God With Us (and Them)

From time to time, not as frequently as one would like but not as rarely as one might fear, a busy editor’s day is disrupted by the arrival of a book with an inimitable and irresistible voice. We only intended to skim it when we took it out of its shipping envelope, with a quick glance at the table of contents, the first few pages, and the index—taking the literary vital signs that allow readers, like emergency room nurses, to perform rapid triage. But we find ourselves increasingly absorbed in its pages, neglecting the rest of the mail on our desk, the bouncing icon on our screen, and the blinking light on our phone. A book like this is like treasure hidden in a field. The one who finds it goes away rejoicing, and also misses the 4:35 train.

David Dark’s book The Gospel According to America packs that kind of punch. Dark has several things going for him. He is from the South, the region that has provided some of America’s most vivid and idiosyncratic voices—the region where being American is most deeply and continually both a point of pride and a problem. He is a high school English teacher, which means that he has had to become adept at stirring sleepy students into awareness of a grand conversation that both transcends and includes the popular culture they absorb every day. But perhaps most important, he is dangerously and delightfully intoxicated by the gospel of Jesus Christ.

All of which makes him an ideal person to answer our question, How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good?

What you believe is what you see is what you are is what you do. —Stanley Fish

Way back in the Sixties in a small, second-floor apartment in Nashville, a struggling singer-songwriter named Kris Kristofferson sat scandalized by a story he happened upon in the pages of Life magazine. It appeared that the lone white Baptist minister to sit alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (who’d also accompanied black schoolchildren past the screaming mobs of Little Rock in 1956) was now actively involved in ministry and friendship with members of the Ku Klux Klan. Will Campbell was his name, and he’d doubtless make for good songwriting material if nothing else. But the world took a stranger turn when Kristofferson realized that this controversial figure was the same unassuming minister who occupied the office immediately beneath his apartment.

Kristofferson ran downstairs and expressed his astonishment without preamble. “What the hell kind of a place is this? You’ve got a preacher who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King and also ministers to members of the Ku Klux Klan. I’m a Rhodes Scholar, and I don’t understand that.”

“Maybe the reason you don’t understand it is that you are a Rhodes Scholar,” Campbell slyly replied.

This little anecdote came to me after years of being haunted by what I can only call the multipartisan witness of Will Campbell. I read about him in an issue of Rolling Stone when I was in college. I was pleased to discover that he was stationed only a few miles from me in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. And when I undertook some cross-community work in Northern Ireland upon graduating, neither party (Catholic or Protestant) knew quite what to make of my tales of the Klansman-loving, civil rights activist, Baptist preacher Will Campbell. I didn’t either. But I was pleased to testify that the biblical imperative to “be reconciled” (2 Corinthians 5:18-20) was a more complicated, strange, and wonderful business than they, caught in their bloody, faith-based, sectarian strife, or I, as a white, American southerner, had begun to understand.

Campbell marks one crucial point on a moral continuum I’ve wanted (or wanted to want) to be faithful to since I went to a movie theater to watch The Mission by myself as a teenager. The preview had gotten my attention with a crucified Jesuit being sent over a waterfall in South America. And as Jeremy Irons’ Father Gabriel went back up it, extending and embodying good news to the Guarini tribe who would eventually incarnate the gospel to an ex-Guarini-hunter played by Robert De Niro, I was pummeled by one scene after another of lived Christian witness. As I tried to recover myself from the devastating final scenes (in tears, exiting the theater, into the rain and under an umbrella, conveniently enough), I was struck by a historical movement of radical patience. A continuum. I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to try to be an envoy of God’s mercy as well as a recipient.

I’d read the Bible. I’d always been a churchgoer. I was very much baptized. But I don’t think I’d ever been made so powerfully aware of Christianity as a countercultural movement. This was genuinely objectionable subject matter. The Jesuits portrayed in the film weren’t just loving enemies theoretically. They were loving enemies even as the enemies acted as enemies. And the Guarini embraced and received the murderer of their kindred. This was something new. “God is love,” Jeremy Irons’ Jesuit had affirmed with a tremble in his voice (knowing that it put him on the wrong side of the firepower of The Powers That Be). This wasn’t just a matter of holding some interesting, private, personal religious opinions. It was a different culture, a different politics altogether. I wanted to tell people about it, and I found I couldn’t share my enthusiasm for the film without getting allied or associated (in the minds of my hearers) with this very different way of being in the world. This could get messy.

In considering Will Campbell, the Jesuits of The Mission, and, in time, figures like Dorothy Day and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I was confronted by individuals whose bottom-line reality differed radically from what had been presented to me as obvious, sensible, and logical in everyday discourse, including among those ostensibly Christian. I was being confronted by a different kind of conversation in which love alone is credible. I had to make room in my head and heart for what they were up to. I had to make room in my perception of myself, others, and the news of the day. This Christianity was revolutionary, and it functioned by its own logic, irrespective of what was routinely determined to be appropriate, seemly, or realistic. It didn’t need my affirmation (or anyone else’s), but it was there (in history, in the present, in certain stories) demanding it and awaiting my response each day.

There are people, from time to time, who try to live, from time to time, as if Jesus is risen. There is a grace-informed consciousness at work in the world, and it infects the way people think about and talk about rednecks, racists, terrorists, primitives, liberals, and conservatives. This consciousness of the gospel of the coming kingdom is simultaneously no respecter of persons and perhaps the only respecter of persons. This gospel is never at our command, under our copyright, or effectively contained within an -ism, an ideology, or any well-intentioned human construction. Or, to put it another way, no one has successfully gotten this Jesus. The question is always whether or not Jesus’ rare ethos has gotten hold of us.

Until I became familiar with the likes of the Jesuits and a sense of Christianity as a discernible movement, an alternative lifestyle, within history, I was tempted to view God-language as if it were capital at my disposal. I had yet to properly understand the call to confession, the call to number myself among the not-so-deeply-converted multitudes who can be helped only by forgiveness and more forgiveness. If we view ourselves as learners, rather than knowers or possessors, of the loving way of the Lord and as largely unwilling initiates of a kingdom coming (on Earth as it is in Heaven) to an often horribly hateful world of which we are a part, we might learn a habitual hopefulness concerning human flesh and blood and a redemptive skepticism concerning the systems, structures, and bad ideas that subtly excuse the loss of some human lives as somehow inevitable, necessary, or, as the saying goes, “worth it.”

As self-conscious learners, we will be wary of defensiveness and the adversarial posture that too often imagines other parties to be stiff-necked and proud and resistant to the Holy Spirit. And we will be anxious to recognize our own knee-jerk opposition to the Word of the Lord, always acknowledging the contradictions that haunt our lives, always confessing them, often amused by them. We might more regularly hear in our heads a sensibility recently echoed by the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, originating with the Elder Zossima’s confession in The Brothers Karamazov: “We are all guilty. Each before everyone. And myself more than others.”

While this radical admission that our righteousness is as filthy rags resonates throughout the New Testament, I’m not sure it’s a distinguishing feature of the public persona or brand of “evangelical Christianity” in popular discourse. Many self-described Christians would likely join Mel Gibson in confessing that, in some sense, we all killed Jesus. But the confession doesn’t necessarily reflect a working awareness that Jesus’ teachings are often anathema to us, that his proclamation often eludes us just as it eluded his contemporaries, and that a certain lying violence within our thinking (toward the least of these, the stranger, the “collateral damage”) will often amount to rejecting Jesus all over again.

What if we began to believe that we are the kind of people who have eyes and see not, ears and hear not, who swear on the Bible and hold it aloft as if it were delivered by angels while making a mockery of its witness by regarding some lives as expendable, acceptable human sacrifices to the way of world markets—what would happen then? We might cease to speak in conversation-stoppers and become servants (ministers, minstrels) of an evangel that is more than mere affirmation of what we already think we know. We might use our words with more modesty and greater precision and an appropriate fear of speaking unfaithfully of good news that transcends our understanding. We don’t have to let uptight power brokers (news networks, political administrations, corporations, advertising schemes) set the tone in which we speak to each other. We get to be more pentecostal than that. We get to dream new dreams. Set new terms. We get to imagine the world differently.

In recent years, I’ve come to know Will Campbell personally, and I’ve endured the pleasure and embarrassment of being outmaneuvered repeatedly by his profoundly evangelical wisdom and wit. He doesn’t believe in issues or parties or the allure of the principalities and powers, strictly speaking, and, one evening, I tried to anticipate his response with a leading question. I was in for it. “Shouldn’t Pentecost have settled the race issue once and for all?” I asked.

“It did!” he fired back, looking at me with bewilderment and concern as if I was choking on a seed. And I realized I’d been out-conservatived, out-liberaled, and out-evangelicaled. For Campbell, Pentecost is a settled reality and we’d all do well to act like it. Be ye reconciled to the God who is redeeming all manner of people and things. Being reality-based in this manner will require some vigilance. Trying to keep this good word alive and signaling in our minds amid the simplifications of public discourse can be a bit of a trick. Those fixtures and forces have a habit of radiating their way into our lives and our speech patterns, deluding us with false witness, but we can forgive their purveyors as they usually don’t know quite what they’re doing. We are all alike caught up in various ways of denying the sacred integrity of human beings, various denials of Jesus’ good news.

When we catch a glimpse of this gospel, it can begin to draw us away from one-dimensional thinking, means-end misbehavior, and the prison of our days. But like poetry, it doesn’t exactly make these things happen. It just survives in the valley of its saying where the unimaginative and the unthinking wouldn’t think to tamper. It dares us to sense a sanctifying presence in all kinds of people and places we have yet to look. It invites the listener into a new world where all things are being made new. A world inaugurated in the telling (and in the struggle to understand it). A new way at hand, coming, and already among us. World without end.

David Dark is the author most recently of The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea (Westminster John Knox).