Honor, Shame, and the Gospel in the American South, Part III
From Covenant, the blog of the Living Church
Previous essays in this series have explored the matrix of an honor-shame culture in American Southern history, and how the American church found itself in moral bondage to the peculiar institution of slavery. We can see the consequences of the moral captivity of the church that was a prerequisite for the system of race-based slavery and the racial segregation that followed it, and the dangers to religion — for none of us exists in such a sectarian enclave that’s entirely disconnected from our culture — in the context of the segregationist South. An example of the ways in which this captivity was particularly insidious is the way it is evident even in the work of those committed to progress in the area of race relations.
In 1963, eight white clergy wrote a letter to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., counseling a delay in the demonstrations he and others had planned for Birmingham, Alabama. It is of particular importance that these were sympathetic, at least to integration, and not ardent critics of King, nor were they people spewing hate from their pulpits. Quite the opposite. Biographers and journalists have noted how several of them were known to have preached to their congregations in order to support civil rights. All eight had written an open letter to Governor George Wallace the preceding January to chastise him for inflammatory rhetoric. (For more information about these clergy, see this story on AL.com).
A cross section of Birmingham’s white religious leaders, the eight clergy were: Rabbi Milton Grafman of Temple Emanu-El, Catholic Bishop Joseph A. Durick, Methodist Bishop Nolan Harmon, Episcopal Bishop Charles C.J. Carpenter, Episcopal Bishop Coadjutor George M. Murray, Methodist Bishop Paul Hardin, and the Rev. Ed Ramage of First Presbyterian Church. A number of these men continued to work in favor of civil rights after the famous exchange of letters. Influenced by King, Durick became a well-known advocate for civil rights who cared for the poor when he was Bishop of Nashville between 1969 and 1975 (see his obituary here). In regard to Charles Carpenter, the Bishop of Alabama, Brandt Montgomery has written for Covenant about his stance on civil rights.