZ: I was scared to go out and take the trash out, because I knew that these people had been around our house and put sugar in the gas tank and slashed our tires, and I didn’t feel safe outside at night.

LAWTON: Their parsonage next to the church was bombed twice, once while no one was home, and once in the middle of the night when everyone was sleeping, including their nine-day-old baby. The house sustained some damage, but no one was injured. Supporters later planted a tree in the crater where the bomb went off. Graetz says he and his wife wrestled over the impact on their children.

GRAETZ: It was okay for Jeannie and me to put our lives in danger, but did we have the right to put our children through that? And we finally decided that we couldn’t control that—that God had brought us here, the children were in God’s hands, and if God wanted them to be protected, that would be his job.

LAWTON: Jean Graetz says African-American friends and sympathetic white supporters gave them strength.

JEAN GRAETZ: I felt that the Lord had put a circle of love around us, because we had wonderful friends, and I knew God’s love was around us, and I just pictured this circle around us so that the hate from the people that didn’t like us couldn’t get through.

LAWTON: Graetz says the civil rights movement had a strong spiritual underpinning. The weekly mass meetings held in support of the boycott were basically worship services, full of prayer, sermons, and lots of singing of traditional hymns.

GRAETZ: These hymns oftentimes took on new significance because of how they related to how people related to one another in the movement. Bible verses which we would think of—oh, that’s a nice thought—became deeply moving to us because of what we were going through here.

LAWTON: Graetz says this reflected the theological tone set by King.

GRAETZ: In effect, the church in the black community was reinterpreting what the Bible said about how human beings ought to treat one another, so that it was the black Christians teaching white Christians what it meant to be Christian.

LAWTON: After about a year, the boycott ended when courts struck down the bus segregation laws. At the last mass meeting, Graetz read the Scriptures—I Corinthians 13, the well-known passage about love.

GRAETZ: And I got up and started reading and in the middle of the reading, again, loud applause, and I thought, they’re not letting me finish. And I looked down at what I was reading and realized that what I had just read was, “When I became a man I put away childish things.” And people knew that we had matured in this process. We were different people.

LAWTON: The Graetzs have remained active in many civil rights causes. They are now consultants at Alabama State University’s National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture. http://www.lib.alasu.edu/natctr/ They give tours and discussions about justice and the work that still needs to be done in order to achieve their vision of the beloved community.

GRAETZ: People will say to us, “We really appreciate what you did,” and our response always is it wasn’t just us. It was 50,000 black people who stood together, who walked together, who worked together, who stood up against oppression. If it had not been for this whole body of people working together, this would not have happened.

LAWTON: And that’s a story they want to keep alive.

I’m Kim Lawton in Montgomery, Alabama.

Tweet

RAFAEL PI ROMAN, correspondent: Even at the end of her short life, when it became harder and harder for her to walk, Flannery O’Connor went to Mass nearly every day at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Milledgeville, in central Georgia. She lived with her mother in an old plantation house surrounded by 1500 acres of pasture and woods. In her room after church she would write all morning, facing the back of a tall chest so that she would see no distractions. Her output was not massive—two short novels, two collections of short stories, a number of essays, and a lot of letters. But today many consider her one of America’s greatest writers. Since O’Connor’s death, more than 50 books have been written about her, one of them by Ralph Wood of Baylor University.

PROFESSOR RALPH WOOD (Author of Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South): Flannery O’Connor is the only great Christian writer this nation has produced.  That is an astonishing fact. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Emily Dickinson, Frost, Stevens: not one of them Christian, at least not orthodoxly Christian. She is a Southerner and a Catholic, she’s not at the center of American culture, and yet she is our only great Christian writer.

Prof. Ralph Wood

ROMAN: What makes her increasing popularity even more surprising in these secular times is the fact that O’Connor was a self-proclaimed orthodox Catholic whose subject, in her words, was “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”

O’Connor was the only child in a respected and well-off family. She was fascinated by birds of all kinds, and when she was a little girl a newsreel cameraman came down to film a chicken Flannery claimed could walk backwards. Later on, her hobby centered on peacocks, a bird she saw as her personal symbol, according to her biographer, Brad Gooch.

BRAD GOOCH (Author of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor): I think she liked it because it was a comic and gawky bird, like herself. It ate her mother’s flowers and kept everyone awake all night, and then at a certain transfigurative moment tails would open, and here was all this beauty which she saw as a symbol of the way her fiction worked, and also in the Middle Ages the peacock was the symbol of Christ and the church so, you know, it all lined up for her and the peacocks.

ROMAN: As a young woman, O’Connor went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, to the exclusive Yaddo artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, and then to New York City and Connecticut, writing all the way. Then, at the age of 25, she was forced to return home because, like her father before her, she was dying of lupus. It was back in Georgia in the 1950s that she discovered the characters for her stories.

WOOD: Not the cotton belt, not the tobacco belt, but the ugly word the Bible belt, and for O’Connor that was the glory of her region. These were the emarginated people on the sidelines of southern life in small, out of the way places.

ROMAN: She wrote that her Christ-haunted characters are so cut off from orthodox Catholicism that they don’t have a guide and that they are actually involved in a do-it-yourself religion that is kind of comical, sadly comical.

WOOD: She said, look, these are my brothers and sisters. They are as unlike me as they can be when it comes to the church and its sacraments, but they are a whole of a kind of sweated gospel, a gospel that takes God and God’s world with the utmost seriousness, and therefore I’ve got to attend to them.  I cannot dismiss them, saying these are people after my own heart, and I want to write about them sympathetically.

ROMAN: Father Thomas Joseph White is a Dominican priest whose conversion to Catholicism was influenced by O’Connor’s fiction.

FATHER THOMAS JOSEPH WHITE, OP (Theology Instructor, Dominican House of Studies): You don’t have baptism, confession, and the Mass, which she says are, you know, the center of her life. You have instead odd and grotesque, historically surprising events where people encounter the grace of God.

ROMAN: From these people her stories emerged. In “Wise Blood” and “The Violent Bear It Away,” and in twenty short stories, she told dark tales of murder and bigotry and madness, of a preacher of the Church without Christ who puts out his own eyes. Some have asked, is this Christian?

WOOD: She says most sins are committed by acts of immoderation, of excess, but she says there is one and only one quality that can never be sufficiently immoderate, and that is the love of God, and she saw in these backwoods, southern, I call them folk Christians more than fundamentalists, that kind of completely radical love of God in their own way.

ROMAN: Talk about the importance of grace and mystery in her work.

WOOD: Mystery does not mean for her a kind of a fuzzy, foggy, gooey something or other. It’s a very specific term for her. For her the word mystery means that which is inexhaustible in our knowledge of God, that the deeper we go in understanding who the self-declared, self-revealed God is, the more there is yet to understand, so that the greater our knowledge of God also the greater our ignorance of God, so that we know only a thumbnail of what and who God is.

Brad Gooch

ROMAN: As the civil rights movement changed attitudes and language, O’Connor was sharply criticized for using the N word in her writing.

GOOCH: She couldn’t change that word because that’s the way those people speak.

WOOD: For Flannery O’Connor, race was indeed the curse of the south in the sense that it was the single-most important test which we as white Christians failed. For O’Connor, the mistreatment of black people is a violation of their being creatures made in the image of God.

ROMAN: In recent years, O’Connor has become a favorite not only of writers and scholars but of artists and entertainers of all stripes, including Bruce Springsteen, Bono, the Coen brothers, and even Conan O’Brien and the creators of the hit TV series “Lost.”

Professor Bruce Gentry teaches at O’Conner’s alma mater, Georgia College and State University, and edits the Flannery O’Connor Review.

PROFESSOR BRUCE GENTRY (Editor, Flannery O’Connor Review): She always talks about waking people up to the mystery of the world, and I think that puts her in a position that is similar to a lot of people in popular culture. You know, they want to create something substantial, but they also want to do it for a popular audience.

ROMAN: In the process of writing his biography of Flannery O’Connor, Brad Gooch says he came to admire her discipline and determination, particularly during the final months of her life.

GOOCH: She was staying alive through writing, and you see it at the end of her life, where it becomes a real race with death. She’s working on stories which she keeps under her pillow in the hospital so the doctor won’t take them away from her. She’s editing one story after she’s had last rites. So all of this seems to me a very clear kind of sense that this is what’s keeping her alive, or why she’s alive.

ROMAN: O’Connor’s admirers wonder what her legacy will be in years to come. Some say that will depend on whether future readers will understand a writer who saw “the action of grace in territory held by the devil.”

I’m Rafael Pi Roman for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Readers coming upon the work of Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) for the first time in this first decade of the 21st century can be forgiven for not immediately recognizing her as a “Catholic novelist.” Many of her original readers in the 1950s and early 1960s did not, on first reading, or even second and third readings, know of O’Connor’s personal Catholic commitment nor read her novels and stories of so-called “backwoods prophets”’ and grotesque Southern Protestant and Pentecostal fundamentalists as exemplifying a particular Catholic sensibility.

Still, readers found O’Connor brutal, broadly brushed stories compelling, and she is well embedded in the canon of both Southern fiction and most “religion and literature’’ reading lists.

But how has she fared over the past half-century?

Revisiting O’Connor after five decades, it still remains difficult to find that Catholic sensibility she and many of her admiring critics insist permeates her work, and other shortcomings—in particular the almost complete absence of attention to race and the civil rights movement that was convulsing her beloved South as she wrote some of her most powerful works—become increasingly apparent with distance. It can even be argued that the signature elements of her style—character as grotesque, gratuitous violence as the bearer of meaning—no longer shock, no longer convince.

O’Connor made her mark as one of the most original and boldest story-tellers of the mid-century South, writing two novels, two major collections of short stories, and a number of other miscellaneous stories and occasional prose. She was also a prolific letter writer and wrote numerous books reviews, principally for Roman Catholic diocesan newspapers. While mining some of the same social milieu as Faulkner—the poverty-stricken, illiterate backwoods and the small town lower-middle-class gentility—O’Connor imbued her stories and novels with religious imagery and themes drawn primarily from a corner of Protestant and Pentecostal fundamentalism, as well as pre-Vatican II Catholicism.

She had a certain contempt for both her time and her audience, believing her present was not only secular but also mired in nihilism, and considering her principal audience to be unbelievers who needed the shock of her paradigmatic and emblematic violence in order to be brought to belief. “My audience is the people who think God is dead,’’ O’Connor wrote in one letter. In her influential essay “The Fiction Writer and His Country,’’ she argued: “The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

O’Connor defended her approach in a 1955 letter complaining about readers who found her powerful and jarring story “A Good Man is Hard to Find’’ brutal and sarcastic for its depiction of the killing of an entire family, including a sleeping baby, by escaped convicts: “The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.’’

But what she calls “Christian realism” seems more like the judgment of a wrathful God. It is a notion of the human situation so distorted by sin that all understanding of the orthodox Christian conception of humanity created in and retaining the image of God is absent. It was hard then and is equally difficult now for some readers to see grace announced with the point of a gun and a mass murderer as a prophet of God in waiting, or to “be on the lookout,” as O’Connor once told students before reading “A Good Man,” “for such things as the action of grace in the grandmother’s soul, and not for the dead bodies.’’

In any version of Christian realism, dead bodies count; they are not soulless plot appendages. As Joanne Halleran McMullen, in her book “Writing against God: Language as Message in the Literature of Flannery O’Connor,’’ has noted, both the central characters in this story are nameless. Neither the grandmother nor the pathological murderer is given a name. The latter, McMullen notes, is called by what he is—The Misfit—not who he is. “He has no Christian name; it is his depravity that has become specifically ‘incarnate’ in O’Connor’s world.” Grace may somehow be operating in the final gestures between the grandmother and The Misfit when she reaches out to touch him but he recoils as if bitten by a snake—a biblical symbol that is the antithesis of grace. But this seems more apparent in O’Connor’s intention than the story’s realization. In her lecture on the story, O’Connor describes The Misfit as a “prophet gone wrong” who, because of the grandmother’s touch, would become “the prophet he was meant to be.’’ But, again, the story as written provides the reader with no clue for understanding The Misfit as a prophet either gone wrong or yet-to-be. Throughout her fiction, O’Connor’s characters seem only faintly realized as human, as people with individualized souls and personalities meriting the author’s or the reader’s sympathy, compassion, or even revulsion.

O’Connor wrote before Vatican II threw open the windows of reform in Catholicism, and it would be understandable if Catholics, or other readers familiar with some of the new, more pastoral accents created by the Second Vatican Council, had difficulty recognizing O’Connor’s Catholicism. But even in the pre-conciliar church, some critics within the faith were quick to denounce O’Connor’s work. Essayist Robert O. Bowen, reviewing “The Violent Bear It Away” in 1961, was fierce: “Neither its content nor its significance is Catholic,’’ he wrote. “Beyond not being Catholic, the novel is distinctly anti-Catholic in being a thorough, point-by-point dramatic argument against Free Will, Redemption, and Divine Justice, among other aspects of Catholic thought.’’ Yet O’Connor read widely in contemporaneous Catholic thought, and much of her book reviewing, albeit mostly brief notices, concerned Catholic theology and doctrine.

To the contemporary reader, O’Connor’s fiction does, indeed, seem to eschew the notion of free will for her characters; they seem to be playing out preordained roles in a cosmic drama of divine anger and judgment. And while there are sacramental elements in her work—at least one story centers on baptism—they appear mostly as ornament, like the comparison of the sun to an elevated host during the Eucharist in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” In part that may be because O’Connor was concerned that her message and meaning not be transparent. While her Catholicism can be veiled, it can also leave her readers confused. In her nonfiction, O’Connor stressed the role of mystery in Catholic doctrine. “The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula,’’ she wrote in “The Church and the Fiction Writer.’’ Too often, however, the Mystery became mystification for the reader.

Perhaps O’Connor greatest lapse, and the element that makes her fiction more of a footnote in the history of American literature than work of enduring value, is her total exclusion of the civil rights movement and the religious elements—black Protestants especially, but also white mainline Protestants and Catholics—that fueled it and that were so much a part of the texture of everyday Southern life in the period in which she was writing. It seems a curious omission for a writer of O’Connor’s sensibility, who sought to be attuned to the action of “grace through nature’’ and who boasted of being a Southern writer, a regional writer, to ignore that drama of biblical proportions being played out in her own front yard. It was a drama with many of the same elements—violence, lynching, castration, rape—that she rooted her fiction in. The critic Ralph Wood is most probably correct when he says O’Connor was no racist, but he fails to explain away her ambiguous attitudes toward African Americans and her contemptuous dismissal of efforts, especially by Northern sympathizers and others, to heed the call of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to join in the struggle to dismantle segregation, in some instances by giving up their lives.

“The South is traditionally hostile to outsiders, except on her own terms,’’ O’Connor wrote in “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South.’’ “She is traditionally against intruders, foreigners from Chicago or New Jersey, all those who come from afar with moral energy that increases in direct proportion to the distance from home.’’ Apparently O’Connor feared that “moral energy’’ might dilute or undo the racial status quo on which Southern identity depended, believing that only time and history would resolve the race issue. In Wood’s view, racism and segregation were, for O’Connor, “a species belonging to a much deeper and more pernicious genus of evil.’’ If so, it is nowhere evident in her work.

David E. Anderson, senior editor at Religion News Service, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on John Updike, Walt Whitman, and American religious poems.

I had the great good fortune of going to a small Texas university called East Texas State College, and there I had the extraordinarily great gift of having had a Roman Catholic major professor in English, and he taught us all the great literary texts of both the American and English traditions. But during my senior year of 1962-1963, he brought Flannery O’Connor to our campus, her only Texas visit—1962. She would die two years later in 1964 of lupus at the age of 39. And in those days every single undergraduate at this little college was required to read A Good Man is Hard to Find, that collection of her first short stories from 1955, and I was just overwhelmed. I was struck by something really strange, something really odd, something also very hilariously funny, and something that took my own world of rural east Texas, small-town east Texas, not sophisticated, not cultured, but turned it into art of the greatest, highest kind. But it was also very deeply Christian, comic-Christian and southern in ways that in some sense defined me, and I said to myself, if I can spend the rest of my life trying to fathom a writer like Flannery O’Connor and other writers like her, I’d have my calling, and that’s how it’s turned out to be, thanks to this one professor at this one small state school.

[Her work] can be appreciated, it can be read as a kind of document of its times, it can be read as an illustration of what a southern kind of literature of the 1950s would have looked like, but it can’t be really comprehended in the sense of grasped in all of its fullness apart from her Catholic Christianity. She said if I did not see through the lenses of my faith I’d have nothing to see. I’d have nothing to say. So quite literally there would be no Flannery O’Connor without her profound, life-centering faith in the Catholic Church and the Catholic tradition and the Gospel. You don’t have to have Christianity to understand Shakespeare, although it would help you understand a great deal of Shakespeare, but if you don’t understand O’Connor in the light of her faith, you really don’t understand her. You misunderstand her.

There can be a kind of reductionism and too quick reading of her in Christian terms. She, by the way, did not want to be known as a Catholic writer; she wanted to be known as a writer, that is to say as a woman whose work had its own excellence, that could stand on its own legs, that did not have to be propped up with the crutches of her faith as if it would crumble without it, so in that sense she is not a Catholic writer, and those that say there’s more to her than simply finding Christ figures—there really are almost none, or of tracing down Christian themes—is to misread her, I think they have a point, and she would agree to that point insofar as she said this: remember that reading literature is not like algebra, it is not a matter of finding x, that is to say the kind of extractable meaning that you can lift out of the text—that’s an Enlightenment notion by the way. Instead, she said once you find x you can forget it. A literary text is the embodiment of a whole way of experiencing the world, and therefore it’s going to have depth after depth, layer after layer, but for O’Connor there is nothing larger than the Gospel, nothing larger than the faith, so that those who say you must not reduce her to her faith are engaged in a fundamental category mistake. When you’ve got, as the Book of Colossians says, Christ present in the presence of the cosmos, then in a real sense the Gospel is larger than the universe, so there’s nothing outside it, grander than it, larger than it, and therefore she could encompass all that counts against it. There’s nihilism running rife through her stories. If you don’t pick up that nihilism, you’ve missed it. If you make a kind of sweet, easy Christian reading of her, you’ve missed it. But you can’t get to the core of her apart from her Christianity.

She wrote two novels, two collections of short stories, one collection of essays, and of course her very important collected letters called The Habit of Being, but out of that small body of work grew a kind of presence that simply cannot be exorcised. You cannot get rid of her, because when you read her you know that no one else could have written that work. In fact, Evelyn Waugh, not knowing that Flannery was a woman, said of her what he thought was something very complimentary but was in a certain way an insult, he said no woman could have written this work. Now Waugh of course got it really wrong, but his point was there’s something strange, spare, odd, alarming, troubling, but above all unforgettable about her. You cannot walk away from these stories saying, well, I’ve got O’Connor down, I’ll move on to something else, and so people keep returning to her. There are more than 50 books written on O’Connor now. She was the second writer in the Library of America series from the 20th century to be included. Faulkner was the first. That’s remarkable, that the second writer in that whole important series from the 20th century was Flannery O’Connor. So there’s something that’s perduring, lasting about her that’s just not going to go away.

The assumption made by most of her readers in the early ’50s when she came into print was that here we have another H.L. Mencken, here we have another Sinclair Lewis, here we have a sophisticate, and above all a Catholic sophisticate, making fun of these dumb, backwoods, benighted, backward fundamentalists who are screaming “Jesus saves,” who are doing wild and hairy things like handling snakes and so forth, so she must be mocking, she must be having fun with them, she must be satirizing them in the fashion of Mencken or Sinclair Lewis. Of course, Mencken called the Bible the nastiest name he could think of, you know—not the Cotton Belt, not the Tobacco Belt, but the ugly word, the Bible Belt. And for O’Connor that was the glory of her region, these people, backwoods—not our contemporary fundamentalists, not those that have moved into political power. These were the emarginated people in the sidelines of southern life in small, out of the way places, never making it into the news, never wanting to get into the news, never trying to push political candidates forward, never using the Gospel for some so-called larger political end. They were, instead, obsessed with God’s own self-identification in the Jews and in Jesus and in the book that is that story of self-identification, and so she saw—look, these are my brothers and sisters, they are as unlike me as they can be when it comes to the church and its sacraments, but they are a whole of a kind of sweated Gospel, a Gospel that takes God and God’s world with the utmost seriousness, and therefore I’ve got to attend to them, I cannot dismiss them, and so she winds up saying these are people after my own heart, and I want to write about them sympathetically, and of course that just stunned her secular audience, as they couldn’t understand at all what she was trying to do, when she was saying I think, in fact, what St. Thomas says. She says most sins are committed by acts of immoderation, of excess. There’s one and one only quality that can never be sufficiently immoderate, and that’s the love of God.  And in fact Thomas says you cannot love God moderately, you cannot love God in a kind of lukewarm fashion. We love God either absolutely or not at all. And she saw in these backwoods, southern, I call them folk Christians more than fundamentalists, that kind of completely radical love of God in their own way.

Now she sometimes criticizes them. Criticism and mockery, of course, are two different things. Mockery is to stand outside of and above and look down upon in a kind of scorn and disdain for that which you think is less than you are. Criticism is from the inside, trying to say, look, here’s something really important but that needs qualification, modification, and so there are stories in which she comes down on the anti-sacramental character of southern folk Christianity, the most powerful of which is called “Parker’s Back,” that story about a man who has—long before tattoos were de rigueur and fashionable—who has the figure of Jesus Christ tattooed on his back, and it is for that reason his wife rejects him. She cannot stand the idea of Jesus being figured image in any kind of incarnational way, certainly not in her church, and least of all on her husband’s back. So [O’Connor’s] critical of the anti-sacramental quality of that kind of southern folk Christianity, but she is not dismissive, never dismissive.

Prof. Ralph Wood

When these people have profound encounters with a living God into whose hands it is a fearful thing to fall, since the Book of Hebrews, they don’t know what to do with it. They say there are no structures, there are no forms, there are no disciplines, there are no sufficient habits in which to place these radical encounters with God, and so they go off and do nutty things. For example, when I was teaching in the south, a fellow up in Boone, North Carolina, decided that since we hear our Lord say if your hand offends you, cut it off, went to the shop at Appalachian State University, got a saw out, and cut his hand off. Well, again, O’Connor would not make fun of that. She would criticize that and say, again, his Christian world did not give him the forms in which to put a radical kind of Christianity, and so she’s critical of that lack of form, but not the lack of substance. Those are two very different things. She admires him for having very great substance. She said those who were such drastic Christians, if they had been in the Catholic world would have wound up in a monastery where they could have had their lives given a certain kind of shape, as they couldn’t in do-it-yourself religion.

Thomas Merton, in a famous phrase, says that the command “love God” has now the force, roughly, of “eat Wheaties.” It’s just another empty phrase. But for O’Connor, “grace” and “mystery” are not empty phrases. They are something than which there is no greater. The grace of God, for O’Connor, she said, must wound before it could heal. What we would want is the kind of grace that comforts, cheers, that always lifts up but never casts down. She says we want a Christianity that’s like a warm blanket, when in fact the Gospel is a cross. Of course, she’s absolutely right about that, so for her grace means the cross entering the world in such a fashion as to bring radical judgment, that is to say wounding, but of course far greater and deeper healing, that is to say, gracious redemption. Likewise with the word mystery: mystery does not mean for her a kind of a fuzzy, foggy, gooey something or other. It’s a very specific term for her.  For her the word mystery means that which is inexhaustible in our knowledge of God, that the deeper we go in understanding who the self-declared, self-revealed God is, the more there is yet to understand, so that the greater our knowledge of God, also the greater our ignorance of God, so that we know only a thumbnail of who God is. So mystery for her is, therefore, an inviting term. It is not a kind of term that stops conversation. It’s not that which is just a puzzle, an enigma to which you throw up your hands and say, well, that’s a mystery. On the contrary. Another translation of the word mysterion in Greek is not only mystery but sacrament, so for her the sacraments invite ever deeper, inexhaustible exploration, knowledge, truth, wisdom, and of course humility, because the more you understand the less you know you really understand.

The violence puts off many readers. A lot of folks encounter it and say I want no more of that. There’s enough violence in the world around us, why go read a writer where in her most famous story five people get killed? Where the protagonists of both of her novels turn out to be murderers, where almost every story ends in death. In fact, she said, I can’t imagine many good stories that don’t end in death, because she says death has always been like a brother to my imagination, and what she meant by that, of course, was that in the moment or the fact of death we bring our lives to the point of culmination, either of course in fullness, giving back to God, like in the parable of the talents, or squandered with nothing to return. So death is for her a moment of immense focus, clarity, and sharpened culmination, and therefore for her death was a thing that Christians are meant to live toward. I point out to my students, we celebrate the saints on their death days, not usually on their birthdays, so that violent death, as it were, is a way of speeding up that process, of making what would often be a long and slow and unprepared-for moment supremely well prepared for, either by suffering a violent death, or alas by committing a violent act of crime, murder, that makes you refocus. But those deaths are never gratuitous in O’Connor. In fact, she had a witticism I often repeat to help students. She said now remember, a lot of people get killed in my stories, but nobody gets hurt. And what she meant by that was that nobody’s tortured. Almost everyone goes to their deaths graciously. Think of that story where even the mother whose child is about to be murdered goes off to her death in a kind of accepting way, so that deaths are never there for their own sakes so that she can make our skin crawl. No one’s fingernails are plucked out, as they are in Dostoevsky, for example, no one made to squirm before being killed, but instead brought to moments of immense clarity about who they are in final, ultimate, metaphysical, theological terms. Now, that also happens to echo the fact that ours is the most violent world in the history of the human species. O’Connor knew well, though she did not live to witness the pronouncement of Pope John Paul II when he called ours the culture of death. She knew ours was the culture of death, that more people were killed by violent means in the 20th century than in all the preceding centuries combined. One of my students calls it the age of ashes, the century of blood, and that there is built into our existence a fundamental violence, an antagonism that causes people to kill each other in mass numbers, usually nation-states and their omnicompetent governments killing their own citizens, but also simply a widespread kind of seething fury that underlies everything, because of course that’s the real mark of God’s absence from our world. That’s the nihilism she thought characterizes our world. So she wanted to confront that nihilism, but not with stories that are nice, that are sweet, that are saccharine, that say don’t be violent, be good.  No, she meets violence with violence, but the violence she meets it with is redemptive violence, it’s the violence where people come to see themselves before God, and always when they see themselves in that form, maybe one exception, they come to the moment of repentance, to a moment of grace, so that a kind of horrifically destructive violence is answered by a wondrously redemptive, constructive violence. After all, the cross is the ultimately violent act, where we killed God himself, so you can’t have a Christianity that isn’t in some sense spiritually violent, in that if we were doing real warfare with all that counts against God, there’s going to be something internally violent, so most of her characters undergo an internal warfare more than an external kind of violence.

Mayhem, murder, a woman being gored by a bull that gets loose, a grandmother being shot 3 times in the chest by a mass murderer, a little boy drowning himself to be really baptized, on and on and on—those stories are also hilariously comic for two reasons. The most obvious reason, that O’Connor simply understands what is really comic about ordinary southern, country, untutored life. Southerners tell stories, southerners make jokes, southerners are just funny, and a lot of her funniest lines are from these characters. For example, at the end of The Violent Bear It Away, where the protagonist is, to his great surprise, confessing that he has in fact drowned a boy, tells this to a truck driver he’s hitched a ride with: “Hey man I just drowned a boy,” And the truck driver says, “Only one?” Well, you see, that’s not a sophisticated humor. O’Connor really liked Mark Twain, a kind of slapdash bang ’em up humor, and it’s usually out of anecdotes like that that things are funny. For example, in her story with the famously ugly title, “The Artificial Nigger,” a grandfather decides to take his son into the city to show him what a wonderfully common and safe world they live in out there in the rural countryside, whereas the city’s going to be really forbidding, and the boy will never want to go there again. He says I’m going to teach you how you never will get lost out here, and the boy says, “Out here there ain’t nowhere to get lost.” So it’s one-liners like that that are very funny. But of course O’Connor, as a deeply Christian writer, knows that comedy is the ultimately Christian category. When Dante writes his great book, he calls it the Commedia, the Comedy, because comedy is a literary form that always issues in life. It usually ends with a marriage. Of course, the New Testament ends with the great marriage feast of the lamb, with life coming into the world, with new birth, with resurrection. Tragedy, though a very great, noble art form, ends in death, and in some sense in defeat, usually in ennobling death, but still in a sense that finally things are to be despaired over. So it’s comic in that ultimate sense, that you can laugh not at O’Connor’s characters so much as with them, because you see—that we’re like them and that we need to undergo the same radical renovation they undergo.

“The Artificial Nigger” has caused a great deal of consternation among her readers. It means that her work is often not taught in high places in American academe, because that word is so offensive, and I confess it is offensive, it should be offensive, but it’s absolutely appropriate to the story and to the characters who use it, just as in Huckleberry Finn the word appears in an absolutely appropriate way by Mark Twain. For Flannery O’Connor, race was indeed the curse of the South in the sense that it was the single most important test which we as white Christians failed. Walker Percy of course says the same thing. She approaches the race question, however, not in the fashion that most people would expect, that is to say I can’t remember many, if any, places in her letters, which were voluminous, her using the phrase “civil rights,” because as Alasdair MacIntyre points out, rights are an invention of the 17th and 18th centuries.  For O’Connor, the mistreatment of black people is a violation of their being creatures made in the image of God. Therefore racial injustice is a horror to God, first of all, and of course to blacks, and therefore to be corrected. She supported, and I think especially in a late letter she supports Martin Luther King, because King is dealing with that question from within the church. King is appealing fundamentally to the Gospel saying, look, this is not how Christians treat their fellow Christians, and I think that was more or less O’Connor’s own approach. She did not like topical art. She says that “topical” is poison, and she meant by that if you set out to make a point in a story, it’s no longer a story. She says I always begin a story with some complex situation, and I ask, how in the world do people get into that jam, and how in the world might they get out? So she deals with the race question, the race problem in her stories in two ways. One, this is what is surprising, by showing the way in which racial injustice is a symptom of a larger disease. That’s a crucial distinction for her. The larger disease is a pandemic sinfulness of the human race in our fallenness, and that means for her everybody is sick. That means that black people who are sinned against are still sinful. That means that civil rights workers who are there seeking to overcome racial injustice are still sinners, no less than their white persecutors, and so she writes about the sinfulness, not so much in blacks, although she has some as they’d say “sorry blacks” in her stories, but she writes about self-righteous racial reformers who can go off and “do good,” so called, away from home, but who cannot attend to the people who are right at their feet. That is to say they cannot deal with their own mothers or fathers or brothers or sisters in such a way as to be redemptive and reconciled. So she’s concerned about the way in which, unless we’re very careful, we divide the world up into what someone said is the easiest moral question of the world, you know. Percy said if blacks are being mistreated, stop mistreating them. That’s pretty simple. But the complex matter is this matter of sinfulness that infects all of us, including, as I’ve said, those who are victimized and those who are trying to liberate them, the blacks, from their injustice. But the other way she treats the racial question, and far more deeply in my view, is to show the way in which black people have often been the means of redemption to white people because of the way in which blacks have born their suffering. In the South, almost all blacks are Christians, and therefore they have acquired something from the Gospel that has enabled them not to strike back, not return evil with evil, not to say “the fire next time.” O’Connor knows that justice delayed is in a real sense justice denied. But she also knows that justice too quickly corrected can mean new injustice created. You can drive out one devil by welcoming in seven devils through the back door. So in these other kinds of stories what she does is show moments of a strange kind of racial redemption, and she was moving into new territory at the very end of her life. The story that was left on her desk unfinished was called “Judgment Day,” in which a black man and a white man are living together, something really radical and strange in O’Connor. But far more importantly to me than that story is the one with the offensive title, “The Artificial Nigger,” where in very subtle ways most of my students don’t get, because it is so subtle, we confront a black Madonna by way of a large black woman standing in a door in the ghetto, and this young boy named Nelson, who’s never been in a church where there’s a figure of Mary, never seen a Madonna, has an instinctive sense that this must be what the mother of God would be like. He doesn’t use any kind of language in this story, but he has an instinctive sense that there’s some kind of accepting, embracing love of God that has this maternal quality that he’s never known. But more importantly, the story ends with a terrific sense in which this grandfather named Mr. Head and this grandson named Nelson have sinned against each other in that most diseased sort of way, the most fundamental way, violating each other, but they’re brought to their reconciliation before a broken Sambo. Now, for a northern audience that will have to be explained, that in the South, less and less now, thank goodness, many whites had black Sambos on their lawn, usually at the gate. They took two forms. Usually one would be a black jockey, holding a lantern, and was thus serving as the light post for entering the driveway. The other and far more degrading is the kind they encounter, and that’s of a black eating watermelon, which of course was a very demeaning way of ridiculing blacks as unworthy to do anything but eat watermelon and spit the seeds. But in this case, the black Sambo has not been attended to well. The watermelon has turned brown, so it’s barely discernable as watermelon. One eye has been chipped out so that you can’t really see that this is an ordinary face, and the back of the statue has come loose from its attachment, and so it’s leaning over, its mouth turned down, its eye chipped out. It becomes a crucifix before which these two terrible sinners against each other are reconciled, and there can be no other crucifix for this white man and this white boy than that figure by a black Sambo. I think that’s why it was her favorite story. It’s her largest embodiment of the Gospel in fiction, in ways that are not at all preachy or sermonic or point-making.

For O’Connor the term sacramental is not a loose and baggy term that applies to any sense of something slightly holy anywhere. It means instead something in the world that has discernable analogies with what lies beyond the world, so you can see visible signs of God’s invisible grace if you have the lenses for seeing them. Those occur in a lot of places in O’Connor’s fiction, for example, very often in a tree line, which in southern Georgia and Florida you often have, that stretches on and on to infinity. That becomes for her a moment of discerning what lies beyond us. The trilling of a bird in a lonely woods makes you pause: Why four notes rather than three? Why that noise and that alone? Again, it calls into mind a world beyond this one. But above all just silence.

St. Thomas Aquinas

Silence was, for her—as St. Thomas said, silence honors God, and so many times her protagonists and characters come to their moment of awareness of who they are in silence, all of those things having the sacramental quality. Now, on the other hand, the word sacrament means something very different. It’s not an adjective but a noun, and of course as a Catholic, for her there are seven sacraments, and that means therefore that sacrament is an act in which something happens, in which what was not present is made present, and the most famous incident about that business is a famous New York dinner party hosted by Robert Lowell and his wife, and a lot of the literati of New York were present, one of whom was Mary McCarthy, the kind of literary doyenne of New York society in the ’50s, and McCarthy had just written a book called Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, the basic thesis of which is how I outgrew the Catholic Church, how it became too small for me, how I transcended my narrow Irish Catholicism. Flannery O’Connor rarely spoke unless spoken to. She was shy. She was not a hail woman well met. She never said a word until Mary McCarthy said, well, you know, I’m not a Catholic, don’t believe any of that hocus pocus. I nonetheless find Eucharistic symbolism useful in my art. There is after all a kind of cultural resonance to bread and wine that people will kind of pick up on it and know that something significant is going on because you’re putting it to symbolic use. Well, Flannery O’Connor, who had not said a word the whole evening, rose to the edge of her chair and said in her best Georgia drawl, which I can’t imitate, “If the Eucharist is only a symbol then I say to hell with it.” In other words, for her this is the real presence of our Lord, and not just for her as a Catholic, but surely for us who are Protestant.  In the 14th chapter of John we read, if you eat of my meat and if you drink of my blood, you have life in you, and if you don’t, you don’t have life in you, and Paul says if you drink of this cup unworthily you risk your own damnation. Well, something is happening, and that’s not just something. It is God’s own real presence, where Christians are meant to feed and find their very sustenance without which we cannot do. So Flannery O’Connor’s life was sacramental to the core. She went to Mass every day when possible, trudging through the deep snows of Iowa when she was a graduate student there, getting out of the YWCA in New York, trudging down to the local Catholic church, because the Eucharist, the Supper, the Communion is the place where we receive into us that which we cannot possibly give ourselves, and whereby the church of course is made into the mystical body of Christ, where we’re transubstantiated no less than of course the bread and the wine. And so that works itself out in her fiction over and over again, though not overtly; usually covertly, because again she doesn’t want the kind of trundle in Catholic sacraments that let the reader know, okay, here’s a Catholic, she’s going to show you something. It’s always sly, indirect, at a kind of acute angle, as in for example the story called “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” where this little girl who’s been eaten up with her own Catholic pride, she’s so proud of being a Catholic as over against these dumb Church of God boys. To one of them she says “you dumb ox, you dumb Church of God boy,” and of course that’s exactly the name for Thomas Aquinas, the dumb ox. He was big, he was slow to speak, and he was often taken advantage of with jokes and the like. But at the end she sees that consecrated host at the service of benediction, not the Eucharist but there on the altar, like a huge sun, and sees there’s life, and in so seeing undergoes her own radical humiliation that becomes her humility.

One can read her as a nihilist. I’ve had students tell me that they read her in high school, they read her as a nihilist because a lot of people get killed. In the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” you’ve got the serial killer who finally decides there’s nothing to do but plug her, kills her, walks off. Nihilism. And O’Connor said nihilism is the gas we all breath, and then she added what is a very frightening footnote. She said whether inside or outside the church it’s the gas we breathe. So there’s nihilism in the church.  The church can become the place where we enact the nothingness of our world, where in a horrifically not just anti-sacramental but sacrilegious way we deny God. So nihilism is never anything she dismisses. She admired Nietzsche for that reason. He named our illness. He had no cure, but he named our illness. In fact, she said, “I read recently about a new technique where we can breed the wings off chickens so they will have these big, fat, luscious chicken breasts that we can eat.” She said, “We are an age of wingless chickens, which is what I think Nietzsche must have meant when he says God is dead.” She never dismisses nihilism. It’s there. However, she read St. Thomas every night 20 minutes before bed. Well, that’s not bedtime reading, if you’ve read Thomas. Thomas is tough. He’s a knotty, dense, complex, rich, meaty thinker who was the great, formative influence on her thinking, but again in a background sort of way, not in a foregrounded sort of way. And she made jokes about this. She said I can envision the day when my momma walks into my room and says turn off the lights, and I say sed contra, on the contrary, light being eternal cannot be shut off, and she added “or some such nonsense like that.” So she made fun of her own Thomism, but she got her Thomism largely through Jacques Maritain, who taught her in his book Art and Scholasticism that art is a virtue of the practical intellect, by which he meant that art achieves its purpose and in that sense gives glory to God by being what it is and not another thing, by being really good art. Not by preaching, not by being nice, not by being cheerful, but by being whole. People kept saying why don’t you write a fiction that’s wholesome? She said I do. I write fiction that’s whole, because there’s nothing extraneous, there’s nothing disingenuous, it all has to be there, and so she felt that her first calling was to practice the habit of good art making, as St. Thomas had taught her, without any necessary regard for how good a person she may have been. She knew she was not a good person, as none of us truly is. Jacques Maritain in fact quotes Oscar Wilde, who says that a man is a poisoner is nothing against his prose, and Chesterton says a man may be able to hit his grandmother at 100 yards. That means he’s a good shot but not necessarily a good person.  So O’Connor wanted to be a good shot. She wanted to create really good art, in the deepest sense, that’s whole, that grasps the fullness of any scene or situation in all of its dimensions, from the depths of the demonic to the heights of the transcendent, and thereby she would glorify God, and she got that from Thomas, especially through Maritain.

She welcomed the Second Vatican Council. It ends in 1965, she dies a year before. She especially welcomed the council’s new emphasis upon scripture. It wasn’t entirely new, it had begun with the institutes in Jerusalem and the Medieval Institute in Toronto. She felt that the church was really digging into its deepest resources, which are scripture and tradition, and that could be only for the good. She was scandalized, to be honest, by a number of Catholics who did not know the Bible. The old Protestant canard that Catholics don’t know scripture was to her all too true. She made it, by the way, her point, not for that ever to be said of her. She knew scripture inside and out. So this new refreshment of the church, this opening of the church’s windows to the world of scripture and tradition was really refreshing. She also wanted the church to really engage modern thought. She did not want the church to be medievalizing in the bad sense of trying to be nostalgic, recovering a lost age. For example, for a while she was an enthusiast for the work of Teilhard de Chardin because she thought Teilhard was offering a new synthesis of classic, Catholic, orthodox theology with Darwinian evolutionary science, that he had brought those together into a new configuration of wholeness. She had lived to see that that was wrong. She lived to be critical to him. In fact, I think she’s making fun of his famous phrase, “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” in her story with that title because what happens there is you’ve got these two rising forces they don’t converge, they clash. So she welcomed the new stress on scripture, she welcomed the new opening to the world of modern thought. However, I don’t think she would have welcomed the radical alterations of the liturgy. She was no classicist, she did not read Latin, she read Thomas in translation, but she felt that even uneducated Catholics could follow the Mass in Latin and that therefore I expect she would have seen no great need to have said it in the vernacular. That’s my suspicion, and I am quite sure she would have protested against the denudation of the churches of its sacred images, at least the radical stripping of so many Catholic churches. Now she didn’t like frivolous decorations. For example, when her Irish Catholic priest in Milledgeville festooned the church in green for St Patrick’s Day she was horrified, because she wanted to make sure being Catholic did not mean being Irish, although she had an Irish name. Being Catholic meant being a member of the church universal and complete. But I don’t think, therefore, she would have liked the way in which so many Catholic churches ceased looking like Catholic churches. Not that you have to have fancy decor  She said for me mass involved the same act if it’s said out of a suitcase in a boiler room as it is said at St. Peter’s in Rome. So it’s not it all has to be in a perfectly aesthetically pleasing context or setting. But I think at the same time she would not have wanted to be folksy and so devoid of reverence. Remember those balloon Masses of the late 1960s? I’m horrified to think what O’Connor might have said about those. One of my friends at Notre Dame, John O’Callaghan, said there are some of those Masses that made you want to go say confession after you had attended them, not before. I think she might have had that same regard.

Thomas Merton compared her to Sophocles. That’s a stunning statement, to say the least, by Merton, because Sophocles certainly is the greatest of the Greek tragedians and a figure that kind of gives us the main texts in some ways of the Western world, the Oedipus trilogy, but I think that’s a bit extravagant, frankly. I think O’Connor would be not too well pleased to be put on that kind of not just pedestal but pinnacle. I would call her a major minor writer. By that I mean someone very important, but not a person of the very—I wouldn’t put her with Dante or Shakespeare or with Sophocles. I’d put her with people like, for example, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great Jesuit poet of the 19th century, Evelyn Waugh, the great Catholic novelist of the 20th, Claudel, Bernanos, the great French writers. But I would add to that something that can’t be said of any English Catholic or any French Catholic, and that is Flannery O’Connor is the only great Christian writer this nation has produced. That’s an astonishing fact, when as Chesterton said this is the nation that has the soul of a church, the nation that has more churchgoing people than any other industrialized advancement, and yet name our major writers, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Emily Dickinson, Frost, Stevens—not one of them Christian, at least not orthodoxly Christian. There are points in which their work certainly has Christian quality, especially in Emily Dickinson, but you would not call any of them a Christian writer. So you have this one figure, and again on the edges of American culture. She’s a southerner and a Catholic, she’s not at the center of American culture, and yet she is our only great Christian writer. That’s a claim large enough, it seems to me.

I think the sacramental barrenness of so much American Christianity has failed to enliven the imagination of its products. I mean, for example, the Hispanic maid in my building at Baylor is a woman who is not literate, yet she knows the whole Christian story because she has seen it figured in images in her Catholic church. She’s greatly impressed that I’m named after the archangel Raphael, so she’s picked up by osmosis, just by breathing in the sacramental, imagistic world of her Catholicism, a kind of richly imaginative way of construing the world. But the church in America has been too often a reflection of America. It has not been sufficiently countercultural. It was not at the places where it should have stood over against the culture with a kind of prophetic witness that would make writers of the caliber of the ones I mentioned pay attention. I mean, Mark Twain was horrified by slavery and Mark Twain’s a southerner. What were southern churches saying about slavery? Not much. Emerson, you know, winds up with a kind of Unitarianism that is so devoid of thick Gospel content that he can’t produce any kind of art that would be, again, profoundly Christian. So at both the political and the intellectual level I think the church has failed to provide an alternative that would really, again, arrest the attention of our brightest, ablest, most imaginative thinkers. That’s why Hawthorne is drawn to the Puritans. The Puritans at least tried; they may have gotten it wrong, but he takes them way more seriously than he does the experiment at Brook Farm, where everybody went around saying “how’s your Over-Soul?” and things like that.

Thomas Merton’s influence is more directly political. He was a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War. He, together with Dorothy Day, who also exercised an equally important influence on American culture, it seems to me, if not more important, because her work survived through the Catholic Worker Movement. In fact, the joke was that after Merton’s death a lot of Cistercian monasteries said hurray, at last we don’t have all these people thinking they are called to be Cistercians because they’ve read Thomas Merton, so in some ways it’s as if his work had a kind of counterproductive effect. Merton’s influence, it seems to me, is scattered. It has political effect. He’s very good about retrieving Cistercian mystical thought, hugely. His book New Seeds of Contemplation is, to me, one of the great books of mystical literature in our time. He writes very good poetry, but not poetry of the highest order. His essays, I think, are the essence of his work. In that regard he’d be more like Wendell Berry. I’d compare Merton to Berry. Berry is our best Protestant and Baptist essayist. I think Merton was probably our best Catholic essayist, but O’Connor moves in a different realm. She moves in a different realm, and that is a realm that’s not simply prose fiction on the one hand, nor kind of elevated insight on the other hand through essays, but the reconfiguration of everything through the lenses of the Christian faith. She liked to quote Conrad. Conrad said the function of a writer is to make the audience see. To make the audience see, and by “see” O’Connor interpreted that to mean not simply figure out that’s an oak and that’s not a hickory, not simply some kind of realism, but to have vision. Sight is one thing. Sight is simply to use the eye as a kind of ocular organ for perceiving furniture, lamps, and the like. But the eye when seeing through, seeing something behind it informed by the Christian faith, and it becomes a lens for beholding what she calls “distances” that are far off close up. Then you’ve accomplished something. That’s what she does. She’s prophetic in that sense. She says I’m a realist of distances, not a realist of surfaces or a realist of appearances, but a realist of distances—trying to bring that which is far off close up. It was far off, of course, as the transcendence of God, the otherness of God, the sinfulness of human nature that goes unrecognized and so forth. I don’t think Merton ever accomplishes anything that great, and that’s why I think she will last in a way he won’t.

Already we’ve seen downturns and upturns in O’Connor’s reputation. There was a while where her work was held in a good deal not just of suspicion but disdain, because of the way in which her characters do, when appropriate, and only when appropriate, use the N word, in the way in which she was dismissed, I’m afraid, about people in high places, as a Catholic, and therefore in her own way a fundamentalist. I know people who call O’Connor a fundamentalist, which means she believes in the basic doctrines of the church, so that there have already been ups and downs, but what we’re in now in the midst of is a new kind of resurgence that I think will continue. It will have its low points, I don’t doubt that it will, but she said even if it takes 200 years for my work to be appreciated that’s okay. My Catholic friends said remember for us a thousand years isn’t a very long time. And so if there is a thousand years, I think O’Connor will be appreciated a millennium from now.

KIM LAWTON, anchor: A tense national debate about racial profiling has continued since Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested in his Cambridge home for disorderly conduct. Gates, who is African-American, was arrested by Sergeant James Crowley, a white officer who had responded to a 9-11 call about a possible break-in. The controversy intensified when President Obama said the police “acted stupidly” when they arrested Gates. The president later said he regretted his choice of words and he hosted both Gates and Crowley at the White House Thursday for a conciliatory beer. The incident and the ensuing debate show how divisive racial issues can be in this country.  Even though America has elected its first black president, efforts toward racial integration are often still fraught with difficulties, not least in churches where it’s been said that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week. Lucky Severson reports.

LUCKY SEVERSON: If something seems odd or unusual about these worshippers, maybe it’s the diversity, all the different colors and nationalities of their faces. This is the Wilcrest Baptist Church in Houston, and Pastor Rodney Woo couldn’t be more proud of the cultural and racial mix of his congregation.

Pastor RODNEY WOO (Wilcrest Baptist Church, Houston, TX): I think my main passion is to get people ready for heaven. I think a lot of our people are going to go into culture shock when they get to heaven, and they get to sit next to somebody that they didn’t maybe sit with while they were here on earth. So we’re trying to get them acclimated a little bit.

SEVERSON: Assuming Pastor Woo is right, there are a lot of congregations that need to get acclimated. A recent study found that only 7 percent of churches in the US are integrated. This comes as no surprise to Ohio State sociology professor Korie Edwards, author of the book “The Elusive Dream.”

Professor KORIE EDWARDS (Sociology Department, Ohio State University and Author, “The Elusive Dream”): We’re segregated in housing. Even the job market is segregated, and we end up going to churches with people who look like us.

Professor Michael Emerson

Professor MICHAEL EMERSON (Sociology Department, Rice University): Sometimes,you know, you’ll hear the statement of African Americans saying, “I have to work with whites. I may have to shop with them. But on Sunday I want to — I don’t want to have to worship with them. I want to be able to just be myself and let my hair down.”

SEVERSON: Rice University sociology professor Michael Emerson, who authored the study on the make-up of churches in the US, says racial separation inside most churches is even more pronounced than it is outside for a number of reasons.

Prof. EMERSON: What we found in the study is that churches are 10 times less diverse than the neighborhoods they sit in.

SEVERSON: Emerson also found that churches in the South were the least integrated, partly because African Americans are concerned about whites taking over their congregation.

Prof. EMERSON: That’s a big fear, right, and when I talk with black pastors, the same thing: If we try to have this move towards interracial congregations, whites will just dominate them. There are so many more of them, and they’re used to being in the position of power, so they’ll just take over, and we’ll lose the one thing we do have.

Prof. EDWARDS: And so what happens in these congregations where you have whites and blacks, even though they may be well intended, people coming together and wanting to do the Christian thing, wanting to serve God together, you’re going to find that these kinds of issues that occur outside of the church come into the church.

SEVERSON: Pastor Rufus Smith of the City of Refuge Church in Houston is one of very few African Americans who lead an interracial church. Smith says when he took over the evangelical Presbyterian congregation it was mostly white, bored, and dwindling. He said he would only agree to be pastor if members promised to integrate.

Pastor Rufus Smith

SEVERSON: Today the church is about 45 percent white, 45 percent black, and the rest Hispanic and Asian. But Pastor Smith says the “grand experience” hasn’t always been pleasant.

Pastor SMITH: You’re certainly up against the natural stereotypes. You’re up against ignorance. You’re up against some hard-heartedness and, you know, some outright evil with respect to some people.

SEVERSON: Pastor Rodney Woo, half Chinese, grew up in a black neighborhood, went to an all-white church, and married his Hispanic childhood sweetheart.

Pastor WOO (preaching): The poor rich. Let me tell you who they are. They are the people who have a lot of money and nothing else.

SEVERSON: When he came here, the church had only two black members out of 180. Today Wilcrest Baptist has 500 members divided almost equally among whites, blacks, and Hispanics, with the remainder made up of Asians. Woo says he didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be integrating his church.

Pastor Rodney Woo

Pastor WOO: When we started a lot of people were going, “Ah, this is making me feel uncomfortable.” Whether the kids were in the nursery together, or their kids were in the young group, a lot of parents were fearful that their kids might start dating somebody that was a different race.

Prof. EMERSON: In the beginning stages, there’s often a lot of pain, a lot of confusion. A lot of people leave. Maybe there’s even anger. But if they make it through that, it becomes something that people just a lot of times will say, “I couldn’t live without it.”

Pastor SMITH (preaching): Ask me how I feel.

CONGREGATION (responding): How do you feel?

Pastor SMITH: If I was any better, I would have to be twins, and that’s the truth if I ever told it.

SEVERSON: Pastor Rufus Smith has succeeded in not only integrating his church racially. His congregation comes from all walks of life. When it grew, he deliberately located the church between affluent and low-income neighborhoods. Carol Vance, a former district attorney, was one of the founding members.

CAROL VANCE (Founding Member, City of Refuge Church): We picked Rufus because he’s a great pastor, not because he’s black. But I think it’s wonderful that he is, because we’re sitting right here on the edge, and I sort of like to think of our church as the “bridge over troubled waters.”

Pastor SMITH: To me, one of the true tests of the power of the Gospel is to unify people across socio-economic, racial lines, which is what the heart of Christianity is and was.

SEVERSON: Karen Giesen has a doctorate in theology. She says she grew up in a white church where people bowed their head, folded their hands, and worshipped quietly — very different from what she experiences at City of Refuge.

KAREN GIESEN (Congregation Member, City of Refugee Church): The worship style is an issue. None of us are right in probably our heart language style. We’re all making a sacrifice to be there. It’s a mix. A lot of people go looking for churches saying, “I am looking for the one that ministers to me,” and to go here we’ve obviously all made a choice that we want to serve there.

SEVERSON: Rebecca Miller wants to be a pastor. She says she searched to find a church that felt like a community.

REBECCA MILLER (Congregation Member, City of Refuge Church): People worship the way the spirit leads them to worship. I really don’t think that there is anybody saying you can’t shout, you can’t scream, you can’t say “hallelujah” or you can’t clap your hands. It’s not the typical Presbyterian “you can’t raise your hands” church.

Pastor WOO: Where we really changed, and we saw the growth, grow at exponentially, was when the church became less than 50 percent white, and so there was no majority group, and that just changed the entire mindset.

SEVERSON: Church guitarist Jim Kruse married a Hispanic and adopted a Hispanic child. He says he’s learning a few things about his own prejudice.

JIM KRUSE (Guitarist, Wilcrest Baptist Church): What we’re learning is that you may not come to it thinking you are prejudiced. You may be seriously trying not to be prejudiced. But then you find out the things you are doing come across as prejudiced. So I think a lot of our effort has been to learn to relax, to let people be people.

SEVERSON: It would be difficult to find a more graphic example of religion bridging a racial divide than Dwight Pryor and Rick Taylor. Taylor describes himself as a reformed “redneck.”

RICK TAYLOR (Congregation Member, Wilcrest Baptist Church): From where I come from, to be honest, I was taught to hate people like Dwight and to not have anything to do with them and that they were less than I was, and I believed that most of my life. I truly did. But the Lord has a way of showing you your prejudices in your life.

Dwight Pryor and Rick Taylor

DWIGHT PRYOR (Congregation Member, Wilcrest Baptist Church): I grew up in North Mississippi. As a little kid on those school buses, watching those people would shout racist names at me, and some of them were deacons and pastors in our community. It left a cold chill in my heart — a hatred.

SEVERSON: Dwight is a control systems designer, and Rick is a retired general contractor. The bond that has grown between them is plain to see.

Mr. TAYLOR: Racism colors the truth. It makes people not look at other people as if they were human. It goes that deep. It truly does, and Christ teaches us that we are all the same.

SEVERSON (to Prof. Emerson): Are churches that integrate richer because they did it?

Prof. EMERSON: Yeah. I never meet a church that wishes they didn’t do it. I never meet a leader that wishes they didn’t do it. They will all say, to the person, “It’s hard. It’s difficult. It comes with complexities and confusion.”

SEVERSON: And they will say, if they’re like Dwight and Rick, that church integration may not always come easy, but it comes with rich rewards and improbable friendships. For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in Houston.

Professor Michael Emerson

Q: Fewer than ten percent of churches in America are integrated.

A: Yeah, that comes from our research here, actually.

Q: The number is that low?

A: Yeah, seven percent. That’s what it is.

Q: Were you surprised at that?

A: Yes. Well, yes and no. But yeah, that’s pretty low.

Q: Why? What are the reasons for its being so low?

A: There are three things, and it depends on the group that we’re talking about, but there’s history, there’s culture, and then there’s social networks. So, you know, historically black and white, they worship together until about the end of slavery, and people started moving out into separate churches. But it was because of discrimination and racism and such that blacks began to establish their own denominations and their own churches.

Q: They worshipped together before the Civil War?

A: Absolutely. In part because they had no choice, right? If you were a slave, you did what the master said. And they said to worship: “You’re going to worship with us.” Now they had to sit in separate places and sometimes they’d even have to sit outside and look through the windows. But they did worship together. So we didn’t get the denominations and the separate congregations really till about into Civil War time. What’s happened then, of course, is now that we’ve had well over 100 years of this history to establish separate cultures, different ways of worshipping, and different ways of understanding theology so that when people try to come together makes it very difficult. And then, of course, social networks, you know, how do we find a place to worship? We go where our family goes. We go where our friends are, and because our social networks are so segregated by race, we end up with what we have. We also find that, you know, if you’re immigrants, you’re not part of that history. So it’s a little bit different experience. So it may be a language that separates you — again, social networks. But second-generation Asian and Hispanics, second, and third and fourth and so on, they are much more likely to be in integrated churches than are blacks or whites.

Q: Are churches a reflection of our society? We live in different neighborhoods. We work in different jobs.

A: They are. But what we found in the study is that churches are ten times less diverse than the neighborhoods they sit in. So there’s something more going on than just reflecting the neighborhood, yeah.

Q: What is going on? Is it cultural — that it is difficult to accept an outsider? Is a black church accepting whites, or the other way around?

A: I’ve been in both settings and observed, and I think when non-blacks visit a black church they will feel, they always talk about feeling so welcomed and warmly greeted but being surprised or shocked or whatever by the length of the service, by the different worship style. If we go into white congregations, non-whites will sometimes say it felt like worship never started. It was sort of dead and didn’t feel that warmly received. But so — and there are different realities either way, and it makes it difficult for all groups to try and cross boundaries.

Q: Generally white services are more calm and by the book and a lot more emotion in black services. Is that difficult for whites when they go into a black church?

A: Right, right. Preaching styles and people being slain in the spirit and things like that. Now it doesn’t happen in all black churches, and it happens sometimes in white churches, right? But on average they’re quite a bit different.

Q: The congregation saying “Amen”?

A: Call-and-response style, yes, exactly. So whenever different groups get together then there has to be this long period of negotiation. How will we worship? What’s acceptable? What’s not? If I want to say “Amen” can I? It’s one of the things we find in these congregations is that they are much more likely to be sort of up-beat worship styles, more likely that people in these congregations say “Amen,” maybe get up and dance some, tend to be a little bit more lively than a typical white service would be, but not as lively as a typical black service would be.

Q: What is most likely, a black church that’s integrated with whites or vice versa?

A: We rarely see that. Almost never.

Q: Why is that?

A: Because I think whites are used to being in power, so when whites think we ought to have integrated churches they think, “People ought to come to our church. What can we do to get them to come?” I meet almost no one that goes to an African-American church or thinks, “I’m going to do that.” Now there are whites in African-American churches. They’re interracially married. They’re highly committed. Maybe there’s a professor or two, or a student. Once in a while you get people that maybe because of economic reasons, or have a social network, they get attracted. But it’s a very tiny percent so that when we look at, you know, who are pastors and who are the head clergy of these congregations, they’re overwhelmingly white, just a few African Americans, and those folks are usually called to what were formerly white congregations, or they started interracial church from the get-go.

Q: If the pastor is black, are whites going to be less likely to go to that church because the pastor is black and in charge?

A: Yup. It’s the sad fact of how race still works in our country. We find that over and over again.

Q: But a white church doesn’t feel very welcoming to African Americans, right?

A: That’s right, that’s right. So you can see what is the difficulty. I mean, how do you make these things happen? We’ve done a lot of studies to see when they do happen, why, and I mean there’s a variety of reasons. But one, it starts with a commitment where they decide this is going to be who we are. Maybe it’s out of their faith, a new way of looking at their faith, that we must be integrated across race. So they actually put it into their mission statement, and they start changing things as a result. They may change how worship works. They may actively recruit folks and try and get them to come and help them to feel comfortable and get them involved in leadership, and there’s a variety of ways.

Q: Are they glad they did it? Does the church end up being richer for it?

A: I never meet a church that wishes they didn’t do it. I never meet a leader that wishes they didn’t do it. They will all say, to the person, it’s hard. It’s difficult. It comes with complexities and confusion as you’re trying to go across cultures, and you don’t understand, you didn’t mean to offend somebody but you’ve offended somebody. But they will all say it just does something. They could never go back to being a uniracial congregation again. It brings excitement. It brings life. It allows them to be able to know people they would never know, to meet people that are outside the congregation they would have never connected with, you know, through the networks that they developed in the congregation.

Q: Would our society be a better society if we had more integrated churches?

A: I certainly think so, and I argue so, and I give talks on that. Are there risks by putting people together? Absolutely. Is there value in the black church? Absolutely. Is there value in having immigrant churches? Absolutely. But if we don’t have congregations gathering with people of different races, what we’re doing is we are redefining racial division, a racial inequality. I spent a lot of time developing in books why worshipping separately actually impacts inequality, economic, social, on and on. So I really do believe there are huge advantages to being together even though it’s difficult, even though we have a lot to learn.

Q: Is this integration happening more in one part of the country than in another part?

A: It happens a little bit more in the West, where there’s more fluid — where everybody’s originally from somewhere else. So they have a little bit more permission to do it. It happens the least, at the individual level at least, in the South, because the South has very strong, you know, set up black churches and white churches and a long history of that, and so it’s a bigger social cost. One of the things we find when we talk to people that attend these congregations, they all have social cost to it. People want to know why they’re doing that. Sometimes they’re questions about selling out on their race or “Are we not good enough that you have to go to this kind of congregation and not ours?” So there are costs to it, and I think they’re a little bit higher in the South because of its history.

Q: I guess a pastor really sometimes has to walk a tightrope as well as really be an amazing politician, too.

A: Absolutely. Every pastor I talk to says, and particularly if they’re African American they’ll say, “I’m not black enough for African Americans. I’m not white enough for the whites. I’m not Hispanic enough.” There’s always that sense of because we’re so racially defined, if you’re trying to cross the boundaries you don’t fit into any particular space. We just say there are five, you know, racial groups in the US. I say that these folks are what we call a sixth American. There’s something different. They are somebody who — they don’t exist in any particular racial category, so they all feel it and they kind of congregate to each other. So you find a lot of these sixth Americans congregate in these interracial congregations. They hang out together at work, at school, wherever.

Q: There is an impression that in many ways church has meant more to the black community over the years than any other particular section of America.

A: Absolutely. It may be changing, but still it’s the one place, that total control of an institution, that African Americans have. So sometimes, you know, you’ll hear the statement of African Americans saying, “I have to work with whites. I may have to shop with them. But on Sunday I don’t want to have to worship with them. I want to be able to just be myself and let my hair down.” It’s also, of course, as we know, the seat of political organization and the affirming of your blackness and so on.

Q: And hearing liberation theology. Is that fairly common, as in Jeremiah Wright’s church?

A: Yeah, there are variations of it. He says that very strongly, and you’ll find congregations that do that and others that would not say it as strongly. But it is a very common strain. Yeah, absolutely.

Q: Do African Americans worry that if whites come to my church, they’re going to take over?

A: Oh yeah, absolutely. That’s a big fear, right, and when I talk with black pastors, the same thing: If we try to have this move towards interracial congregations, whites will just dominate then. There are so many more of them, and they’re used to being in the position of power. So they’ll just take over, and we’ll lose the one thing we do have.

Q: I imagine there are phrases in the Bible they have to be very careful how they use.

A: Absolutely. There’s a lot of terminology, like “washes whiter than snow,” and these things which when they’re said in a uniracial congregation, they just go fine. But when they’re said in a mixed congregation, some people will get offended and wonder, “Why are you saying that? What are you saying?” And sometimes the clergy are blindsided by that. Other times they realize that ahead of time and say they’re not going to use those terms. So it gets complicated for sure.

Q: Is there a trend? Even though it may be slow, are we seeing more integrated churches?

A: We’re going to see more, and we are seeing more, and I’ll tell you exactly why. Not because white and black are more likely to get together. Only a third of the seven percent of congregations that are interracial are black and white. What’s happening is that Asian and Latino and other groups without that history are more likely to end up in either black churches or white churches and then make them multiracial churches. I talk about that in the US we have two cultures. We do not have an American culture. We have a white American culture and a black American culture. So when those two groups try to get together, [it’s] very difficult because they each feel like they have the right to their culture. If you move here from somewhere else, I often think if I move to Germany, for example, or if I move China and I go worship there I will understand and I’ll be willing to give up a lot of my culture because I’m in somebody else’s homeland. So I’m going to have to act German or Chinese, whatever that might mean. But in the US, when you have two separate cultures, each with its right, each of which has come to exist in this political entity in the last couple hundred years, each feeling like, “I have the right to hold onto my culture,” and that’s what makes it difficult.

Q: If you have a white church and Asians move in and Hispanics move in, is it less of a problem than if African Americans –

A: Yeah, I think it’s still a problem, but I think it’s easier, I really do, because of not having that similar history, so that’s why I think two-thirds of these mixed congregations are either white with Asian and Hispanic, or black with Asian and Hispanic.

Q: But if you have a white church, and you have a mix of Asians and Hispanics, it makes it easier for African Americans to come?

A: Yes and no, because what happens is sometimes these congregations will still have the white style of worship, even though they’re mixed, because folks are willing to give up whatever they may have come with. So it’s still quite a stretch for African Americans, yeah.

Q: Music is very, very important in a black church.

A: Absolutely, although every congregation will say, you know, every worship leader will say it’s vital. It’s very important, but again these are, you know, these are different cultural styles. So the tradition from Europe is that you’re supposed to emphasize the mind over the body, so you sing from a very kind of staid perspective. Again, there are charismatic white congregations all over, and they don’t sing that way. But, you know, on the average.

Q: I was recently in South Philly in a neighborhood that has a lot of violence. If the churches there were more integrated, do you think that would work more toward healing the wounds that are there?

A: It would because, you know, think about it. I see this in the way that sermons are preached. How would you give a Black Nationalist speech or campaign for the Republicans when you’re an integrated congregation? It doesn’t happen. But I see it happen in uniracial congregations all the time. But people — when they’re in mixed company, we speak differently. So one of the profound things we found when studying these congregations, the mixed ones, is just how much overlap and interracial ties that develop not only with the people in the congregation, but they start meeting each other’s families, and their friends, and they go to each other’s neighborhoods if they live in different neighborhoods, and at work they meet people they wouldn’t otherwise met, and so it creates a whole new definition of what the group is. So I think it’s a lot harder then to have racial violence against each other.

Q: Are you familiar with the City of Refuge Church and Reverend Rufus Smith?

A: I think they’re doing an amazing thing in that they have all groups. But they have large segments of white and black, and so I think it’s the most difficult of these kinds of congregations to have, and it takes a very deft leader, and him being African American, I mean I’m sure it’ll be interesting when you talk with him. He’ll have to be very knowledgeable of white culture, black culture, and walk these fine lines.

Q: His is more multiracial than, say, Pastor Woo’s –

A: Oh, Pastor [Rodney] Woo would be more multiracial and more groups, right. I think they have people from 40-some different countries. International church is what I would call it. They’re immigrants from all over the world, be they black, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern.

Q: I assume that Pastor Woo’s church is the way it is either because the congregation wanted it, or because he wanted it. How did it end up being that way?

A: It was an all-white church. It was starting to decline. They had to hire a new pastor, and they hired him. But he came under the condition that “I want and I’m called to make this a multiethnic church.” So they knew. He’s interesting because he’s part-Asian, part-white. He’s married to a Hispanic woman, so that’s their family and that’s their vision.

Q: What’s it feel like in one of his services? I’m sure you’ve been there.

A: I think it’s pretty dynamic. There’s a lot of energy there and life, and you’ll have women dressed in their traditional African dress when they come, and you have people from all over the place, and some people have headphones on because they’re listening in Spanish.

Q: So it’s a rich cultural experience.

A: Yes, absolutely.

Q: And Pastor Rufus Smith and the City of Refuge. Tell me a little bit about that.

A: Same thing. There’s a lot of life there, but it’s a different sort, because there’s a lot less immigrants and a lot more racial, the mix of black and white in particular. I’ve actually never been to their worship for an extended period of time, so I can’t comment wisely on it. I can say that I’ve talked to people in both congregations, and there are both positives and negatives. I mean, so if I’ve talked to whites in City of Refuge, sometimes they’ll wonder, “Why do we do things a certain way, and why do we make a big deal out of events?” And what’s happening is they’re falling back on their understanding of the way that church should work. It’s not always working exactly like that, and they feel frustration or confusion. Sometimes people leave. That’s certainly common in mixed churches.

Q: So there are downsides, but the downsides are outweighed by the upsides?

A: Downsides, yeah, and when there are more downsides when churches first start — they go through stages of transforming to becoming multiracial. So in the beginning stages there’s often a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, a lot of people leave. Maybe there’s even anger. But if they make it through that they come to a new agreement, and they start creating a new culture, and it becomes something that people just — a lot of times they’ll say, “I couldn’t live without it. I just have to be there.”

Q: You see it manifest in any other ways, for instance, in the neighborhood? Do they socialize together if they go to church together?

A: They do, and that’s what really surprised us, because it was such strong effects. They’re more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods after they start being in these kinds of congregations. They are much more likely to say that their two very best friends are of a different race, that their circle of friends, their friends in the church, but also in their whole social network, absolutely. We’ve had people say, “Now when I go to work, I don’t feel uncomfortable talking to people of different races, and I go up and introduce myself, and I start making a new friend I wouldn’t have done otherwise.” And again, this connection that you get: I meet Joe at church. Joe’s connected to a whole network of people I don’t know. Joe likes me. He invites me over to his son’s birthday party, and I meet his whole family. I meet his friends. I get to know his neighborhood. That happens all the time.

Q: Will the election of Barack Obama have an impact on interracial churches? Will we see more of them?

A: Oh, yeah. I think with President Obama there’s going to be a discussion, because he himself is multiracial, because we have for the first time a non-white president. There’s going to be talk about what does this mean? What is it? Are we in a new era? And I think it’s going to open up a wider place for a discussion about we ought to come together in our churches, in our neighborhoods, in our work places, in our clubs and our networks. I think it’ll be more acceptable to talk about it. We’ll see what happens. It’ll take some time. But I think it will.

Q: But generally you think it will be positive.

A: Yes.

Q: Can you talk a little bit more about why it is difficult to integrate churches?

A: What sort of difficulties would happen when people of different cultures try to come together to worship? Tiny little things such as let’s tell jokes with each other. Humor is so culturally based that when I try to tell a joke as me being a white American, if I tell other white Americans, they’ll laugh. If I tell an African American, they might not laugh. In fact, they either might not find it funny, or they might find it offensive, and I didn’t mean it to be offensive. So these are the sort of little things that build up over time, just like in a marriage. You know, the little things can build up over time. Then of course there are bigger things that matter, like who do I see up there in the congregation? Do I see myself up there? Well, I don’t. So I ask the clergy why don’t I see myself represented in leadership? And I’m told, and this happens quite a bit, “We don’t think about race when we hire. We just hire the best person for the job.” So then I have to conclude, oh, the best people are all somebody other than my own race. So that’s difficult. How do we interpret the Bible? Should we stress things like justice and that God is somebody who cares about equality of all people? Or is he a God of love and a God who’s there to give me an afterlife? And different traditions stress different — so then there’s that. I talked to an African American who says before she goes into an interracial church, she sits in her car and she listens to gospel music to get her fill, and she goes into an interracial church where they don’t do gospel music, and she’s ready to accept the other sorts of ways of worshipping. So there’s that. There’s always the question of time. Does time at 10:00 mean 10:00 sharp? Or does it mean give or take a few minutes? And a few minutes, is that plus or minus two minutes? Or plus or minus ten, or maybe a half an hour each way? So different groups have different definitions, and then they clash on those. So it takes adept leadership to say we’re going to work through these.

Q: Are you looking at Protestant churches, Catholic churches?

A: Protestant, Catholic, even Muslim. We studied a mosque, and this is when we were at Notre Dame, and in this mosque they had people from a variety of countries, most of them immigrants. In some of the countries, when you go into a mosque you remove your shoes. To not do so could be punishable even by death in that nation. In other countries, it would be a great offense to remove their shoes when they come into the mosque, a sign of disrespect. So there was great clashes when, you know, if you believe you shouldn’t remove your shoes and someone’s taking their shoes off, how can they do this? That actually was such a big clash in this case that they had to put a curtain down the middle of where they would worship. And then they would have the shoe removers on one side, and the non-shoe removers on the other side until they could work through coming to understand why we might both be trying to worship authentically, and because of our cultural background we have these different ideas. But it took a while.

Q: Any particular denominations that you’ve seen the most progress?

A: You find the most in not any particular denomination specifically. It’s the style of worship. So if we have what we call a charismatic worship style, that means upbeat music and a more lively style of preaching usually, people are allowed to clap, say “Amen,” whether they’re mainline Protestant, conservative Protestant, and Catholics, whatever, they’re much more likely to be integrated. There’s one denomination in particular, though, that has pushed very hard to be multiracial in its denomination — not only its denomination but, I mean, in its congregations, and it’s called the Evangelical Covenant Church, http://www.covchurch.org/ which is headquartered in Chicago. Their whole goal is that’s the kind of churches they start, multiracial, and I think they say now 20 percent of their churches are that.

Q: Is there particular Christian scripture that points to interracial acceptance?

A: Scripture is vast, and people can pick and choose what they emphasize, and so for hundreds of years verses that said that you are to welcome the stranger, that with Christ there’s neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, we’ve broken down the dividing wall with the original church, where Christians were first called Christian was the church of Antioch in which for the first time you had Jews, Gentiles of all different ethnicities come together as one people. That’s when they were called Christians. So these are the kind of things that now when people are trying to move towards multiracial congregations that they’re stressing. They’re talking about these scriptures that say we ought to come together, and that at Pentecost, when that the Holy Spirit is said to have come upon the first Christians, they were given the ability to speak in different languages, and so that no matter who the people were, they could all worship together. But you know, interestingly enough, those things were not talked about much at all for a few hundred years at least.

Q: But it’s there. It’s a fundamental part of Christianity that you should welcome people of all races.

A: That’s right.

Will historians mark this election as the passing of a generation of American leadership that preferred partisan politics to productive policies? Can the massive and euphoric following of a President Obama resist the temptation to lord it over those who didn’t see their light? Can the idealistic and visionary Obama avoid the missteps associated with the failure of that other new kind of president, the one from Georgia, to master quickly enough the labyrinth that is Washington politics? Will the flawless campaign inspire a flawless first 100 days? Will the voices heard in “the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston” continue to reach President Obama when he resides in the White House? These questions will be answered in short order, no doubt.

With a compelling popular and electoral college victory, Barack Obama can claim a clear mandate to address the economy, to restore the image of America abroad, to bring change and, perhaps much more importantly, to restore hope to a nation and a people desperately in need of it. Perhaps, just perhaps, on November 4, 2008, the nation itself somehow embodied the change we’ve heard so much about. After all, this is the same country where, less than 55 years ago, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King gave soulful voice to freedom long denied, where Emmett Till and James Reeb, so different from one another, were beaten to death for the sins of others, where Selma and Montgomery and Bull Connor and Watts each exposed the ugliness of our American experiment struggling to maintain some semblance of order while unraveling in its inner core. Do you remember the events of Grant Park just forty years ago? On election night 2008, the same park hosted a genuine “rainbow coalition” that elected the nation’s first black president. What does it all mean?

In early May 1955, as the Supreme Court carried on its hearings about how Brown v. Board of Education might be made effective, Reinhold Niebuhr noted Madison’s observation that “it was easier to guarantee liberty than equality by legal means.” In referring to Madison’s insight, Niebuhr drew attention to the fact that liberty and equality were not synonymous; one did not lead automatically to the other. One could have in one’s possession all human liberties as guaranteed by law, while not yet having achieved equality. To have equality, one had to depend upon both the mores of the community and one’s access to a fair share of economic resources, neither being easily addressed by law. Where the mores of the community assume inequality, and the economy is governed mostly by privately held interests, equality is indeed hard for some citizens to come by. That lesson has especially been driven home in recent months.

The problem of racial prejudice has always reached much deeper into cultural life than just the way it has affected the rights and liberties of individuals. The problem facing African Americans in 1955, at the beginning of the civil rights movement, was systemic, deeply woven into the cultural fabric of the nation. One might say, in fact, that racism provided the “tacking stitch” that prevented the various pieces of American culture from moving out of their place. Historically, for the vast majority of American history, it has run through the whole religious, social, economic, and political quilt of American life. For that reason, racism has never been merely a problem solely preventing liberty or rights.

The total eradication of racism and other forms of mainstream cultural hatred has always demanded more than the simple act of imprisoning offending parties or voting out legislators who have kept particular Americans from exercising their God-given rights. American culture itself has always been the culprit. Individuals have only embodied it. To right the wrong of racism and prevent the spread of hate crimes of any other sort, every aspect of American life must be transformed. Only then can genuine equality be achieved for all Americans, those defined by Obama’s victory speech as “young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled.” The election of the first black American president just might signal a significant tipping point in that process. So long, that is, that President Obama himself both remembers and heeds the biblical injunction: “From everyone to whom much is given, much will be required” (Luke 12:48).

– Mark G. Toulouse is professor of American religious history at Brite Divinity School and the author of GOD IN PUBLIC: FOUR WAYS AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY AND PUBLIC LIFE RELATE (Westminster John Knox Press, 2006). Beginning January 1, he will be principal and professor of the history of Christianity at Emmanuel College, Victoria University, in the University of Toronto.

The only thing that didn’t go right was losing the day-after media attention to John McCain’s stunningly desperate gamble. It didn’t rain in Denver, and after an outpouring of predictions that Obama would appear physically diminished at Invesco Field, or look egotistically inflated at his Greek temple, or prove unable to hold the attention of a stadium audience, he gave a sensational speech watched by 40 million viewers that looked as impressive as it sounded.

Obama worked a typical Obama theme, this time calling it “the American Promise” of opportunity and responsibility for all, but he was tougher and more specific than much of his previous campaign rhetoric. Stressing the struggles of working people, he called for tax cuts for the non-rich and higher taxes on corporations that ship jobs overseas. He made a strong case for strengthening the middle class, investing in renewable energy, universalizing health coverage, and repairing America’s international image. He amplified Bill Clinton’s skillful summary of the current miserable economic situation and John Kerry’s forceful summary of John McCain’s retreat to Republican establishment orthodoxy. With perfect pitch for the occasion, he stressed his differences with McCain and gave a clear picture of what an Obama presidency would be about.

Except that an Obama presidency would also represent something magnificent that the Obama convention played down during prime time. The very thing that made this convention historic was the last thing Obama wanted to be talked about from the podium during prime time.

Convention appearances and a great deal of journalism to the contrary, Obama does not believe the moment has arrived for “post-racial politics,” and he explicitly denies he is a symbol or champion of it. His favorite image of how we should think about racial justice is a split screen that holds in view the just, multiracial society that must be created and the reality of an America that is not a just society. You cannot move “beyond race” in the political sphere in a society where race remains a terribly significant marker of social privilege and discrimination.

Obama was a civil rights lawyer, and as a law professor he specialized in civil rights. He understands acutely that we still need civil rights lawyers because racial discrimination is still pervasive in the United States. His very argument for not rubbing the noses of white Americans in the history and reality of white racism is that the problem is too entrenched in white attitudes and social structures to be remedied by race-specific policies or by any appeal to white guilt. As Obama explains in THE AUDACITY OF HOPE, “Rightly or wrongly, white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America; even the most fair-minded of whites, those who would genuinely like to see racial inequality ended and poverty relieved, tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization — or race-specific claims based on the history of race discrimination in this country.”

Since even the most fair-minded whites have a low threshold for anything smacking of black grievance, better not go there in a political campaign. Better not evoke the civil rights movement in prime time at the convention. And better not let on that you understand the racial subtext of the constant accusation that you are an “elitist,” a stand-in term for “arrogant,” a proud type with overweening self-regard, which calls up centuries of needing to put down the “uppity” blacks who dared to defend themselves and their families.

In A BOUND MAN: WHY WE ARE EXCITED ABOUT OBAMA AND WHY HE CAN’T WIN (Free Press, 2007), published last year, Shelby Steele says Obama cannot succeed because he is caught in the historic double bind between African American bargainers and challengers. Bargainers bargain for acceptance in white America by not presuming that white Americans are racist, while challengers challenge white Americans to prove themselves innocent of racism. Bill Cosby, Colin Powell, and Oprah Winfrey are bargainers, in this telling, while Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are challengers. Had Steele written his book a few months later, undoubtedly Jeremiah Wright would have played a larger role; he gets less than a page without being named.

Invisible Man memorial to Ralph Ellison

The bargainer/challenger debate takes place between and within the races, setting guilt-as-impotence against innocence-as-power, Steele argues. America needs to be delivered from this sorry either/or, which is why Obama has generated so much excitement. Steele, however, says Obama is too hopelessly bound by the social forces behind these categories to find a voice of his own. Obama is a racial cipher, not an actualized individual. He has a talent for inauthenticity that makes him good at fashioning a racial persona, which is not the same thing as achieving selfhood. According to Steele, Obama constantly negotiates the either/or in a vain attempt to grant racial innocence to white Americans at the same time that he withholds it from them. Thus, like the fictional Tod Clifton in Ralph Ellison’s INVISIBLE MAN, Obama has not achieved visibility as an individual. Since he lacks a real self, it is not clear that he has any real beliefs, much less that he would risk his life for any. Writing at the end of 2007, Steele contends that Obama would not be able to win the support of blacks and whites simultaneously. If he bargained zealously, he could not win black majorities; if he opted for challenge, making himself “black enough,” he had no chance of winning the nomination. Steele’s advice to Obama: give up what you’re doing in favor of finding out who you are.

In the category of turning a candidate’s strength into a weakness, Steele’s bestselling denigration of Obama’s personal character ranks with the Swift-boating of John Kerry’s military career in the 2004 election. How ridiculous can you get? The reflective, searching, complex, and sometimes painfully honest author of DREAMS FROM MY FATHER has no sense of self? His unprecedented march to the nomination was conducted by a cipher projecting the illusion of personhood? His very success at transcending the morality play of challengers versus bargainers proves he must be a fraud?

Steele is insightful in describing parts of his subject. He notes that challengers are granted distinct roles on special occasions to arbitrate who is racist and what racism looks like, and he rightly stresses that bargainers often have to hide their anger at whites for fear of wrecking the bargain. But his attack on Obama’s personal character is absurd, and his political forecast is not materializing. Obama is running close to 90 percent among African Americans, even as he pleads against racial “us” and “them” rhetoric and keeps racial justice talk out of convention prime time.

Obama supports affirmative action but prefers to talk about universal strategies — better schools, jobs that pay, and access to health care. On the campaign trail he stresses that in the past generation the African-American middle class has grown fourfold and the black poverty rate has been cut in half. Most blacks and Latinos, he argues, have already climbed into the middle class or are on their way, despite the barriers thrown in their way. The politics we need will help others get there. It will stress work and opportunity, making good on the American Promise. And it will not alienate the white working class voters of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania who are going to elect the next president.

We await polling data on how the Democratic Convention played in these election-in-their-hands states and elsewhere, but John McCain may have anticipated that it is going to play too well. On the day after the Democratic Convention, he undermined his chief argument against Obama — lack of relevant experience — by choosing the most inexperienced running mate ever selected by either party. McCain’s desperation should be a sign to nervous liberals of how very winnable this campaign is to elect Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.

–Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion at Columbia University.

But the Democrats have two chief tasks at their convention this week. One is to shift the focus to the Republican record of the past eight years and the unacceptable prospect of a third Bush-like term. The other is to make a hugely favorable impression on the tens of millions of Americans who haven’t paid enough attention thus far to make a decision about Barack Obama. The fact that these goals are contradictory does not lessen the urgent necessity of either one.

This is a blow-out election year for the Democrats. The incumbent Republican administration has done a bad job; seventy percent of Americans say so. Approximately the same percentage say the same thing about the administration’s handling of the economy and the war in Iraq, two things that go together, given the staggering costs of the war.

In a normal election year, any one of these three issues would be enough to dispatch the incumbent party, and the watershed elections of the past 75 years have been two-for-three affairs. 1932 was a referendum on a disastrous economy and a failed presidency, but no war; 1968 was about a disastrous war and a failed presidency, but the economy grew anyway; 1980 put Jimmy Carter’s presidency and economic performance on trial, but it was mere piling on to claim that Carter botched the Cold War and embarrassed the U.S. in Iran. This year marks the first legitimate three-for-three election of modern times, and Democrats are going to clean up — except, perhaps, at the top of the ticket.

The very real possibility that Democrats will lose the presidential race despite their enormous advantages is scaring many of them. I hear it all the time on the lecture trail. “Do you really think that Obama can win?” anxious liberals ask me, especially academics. The question is not, “Will he win?” but, “Do you think it’s even possible?” Others are already bracing themselves against disappointment, muttering quietly, “You know he’s going to lose, don’t you?”

No, I believe that he can and will win, and I think he is the most compelling candidate and human being to be nominated by either party in my lifetime. But I understand the anxious foreboding of many Democrats, because I have a good deal of it. The Republican field, the weakest in memory, had only one candidate, John McCain, who had any chance of winning the presidency this year, but the Republicans lucked into nominating him. If the Democrats had nominated one of their usual bland, white, male, career politicians — think John Kerry in 2004, Al Gore in 2000, or Walter Mondale in 1984, or this year Joe Biden or Chris Dodd — they would be leading handily in the polls. Hillary Clinton probably would be leading by a smaller but still sizable margin at this stage, too.

Obama, the candidate I have supported since the day he entered the race, has a much steeper mountain to climb, even among Democrats. Approximately 27 percent of Hillary Clinton’s supporters report that they are not willing to switch to Obama. That is the third most pressing problem that Democrats have to deal with this week.

Michelle Obama’s luminous, beautiful, wonderfully personal address went as far as one speech possibly could to deal with the personal side of the electoral equation. Her buoyant expression of her faith and hope had perfect pitch for the occasion and its urgent necessity of reaching across a disturbing popular divide in the American electorate.

According to a mid-July New York Times/CBS News Poll, thirty percent of white Americans hold a favorable view of Barack Obama, and 24 percent view Michelle Obama favorably. These pitiful numbers are the yield, thus far, for the Obamas among white Americans after two years of overwhelmingly favorable news coverage, countless magazine cover stories, and dozens of primary and caucus campaigns that ended with a soaring victory speech.

Michelle Obama obviously understands that she and her husband must reach the reachable in a personal way before they change the subject to the Bush debacle and John McCain’s guardianship of it. To the extent that one speech can do that, it was done on Monday night.

Now, we will see how many Americans are actually reachable, and if the Democrats are able to highlight Obama and change the subject at the same time.

– Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion at Columbia University.