some Longer writing

SCHOOLS OF RHETORIC: POLITICAL PERSUASION FROM PHIL DONAHUE TO DONALD TRUMP

Comment, 2022

I offer an essay here helping to explain how we arrived at the weaponized rhetoric that so polarizes politics today–with some suggestions for a way out. This appeared in the Canadian publication Comment, a project of think tank Cardus. In their own words, “Cardus is a non-partisan think tank dedicated to clarifying and strengthening, through research and dialogue, the ways in which society’s institutions can work together for the common good.” I hope my own contribution can be helpful in that dialogue. Click here for the essay:

https://comment.org/schools-of-rhetoric/

My point here is not, in any way, to take sides in controversial politics of late. My concern, rather, is how we have arrived at the point in which so many refuse to listen to the other side. There are so many hurt feelings that too many people feel the only way to win is to out-argue or out-politicize (or even out-fight) the other side.

(In putting this together, I was helped by having a background that includes studies in communication theory, rhetoric, semiotics, philosophy, and theology, as well as listening to family and friends on different sides of issues.)

A Time to Lament

Originally published in The T. J. Eckleburg Review (Johns Hopkins University), 2020

In the following essay, I looked at stories of trauma and injustice in the shared memory of a family or community. It involves the horrid story of a lynching. We know and deeply deplore the terrible evil done to the victims. What shapes those who participate? If, on the other hand, we might have made some effort to be on the right side but wish we (or those who came before us) had done more to stand up for good, can we learn from that? For all of us, what is the purpose of lament?

Lament was a powerful tool once. The Iliad, perhaps the greatest of the epics of old, ends with three women’s voices mourning Hector, declaring what his death at the hands of Achilles would now mean for each of them. In Hebrew scripture, what was most often lamented was spiritual failure on the part of Israel, the resulting disorder wreaking havoc on the people and land. The prophet Isaiah condemned the wealthy who in a period of economic downturn, rather than helping their fellow Hebrews get back on their feet, bought land cheap from underneath them. They might have come out with riches from taking advantage of others’ money problems, but, in the end, they would be left without friends: “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!”

To lament was to give voice to the pain and suffering brought on by an injustice or trauma and to grieve the cost to oneself or to the larger community. Recovering a regard for lament, we come face to face, too, with what we have not done that we should have. And maybe there is something we can do better. In my family, I need only look at my own namesake and what he did and did not do. I am named after my father who, in turn, was named after my grandfather’s favorite uncle, a district judge in Waco. I knew of the judge as a reformer, who pushed back against the Red Light district in Waco (the only such legally tolerated then in Texas), the gambling and casinos that then belied the city’s hope to become “the Athens on the Brazos,” and the ruin brought upon marriages, which he saw in divorces sought in his court. All that I’ve read in court transcripts. In 1849, when my grandfather’s Uncle Marshall was born, the country had its twelfth president, Zachary Taylor; Texas had only its second governor, George Thomas Wood; and grandfather’s Uncle Marshall’s father (my grandfather’s grandfather) had a half-dozen or so slaves to make his life easier on a family farm in East Texas. That is also a reality I need to acknowledge.

Away from the farm, too, my Great-Great Uncle Marshall would have been taught that one race, well, his, in fact, was superior to others’. In 1867, my great-great uncle moved to Gilmer, Texas to be tutored in the law. His instructor was Oran M. Roberts, an unrepentant Confederate, born in South Carolina, schooled in Alabama, who had been Texas Supreme Court Justice until being removed (temporarily) during Reconstruction. In 1861, Roberts had presided over the Texas state secessionist convention, its call to secede declaring “the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color … in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law.” To put actions to his words, Roberts had then taken up arms as a colonel in the Eleventh Texas (Confederate, that is) Infantry.

As for himself, my great-great uncle never said anything in support of secession, nor slavery, and had not fought in the Civil War (as had a brother), but that was, nevertheless, the culture still defended by some when he was receiving his legal tutelage. Beginning in 1870, my great-great uncle practiced law in East Texas, then in 1874 moved away from family to the Brazos Valley of central Texas, where he eventually became a district judge. In August 1905, he would oversee the trial of Sank Majors, a 20-year-old African-American man accused of raping and stabbing a white neighbor woman (she would survive and live until 1963). After a short trial, an all-white jury quickly declared the young man guilty and sentenced him to death. Out of character for the time, though, my namesake yielded to the defense attorney’s objections, conceded that he, my great-great uncle, had not given the jury proper instructions before deliberation, and declared a mistrial.

The rest of the story is a miserable, ugly one. A self-righteous mob teemed into downtown Waco, encircling the courthouse. In a violent act of vigilantism, men hoisted sledgehammers against the doors of the jail. The doors were breeched. Thrust into the glaring light was the figure of Sank Majors, grim-faced, no longer under protection. I have long wondered what he felt. Surely he knew that calling for help was of no use, and that he had been abandoned to the throng, and he must have been terrified. He called out for his mother, and she yelled from behind the mob to let him know she was there. The mob laid their rough hands upon the young man and yanked and pulled him down the street to the Washington Avenue bridge, where they forced him on top a horse, strung a rope around his neck, and drove the horse out from under him. As the young man’s body dangled, people cut off fingers and tore away pieces of his clothes for souvenirs.

Theirs was an utter contempt for their captive. Like the vengeful Hamlet, though with none of his poetic lines, rather only crude epithets, they not only wanted to kill their enemy but to cast him down to damnation and hell. Hamlet would not kill Claudius in the act of prayer, lest Claudius’s soul be saved. A column printed in the Arlington Journal in north Texas captured this ignoble desire to not only mutilate the physical body but to damn another’s soul:

Negroes have come to regard the scaffold route about the surest route to heaven. Give one a few months or a year to pray in and he can atone for all his meanness so he thinks, and swing into the eternal city to sing praises with their murdered and ravished victims through all eternity. Such executions have come to have little terror for him. But the fury of the mob is a different proposition, and fills him with holy terror. Here he is denied the soothing presence of some reverend brother with a long tailed black coat on and a bible under his arm, while his own religious devotions are rudely disturbed by kicks and blows, by curses, and by the scent of coal oil and the crackling of fagots.

Just as with a knee against the neck of an African-American man today, the worst cruelty in lynching is not physical pain, the stripes across the back, the lesions about the neck. The greatest cruelty is in stripping the other person of dignity, ripping away the humanity from another person, wanting to deface the person from very existence. Had the lynch mob been somehow articulate, the argument might have been made that a public lynching could serve as a deterrent to more crime. Amongst those not pacifist today, the right to use such force is understood as permissible only when necessary to prevent a greater evil. Where was the greater evil here? And true justice supposes that each person is to be treated equally, whether the tradesman or lord of the manor. In the case of young Sank Majors, this was not seeking after justice. Justice had already been served and been furthermore promised in a new trial. No, the lynching and disfigurement was a dehumanization, seeing the other as non personam.

To believe Konrad Lorenz, to feel that we belong, we misbehave, we insult, we curse, we even kill. Rather than doing the long, hard work to build relationships, to create community, we instead lash out at a perceived common enemy. It is a cheap and easy way to feel part of a group. We elevate our hero status in the eyes of others in a quick act of violence, whether a hateful insult (or vile tweet), the slash of a blade, the flame flaring from a barrel, or the jerk of a noose. Lorenz writes of the “holy shiver” running down the spine of the instigator, no longer thinking but infused with vitriol, enthused toward annihilation of another. Lorenz writes: “A shiver runs down the back and … along the outside of both arms …. All obstacles in its path become unimportant; the instinctive inhibitions against hurting or killing one’s fellows lose, unfortunately, most of their power.” In the photos of lynchings, the faces in the crowds smile, whether in rhapsody, a sneer or a triumphant smirk, or just a nervous assent. We hear sometimes that a crowd has been “caught up” in a moment. The cliché allows us an out, an avoidance of responsibility. The cliché is not true. Rather, in a thrill that runs down the spine, we yield to evil, disregarding the other as a person. We seek to do evil, not good. The cliché of being caught up in a moment is nothing more than a soft velvet pall to cover the dark malignancy of our souls.

There are some memories that are forever dragged along behind us like some childhood object to remind us of a time when we were innocent, still protected from the world’s callousness. Other memories we steadfastly avoid. They only come to consciousness like an aching joint on a bitterly cold day. The story of Sank Majors was not a proud story for the family. I find no mention in any family letters, only in newspaper clippings from the time. Some accounts in recent years fault the judge for not taking more action, and perhaps that is so. At the time, one newspaper surmised that Majors “had been granted a new trial by Judge Surratt in order that that there might be an opportunity for the court of criminal appeals to reverse the sentence on a technicality.” And the Arlington Journal condemned the judge, my namesake, for granting a new trial, saying that, in fact, it was the judge’s decision that had “driven the people to such a deed.”

Picking among the bones of my forbearers, what am I looking for? As with most people, I suppose, I would like to find in the mythic roots of my family some lofty ideals and a nobility of mind. I look for a sense of dramatic outrage from the judge, my great-great uncle. I want to hear a loud prophetic voice bellow forcefully and powerfully from him to denounce the lynching, to condemn the violation of a young man’s body and soul. Instead, he remains, at best, but a moral reformer trying to do the right thing by a young black man, best as the time will allow perhaps, maybe thinking himself powerless to stand up to the crowd that comes afterward. The law promised due process for each person regardless of social class or color of skin. In 1905, however, a black man was not to be admitted into this protected group (and, we have seen, in some places still not). Do I take any consolation that my great-great uncle had advanced so far beyond his own father’s ownership of others—and the prejudices about racial superiority still clung to by Justice Roberts and his sort? Was he stepping forward, even a few halting steps, of the marked line of his day? But in the end he didn’t question the system itself.

We can learn from injustice. When Sank Majors was lynched, my grandfather was a student just across town at Baylor College. For all his life, he would carry a strong concern for what is good and fair. Inspired by his uncle’s public service, maybe wanting to go further, maybe as an act of penance, my grandfather became a community organizer, seeking to improve neighborhood conditions for people regardless of color or social standing, work he would continue up to his death in 1957. He learned to question the system itself when appropriate.

Seeking after justice was mandated by his faith, too. It was part of his Christian duty, he felt, being about as influenced by the Social Gospel movement as a white Baptist in the south could be then. After hearing a talk on stewardship at his church in Dallas in 1925, he implored the church leaders, and local businessmen, to include civic duty as part of Christian stewardship. He argued that people of faith should work to rectify the underlying conditions of poverty:

As I listened on your splendid talk on “Stewardship” I thought about the slum district of Dallas—districts where men, women and little children—blacks, Mexicans and whites—live in filth, dirt, disease and sin—physical conditions that are so depressing and so degrading that only the strongest character could ever rise above them…. The work of relieving the sick and the suffering and of bringing help to the needy, always appeals strongly to the sympathetic hearts. Is not the work of removing the cause or of removing these causes of equal importance?

The same year, he wrote a letter in response to a query from Jessie Daniel Ames, then the director of the Texas Association for Interracial Cooperation, formed to counter lynchings and other racial injustice. He supplied Ames with suggestions of people she could contact for local help and let her know that he was “now co-operating with the commission of Dallas, which is making a special investigation of the housing problem of Dallas.” (Ames, from Georgetown, north of Austin, had been involved in the suffrage movement, in 1919 had founded the Texas League of Women Voters, and in 1930 would organize the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.)

To distract us from seeking the good, Marlowe understood, the forces of evil do not need to construct heady arguments. They need only show us shiny objects to desire or caricatures of people to look down on and hate. Just a few weeks before he died, my grandfather wrote a letter to his Sunday School teacher, who was also one of the associate pastors at his church. I can only surmise that something had been said that was critical of people of other denominations or about people of another race (this was as the civil rights movement was gaining attention) or maybe some of both. A year before, on February 21, 1956, the head pastor of my grandfather’s church, W. A. Criswell, had addressed a South Carolina Baptist evangelism conference opposing forced integration. Criswell’s speech was meant to reassure his audience that he would not mix races in his own church. These were not accidental remarks. Criswell included as a punch line sure to get laughter from his audience: “Why the NAACP has got those East Texans on the run so much that they dare not pronounce the word chigger any longer. It has to be cheegro.” Not exactly words befitting the person heading up a major church. I can’t help but think that what my grandfather wrote was also a pointed rebuke to the way of thinking in the leadership in his church.

Too many of the virtues pinned on our puffed-out chests are just self-congratulatory nods to each other; they aren’t the honest product of any close appraisal of ourselves. Meantime, civilization groans and collapses under the throes of this smug sureness, moved to hatred by short, angry tweets that continue to rip away the humanity of the other person. “Do we serve Christ,” my grandfather asked rhetorically, “when we discuss the mistakes and misdeeds of other groups who think they are serving Him? Or do we serve Christ when we study the Bible and learn more about Him and of His love for us and about His love for all men, even His love for those men who are doing wrong?”

In his letter to his Sunday School teacher, my grandfather invoked the name of George Truett, who had led the First Baptist Church of Dallas before Criswell, from 1897 to 1947, and still, ten years later, cast a large shadow over Criswell’s tenure, some in Dallas thinking that, no matter the sonorous stirring of Dr. Criswell’s timorous preaching, and strong denouncements from the pulpit of others’ sins, he did not unite people as had Truett. This was bridge building in the first half of the twentieth century, in public civics that would be accepted as safe and acceptable but still pushed the envelope. My grandfather recalled how one time “Dr. Truett was invited to preach the sermon at the annual meeting of the East Texas Chamber of Commerce. Every church in Marshall, white and black, gave way for Dr. Truett. Dr. Truett’s message on ‘city building’ was addressed to all men, of all faiths. His message was addressed to the white men and to the black men, to the Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Jews. It was one of the greatest messages that I have ever heard.”

In instructions for my grandfather’s funeral service, my father, in his own act of pointedness, had Dr. Criswell read aloud that letter to the people of different religious ilk, and color, who filled the church pews. I wonder what Dr. Criswell felt as he read aloud my grandfather’s admonitions. This was December 1957. Just a few months before, a white mob had tried to block the young children in the “Little Rock Nine” from enrolling in schools that white students attended. Only two years before, Emmitt Till had been savagely murdered and mutilated in Mississippi, an act that, no doubt, resonated with my grandfather. It would not be until 1968 that Criswell would, at least publicly, renounce his statements on segregation, as he lobbied to be chosen president of the Southern Baptist Convention to start its conservative course in politics. Why can’t we just see the big picture, care for one another, and work together to help a greater cause?, my grandfather was asking. Why can’t we see the other as fully human? he was lamenting. And maybe, almost certainly, he also was thinking of the young Sank Majors and what had been done to him—and maybe some of what had not been done for him and too many since.

Myles Horton: Highlander Center and the tradition of the Social Gospel

Originally published in slightly modified version in Christianity & Crisis, 1990

This essay was my opportunity to give honor to some of those who were important to the Civil Rights Movement—and to help new generations know more about some of the thought that informed the movement. I had met Myles Horton in 1982 in a visit then to Highlander Center, outside Knoxville, Tennessee. In fact, a photo I made of Myles was used in the memorial for him that weekend in 1990.

In this part of East Tennessee the Appalachian Mountains roll down from Virginia and northern Kentucky to form the Cumberland Gap with its comparatively calmer altitudes. The largest city hereabouts is Knoxville, lying alongside the Tennessee River and home to the Tennessee Valley Authority, that New Deal hope. Off the interstate highway east of Knoxville, the roads narrow and then wind up and down and around the rolling hills. Perched on the sides of the hills is an occasional A-frame structure tucked into the trees or a trailer house with pieces of plywood appendaged as a front or side porch. A thin wisp of early morning mist lies on the green valleys below. Turn left at an intersection the prominent landmark of which is a junkyard of aging, rusting cars and trucks. Climb a steep dirt road, and there in this unlikely repository is the school, begun by former seminary students, that helped launch the civil rights movement.

On a spring day earlier this year, hundreds of people from across the United States and from Canada and India gathered here at the Highlander Research and Education Center on 104 acres on top of Bays Mountain. They came to pay respects to the memory of Myles Horton, the school’s long-time director, who died January 19 at age 84, and to help chart a course by which to continue to seek social justice.

That question seemed to be on everyone’s minds that weekend. Not only how to keep Highlander moving forward, but whether its populist, participatory philosophy still works heading into the next century. I had returned to Highlander to ask those same questions and another, where does the Christian fit in with work for social justice?

I knew Highlander’s roots were in the “Social Gospel.” Highlander was started by seminarians from the South who were stirred by the hope that society could be redeemed by applying biblical principles of love and justice. The church in which Horton grew up, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, sprang from a 19th-century revivalism that stressed personal responsibility and possibility. He later would describe it as “a people’s Presbyterian church.” In the summer of 1927, Horton, then a university senior, had gone to the mountains to begin vacation Bible schools for the church.

What he found was abject poverty in the people and wasted bounty in the land. The rich minerals were siphoned off, the trees cut and hauled away, and the locals left with little. By day he tried to meet the children’s spiritual needs. But Horton also invited the parents to come at night to talk together about their physical needs: how to find jobs, how to replant mountains, how to test a water well for typhoid. From that experience, wrote biographer Frank Adams, Horton took his Christian idealism and sought a model by which people could educate themselves.

At the urging of a sympathetic Tennessee congregational minister, in 1929 Horton went to Union Theological Seminary. There he, and two others who would teach at Highlander, Jim Dombrowski and John B. Thompson, were especially influenced by the teaching of Harry F. Ward, who had just written a book about economic morality and had drawn up a social creed for the Methodist church and the Federal Council of Churches. Another teacher, Reinhold Niebuhr, solicited funds for the proposed school.

Farther south, Don West, who would later help Horton found the folk school, took degrees in both education and religion from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he was influenced by Alva Taylor, a teacher there who also was a Disciples of Christ minister soaked in the Social Gospel. In a book on Christianity and industry, Taylor wrote that the gospel “proclaims the kingdom of God as well as individual salvation. The greatest responsibility faced by the Christian leadership of our day is that of Christianizing social relationships. Our civilization is Christian only in so far as its social life is Christian.” Taylor later would work with West and Horton to provide food to striking miners in Tennessee.

I knew as well that not all the influences had come from the church. At Union he also had discovered Marx. “I was not so much interested in his conclusions, predictions and prophesies as I was in how you go about analyzing and envisioning society,” he later said. Horton studied a year in Chicago, too, under the sociologist Robert E. Park. There he also visited with Jane Addams, founder of Hull House. With encouragement from Niebuhr and two Lutheran ministers who had befriended him, Horton then spent part of a year in Denmark studying the folk school system there (as did West). But Highlander represents to me at once the influence of Christianity on work for social justice, and the ambivalent relationship those who work for social justice have with the churches where they first discovered the principles of love and egalitarianism.

Myles was critical of the role that institutionalized churches sometimes play in pacifying people. But he also saw that the church can offer people a strong sense of hope and possibility, as the black church would in the civil rights movement. That weekend, Herbert Kohl, who with his wife, Judith Kohl, helped Horton write his recent autobiography, The Long Haul, would tell me about Myles, “The way he put it is he never confused religion with the church.”

After a racism workshop one afternoon, I sat in folding chairs under the main assembly tent with Anne Braden, a white woman who had worked with both labor unions and the civil rights movement in the South and had known Horton and Dombrowski. (It was Braden who, one day driving Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to a speaking engagement, heard him say about a song he had heard the day before at Highlander, “We shall overcome. That song really sticks with you, doesn’t it?”)

Braden, who had on a Rainbow Coalition button, told me she sensed in people such as Horton and Dombrowski that something better is possible. “They had a vision of a society that provided justice, and they especially had a vision of a society that at that point in the South did not oppress black people. People don’t understand today how key that issue was. You couldn’t grow up in the South in that period without knowing,” she recalled.

I asked her whether religion had played any important part. “There may be some exceptions,” Braden said, “but most of them came from a Christian religious background. Not to denigrate other religions, but it happens to be that’s where they came from. That was true in the ‘60s too. The whites who came into the civil rights movement came out of the churches. Many of them left the churches because the churches until the late ‘60s weren’t doing a darn thing.” Nevertheless, she told me, “they came from a Christian ideal of ‘I am my brother’s keeper, my sister’s keeper,’ and the whole Social Gospel tradition of the ‘30s.”

Full of good intentions and ideas about how people could help themselves, in 1932 Horton and West had gone to Tennessee to found Highlander Folk School, what today is the Highlander Center. In its first two decades, Highlander helped organize miners, textile workers and farmers into unions. Always Highlander sought some sort of reconciliation between whites and blacks, at a time when Tennessee and some other states outlawed integrated public meetings.

By the mid-1950s Highlander became the center of integration workshops. In 1955, Rosa Parks, a Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress and secretary of the local NAACP chapter, attended one workshop, just weeks before she refused a bus driver’s orders to vacate her seat for a white man. “At Highlander,” Parks later said, “I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society, that there was such a thing as people of differing races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops and living together in peace and harmony.”

About the same time, starting on John’s Island, South Carolina, Highlander began working with black community leaders who wanted to teach their neighbors how to read and write so they could pass the tests required to register to vote. When in 1961, Highlander turned the citizenship schools over to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a young black minister who had recently joined the Highlander staff, Andrew Young, went with the program to ensure its success. In 1982, Young, then the Atlanta mayor, would nominate Horton, who in 1972 had retired as head of the school, and Highlander for the Nobel Peace Prize.

But apostles and prophets are not always welcomed by the local priests and princes, and Highlander might be best known in the South for a billboard. In 1957, an exasperated Georgia governor sent an undercover agent, who registered as a free-lance photographer, to Highlander’s 25th anniversary celebration. Martin Luther King Jr. was photographed with some others there, and soon billboards across the south proclaimed that King attended a “Communist Training School.”

At the time then, the spirit of many was less one of celebration and more one of surviving in order to alleviate the wrongs that discomfited their consciences. At Highlander this year, Rosa Parks, seated, a shawl wrapped about her shoulders, passed on to several dozen children some of the stirring she had felt to see justice done. “I wanted my freedom just as everybody else,” this slight woman with a soft blur of white hair said, “but I was willing to make whatever sacrifice necessary to let it be known that I did not feel I was being treated as a human being and as a passenger. I wanted to make very clear that I did not care to be treated in that manner. For a long time in the South the powers that be, the segregationists, wanted to say that we as a people cooperated with the way they treated us and that the only opposition came from outside agitators and troublemakers. I was not an agitator, nor an outside troublemaker in my estimation.” (Asked by one child the organizations in which she had participated before that day in 1955, Rosa Parks listed the NAACP and several local groups and then named the St. Paul AME Church.)

Running all through the weekend was testimony that here many felt a refuge from an unjust society they were trying to change. A convivial Bernard Lafayette told how he first came here as a seminary student from Nashville’s American Baptist Theological Seminary (which is now American Baptist College and where today Lafayette is vice president). In 1960 Lafayette attended Highlander workshops with his roommate John Lewis (who in 1986 would be elected a Georgia congressman).

“Highlander was a place where we could get away, think, plan our strategy, and also connect with ourselves,” Lafayette recalled. “We used to come here as a retreat from the battle in Nashville. We were exposing ourselves to some new experiences as college students. Those of us who were from the South were actually testing laws that had been there for a long period of time. We were becoming convicts. We were establishing jail records. And all those things were serious decisions. Some of us were jeopardizing our scholarships. Some of us were jeopardizing our relationships with our families who were depending on us. A lot of us were first-generation college students. And we had to make it for the rest of those who were behind us, and we were jeopardizing all this.”

In one workshop, Horton challenged Lafayette, who today is a consultant to the New York City Martin Luther King Institute for Nonviolence, about the civil rights movement’s positions. “Myles asked, ‘Well why shouldn’t white folks have the right to eat with whomever they like?’“ Lafayette recalled. “I began to think about that and got angry. I stood up and we had a good old fuss. I didn’t then understand the concept of being a devil’s advocate. What Myles was doing was causing me to think critically about why I was doing what I was doing. That was one of the things he consistently did.”

Horton successfully anticipated two social movements, the labor movement and the civil rights movement. Like his friend King, by the late 1960s Horton had begun to see that democracy to be workable must include economic democracy too, and Highlander shifted attention back to the impoverished Appalachia. He described those last years as an organizational time without the momentum of a fast-paced movement. Toward the end of the weekend I climbed the steep slope up to Highlander’s meeting rooms to ask John Gaventa about that organizational work and whether there can be something again with the moral power of the civil rights movement.

Gaventa, now 40, first came to Highlander in 1972 for the 40th anniversary activities and then began coming back for workshops. He joined the staff in 1976, and last year was named the new director. There are similarities in the backgrounds of Highlander’s most recent director and its first. For one thing, both thought a lot about methodology in both learned institutions and Appalachia.

Gaventa won’t bring it up, but he is a former Rhodes Scholar. In his studies he looked at a Cumberland Gap valley where the land and resources were controlled by a London-based company. In one county the company owned 90 percent of the coal yet paid less than three percent of the county’s property taxes. Meanwhile about three-fifths of the valley’s families fell below the poverty line and nearly one-third of the people were out of work. Gaventa asked what were the conditions that left the local people feeling powerless to protest—and how can people make outside owners be accountable. A subsequent book, published in 1980, garnered the American Political Science Association’s award for the best book that year on government, politics or international relations. And in 1981 Gaventa was named a MacArthur Fellow, joining Robert Coles, Elaine Pagels, Richard Rorty and other recipients in the first year of the award.

Gaventa also shares with Horton a religious influence. He spent most of his young adult years in West Africa as the son of Baptist medical missionaries. “Like Myles,” he told me, “I come out of somewhat of a religious background, which I think taught me a lot of basic concepts, of respect for other people, of justice.”

Gaventa believes as did Myles that people learn from experience. Education isn’t simply a process of transferring information from one set of people to another—but is a group of people running their own workshop, deciding what social action to take, or learning how to find and use information. The latter, sometimes called participatory research, is of special interest to Gaventa.

A lot of Highlander’s work now focuses on teaching local communities how to research industrial pollution and the companies behind it. Gaventa spoke of a growing frustration in communities, of people wanting to reclaim control over health conditions. He believes people learning how to do their own environmental research might be as important now as citizenship schools once were. “We sense from them, communities we’ve been working with all over the country,” he said, “a tremendous anger, a tremendous sense of, OK, we’ve dealt through the regulatory process, government agencies like the EPA, but still we’re dying, the water is being poisoned. The environment in many areas has become a question of life or death, a question of dignity, a question of human rights.”

Other work is with communities that have been abandoned by corporations. “There has always been this sort of liberal idea that the people improve by bringing industries in and you develop the economy and it trickles down. But that’s not working. As people say, we’re still waiting to get wet,” Gaventa said.

“The traditional models of delivering the economy are not working, and there are increasingly large numbers of people who are getting worse and worse off, even though they’re working, even though they’re doing everything society told them to do. It begins to unmask the fundamental moral questions. It is no longer a question of economic development. It becomes a question of dignity and human rights.”

Gaventa sees more and more people wary of businesses that shop around from community to community for the most breaks. He told me, “I think increasingly communities are going to question whether or not they’re going to trade off their community to get capital or the rights it wants, to do a development model that benefits so few people and creates so many quality-of-life problems.”

In the final analysis, the gospel goes mostly unstated at Highlander, but the school’s roots in Christian principles of love and justice have been assumed into its ethos. It is an ethos long talked about by prophets, who have seen that a society’s faith is tested by how that society treats the least powerful. On the way out to Tennessee I read again God’s indictment against corrupt officials and arrogant land owners in the eighth century B.C. “Is it nothing to you that you crush my people and grind the poor?” God rebuked them (REB, Isaiah 3.15). And God admonished them against taking advantage of the hard times to buy up land at cheap prices: “Woe betide those who add house to house and join field to field, until everyone else is displaced, and you are left as sole inhabitants of the countryside” (Isaiah 5.8). If the greed and injustice continued, God warned, in the end the land would be in ruin so that the people would work harder only to reap less from the land.

Perhaps the most eloquent thinking I heard about the relationship between a place such as Highlander and personal faith came from Maxine Waller, who today leads a citizens group in Ivanhoe, Virginia, that is building a community center, renovating houses, and writing its own local history. Waller first came to Highlander several years ago for a workshop in Highlander’s Southern Appalachia Leadership Training (SALT) program. “The reason I came to Highlander was that I prayed,” she unabashedly explained to everyone under the main tent. “I said, ‘Lord, I’m a believer and I don’t know what to do. I need some help, and would you please help me?  You have always supplied my needs and I’m depending on you once again.’  The next morning I got an application for the SALT scholarship, and that’s the truth.”

At Highlander she expected to find a lot of talk about God but didn’t. “When I came to Highlander I didn’t hear too much about God. I started thinking, ‘What’s happening?’” Waller said, and then she offered her findings. “So I did some research and I found out Myles started out in the church. A lot of people don’t know that, that Myles started out in a church and then found out that was where God’s work wasn’t being done. So Myles started doing God’s work and it was called a lot of names.”

Self-examination in the Spiritual Autobiography

Originally published in Christian Educators Journal

This was a message about writing, seeking humility, and self-examination.

After the waitress brought his fettuccine, my friend stabbed a fork into it and looked up at me. He wanted to know how to write a book about his life. He told me he had a message to tell. “If Jesus could turn my life around, he can turn anyone’s around,” he said. He confided how he had dealt cocaine, fenced stolen goods, even robbed others. His crime and deceit had ruined his marriage and cost him time in prison. Now he had a second marriage, a young baby, a second chance at life. He wanted to write about his journey to that point. A week later, he showed up at my door with a dozen pages of single-spaced material. “Chapter 1,” he said. It was the first of many dispatches left at my door.

There might have been a message in his life story, but it was obscured by the staccato delivery. His writing style was matter of fact, mostly exposition with few details. So over a winter and summer I coached him in the ways of the spiritual autobiography. In coaching him, I borrowed from what I knew about the genre, material I had culled and digested for conference papers. But I also advised him about writing in general. Perhaps something in those lessons might also be of some use in your classroom.

First, the good story combines motion and emotion.

Early on, I gave him homework. What were the times he remembered with his father? How did his father move about the house? What did the house smell like? Through remembering these details, I wanted him to describe motion and emotion. “Put yourself in motion,” I said. In one place, he had written that the bugs were bad and the weather was hot. I suggested the following:

I squirmed around as best I could to escape the insects that plagued me. I tried to pull away from the Long Island water bugs that crawled about my feet. My skin tightened as the late-summer mosquitoes circled around my sweaty neck.

Second, move the plot along unobtrusively. Work the action into other material, keeping “I” as a subject to a minimum.

Too many of beginning writers’ transitions are “Next I …” or “Then I ….” Just one alternative is to use the changes in time or seasons to move the plot along. At one point my “student” wrote how one year something bad had unexpectantly happened to him and his sister. I quickly sketched the following to show how he might set up these events (filling in the blanks with his own details):

That fall had begun innocently enough. In autumn, the mucky, humid summer air blows out and is replaced by crisp, cool breezes that call children out of their houses to the streets to play. We looked forward to …. Then one day we learned that ….

Third, use details to create verisimilitude, that is, to give readers a sense of a real place, time, and people.

At another point, he wanted to describe how, when he was fifteen years old, he had helped a friend steal a car. He had written that a street was lined with willow trees and that he had listened for dogs. I showed him how he could add more details to move the plot along while painting a picture of what his senses had experienced:

It was nearly dark as Johnny moved his car through the Friday evening traffic coming home. As we drove along the two-lane backdrop, we settled into a silence and I gazed out the window. It was a starless night. The sky was a washed-out gray, occasionally pierced by a yellow light from a house in the distance, the countryside a blurring of patches of green and brown. When we reached town, we turned off the main road down a dark street lined with tall willow trees between the street and the houses. Johnny showed me where the car was, parked in an alley…. I was nervous as I approached the car. A light breeze was rustling the leaves of the trees. I listened for dogs but didn’t hear any.

Fourth, the spiritual autobiography is marked by a certain sensibility, as the protagonist becomes aware of his or her culpability in choosing wrong.

The early models for this genre were, of course, St. Paul and St. Augustine. In their examples, conversion is marked by a dramatic moment in which the individual has a transcendental experience and is transformed. Some scholars have suggested a subsequent conversion narrative pattern, too. As Peter Dorsey puts it in Sacred Estrangement: The Rhetoric of Conversion in Modern American Autobiography, this pattern records “not a single moment of regeneration but a series of awakenings interspersed with periods of despair and melancholy.” Anxiety over the state of one’s soul and evidence of wrestling with temptation is a sign that the individual is being called apart by God.

The second pattern is now closely associated with the spiritual autobiography of Puritans, but a helpful more-contemporary example is Charles Colson’s Born Again. A theme through Colson’s books is his pride in his own abilities and his desire to be self-reliant—even after his conversion and later imprisonment. The thread that runs through his autobiography is not gossip about the political machinations of that era—but Colson’s self-reflection and his growing awareness of what his pride had cost him. (Another example is Dan Wakefield’s Returning.)

My “student” hadn’t yet achieved that perspective. His autobiography was like too many Cecil DeMille movies. Sure, at the last moment Samson does the right thing, but up that point most of the focus is on his relationship with the sultry Delilah. In my tutoree’s autobiography, there was still too much attention on the crimes, money, and women—and not enough on his spiritual struggles.

Fifth, show the inner struggle.

God had paraded a series of people through his life to witness to him. At the time, my “student” hadn’t paid much mind to their prayers or testimony. He needed now to go back and to try to see that spiritual activity. To start him along this path, I asked a few questions about one of those witnesses in his life and then scribbled the following example for him:

She belonged to an Assembly of God church just down the road from her house. From the outside it didn’t look like much. It was a one-story wood frame structure with an exterior of light beige stucco. But inside there was something going on. You could walk in and feel God’s presence. Sunday mornings three hundred people would fill the church to raise their voices. Each Sunday night the church held a prayer meeting. Years after I would learn that, each week, top on her prayer request list was my salvation.

This quick sketch helped him see how he might peel away the surface layers to reveal the inner struggle.

Unfortunately, we never got the opportunity to finish the story. By fall he had moved away. But he was beginning to see what is true inside or outside the classroom—that the challenge in telling a spiritual autobiography is to reveal the inner struggle, using all the tools available to the writer.

Faith and the Unsuccessful Life

Message presented 15 February 2009, Peace Mennonite Church, Dallas

What I tried to say here is that it’s OK to not be successful in the eyes of the world. Just keep working for peace, healing, and reconciliation.

Think of this sermon as the “un‐sermon.” From time to time, in the past, the owners of the 7‐Up brand have marketed their soda as the “Uncola,” something different from the norm. In thinking over this sermon the past few weeks, I have thought of this as the “Unsermon.” In some churches you might get a sermon series promising to bring you success in marriage and money if you will attend and pay attention. I think a relationship with God can help us in that direction, if only because in acting honorably and honestly we have a better sense of priorities. But what about those times when we are trying to be honorable and honest in our dealings with others—and it still seems as if we do not have success in our lives, at least as measured by the world?

The title for the message this morning is, of course, meant to be somewhat ironic. Having faith does bring success. The question, though, is this: what is meant by success? What should we call success? How should we measure success?

Both our Old Testament and New Testament readings this morning are about someone with an illness, an affliction that has been lifted off that person. But there are as many passages in the Bible about people who are given “a cup to bear” and never permitted to escape the consequences the world throws at them. Some of my close friends have had their faith shattered by seeing suffering, atrocities, or injustice seemingly ignored by the church or, in their eyes, God. If, as Christians we represent to the world that we demonstrate our faith by success in our businesses—that our accumulation of things is tantamount to showing God’s blessings on us—that our perfect marriages are the best example of our faith—that with enough faith there will be no suffering—how then do we explain what faith is, who God is, to people who see continued examples of injustice and suffering and failings? What do we have to say to the many in the world without good health, with failed marriages or other failed relationships with others, with financial uncertainties, or even living in war zones?

As I have confided to a few friends of late, at this point in my journey, I could not point to success in my personal life as evidence to prove to others the validity of my faith. I wouldn’t make a very good poster child. In fact, as of late my personal life is rather messy and sometimes disheartening. I recently ran across this quote from musician Bruce Cockburn from a 1985 interview in The Other Side magazine:

I guess my Christian experience has been different from a lot of people’s. Every now and then, I force myself to watch one of those Christian TV shows like the “PTL Club.” Sincere guys come on saying, “I was a drunkard, and I lost my job. Then I found the Lord, and all of a sudden, my marriage was saved; my job was saved; I don’t drink any more; and I’m a millionaire.’”

I have no reason to doubt those folks’ sincerity. I could go on that show and say, “Well, I started out as an agnostic, went through Buddhism and black magic. Then I became a Christian—and my marriage fell apart.” For me, my faith is a whole other thing than those PTL guys’ faith. And, although I have to say this with a certain caution, I know that no matter how much I screw up, God is still going to be there. A large part of my faith is trusting that God won’t let me screw up beyond a certain point.

That hit home for me. My successes, measured in worldly terms, would not be a good indicator that my faith has significant advantages for others. I am with Cockburn. I respect the sincerity in the testimonies of people who have reaped material rewards because of their faith. But I can’t point to huge worldly successes in my own life. What my faith has meant is that I am better than I would otherwise be. Now I am only socially awkward and clumsy a lot of the time. Without God, I might be a big‐time jerk to others, a royal pain to be around. And I would be without comfort when things go bad in a big way. In actuality, my life has a lot of riches, but they are the friends I have, who have ministered to me when I’ve been down, the students whose lives I have touched and who have come back to thank me.

A lot of the time, when ministers speak on this topic, they choose as a text the book of Job. But that’s almost too easy, I think. For, in Job, though he is tested severely, in the end he is given back much more than he has lost. What about a sermon for those people who still are hurting and struggling—and seemingly not getting anything in return?

I want to look this morning at the example of Jeremiah. In the literature of the Hebrews, no prophet says more about a prophet’s struggle with his or her burden than does Jeremiah. But what was the burden? And what did Jeremiah discover in his struggle? Some light can be shone on these questions by examining the key passage of Jer. 20:7‐13, one of several “laments” of Jeremiah.

Here is the short version of the story then. Pashur, chief officer of the royally allied temple, has ordered the beating of Jeremiah because he has opposed the civil religion. Jeremiah further suffers as his body is bent as he is placed in stocks. Some translations, for example, the Tanakh, translate this word as “cell.” Whichever it is, Jeremiah has been placed in a rigid enclosure that is torturing his body. This is the low point for the prophet, ridiculed and beaten by the representatives of this nationalistic religion, who see Jeremiah as a dangerous upstart.

Placed after this abusive treatment of the prophet is Jeremiah’s final lament. In Jer. 20.7‐8, the prophet begins with a complaint. God has involved Jeremiah in God’s work, but Jeremiah has been rejected and ridiculed by the people:

You enticed me, O Lord, and I was enticed:
You overpowered me and you prevailed.
I have become a constant laughingstock,
Everyone jeers at me.
For every time I speak, I must cry out,
Must shout, “Lawlessness and rapine!”
For the word of the Lord causes me
Constant disgrace and contempt.
(Tanakh)

These are not exactly complimentary words toward one’s boss, not to mention one’s God, but, as in the Psalms, God would rather his followers at least argue with him, or challenge him, rather than ignore him altogether.

In looking at commentaries on this passage, I see one scholar suggesting that in the passage just read the words translated “enticed” and “overpowered” carry over from passages such as Deut. 22.25, 27 and 2 Sam. 13.14 the analogy of a “brute force” used against a weaker being (Holladay, 552‐553). Another scholar suggests that the author thinks of Yahweh almost as an enemy or adversary, since following God has meant only persecution for Jeremiah (Carroll, 398‐400).

But whether “enticed” is analogous to a physical overpowering, an enticement, or a forceful persuasion is not so important as that Jeremiah was unprepared for God’s strength. Another lament from Jeremiah, in Jer. 15.18, illuminates the contexts. There Jeremiah also had regretted being born to become a point of strife and contention to his people. And he complained there, too, that Yahweh had not exonerated Jeremiah before the people. There, too, the prophet asked rhetorically whether God had misled him:

Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable,
refusing to be healed?
Wilt thou be to me like a deceitful brook
like waters that fail?
(RSV)

(Imagine talking to your boss, parents, or teachers like that.)

What is suggested in comparing Jer. 20.7‐8 with Jer. 15.18 is that the prophet was unprepared for God’s plan for the people. A further glance back in the book of Jeremiah shows the prophet first willingly allied himself with the temple reform, part of a nationalistic movement. When it became evident that the powers that be, the “princes, prophets, and priests,” had corrupted the temple worship into merely an outer ritual, Jeremiah began preaching against this—and against the breakdown in ethical practices that always follows when those who are supposed to be preaching the Word abdicate their responsibility. Jeremiah expected God to step in and make things right. But when the hypocritical, those doing wrong, began to prosper, and their ministries grew and their businesses flourished, Jeremiah became disillusioned.

Jer. 15.19 suggests that the prophet might even have stopped preaching for awhile. In Jer. 20.9, the prophet says:

I thought, “I will not mention Him,
No more will I speak in His name”—
But [His Word] was like a raging fire in my heart,
Shut in my bones;
I could not hold it in, I was helpless.
(Tanakh)

The word translated “heart” here is in the Hebrew “leb” and conveyed the idea of the innermost person, the center or core of one’s self. For the Hebrews, it carried the idea of the feelings and will. So the image is that of a reluctant prophet’s continuing to preach, even when he isn’t getting any personal gain—just the opposite, is losing friends, his position in the community, even his savings and house—because of some force he cannot resist—and that penetrates his innermost being.

The picture of a “raging fire” is the same image as that associated with God’s covenant with his people in Deut. 4.23‐24:

Take care, then, not to forget the covenant that the Lord your God concluded with you, and not to make for yourselves a sculptural image in any likeness, against which the Lord our God enjoined you. For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, an impassioned God. (Tanakh)

The consuming fire is a sacrificial image. Just so, the Word of the Lord consumes, like a sacrificial fire, the prophet’s innermost being.

Jeremiah, then, has two understanding of the Word of the Lord—or Torah. First, it is not something with which one can feel comfortable. Rather, when there is a genuine experience of God, then God’s word will challenge the whole being of a person. Second, the Word has an existence independent of prophets or other people. The Word of the Lord came to a resistant, immature Jeremiah (Jer. 1.4), and Yahweh placed his words in Jeremiah’s mouth (Jer. 1.9; cf. Isaiah 6.6‐7ff).

According to Jer. 20.10 even those who had said they were Jeremiah’s friends waited for him to make a mistake. (Literally, it is “every man of my peace.” The phrase could mean a friend, that is, someone interested in another’s welfare, but here it also could be an ironic statement about the “shalom” of the temple, whose leaders had had Jeremiah imprisoned.) Presumably, Jeremiah’s “mistake” was his critical remarks in the temple yard; there he had spoken against the civil religion, against the empty rituals the people had made their worship, telling the people they were not acting out what God commanded them to be and do (Jer. 19.14‐15).

Jer. 20.7‐9, then, as much as it is a complaint against the force of God and Torah, is also a summary of Jeremiah’s path from a preacher for the powers that be to becoming a critical prophet on the outside, on the fringes of the church as it was known then. In his prophetic growth, Jeremiah has found himself increasingly on the outside of faith as merely ritual. Along the way, as Jeremiah has protested to God, God has asked Jeremiah to go even further in a symbolic alienation from community and the civil religion. Jeremiah becomes what is sometimes called in the seminary a “peripheral prophet.” By Jer. 19 he is rejected by his hometown (Jer. 11.18‐23), prohibited from marrying (Jer. 16.2) and physically outside the gate of the temple, outside the church of his day. He has been effectively ostracized—and stripped of anything that would even hint that is he is in this for the money or reputation.

But, just as in the Psalms, after the lament against the hardships that following God has caused the righteous comes the acknowledgement of trust and faith that God will ultimately deliver the goods. In Jer. 20.10‐12, Jeremiah says Yahweh will be like an avenging warrior on his side:

But the Lord is with me like a mighty warrior;
Therefore my persecutors will stumble;
They shall not prevail and shall not succeed.
They shall be utterly shamed
With a humiliation for all time,
Which shall not be forgotten
O Lord of Hosts, You who test the righteous,
Who examine the heart and the mind,
Let them see Your retribution upon them,
For I lay my case before you.
(Tanakh)

Jeremiah has felt Yahweh’s overpowering him. Compared to that, the attempts of Jeremiah’s enemies to prevail against the prophet would be anticlimactic. (As Niké told us this past week on another topic, Jeremiah is more in awe of the one who has sent him—than he is in fear of the people to whom he has been sent!) Jeremiah delivers a strong message—that those who have hitherto enjoyed access to the inner circles of power and influence—who have made a show of religion but do not act it out in their lives—that, in the end, they will be brought down and shamed. However, from what we read in the scriptures, in his lifetime Jeremiah never saw this justice realized. We don’t know for sure, but, according to some extra‐Biblical literature, traditions outside the Bible, he was later murdered by people angered at his speaking out.

What is the take away for us this morning? I have a hard time praying for even my enemies to be punished. But, if we truly care for others, for their walk with God, for their ultimate salvation, we want people to be humbled when they do wrong—so they can, in turn, try to repair some of the hurt they have inflicted on others—and so they can have a relationship with God that is genuine, that is not just based on the current state of their health, wealth, job, looks, admirers, or influence in the community. Sometimes those people include us.

We also want justice to be done. We want to be able to point out a consistent ethic, that doing good will, in the end, win out. Globally, that might not happen any time soon. Whatever our eschatological views, though—whether we hold to a “realized eschatology” or not—as believers we, at least, should be striving to show that ethical, moral consistency in our own lives—and working for peace, healing, and reconciliation in the lives of others. As Phil. 4.8 reminds us, wherever we are, we should we be working for—we should be seeking to represent—”whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable.”

Finally, there is another message this morning for me. I am not a believer because I think I will become wealthy; because I will maintain my good health; because I will be amazingly handsome with a buff physique, attractive to all women; because I will have a beautiful wife who always loves me and who continues to be faithful, seeing through my shortcomings; because I will become a much‐admired rock star or rap star or whatever your idea of having made it is—or even artist or theologian, the latter two perhaps closer to a temptation for me. There is no connection for me between my worldly gain or worldly esteem and my faith. Rather, my faith is simply the right thing to do. No matter what others might throw at me—no matter what the world might throw at me—I hope, at least—I would continue to reflect my faith in God and to be an example to those with whom I come in contact.