By J. Brent Walker, Executive Director
When that self-described “bootleg preacher,” Will Campbell, died June 3, heaven became richer and the earth poorer.
He was one of a kind. It is not easy to replace someone who can stand on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel soon after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and later visit James Earl Ray, the shooter, in jail or who can lead the advance guard for civil rights and school desegregation and visit a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in prison. Will taught all of us that love must be complete and bilateral. “If you love one, you gotta love ‘em all,” he would say. In his sometimes iconoclastic and always prophetic way, Will out-Christianed the best among us.
Preacher Will was special to me and to the Baptist Joint Committee. His memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly (1977), which I read — no, devoured — with utter astonishment 30 years ago, helped inform my personal response to God’s call that, a seminary education later, ended me up at the Baptist Joint Committee. He later inscribed my copy with a version of his famous dictum from Dragonfly describing the pith of the Christian faith: “We’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway.” (including Will and me!)
And he was an advocate for the Baptist Joint Committee, through his words and his purse. As a thoroughgoing “deep water” Baptist, he believed passionately in religious liberty and the separation of church and state. In his 1999 book, titled Soul Among Lions: Musings of a Bootleg Preacher, he railed against those who “clothe a blatantly political agenda in pious rhetoric and peddle it as gospel.” Continuing, he averred that our nation’s Founders “weren’t trying to establish a Christian nation. Quite the opposite. They were fleeing from entanglement with anybody’s religion. They had seen the beggary, the bloodletting inhumanity of theocracies, and wanted no part of it. Church was never intended to be state. State was never to be church.”
But he was far from doctrinaire. In typical Will Campbell fashion, he wanted both sides to get their due. In Soul Among Lions, Will also addressed the issue of school prayer. Crediting a good friend, country singer/songwriter Tom T. Hall, Will offered a solution to the standoff: make prayer homework! Preacher Will wrote, “Those who press most ardently for prayer in the public schools are also champions of family values. And who isn’t? So to make school prayer homework is to encourage family values. … Muslims could pray to Allah, Jewish families to Yahweh, Christians in Jesus’ name. No one’s religion is violated.” When Will asked Tom, “What about atheists?” Tom answered, “Atheists meditate.” Yes, Will’s humorous yet serious solution was an effort to get a win-win solution. Prayers can be offered to God but without the sponsorship of and entanglement with government.
Most church-state controversies dealing with government-sponsored religious expression can be handled in the same way. And usually the alternative does not have to be private homework; it can be publicly expressed religion.
Government-sponsored prayer at graduation ceremonies can easily be replaced with privately sponsored, but openly expressed, baccalaureate services where attendance is voluntary and governmental control absent. Worship, including prayer, can be experienced genuinely and to its fullest.
How about official prayer before legislative bodies? The same can be done there. Officially sanctioned legislative prayer can be replaced with a moment of silence along with prayer in voluntary associations of caucuses on both sides of the political aisle and across the religious spectrum before the official session begins.
Government-sponsored displays of religious messages such as the Ten Commandments or symbols like the Christian cross can be even more prominently displayed on church or synagogue property in full view of the public. This can be done without having to demean the former by calling Holy Scripture the foundation of Anglo-American law or regarding the latter as little more than a secular war monument.
On and on we could go. Almost any church-state problem one could name can be handled the same way. Stand up for principle, but try to find a way to accommodate the desired religious expression without enlisting the offices of government to do it.
That common-sensical, enemy-loving, grace-filled bastard whom God loved would proudly say, “Right on, brother!” Thank you, Preacher Will, for your life and legacy.
From the July/August 2013 Report from the Capital. Click here for the next article.
