Fight of the Century

by Michael Chabon

  The title of the sermon is not really a question, yet a question mark dangles, taking the joke too far. At a bar in Washington, DC, a white couple next to me touches each other’s thighs, gregariously filling space with their conversation and echoing laughter. I tell myself that their display, like a stock photo in a picture frame, is not meant to taunt me or remind me of my otherness. My otherness is of course in the joke of my aloneness. (Why can’t I get that hymn out of my head, out of my body?) I hear the man remark to his companion, “It all makes sense now.”

  That’s how I feel reading Is Segregation Scriptural? That’s how I feel sitting alone, hunched over several plates of appetizers, flirtatious couples orbiting my lonely dark planet. It is very clear to me what I am allowed to expect and want from my American life, and too easily, I follow the rules. I do not trespass. Maybe because I hate myself, but maybe because I know I am hated. In Washington, DC, right now, in February 2019, a national emergency has been declared, and the emergency concerns borders. It all makes sense now.

  As a product of white evangelical education—albeit among the so-called progressiveness of Southern California, as opposed to the deeply embedded racism of South Carolina, and a solid thirty years after Bob Jones’s Easter sermon—I know what is and isn’t scriptural, and I know how to argue in Bob Jones’s dialect. It’s the same rhetoric I encountered in chapels and classrooms where I sat, befuddled, terrified, and ashamed, as youth group leaders or pale Bible teachers presented rigorously fabricated interpretations of scripture. There are some slick acrobatics involved in using biblical text to prove your doctrine, bending the world to your vision of it until other points of view vanish. A kind of speaking that creates truth from scratch, without question. This is what it says, and who can argue with God’s words? This impassioned genre of speech, this art of war, is well suited for fundamentalist evangelical white Christians and people like me, who are bullheaded. Therefore, I’m calling bullshit on Bob Jones’s whole platform.

  * * *

  Anyone can use the Bible to prove anything. Much like a poem, its interpretation may be subjective. Its authors are consistently debated, and either way, long gone, so the text is fair game. Words don’t mean the same thing for one person as they do another. Rather than seeking the text’s intention, analyzing it in its historical context, as one would a poem, many preachers—whom, it should be noted, are not always theological scholars but self-appointed messengers—approach the text with their personal convictions, politics, and feelings about what constitutes faithfulness, what constitutes right. Words do not always awaken the same fears or the same people.

  In the introduction to his book God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, James Weldon Johnson writes of the great impact of “old-time preachers” on the “sense of unity and solidarity” among slaves and their descendants. “It was the old-time preacher who for generations was the mainspring of hope and inspiration for the Negro in America,” he says, noting that their “power for good or ill was very great.” Because “they were the first of the slaves to learn to read, and their reading was confined to the Bible,” the Negro preacher’s brilliance was in the ability to translate and freestyle, such that “a text served mainly as a starting point and often had no relation to the development of the sermon.”

  Words are always blooming with possibility. The languages of words and bodies and actions and looking can be the dearest gift—a pathway to empathy and love. At its most beautiful, language is the secret weapon for understanding how we relate, how we make sense of the terms of our weird world. Or it can be another kind of weapon, sharpened in the hands of the stubborn or the extremist or the fear mongering. Words are ductile, delicate, and loaded like that.

  We entrust our spiritual leaders as interpreters of a higher and more enlightened power—we are swayed by their reasonings, like a poet’s or a president’s. It is dangerous to insist that the Bible’s words are absolute, literal, unflinching, and to manipulate the Bible as a secondary source to back up the claims of the primary source, which, really, can be whatever. What can we learn from the text? is a markedly different question from, Where in the text is my point proven? How might this text transform my understanding of the world? It’s a departure from, Where does the text align with what I personally believe about the world?

  The standpoint of Bob Jones’s Easter message is particularly American, rooted in his perspective of American life in 1960 South Carolina—and his alone. His mission isn’t to interpret God’s Word but to convince his constituents, neighbors, and anyone else listening to the radio, that his way of seeing is the right way of seeing. How Jesus might have seen American life in 1960 South Carolina. (Because Bob Jones and God, it seems, share the same mind? I wonder what it feels like to think this about yourself.)

  First, Bob is mad. Anger is no vibe to bring to an argument, and certainly not, as he puts it, “one of the most important and timely messages I have ever brought.” I am a woman, so people are always reminding me to leave my emotions out of it, but no one has reminded Bob that emotions compromise your chances of ever being taken seriously; therefore my opponent has entrapped himself in this vulnerable position. Still, before he even begins, he’s already patronizing his listeners: “Do not let anything disturb you. I want you to hear this message through.”

  Do not let anything disturb you. A theme is established. It hangs in the air throughout the sermon, in the bedrooms of each supposition. It always comes back to this language. Disturbance, protection. Vigilance. Unrest, peace, purity.

  Second, Bob is fucking terrified. He knows something terrible looms and threatens—something satanic, a word he capitalizes. This has gone too far, Bob thinks. This is an emergency. He hones in on a single word in a single verse in a single chapter in the Book of Acts, Acts 17:26: “And [God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all faces of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” “That says that God Almighty fixed the bounds of their habitation,” Bob Jones reiterates, blasphemously disregarding the rest of the verse and neglecting to analyze the passages surrounding it. “That is as clear as anything that was ever said.”

  Citing anything out of context is completely irresponsible debate etiquette, but Bob Jones introduces the verse apropos of pretty much nothing, only attributing the passage to Paul, whom he considers to be “the greatest man who ever lived… greater than Moses.” I buy this, because in the white evangelical interpretation, Moses is hailed as a sort of Abraham Lincoln, nobly leading slaves to freedom. I don’t really understand the Paul thing, though, because what I remember about Paul is that he was once named Saul. In my interpretation, Paul is arguably the Bible’s greatest example of transformation and progressiveness. Paul signifies and sanctions the godliness of reinvention—his greatness is in his growth. I would say that Paul is a symbol of the righteousness gained from expansion, from change and course correction. I would say that self-improvement, and a spirited drive to better one’s community, is one of the most exemplary acts of faith, a heartening display of service. Bob Jones fearfully condemns progression and adaptation as against God’s intention. Unless it concerns the rehabilitation of the formerly African.

  * * *

  One of the first doctrines I learned from my zealous teachers-slash-missionaries was that the world split between those inside and those on the outside—a truth made unwaveringly clear as landscapes and demographics transformed on the drive from school to our house. My side of town felt darker, less pure; my family’s values not stringent or steadfast enough. I feared for us and pitied us. Was it even possible for us to see the world washed in so much warm light? Why couldn’t joy and devoutness come more naturally? Was it because we were African American?

  What I learned was fear. Every interpretation of scripture was a warning. In every Bible class lesson, every youth pastor’s message, and every memorized Bible verse, I heard or else. The line between good and bad, clear as anythi
ng. You are in, or you are out. There was Christian and there was secular—no murky waters, no room for uncertainty, no excuses.

  That word: secular. The way my elementary school teachers’ faces contorted angrily as they spat it—railing against Harry Potter, or skirts above the calf, or South Park, or *NSync. The way my friends offered to pray for me and my ongoing struggle to resist temptation, to resist the dangerous allure of the secular world. Do not go outside the lines. That villainized outside world. Everything of it will only doom you to hell.

  African American culture, of course, is itself inherently secular. Probably because of the rap music. Probably because of residual influence of our godless African ancestors. If I was going to wrangle myself a spot in heaven—the black part of town in heaven—I would have to become an entirely different person. I would have to clamp down my impulses to argue and shout and be unique. I would need to stay still, remain quiet and earnest—I would need to prove myself to earn an asterisk on my African American status. This is how I became “not really black, though.” How could I be, if I was among them?

  Much of the groundwork on which Bob Jones builds his message is a bizarre variation on the classic “I have black friends” defense, which, it should be noted, is never convincing, and definitely never asked for. He talks at length about a Chinese couple he once met, concluding, “All right, he is a Chinese. He married a Chinese woman. That is the way God meant it to be.” He says, “Chinese people are wonderful people. The Japanese people are ingenious—they are wonderful people. The Koreans are wonderful people. The Africans are wonderful people. In many ways, there are no people in the world finer than the colored people who were brought over here in slavery in days gone by.” Of course, Bob preaches again and again, the Bible makes crystal clear the importance of lines between peoples. It’s what pretty much the whole book is about if you’re looking at it that way. Being led astray. Purity. Disgracing your line. That’s what feels as violent to me as a deep slash across my back—the straight and solid line.

  “When nations break out of their boundaries, and begin to do things contrary to the purpose of God and the directive will of God,” the preacher gravely reminds, “they have trouble.” Boundaries and borders and walls and limitations are essential to godliness—any other ideology is of the secular world.

  The boundaries of our habitation include countries of origin (which Bob Jones liberally conflates with race), restaurants, public pools, train cars and buses, and of course, wedding chapels and sexual relations. Build a wall around all these things, all these different kinds of bodies, and “we will have no trouble.” No threats to God’s plan. No national or spiritual emergencies.

  There is another way to read the Bible, to interpret God’s will: that what God demands of us is not borders or walls or separatism, but love.

  * * *

  Caught up in the fervor of his South Carolinian perspective, Bob Jones seems to have forgotten that these United States were founded by rebels who broke out of the bounds of their habitation and created a new established order. Borders and oceans were crossed. America, the land of imported races, and yet still one nation under God. Freedom is a dangerously ambitious slogan to apply to a nation, and a hypocritical ideal to apply to a religion.

  Which brings us to another horrifying and reckless assertion Bob Jones makes, which I can only interpret as a justification of slavery. This claim happens subtly but confidently. He first pronounces, of course, that slavery was wrong. “But God overruled,” he reasons. “When they came over here”—and I could spend paragraphs on the use of this word came, not to mention the fixation on victims, they, rather than perpetrators—“many of them did not know about the Bible and did not know about Jesus Christ; but they got converted. Some of the greatest preachers the world has ever known were colored preachers who were converted in slavery days.… God Almighty allowed these colored people to be turned here into the South and overruled what happened and then he turned the colored people into wonderful Christian people.”

  There you have it: a neat little scriptural justification of American slavery; lemonade out of the single most disgraceful human rights violation America has ever committed, a legacy that will continue to plague our country until its end. That little slip-up.

  “Did you colored people ever stop to think where you might have been if that had not happened?” The smugness. The moral superiority. “Now, you colored people listen to me.… You might be over there in jungles of Africa today, unsaved.” The motherfucking nerve. That goddamned question mark.

  Bob has worked himself into incoherent fury and fight. In all the backflips to loosely connect Jim Crow segregation to one little Bible verse, his sermon has completely lost its way. He darts from warped discussions of war with Japan; to rambling about how the good white people of the South have helped build churches for the good colored people in the South; to a claim that the places in America with the most trouble are the most integrated (New York, California…); to shouting out his favorite Chinese people; to, yes—the reminder that we colored people should be altogether grateful we were brought here, that God allowed us to be. When he’s gotten too far off message, he returns to the word boundaries, to the necessity of restriction and purity and how things were “meant” to be. We are allowed to be here—with an asterisk.

  As do most self-righteous white men who have only ever been granted authority, Bob Jones has absolutely no handle on the concept of subjectivity.

  * * *

  According to Bob, after God adjusted his unflinching and crystal-clear will and “permitted the slaves to come over to America,” it was us African Americans who didn’t follow God’s will—a baseless accusation that our purpose in being (no, coming) here was “so that the colored people could be the great missionaries to the Africans.” Instead, we settled in. We crossed the borders of our assigned plantations and started having sex with the good white people, trampling the divine order. “The white people in America would have helped pay their way over there. By the hundreds and hundreds they could have gone back to Africa and got the Africans converted after the slavery days were over.” This is news to me! In all my years of hearing, “Go back to Africa,” I never knew there were checks being waved around.

  Could and would are theoretical assumptions, reserved clearly for white slave owners whose sins were forgiven, for whom God graciously amended his will. “We are having turmoil all over America”—and you might think Bob Jones refers to the racist crimes of the Jim Crow era, generally considered to be disturbing and satanic—among them, lynchings, church bombings, and constant violence against wonderful Christian people—but instead, he damns “propagandists” who “slander God Almighty” by “preaching pious sermons… about rubbing out the line between races—it makes me sick.” It’s obvious he refers not only to the aspirations of the entire civil rights movement, all those who “put their own opinion above the word of God,” but specifically Martin Luther King Jr., whose peaceful, gentle, and obedient style evangelicals across the board love—like are obsessed with. I remember asking about Malcolm X in an elementary school classroom and quickly being met with horror stories about dangerous, gun-wielding thugs who served only to distract from the Christian—American—progress achieved by Dr. King. I mean, come on. I have never met a white Christian who didn’t like that guy.

  In 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges needed to be escorted to her integrated public school by US marshals after receiving death threats. In 1960, months before Bob Jones insisted on the radio that “no two races ever lived as close together as the white people and colored people in the South and got along so well,” four negro college students refused to leave the counter of a Woolworths and were met by spit in their faces, cigarettes burned into their skin. This was in Greensboro, North Carolina, 189 miles from Bob Jones’s Greenville, South Carolina.

  Six years earlier, Brown v. Board of Education had ruled the segregation of public schools unconstitutional. This was a decision of the secula
r world, upholding their own political agendas above God’s will, straying from his indisputable Word as did Eve in the garden, damning our nation to oppressive, satanic influences. In 1967, Loving v. Virginia legalized interracial marriage in the United States. Bob Jones University began to admit negro students only four years later, in 1971—provided they were married, and to another negro.

  Meanwhile, in 1970, the Internal Revenue Service had amended previous regulations to specify that only private schools without discriminatory admissions policies be allowed to claim a tax exemption status. Bob Jones, steadfast in his commitment to keep black pussies like mine from curdling the purity of the white race, the crucial bounds of our habitation, ignored this, opting instead to file suit petitioning the school’s revoked exemption status on the basis of the First Amendment. In 1975, still involved in a drawn-out legal battle with the courts and determined to make the case for their entitlement to tax cuts, the university conceded to allow admission to single negroes—provided they were not engaged in, or known to advocate for, interracial unions. And anyway, interracial marriages, dating, and intimate relationships were prohibited under the school code of conduct, and continued to be until 2000.

  No wonder that in 1990, my place in my white evangelical school felt like a favor. Why I didn’t bother thinking of myself as ever getting the guy, modeling the Christian values of white families contentedly smiling at the grace they feel from the inside out. Why I felt that because of my color, I could never be fully saved, always given a pass for my blackness, which, in scriptural language, carried with it corruption, imperfection. On chapel days, we gathered for prayer and worship before a sermon from our school pastor. In one song, we begged, “Wash me white as snow.” Those were literally the lyrics. I know because they were taught to me by good white Christians. No wonder. It all makes sense.