CHARLOTTE'S HOLY WARS
Religion in a New South Cityby Frye Gaillard
Essays, 44 pages
ISBN 1-930907-83-4, (Main Street Rag, 2005) $7
This is a collection of four essays first published by Creative Loafing in Charlotte. The cover photo is by Chris Radok and is used with permission.
Preface This book began as a newspaper assignment for Creative Loafing, the weekly alternative paper in Charlotte. The editor, John Grooms, and I were talking one day about the role of religious leaders and churches in shaping the ethical and political debate in the city. In the course of our musings, my mind drifted back to the turbulent time when I first came to town.
I had signed on as a reporter for the Charlotte Observer, and my first assignment was the school busing crisis, which, in 1972, gripped the city like nothing that I had ever seen before. There were deep divisions between black and white, and racial fighting in the local high schools, but even in the midst of all the turmoil, there was a special quality about the public discourse. There was, I thought, a civility at its core, and a determination to do the right thing, even if people weren’t sure what it was.
At first I was puzzled about the source. What was it, really, that seemed to hold the possibility of peaceful consensus, even in the bleakest, most contentious of times? I asked one of the Observer editors about this—a wise old hand who had been around Charlotte for most of his life—and his answer to the question was quick and emphatic, as if he couldn’t believe I had to ask.
“Well,” he said, “of course it’s the churches.”
I quickly came to see that the editor was right. Nearly every player in the Charlotte busing story was motivated in large measure by faith. The plaintiffs in the case, Darius and Vera Swann, were African-American missionaries who had lived in an integrated community overseas, and had come to believe that this was God’s will. The judge who heard the case, James B. McMillan, was a Presbyterian elder whose stoic response to the public criticism he endured was the notion that “God has his plan for our lives and we tend to do better if we don’t depart from it.”
Gene Owens, the senior minister at Myers Park Baptist, led demonstrations in support of McMillan. And William Poe, the school board chairman, was a Baptist deacon who was passionately opposed to the judge’s busing order, but came to accept it once the Supreme Court ruled that McMillan was right. This might be a difficult moment, said Poe, but it was morally wrong for people to try to tear the community apart.
So it went all the way down the line. This was, in those days, a community where ethics and faith were intricately intertwined. But what about today? John Grooms said he wanted to see a story that explored that question, looking at changes in the ministerial community, the apparent decline in the influence of the churches, and the overall impact of faith on the moral and political climate of the city.
This essay represents an expansion of the original story, and like the piece in Creative Loafing, it is meant to be a snapshot of our place. I don’t mean to say in the pages that follow that the only measure of a minister or a church is how they respond to the issues of the day. I have a friend at Covenant Presbyterian who says his minister, John Rogers, “preaches sermons that could be given in nearly any century. They are not dependent on that morning’s headlines.”
There is something to be said for such timeless theology. But my own bias—and that is probably the right word for it—was shaped during the civil rights era in the South, when too many churches were timid and silent during the greatest moral crisis of our time. So I applaud the people who speak out for their faith, even when I don’t agree with what they say. But I’m troubled by the possibility, raised in the story, that too much certitude can be dangerous, and that the blaring of voices may be one reason that too many people tune out the noise.
In the end, I suppose, this contemporary portrait of a New South city is not intended to be reassuring.—Frye Gaillard,
April 2005