THE CHURCH OF CHRIST
AND CIVIL RIGHTS DEMONSTRATIONS
Norman L. Parks

The Church of Christ is a lower middle class denomination. This identification implies not only a group centered in a clearly defined social stratum, but also a group inclined to read into its religion as binding rules the mores practiced by its members. An example of this is a manuscript by the president of Alabama Christian College entitled “The Attitude of a Christian in the Midst of a Race Crisis.”

Though I do not know personally President Rex Turner and have never visited his college (though I once made a modest contribution to its support), I would assume that he is both a very sincere and a humble man. Sincerity and humility, however, are not sufficient to dress in Christian robes the essential authoritarian and reactionary themes of his essay.

In keeping with the legalism of his religious group, President Turner reveals a full acceptance of the dichotomy of superordination-subordination. He identifies three classes of social “sub-ordinates” in wives, children, and “ servants” (i.e. negroes). “True enough,” he observes, “slavery is unlawful in the United States. The fine principle involved in the master-slave relationship, however, obtains today in both social and civic relationships of a like nature as it did in Paul’s day.”

During the current race crisis, he believes, the Christian must do nothing to alter the status quo, but must pursue a neutral course. “The present trend on the part of a segment of gospel preachers and leaders to crusade for the cause of desegregation,” he writes, “is contrary to the true spirit of Christianity.” Those who do so identify with the wrong crowd (“rank modernists”) — the familiar guilt-by-association stereotype. Even worse, they become committed to “an effort to displace the gospel of Christ with a social gospel.” Christians who oppose racial ghettos and insist that negroes be granted the right to rent or own homes in any residential area, leading to desegregated churches, “are being ridiculous.”

Those who approve of peaceful marches, mass petitions, and assemblies to protest second class citizenship, disfranchisement, racial discrimination, or Bull Connor’s police dogs may have the constitution and laws on their side, but not the Montgomery educator. No, indeed! They are “under spiritual obligation” to refrain from such! Martin Luther King and the NAACP by his standards clearly belong to the world, the flesh, and the devil.

No doubt such a stance will win the approval of the Montgomery power bloc It may help in local money-raising and attracting white students. However, it is a reasonable presumption that, in spite of his article, President Turner will sign on the dotted line to obtain federal grants and loans. At least most of the other Church of Christ colleges, trailing far to the rear of the secular institutions, have accepted nominal desegregation and hit the federal money trail. How quick can action come when it becomes possible to serve both God and mammon!

It is a curious mentality which insists that a Christian may not support the negro’s cause, leaving him in his present state of enforced inferiority, but which goes all out for dry laws, movie and book censorship, and Sunday closing laws. Not too long ago the administrators of the largest Church of Christ college appeared in a nation-wide TV documentary clamoring for a movie censorship board in their city.

Does the religion of Christ embrace the dichotomy of superordination-subordination? We think not. As brothers and equals, we are “all one” in Christ Jesus. The injury of one is the injury of all and “any man’s death diminishes me.” A religion which rides by on the other side and fails to express itself in action against the deprivation and the economic, social, and spiritual starvation of one’s fellowman is not the religion described in the New Testament. The meaning of the Nazareth Charter is as broad as the words which Jesus invoked to describe his mission:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me to preach glad tidings to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind,

to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

This magnificent charter makes no distinction between the gospel of Christ and all-out effort on behalf of the oppressed, the imprisoned, the poverty-stricken, and the disinherited. What kind of religion is it that says to society’s victims, “We will minister to your souls, but we will not march with you or lift our voices to protest any of the burdens which drag you down into the darkness of poverty, ignorance, and vice, sin against your manhood, or rob you of spiritual light?” The man who sees no ray of hope for a better life here is not likely to catch a moving vision of a celestial city hereafter. Homilies and sermons on the racial crisis will be vain unless addressed to the profound reasons for the moral disarray of the American negro.

President Turner is afraid of “excitement,” “social and political unrest,” “demonstrations,” and “agitators.” So is the supporter of every status quo order from the Sanhedrin to the Kremlin. Perhaps it has not occurred to him that it is not so much the negro being the agitator as being agitated in his efforts “to reply to God after the silence of the centuries.” Perhaps he doesn’t remember that a group of Christian “agitators” were involved in a riot at Ephesus. And has he forgotten that Paul and his associates were described as “those who have turned the world upside down”? They did, too, because they hit the silversmith business at Ephesus, the soothsaying business in Macedonia, racialism in Athens and class distinction everywhere.

Christianity is not a status quo religion, as the scathing social messages of John the Baptist foretold. And they got him into trouble. Truly, as the Good Book reminds us, “We get into the kingdom through many a trouble.”

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Norman Parks is Professor of Political Science at Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro. He received the Ph.D. from Vanderbilt. He has spent sixteen years as a student and teacher at Church of Christ Colleges, including eight years as dean at David Lipscomb College. He taught also at Freed-Hardeman and Oklahoma Christian. While always loyal to his Church of Christ background, he wishes to serve more widely as a disciple-at-large.