Race and the Roots of the Presbyterian Church in America, no. 4

[For the explanation of this series and the first post, see here; see here for installments two and three. There will be a final application post tomorrow.]

Even
as the 1960s came toward a close, Nelson Bell continued to advocate what he
took to be racial moderation. “Forced
segregation was wrong, forced
integration is equally wrong,” he reiterated. However, behind his continued
commitment to the idea that “Christian race relations proceed from love, not
force,” he actually had travelled a long way from the late 1940s and early
1950s. He recognized that the Supreme Court had no choice to void Virginia’s
statute against interracial marriage; he observed that churches had no business
enforcing “closed door” policies, banning blacks from corporate worship, a
practice that was “un-Christian.” He also admitted that society needed to
provide “the right of equal opportunity” to all of its citizens, a commitment
that could only be the result of Christian morality shaping social policies.
All of these positions were far beyond what he could have imagined twenty years
prior. And yet, he continued to believe to the end of his days that the civil
disobedience practiced by Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King worsted
the cause of race relations. Bell could not see that if it was not for the
willingness of King and others to disobey Jim Crow laws in order to gain racial
justice, then racial moderates like Bell would have never come to defend equal
opportunity regardless of race or color.[1]

No
doubt, Bell traveled toward greater racial moderation because of the force of
the cultural moment. However, the effect of his son-in-law’s example of
integrated crusades undoubtedly played a part as well. When Graham declared in
Jackson, Mississippi, that “there is no segregation at the altar” and that
there should be none in the church either, he began to shift the ground upon
which Bell, as well as other younger southern Presbyterians, would stand. When
these younger southern Presbyterian conservatives met to form the Presbyterian
Churchmen United (PCU) in 1969, they included in their seven-point “Declaration
of Commitment” a statement that emphasized a spirit of “love, concern, and
neighborliness toward all races of men without partiality and without
prejudice.” D. James Kennedy stressed that theme at the PCU rally in December
1969 when he “made it plain and simple that the continuing church movement was
about faithfulness to the Scriptures, to evangelism, and to world missions and
not about preserving a segregated way of life.” When these younger leaders
began working to form a Continuing Presbyterian Church, many of them were
determined that the new church would be racially inclusive. When the Continuing
Church steering committee met in 1971, Ben Wilkinson stressed, “We are not a
racist group seeking to build a racial church.” While recognizing differences
of opinion, Wilkinson wanted to know “black pastors and elders who might be
interested in the Continuing Church.” Wilkinson was typical of these younger
leaders: to a man, they desired a break with the southern way of life and a
church that reflected the Gospel itself.[2]

To
be sure, there were other prominent leaders in the Continuing Church movement
who would continue to defend segregation. Increasingly, they were viewed as a
liability, both for the new church, but more importantly for the advancement of
the Gospel itself. And yet, it is safe to say that over the past forty years
since its founding, the Presbyterian Church in America has not done enough to
address this more recent past. The 1960s are not dead; they are not even
past–they continue to shape our conversations and to impact what kind of church
God is calling us to be.