The always awesome Will Campbell has an article online about Elvis Presley as a redneck that provocatively explores the nature of racism in America:

America is a racist society to the core and we all know it.  Ah, we have dressed it up now.  We don’t need a Bilbo, a Pitchfork Ben Tillman to scream “nigger!” from the courthouse steps on election eve to keep poor whites voting right.  We have code words.  Is it not obvious that last year’s election had to do with race. When we heard talk of welfare abuse it meant welfare for black people, though statistics show more whites than blacks on welfare,  when we heard, “…get rid of affirmative action,” it was from those wanting to hang on to the piers of privilege being mildly threatened by enterprising and struggling minorities.  “Teen-­age pregnancies” meant black teenagers having babies. “Crime in the streets and let’s build more prisons” was a euphemism for incarcerating and executing more black people. Was that not obvious?  And is it not manifest already that the next presidential campaign will be waged on that same cunning and pernicious ground?  Perhaps not as brazen as the Willie Horton syndrome but the message will be loud and clear.

I think I can make a case that the poor, white, rural, working class, the redneck, is guilty of less true racism than any other group in white American society.  Not guilty of less prejudice, perhaps, but less racism.  There is a distinction that must be made between racism and prejudice. And between racism and racialism for that matter. (Racialism.  A concept that you might want to consider.)  I am not saying that all or any one of the poor, working class are without prejudice.  History would not bear me out.  We can be educated, or converted out of prejudice; sheer raw, naked bigotry.  But racism is a condition; the structures, the institutions in which we move and breathe and have our being that give white males the advantage.  That is what racism is.  Every one of us afflicted with this incurable skin disease called whiteness is a racist.  That does not mean we hate black people or wish them ill.  It simply means that our skin color has given us ascendance.  That is what racism is.  Prejudice is something else.  Something on a more conscious level.  The “redneck” is less racist because he operates from a base of considerably less power. It is not the poor, rural, laboring class that produces the rulers, the governors, the managers of this present age that harbors the racist cycle.

The article is from 1995, by the way, just to put the “last election” comments in their proper context.

Time to bring in yet another serving of Will Campbell:

Hell, I don’t know what the church is. Jesus said something about the fact that He was going to build the church. He did say that nothing would prevail over it . . . even the gates of Hell, but He didn’t ask me to build it. And He certainly didn’t ask me to define it. I believe the church is at work in the world only because of my faith in this Jesus person. Trouble is, I don’t know what Jesus is up to or where His church is. That’s good because if I found the church then I’d give it a name and start running it.

Will Campbell, “Interview with The Wittenburg Door,” in Writings on Reconciliation and Resistance, 71-72.

I’ve got to get that 9 Marks crap out of my system. And there’s only one way I know to do that: Will Campbell:

I believe God made the St. Lawrence River, and the Rio Grande River, and the China Sea and the English Channel, but I don’t believe God made America, or Canada, or Mexico, or England, or China. Man did that. . . . It is doubtful that there has ever been a nation established for bad reasons. Nations are always established to escape tyranny, to combat evil, to find freedom, to reach heaven. Man has always been able to desire to build a heaven. But it seems he has never been able to admit that he didn’t pull it off. So he keeps insisting that he did pull it off. And that is really what patriotism is all about. It is the insistence that what we have done is sacred. It is that transference of allegiance from what God did in creating the whole wide world to what we have done with (or to) a little sliver of it. Patriotism is immoral. Flying a national flag—any national flag—in a church house is a symbol of idolatry. Singing ‘God Bless America’ in a Christian service is blasphemy. Patriotism is immoral because it is a violation of the First Commandment.

Will D. Campbell, “I Love My Country: Christ Have Mercy,” Motive (December, 1969)

H/T: Chris Spinks (via Facebook)

All society knows to do about criminals and prisoners is to do what they did to Jesus and to those executed with him. But God in Jesus did and does free the prisoners. Resurrection. Jesus is prisoner in our place. He is executed in our place. So that we might be free. So that we might be resurrected. “Free?” Yes, free to be with God and with neighbors and enemies the way Jesus was with God and with neighbors and enemies. But free also in and from prisons of stone and concrete.

The texts, but more critically the lives of Jesus and the prisoners admit of no demythologizing, no re-mythologizing, no hermeneutic contortions, no theologizing about symbolic or other hidden meanings. Jesus proclaims freedom to the prisoner. That is the good news in its first-fruits. Men’s crimes against God and therefore against society are taken up, they are assumed by the imprisoned and executed Jesus. Jesus in our place. But we in His. Free. Resurrected. So why not “free the prisoners?” God has. All of us, inside and outside prison. “Worldly standards have ceased to count in our estimate of any man” (2 Corinthians 5:16). So what could the “prisoners” freed do to us that we are not already doing to ourselves? Murder us? Pervert us? Steal from us? Use us? Lie to us? Is not the freedom that Jesus means the very option to humanity that the murderer, conspirator, dope-pusher and user, sodomist and thief cannot find in the prisons and the paroles of society?

. . . It is not to oppose “reform” of prison life, but to overcome prison, to preach and live the good news of freedom to the prisoners as a first-fruit of freedom to us all.

We cannot blot out Christmas and Easter. Jesus became a criminal and prisoner of society and was executed for us. All! Everyone! When we call him Lord! Lord! we are therefore calling upon a Lord who was and is a prisoner. . . . We cannot take refuge in our law-abidingness, our good citizenship and economics, for our Lord was himself executed as a criminal and thus brings freedom, resurrection, to them.

Will Campbell, “Good News to Prisoners,” in Writings on Resistance and Reconciliation (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2010), 24-25.

Early in my life I took a position against racial discrimination, joined Martin Luther King in the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, walked to school with the Little Rock Nine, and involved myself in the civil rights movement in various ways. In none of this did I think of myself as being on the Left. Others, in the Mississippi of my white rearing, did. The designation was theirs, not mine.

When the Grand Dragon of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan was indicted and tried for contempt of Congress, I helped raise money for his defense. I was with him the night the marshals came to take him away. I kept in touch with his family, visited him in Danbury prison. I should not have been surprised when some considered that a move to the far Right, even though I also visited others there for crimes of war resistance. I saw no inconsistency since neither Isaiah nor Jesus said anything about ideology. Prisoners are prisoners and it is our vocation to set them free.

I harbored deserters and draft dodgers and took some of them to Canada during the Vietnam War. Was that of the Left or Right? To me it was neither. Though seen by most as politically left, again, someone else was drawing the boundaries.

I have written, spoken, stood in vigils against the death penalty. Liberal? If others wish to categorize, they are free to do so.

I see the fashion in which abortion is practiced as the greatest American shame since slavery. Does that mean I am in league with the Reagan-Bush syndrome and am now a right-wing Republican? God forbid! For I believe the economic policies of those administrations have resulted in far more abortions than their rhetoric or gestures have prevented.

So what does it all mean? If these are not political acts, are not to be categorized by someone’s scheme as “Left” or “Right,” then what? Are we talking of anarchy when we suggest that Caesar’s, and society’s, nomenclature is irrelevant to us? Perhaps so. But let it be the Christian anarchy Vernard Eller and Jacques Ellul so ably describe, not the anarchy which simply becomes another political position to be campaigned for. In Christian anarchy there is no Left, Right, or Center. Christian anarchy has to do with grace and human freedom. And it is human freedom which seems to me to be the essential message of Jesus. Thus my seeming contradictions, in a life which has spanned almost 70 years, reflect an effort to survive as a human being, free of other archeies which inevitably define a channel in which its adherents must swim or be excluded, and which, by nature, are enslaving, for they claim ultimate allegiance.

Will Campbell, “Symposium on Transcending Ideological Conformity,” in Writings on Resistance and Reconciliation (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2010), 62-63.

Here’s some more Will Campbell for you all. He continues to impress me the more I read him:

Katallagete! “Be reconciled,” since we are all already reconciled in Christ’s “purpose in dying for all.” This is the only word the Christian brings to the broken relationships between and among men. Because the source of reconciliation, the Word made flesh, “came to dwell among us,” we have no doubt about where the service of reconciliation ought to lead: not into the falsely secure world of a Christendom which denies the work of the Lord by its defensiveness and isolation, but into the genuinely insecure world of politics, wars, poverty, hunger, violence and insurrection — that is, the world into which Christ came and lived, by which he was murdered, and for which he was raised to life.

Will Campbell and James Holloway, Up To Our Steeples in Politics (New York: Paulist, 1970. Reprint: Wipf and Stock, 2004), 12-13.

Will Campbell is about as subversive as they come as far as I’m concerned. This was a fellow who really encountered, believed, and lived the apocalyptic gospel of Jesus in his own contingent circumstances. I’ll write more about him this year and his role in the civil rights movement but for now here is a quote from an article of his on Isaiah 61/Luke 4:16-30, “Good News to Prisoners”:

Jesus’ news is specific, immediate, indifferent to moral codes. It is an event as close to us as brothers, children, neighbors, bedrooms and bars, and the poor and black who stand as judgment on our citizenship and our confessions about Jesus as Lord. Criminals are proclaimed free by God’s deed in Jesus, and that, literally: “Today in your very hearing this text has come true.” It is difficult to be more specific than that. We do not believe that Jesus was speaking of enlightened chaplains who, using the latest techniques of pastoral counseling, lead the prisoners into an adjustment—into a life of great books, celibacy, good behavior points. Nor was He talking of the chaplains who through the art of preaching win a soul here and there to a decision which says, “I am free wherever I am, for ‘if God be for us who can be against us?’” What Jesus is talking about is unlocking the doors, dismissing the warden and his staff, recycling the steel bars into plowshares, and turning the prisoners loose. But let us be clear at all points. This means James Earl Ray as well as Angela Davis; William Calley as well as Phil and Dan Berrigan.

Well. Of course Jesus’ neighbors in the congregation at Nazareth were dismayed and angry: “Today in your very hearing this text has come true.” The one thing society cannot do is free the prisoners. Society can only make prisoners, and rehabilitate, adjust and then parole them . . . to itself. Society cannot free the prisoners. Thus does Jesus’ word from God undermine the claims of absolutism lurking in all political orders—whether religious (Israel) or secular (Rome). All any political order can do is to rest its legitimacy and make its distinctions between criminals and free men on the basis of power deals and arrangements. It is never good news to say to those who stake their lives on the political order and its distinctions that God frees the prisoners. Now, and here, not there and later, God announces freedom to prisoners. Literally, not symbolically. That is how God in Jesus overcomes society. No guns. No plastic bombs or napalm or anti-personnel missiles. No conspiracy that will have to be tried in a court of law. In Jesus God is freedom to the prisoners. Society is overcome. Not destroyed. Overcome.

In his time Jesus had to go. God was made a prisoner and executed. To good religious people, as a religious fanatic; to good citizens, and a political “king.” But in any case, he had to go. Society’s law in both religious and political dimensions makes Jesus a prisoner and executes him in the company of other criminals. And as a wise man reminds us, there, at Jesus’ crucifixion at the place called The Skull, there “was the first Christian fellowship, the first certain, indissoluble and indestructible Christian community . . . directly and unambiguously affected by Jesus’ promise and his assurance . . . to live by this promise is to be a Christian community.” Thus, in their time John the Baptist was a criminal, a prisoner, and executed so; thus, Paul, Peter, and others in the earliest communities who confessed Jesus as Lord; thus the prophets through whom God had spoken his words of reconciliation “to our fathers of old.” Prison and the threat of prison were the necessary part of the life of Jeremiah, Amos, Isaiah, Micaiah, Joseph, Samson. . . . The news that God proclaims freedom to the prisoners is the word that overcomes society and politics. It is the word and deed of freedom which overcomes the words and deeds of inhumanity. Society and politics can only answer by crucifixion, as God answers crucifixion by freedom, liberation, resurrection.

– In Writings on Resistance and Reconciliation, edited by Richard Goode (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010), 20-22.