From Politics to Reconciliation

From Politics to Reconciliation: Katallagete, Biblicism, and Southern Liberalism

Steven P. Miller/Doctoral Candidate, Vanderbilt University, Department of History

For white liberals in the United States, the mid-1960s commenced a period of dissension and confusion. Integration and equal opportunity – tag lines of the civil rights movement – came under fire, and rising opposition to the Vietnam War raised questions about the potential of state policies for effecting progressive ends. Many of the political decisions of white liberals during this era are well-documented, with New Left radicalism and neo-conservatism representing two diverging paths. The fate of sixties-era liberals in the American South, however, has received less treatment, despite their unique challenges within a region struggling to digest civil rights legislation amid continued Klan violence and increased political assertiveness among African Americans.⁽¹⁾ Liberals in the South also operated within a political culture pervasively influenced by evangelical Christianity – a potential resource, for some, a burden, for others.

One organization of liberal Southerners, the Committee of Southern Churchmen, along with its flagship publication, Katallagete: Be Reconciled, both reflected and responded to the peculiar circumstances of the South. As such, the journal Katallagete supplies one important lens through which to gain perspective on a group of (mostly white) southern activists and thinkers toward the close of the civil rights era. First published in 1965, Katallagete served in part as a forum for a host of southern Christians associated to varying degrees with ecclesiastical, liberal, and political causes. Contributors ranged from Will Campbell, director of the Committee of Southern Churchmen (CSC) and the journal's publisher, to Leslie Dunbar, onetime head of the liberal reformist Southern Regional Council, and included celebrated essayist James McBride Dabbs and novelist Walker Percy. Campbell, a Baptist minister and former staffer for the National Council of Churches, and Katallagete editor James Y. Holloway, a fellow Baptist and, after 1965, Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Berea College, framed most issues with incisive, at times provocative, editorials and theological meditations that collectively begged the question of whether liberalism should serve as the defining paradigm for Christian social activism. These were questions with particular salience for a South entering the post-civil rights era. For Campbell and Holloway, the liberal faith in legislative and political solutions – a faith they had once endorsed – furthered a suspect reliance on state power and contributed little toward achieving an authentically biracial society. Their proposed alternative, as the journal's title suggested, was an explicitly Biblical model of reconciliation – first, between God and humans, and secondly, among individuals themselves. Too many Christians, Campbell and Holloway argued, had relied on political solutions to social problems at the unholy expense of the Biblical promise of human reconciliation by means of divine grace.⁽²⁾

The questions and arguments raised in Katallagete had particular salience for a South transitioning toward the post-civil right era. The journal's community comprised one of several clusters of southern liberals struggling to make sense of a period in which a host of dilemmas overwhelmed the legislative achievements of the mid-1960s.⁽³⁾An analysis of the arguments within Katallagete, considered in relation to the larger narrative of southern white liberalism between 1965 and 1974 (the years between the major civil rights acts and the Watergate controversy – a time when Katallagete and CSC were tightly linked and when the journal appeared with greatest frequency), can thus offer insights into the ambiguous place of southern liberals during the late civil rights era. The pages of Katallagete reflected debates among liberal Southerners faced with such watershed issues as Black Power and Vietnam. The dominant voices within the journal represented one facet of a larger critique of liberal legalism and thus paralleled trends within the broader New Left. However, Katallagete offered a specifically Biblical response to its times. While providing a radically Biblical critique of social and political institutions, Katallagete also furthered a very southern tradition of relational politics and grace theology. The decisions of Campbell, Holloway, and other journal contributors to eschew conventional politics contain a story of relevance to the history of southern political culture.

Founded in 1964, CSC effectively replaced the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen (FSC), a membership-based organization that since 1934 had promoted a variety of interracial and labor causes. FSC had experienced a period of decline since the early 1950s. Its successor, on the other hand, adopted a smaller, committee-based structure, with membership mandated to remain between 30 and 100 persons. This decentralized structure reflected the values of Will Campbell, designated the Committee's “preacher at large,” who maintained a hectic schedule of community visitations, ministerial consultations, and speaking engagements. The high profile of Campbell – without whom CSC surely would not have come into existence – led one scholar to claim that “the main purpose of the Committee was to provide Campbell with a salary.” Other CSC members, however, participated in the organization's activities, as they reported from racial crisis zones, prepared radio spots, and contributed to and helped edit Katallagete.⁽⁴⁾

CSC, in its initial statements, prioritized “Biblical Christianity” over ideological preferences, and disavowed placement on a political continuum. Kelly Miller Smith, the first president of CSC and a former president of the Nashville Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, declared that “Christian faith is not identical with any political or social movement,” while Holloway wanted to keep Biblical hermeneutics removed from abuse by either the “social obscurantist or social revolutionary.” Socio-politically, CSC proffered the Church as a “light to the nations.” This role would entail being a “prophetic voice” of a decidedly non-polemical nature, as CSC members would function as “third party” mediators in situations of racial crisis. CSC, however, explicitly denied a moderate agenda and aimed its message “directly [at] the mass [of] uninvolved and ignored southern whites,” who might respond to “a radical moral appeal in [religious] language and thought-forms with which they are familiar and which motivate them.” Despite the modestly bi-racial nature of CSC's membership and leadership (in addition to Smith's service as President, editorial board members during the period considered included black civil rights activist John Lewis), the organization maintained this unique focus on poor white southerners. Thus, while CSC's non-ideological posture suggested a critique of liberal activism, the Committee focused its initial attention on a southern civil religion held captive by racial prejudice.⁽⁵⁾

Katallagete served as the primary means for expressing CSC's message of Biblical reconciliation for a South still burdened by what Campbell labeled a “folk religion.” The journal, which first appeared in June 1965, possessed a subscription base ranging from around 3,000 in 1967 to an estimated 9,000 in 1974. The journal's contributors and readership included substantial numbers of leading southern politicians, religious leaders, journalists, and activists, and the publication received coverage in the southern media. The title, Katallagete, came from the Greek word for “be reconciled” (thus its subtitle) and referred to the paradigmatic Bible passage of the Committee, II Corinthians 5:15-20. CSC's widely released statement of principles began with these verses (from the New English Bible):

The verses suggested several recurring themes of the publication: the reality of Christ's atonement and grace, which had already reconciled humankind to God; the need for individuals to realize this condition of grace before attempting to reconcile humans to one another; and a Pauline stress on grace and reconciliation, in contrast to law and justice. The Committee described its mission in specifically Biblical and theological terms. Campbell stressed the importance of a “well-defined orthodoxy” and an avowedly “Christian doctrine of man.” He had in mind a form of Biblicism that functioned on its own internal logic, irrespective of how that logic correlated with or opposed particular political perspectives. Holloway pondered the significance of introducing Katallagete with a Biblical passage during an age when scripture either lacked social authority or was cynically employed to justify a “political expedient.” For Holloway, Katallagete's use of scripture challenged the southern “Bible Belt” on the region's own terms. Thus, while most CSC members and journal contributors held social and political beliefs that could fairly be described as liberal (and have been characterized as such by one historian), they generally attempted not to explain their worldviews through liberal or secular reasoning.⁽⁶⁾

Still, Campbell and Holloway situated their editorials in a context specific to the South of their time. Reconciliation, for them, represented a mandate of keen relevance to a region awkwardly emerging from a period of intense civil rights activism, which had culminated in the watershed civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. Campbell criticized those who viewed existing legislation and Supreme Court decisions as “the solution of America's race problem,” which had neither been “solved” nor “discovered.” In pitching an article to a prospective contributor, Holloway mused that “the laws are now on the books, etc., so now where do those go … who believed that [laws] would 'cure' our sickness in the South?” By 1966, Campbell wrote, northern civil rights activists had departed from the South, and the nation had turned to other issues; for the South, legalized desegregation “may be justice, but it is not reconciliation.” Campbell's concern with the “failure of law” emerged from the frustrations of his tenure with the National Council of Churches (NCC). As an NCC representative, Campbell had assisted with the integration of Central High School in Little Rock in 1957 and taken part in the organization of the Southern Christian Leadership Council. However, Campbell had grown frustrated with what he viewed as the NCC's reliance on legislative solutions and its smug dismissal of the concerns of poor southern whites. As he wrote to Holloway in 1963, “The liberal brethren seem to be closing in on me a little more each day.” That same year he resigned from his position with the NCC. In his memoirs, Campbell contended that the NCC and other liberal organizations had failed to grasp the inherent limits of political responses to civil rights. The “liberal crash,” he wrote in his autobiography and echoed in his articles, “. . . came when folks began to realize that [black civil rights activists] sitting on those lunch counters weren't talking about a hamburger and a cup of coffee.”⁽⁷⁾

To be sure, not every contributor to Katallagete approved of either Campbell and Holloway's critique of liberalism or the aggressively critical, prophetic tone of many articles. Campbell himself described CSC as a “weird group,” and one scholar has characterized the organization as a “peculiar mix of Barthian, left-wing Reformation, and indigenous Southern evangelical elements.” CSC celebrated Katallagete's eclecticism in an advertisement listing common descriptions (largely of a pejorative nature) of the journal: “fundamentalist,” “obscurantist,” “radical.” Diversity aside, the guiding hands of Holloway and Campbell strongly informed every issue of Katallagete, whether through editorials or article selections. Having both studied at Yale before returning to their native South, the editor and publisher, who first met each other in 1961, maintained a close relationship. Theologically, “I'm not sure any more where I leave off and Will begins,” Holloway wrote about Campbell in 1967.⁽⁸⁾

Campbell and Holloway upheld Christian reconciliation in manifest contrast to liberal socio-political strategies. Within a few years of the journal's publication, in fact, the failures of liberalism became the dominant theme of their editorials. While their frustrations with liberalism straddled the line between in-house critique and wholesale departure (eventually leaning toward the latter), they clearly wrote to an audience familiar with, and supportive of, liberal causes. Holloway accused mainstream liberals, such as members of Americans for Democratic Action, of fostering a legislation fetish that had become an end unto itself. Such “realism” contributed to truncated political visions and, for Christians, blunted the radical message of the Church. Politics and legislation, Campbell and Holloway argued, lacked depth, both theologically and socially. In spite of the “milestones” of President Lyndon Johnson's civil rights and Great Society legislation, Campbell contended, “nothing has changed in the relationship between black people and white people.” Moreover, the mechanics of activism – “our holy marches on Washington and Selma . . . and admonitions to the White House and mandates to Capitol Hill” – had become reified, even sanctified. In criticizing these rituals and questioning the efficacy of civil rights legislation, Campbell, Holloway, and a host of Katallagete contributors sympathized with the Black Power and New Left critiques of a liberalism which was presumably revealing its true colors in response to black unrest at home and the Viet Cong abroad.⁽⁹⁾

In light of the above crises, the dangers of liberal legalism extended beyond being what Campbell identified as a “millstone.” Rather, contended Holloway, liberalism actually contributed to increased social unrest. For Campbell, liberal politics entailed a dangerous aversion to “chaos,” leaving it unequipped for the challenges of the late 1960s. “Law and order” – a progressive mantra vis-à-vis Klan violence in the Deep South – now held sway in a different context: squelching urban riots and radical demonstrations. Campbell and Holloway assailed liberalism's ambiguous response to this role reversal. A majority of Americans supported the violent crackdown against demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Party Convention, although a similar majority had opposed the brutality against civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama. Law and order, no matter how noble its intentions, would ultimately lead to a type of “liberal-totalitarianism,” a “police state in the dress of democratic constitutionalism and liberalism” – in part because law was inherently coercive, and in part because politics could not transcend the racism of its electorate. Holloway argued that “the sure consequence of relying exclusively on laws and politics to resolve American racism will be a confirmation of that racism in and by our legal and political system.”⁽¹⁰⁾

As Niebuhr seemed to have suspected, Campbell and Holloway were prepared to exit the arena of traditional politics altogether. Holloway, who had a Master's degree in Political Science, characterized politics as not only a corrupting force, but a modern-day version of “Baal,” a false God of “cheap repentance” for social evils (an ironic invocation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose legacy they sought to counter). “Politics-as-Baal,” Holloway wrote, “is to act in the belief that politics is redemptive, that politics is Messiah.” Here, his intended target (reflecting the journal's readership) was liberal activism, not conservative civil religion. Campbell and Holloway intensified their argument in a provocative article titled “Up to Our Steeples in Politics,” in which they summarized (but, in fact, radicalized) what Katallagete had “been trying to say” in its four years of existence:

Again, they singled out for criticism political liberals and “Death of God” theologians – i.e., those figures obsessed with relevance. Campbell and Holloway themselves confessed to having returned to the South, fresh from Ivy League theological educations, “armed with Gunnar Myrdal and V.O. Key in one hand and Calhoun's Lecture Notes in the other,” while their Bibles remained in “packing boxes.” By 1970, they confessed “little interest in Christian social action and the Christian-in-politics.” This hyperbolic admission was a marked escalation of CSC's comparatively modest warning, back in 1964, against conflating political activism and Christian faith. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Campbell and Holloway viewed politics as both a distortion of Christianity and an ineffectual strategy for social change:

In place of politics, Campbell and Holloway substituted Biblical faith. Eclectically influenced by neo-orthodox, Anabaptist, and Baptist traditions, Katallagete contained numerous references to Karl Barth and other thinkers associated with the neo-orthodox themes of the sovereign otherness of God and the failings of humanistic liberal optimism. For Campbell and Holloway, as for the theologians of neo-orthodoxy, the standards of Christianity remained wholly separate from those of the secular world. They contrasted this belief with the Bonhoeffer-inspired notion that Christian should engage a world which had “Come of Age.” The concept of Katallagete, Campbell and Holloway wrote, reminded them “that God's reconciliation of all men to himself and to each other is on a different order than the political gimmickry and passion for 'relevance' that goes under the name of 'social action.'” At the same time, they celebrated the profundity of grace-informed social action undertaken within the framework of Christian community, evincing what one scholar of Campbell identified as a “Baptist/Anabaptist ecclesiology.” Both southern civil religion and liberal Christian activism erred in viewing the Church as normatively at the center of historical change, Campbell argued. An issue of Katallagete contained a photograph of congregational foot washing, a Last Supper-inspired practice common among certain Baptist and Anabaptist groups. Campbell offered the zeal (and concomitant marginal social status) of sectarian Christians as a model for readers of the journal. Since those congregations actually lived the assertion of CSC that “the singular task of the Church … is to be the Church,” liberal southern Christians needed to overcome the “embarrassment” of sectarianism. (This language foreshadowed the post-liberalism of such theologians as Stanley Hauerwas.) Similar ontological claims of Christian identity – set in contrast to pragmatic responses to social problems – appeared in the pages of Katallagete. As Campbell and Holloway wrote, “Do? Nothing. Be? What you are – reconciled, to God and man, Katallagete!”⁽¹³⁾

Another great “embarrassment” to be overcome was Biblicism. By this, Holloway and Campbell did not mean to affirm the forms of conservative literalism long associated with the “folk religion” of the South, but rather to embrace an avowedly Biblical perspective that permitted them – and other contributors to Katallagete – to adopt a “prophetic” voice that allowed them to address directly the social and political crises of their times. As suggested earlier, Katallagete grew increasingly radical as the 1960s progressed, and verses of Old Testament prophecy increasingly appeared alongside the more ameliorative Pauline message of reconciliation. The journal's second issue, in December 1965, featured a sermon calling for the merger – i.e., the integration – of Nashville's two First Baptist churches. Four years later, though, Holloway and Campbell published an editorial, titled “Our Grade is F,” which lambasted the prevailing integrationist worldview (“the expectation of the majority that the minority become like the majority”), as well as an education system held captive by amoral (or worse, immoral) technology. At times, such prophetic denunciations took on a more apocalyptic tone, such as when Campbell and Holloway referred to “living the Sign of Jonah,” the Old Testament prophet who reluctantly, then unsatisfactorily heeded a divine calling to witness to the sinful city of Nineveh. Similarly, they urged fellow Southerner Billy Graham to “prophesy to the Pentagon and White House … in the tradition of Micaiah, son of Imlah” – in other words, to declare the judgment of God on temporal leaders.⁽¹⁴⁾ Far from embarrassed by biblical language, Katallagete's critique of Southern Christianity was that it was not Biblical enough.

Campbell, Holloway, and other Katallagete contributors specifically fixed their prophetic attention on two aspects of the liberal state: “technocracy” and education. Their suspicion of liberalism's tendency toward law and order only grew in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Holloway linked a “police state” to what Campbell provocatively described as “the technological concentration camp of our own doing.” As evidence for such seeming hyperbole, Holloway reprinted a report of a presidential study proposing usage of new riot-control weapons, ranging from super water pistols to sticky blobs. Campbell chose a target closer to the journal's home: security measures, including the possible use of “incapacitating gas,” implemented at the Nashville headquarters of an unnamed Christian denomination (the Southern Baptist Convention, as most readers would have surmised). Technology had infiltrated not only the realm of politics, but also that of education. Educational institutions, Holloway and Campbell wrote, were “prisoners of the manifest fruits” of a technology evident in Vietnam and police aggression in American cities. Technology and its handmaiden, education, were dangerously empowered abstractions, means that had been allowed to harden into ends.⁽¹⁵⁾

The prophetic tone of Katallagete, condemning the moral vapidity of technology and education, retained a call for action in keeping with CSC's original mission. Liberal legalism, Campbell and Holloway argued, had blinded activists from a pressing area of need in the South: the suffering of poor whites, which the Church and society had failed to distinguish from the “so-called black problem.” Pete Young, a member of CSC and an expert on the North Carolina Klan, criticized the 1968 Kerner Commission Report on race relations for not recommending specific programs for poor white communities. As Campbell and Holloway argued, Klan members were “victims” of the same forces that oppressed blacks; the real “invisible empire” was not the Klan, but the “latent establishment.” As one of the professed missions of the Committee, working with racist southern whites grew directly from the journal's theological sensibilities, which for Campbell involved believing that “Christ died for [Black Panther leader] Eldridge Cleaver AND the Klansmen.” Campbell's overtures to white segregationists had contributed to his conflicts with NCC, and his position with CSC allowed him to reach out to Klan members. Campbell explained his efforts in autobiographical, somewhat eccentric theological terms. After the 1965 murder in Alabama of Campbell's close friend, white civil rights activist Jonathan Daniels, another friend had challenged Campbell on the issue of whether God loved the killer, Thomas Coleman, as equally as the victim, Daniels. Having previously reduced the central message of Christianity to the pithy adage, “We're all bastards, but God loves us anyway,” Campbell answered yes. If Coleman was loved, Campbell reasoned, then the murderer was also forgiven, a recipient of “acquittal by resurrection.” The Thomas Colemans of the South, Campbell suggested, required more than justice and law. In the pages of Katallagete, Holloway and Campbell went so far as to offer them space for political speech, as the journal featured several articles from these segregationist victims of technocratic society. Their critiques of liberalism (one with the title “Look Out Liberals: Wallace Power Gonna Get You!”) rested uncomfortably – perhaps intentionally so – alongside those of CSC members.⁽¹⁶⁾

Campbell and Holloway, despite their many criticisms of liberalism, still identified themselves, however ambivalently, as liberals of a sort – or perhaps, liberals by default – and presented their writings partially as self-critiques. Moreover, as their attention to southern whites reflected, they were southern liberals, conversant with a community of activists and intellectuals who possessed a strong sense of regional stewardship. A representative editorial referred to “we, white liberal Americans,” while another article implied that Campbell and Holloway continued to vote for Democratic Party candidates. Support for CSC came from such liberal sources as SRC, Field Foundation, and Ford Foundation. Katallagete published articles by CSC members who ultimately remained comfortable with traditional liberal politics – particularly, southern liberal politics – even while the journal's editorials appeared to undermine these perspectives. For example, one issue featured an article by liberal Atlanta Congressman Charles Weltner defending anti-Klan legislation, while in the same issue SRC staff member Pat Watters held out hope for a progressive black-white political coalition in the South. James McBride Dabbs, president of CSC during the mid-1960s and ex-president of SRC, wrote appeals to southern decency that contrasted tellingly with the more strident or pessimistic tone of many of his Katallagete contemporaries. A representative of an older generation of southern liberals, Dabbs, as historian Richard H. King has suggested, wrote in a measured and, at times, elitist manner that differed from the general thrust of Campbell and Katallagete.⁽¹⁷⁾

Although disagreements among CSC members did not always manifest themselves in the pages of Katallagete, they were quite evident in correspondence with Holloway and Campbell, and reflected larger debates among southern liberals. The chief area of contention, not surprisingly, concerned Campbell and Holloway's sometimes smug dismissals of electoral politics and traditional legal and judicial institutions. Dabbs – who, Holloway claimed, “could have agreed with less than 10% of what Campbell and I wrote” and only slightly more of what the magazine published, but who continued to support their work – contended, in keeping with Niebuhr's earlier criticism, that Campbell's defense of the Klan “blurs a necessary distinction between law in the state and law and grace in the spiritual world.” Black civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer upheld the importance of voting in one journal issue, leading CSC board member Walker Percy to confess to Holloway that he “found Fannie Lou's reasons for voting better than yours for not.” Likewise, Episcopalian rector Duncan Gray, Jr., another board member and President of the Mississippi Council on Human Relations, authored “In Defense of the Steeple,” a mild rebuttal of Campbell and Holloway's piece criticizing the Church's acquiescence to politics.⁽¹⁸⁾

In no case was the liberal/Katallagete tension greater than in relation to Leslie Dunbar, southern liberal par excellence. Dunbar, formerly executive director of the SRC, was president of the New York-based Field Foundation during the years considered here, and consequentially was a major link between progressive southern organizations and northern foundations. Dunbar retained a liberal, if chastened, faith in both the value of political participation and the efficacy of political reform. His occasional contributions to Katallagete stood out for their secularity, as well as for their confidence, albeit with a tone of existential resignation, in the electoral process. More than anything else, Dunbar reacted against prophetic types who “all cry woe”; in contrast, Dunbar had chosen to struggle to make political decisions in an age of seemingly shrinking options for progressives. “Politics,” he wrote in the journal, “… is always a matter of alliances.” Privately, Dunbar chided Campbell for lambasting potential political allies – “any of those who have sought ways of living in peace with other men” – with whom the Katallagete community still had much in common. Later, Dunbar passed along to Campbell a letter from a public interest lawyer who facetiously claimed to envy the journal contributors “their peace of mind and sense of resignation,” even though the lawyer could understand their pessimism about politics. Campbell and Dunbar ultimately came to loggerheads in the mid-1970s over the issue of abortion, as Dunbar disagreed with Campbell's vociferous opposition to legalizing the procedure and accused the publisher and Holloway of using Katallagete as a “house organ” for their personal views. “You,” Dunbar had written earlier to Holloway, “ … are so self-assured in your disapproval of liberals like me.… When or how has Christianity been any less of a 'movement' than any of the others you lament?”⁽¹⁹⁾

Campbell, Holloway, and other Katallagete contributors reacted against what historian William Chafe has described as the post-World War II southern business progressive and moderate tendency toward “civility.” The language of civility was also present among southern liberals, for whom, as historian Michael O'Brien has written, “a main task . . . has been to assimilate the South to the nation.” The civility approach relied heavily on appeals to law, decency, and the delicate balance between political reform and sociological realities. Civic boosters and business leaders invoked these ideals into the 1960s. Katallagete articles provided numerous references to the ineffectiveness of this mindset, as contributors regularly ridiculed Lyndon Johnson's advice that Klan members return to “decent society.” Walker Percy wrote (with some regret) of the decline of the racially moderate southern Stoicism in which paternalistic southern whites had protected the livelihood of blacks, while Holloway noted the dangers of a political focus on the Snopse-esque ideal of “respectability.” Pete Young chided North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford, widely hailed as a liberal force in southern politics, for his seeming obsession with the “'New South' dream” of linking the Tar Heel state with the national mainstream. Campbell and Holloway's open letter to Billy Graham read partly as an intra-South squabble, with the former accusing their “[Southern] Baptist Brother” of becoming a “court prophet” for the Nixon Administration. At Yale, the authors had defended Graham's evangelism; now the evangelist blessed the political status quo, while endorsing a moderate line on civil rights. Such concerns with civility and respectability, they suggested in the Graham article and elsewhere, ultimately served as crutches for existing institutions, or glossed over the acute suffering of poor southern whites.⁽²⁰⁾

In contrast to civility, Campbell and Holloway proffered a relational and grace-centered politics that drew heavily from the fount of southern evangelicalism. For them, the two most important units of analysis were the individual and God (rather than the “worldly standards” referenced in II Corinthians 5:16), and CSC remained primarily concerned with reconciling the two. Campbell wrote of the importance of addressing “interpersonal relationships” in the South, because “structures are persons, groups of persons, who lean in the same direction at a given point in history.” This personalistic, Baptist-influenced approach (which, ironically, did not wholly differ from the spirit of the human relations conference movement in which Campbell had his roots) led him to reach out to poor white segregationists. Klan members comprised what Pete Young called the “new lepers … the new untouchables” of southern society, whose plight challenged the “conventional liberal solution to the American racial crisis.” An issue of Katallagete featured a Klan leader's plea to President Nixon “to remember the white ghetto.” As Campbell explained to Percy, Klansmen, already marginalized by liberals, were no longer “useful” for southern plutocrats, who had previously exploited the race issue among poor whites for economic gain.⁽²¹⁾

The radical nature of grace in the face of human tragedy emerged as an overarching theme of the journal's treatment of white segregationists. Human beings, in Holloway and Campbell's theology, were weak, but loved vessels (“bastards”) for whom human reconciliation was an existing, accessible reality. Campbell celebrated the New Testament's “triumph of grace over law” and acknowledged that CSC was “sometimes referred to as antinomian – and maybe so.” Grace was in its most powerful form when juxtaposed with the lot of marginalized persons. A mock Katallagete divinity school course required students to spend time in a prison in order to better understand the Pauline concept of grace. Gaining such an appreciation for the tragic lot of many of his fellow white Southerners had radically altered Campbell's approach to social activism. As he wrote regarding his “bastard” epiphany:

Campbell and Holloway's aversion to grand visions aside, the pages of Katallagete did imply a hoped-for religious South that stood apart from either liberal political solutions or conservative folk religion. Percy wished that a southern faith, shorn of racism, would supplant the hegemonic status of liberal Christianity. Here, the novelist paralleled what historian Morton Sosna identified as a major theme of southern liberals, including such New South boosters as Sanford: a belief “that the South, before the rest of the country, would discover interracial brotherhood.” As mentioned above, CSC viewed faith as existing at the very marrow of southern culture; thus, wrote Campbell, the Committee desired to “[put] some ethical meat on the dry bones of southern folk religion.” Unlike many, although not all, of their southern liberal forbearers, though, Campbell and Holloway were not optimists, but respecters of tragedy. To underscore the tragic nature of southern faith and society, Katallagete published a passage from William Faulkner's The Town, which describes sectarian Methodists and Baptist having founded a Mississippi town “'not to escape from Tyranny as they claimed and believed, but to establish one.'”⁽²³⁾

In stressing the tragic side of southern life and departing from the comparative optimism of such fellow Southerners as Dunbar and Graham, Katallagete upheld, and occasionally romanticized, the emotional depth of common whites, particularly as expressed through country music. Another proposed divinity school course, titled “Wisdom Literature and the Psalms,” offered extra credit to students who attended the Grand Ole Opry. These embraces of white southern culture were an intriguing analogue of the white New Left's cult of Black Power. While conscious of charges that Katallagete romanticized the plight of white segregationists – who, as Young felt compelled to remind Holloway, remained violent persons “wounded in body and mind” – Campbell confessed to feeling “a certain empathy with the racist,” which he did not feel with other social outcasts. Campbell made the practical point that the South would never resolve such contentious issues as integration and bussing unless the redneck was “somehow brought in as a party to the truce.” Overall, though, he dedicated more energy to employing poor whites as foils for the liberal and southern establishments, since as another Katallagete contributor wrote, Klan members at least had the “capacity to envision a greater world.” In his own writing and public speaking, Campbell strategically affected a profane – at times, somewhat crass – tone toward the same end. As Thomas Connelly has rightly argued, Campbell developed a “peculiar civil religion” in relation to his native South, despite the minister's stated aversion to “folk religion.” “Somewhere down the road,” Campbell said, “I learned that southern people had a special compassion.” Katallagete reflected its publisher in this regard.⁽²⁴⁾

While no Katallagete author systematically delineated the journal's hope for a better, grace-filled southern society, it became obvious that this vision would not conform to contemporary political mores, especially not liberal ones. A photo spread in the Fall 1970 issue documented an atypical (and hence, in light of the journal's embrace of paradox, apropos) narrative for demarking the theological and political place of Katallagete: In Stone Mountain, Georgia, two black boys stumbled upon preparations for an upcoming Klan rally and started playing with the children of the Klan members. Eventually, after the Klan members snapped at their children for getting in the way, the white and black boys – respectively, the offspring and targets of the Klan – worked together to wrap burlap around the crosses slated for burning.⁽²⁵⁾

How, then, does Katallagete, the flagship publication of the Committee of Southern Churchmen, elucidate the dilemmas of southern liberalism on the cusp of the post-civil rights era? The pages of Katallagete, particularly the contributions of Will Campbell and James Holloway, reflected movement among a particular group of southern liberals (or erstwhile liberals) from traditional political activism toward a Biblically-driven, prophetic Christian radicalism. They expressed this turn away from temporal models of law and justice both scripturally, through a model of reconciliation based on II Corinthians 5:15-20, and socially, through a ministry to poor white Southerners. Katallagete's overt Biblicism served as a rhetorical and moral mark of distinction from the secular sphere of political liberalism, a call for Christian activists to return to their Biblical roots. The practical components of this Biblicism – a relational approach to social activism and belief in grace-informed ethics – retained a distinctively southern quality reflected in the journal's treatment of poor whites. The publication remained true to its southern roots, but with, to borrow from Campbell's description of his conversion from legalism, a “decided difference” that set it apart from earlier southern liberal traditions.

The southernness of Katallagete lends perspective on the journal's significance for the broader story of the transition of southern political culture into the post-civil rights era. Southern white liberals faced important decisions during this period, choices reflected in the pages of Katallagete. Foremost among these decisions was the question of whether to pursue regional change through traditional political means, at a time when the electorate was expanding. Katallagete appeared during a period of trial for white liberals, both within and outside of the South. Civil rights legislation and increasing amounts of educational integration supplied degrees of hope that were subsequently contested by urban riots and the persistence of racist political demagoguery, as well as the escalation of the Vietnam War. The growing presence of Black Power and black consciousness sentiments further complicated matters. On one level, then, Campbell, Holloway, and other contributors to the journal merely participated in a larger reaction against liberalism, which also informed the New Left and neo-conservative movements. However, the appearance of this trend (and its accompanying voices of dissension among CSC members) was of particular importance within a South on the cusp of a gradual, but definite political realignment toward Republicanism. The trend suggested the erosion of a viable, if already circumscribed, post-war southern liberal tradition, facets of which, as seen in Katallagete, turned inward amid Nixon's “Southern Strategy” and the ascendance of George Wallace. Katallagete also indicated something of the many possible socio-political uses of southern evangelicalism. Campbell and Holloway applied their Southern Baptist emphases on grace and interpersonal relationships to a prophetic critique of liberal activism and the southern status quo. In doing so, they dropped out of mainstream southern politics at a time when post-segregation, yet – despite the hopeful rhetoric of politicians such as Jimmy Carter – often politically conservative forces were preparing to move in. The new political culture in the South was, like Katallagete, amenable to the language of evangelicalism, but with a “difference” other than what Campbell had intended.

1. Most considerations of twentieth-century southern liberalism have not extended far into the 1960s. One of the more sweeping overviews, which characterizes southern liberals by their stance on racial issues and stresses the influence of religion on many southern liberals, is Morton Sosna, In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race Issue (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). No historian has offered a completely acceptable definition of post-World War II southern liberalism, as some historians have emphasized its links to support for the New Deal, while others have stressed its association with racial policies. A conceptual outline of post-World War II southern liberalism is not the task at hand in the paper. Thus, Sosna's identification of his research subjects, while in need of greater historiographical nuance and perhaps itself suggestive of why historians of the topic have not considered the 1960s, is employed here (along with the sometimes neglected element of self-identification): “those white Southerners who perceived that there was a serious maladjustment of race relations in the South, who recognized that the existing system resulted in grave injustices for blacks, and who either actively endorsed or engaged in programs to aid southern blacks in their fight against … [discrimination] in such areas as education, employment, and law enforcement” (viii). In the postwar years, Sosna noted, southern liberals began to support integration, a theme pursued in Julia Anne McDonough, “Men and Women of Goodwill: A History of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and the Southern Regional Council,” PhD. Dissertation, University of Virginia, 1993. Other notable treatments of southern liberalism include Richard H. King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 242-286; Michael O'Brien, “C. Vann Woodward and the Burden of Southern Liberalism,” The American Historical Review 78.3 (June 1973), especially 596-597, 601-603; John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945-1980 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 1-73; and David Chappell, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Chappell's work carries into the 1960s; however, the book mostly deals with the “larger group” of “middle-road” Southerners, rather than liberals per se (xxii).

2. The Committee of Southern Churchmen sponsored Katallagete until 1983, after which the journal was published independently into the early 1990s. See Jennifer Ford, “Will Campbell and Christ's Ambassadors,” Journal of Southern Religion 3 (2000), http://jsr.fsu.edu/ford.htm. For an introduction to Campbell, see Merrill M. Hawkins, Jr., Will Campbell: Radical Prophet of the South (Macon, GA: Mercer University Pres, 1997); and Thomas L. Connelly, Will Campbell and the Soul of the South (New York: Continuum, 1982).

3. Two groups with which CSC maintained significant ties were the Southern Regional Council (SRC) and the New Leftish Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC). Campbell served as a mentor to SSOC staffers, to whom he once signed an open letter “Uncle Will,” while SRC provided CSC with crucial start-up support and connections to New York foundations. On SSOC, see The Phoenix [SSOC newsletter] 1.5 (January or February 1969), 6-7; and Gregg Michel, “We'll Take Our Stand: The Southern Student Organizing Committee and the Radicalization of White Southern Students, 1964-1969,” PhD. Dissertation, University of Virginia, 1999. On SRC, see, for example, letter, Charles M. Jones to Leslie Dunbar, 29 May 1963, Reel 43, I:1502, SRC Papers (microfilm).

4. For introductions to the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, see John A. Salmond, “The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen and Interracial Change in the South,” The North Carolina Historical Review 69.2 (April 1992), 179-199; and Robert F. Martin, “Critique of Southern Society and Vision of a New Order: The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, 1934-1957,” Church History 52.1 (March 1983), 66-80. “A Proposal for the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen (Committee of Southern Churchmen),” 29 July 1963, “Committee of Southern Churchmen, Correspondence and Historical Materials, 1934-1971, folder 1 of 2,” Box 2, Katallagete/James Y. Holloway Collection (hereafter, K/JYH), Special Collections, University of Mississippi (hereafter, UMSC). Hawkins, 49. Letter, Campbell to McGeorge Bundy, 7 December 1966, “Will Campbell, Correspondence, 1963-1979,” Box 2, K/JYH, UMSC.

5. Smith, Holloway, and “light” in Katallagete, June 1965, ii, 1, and i, respectively. “A Proposal,” “Committee of Southern Churchmen, Correspondence and Historical Materials, 1934-1971, folder 1 of 2,” Box 2, K/JYH, UMSC.

6.“Folk Religion” in Katallagete, December 1965, 11. This description of southern Christianity was in keeping with Samuel S. Hill's contemporaneous argument that southern evangelicalism was at least as cultural as it was religious. See Hill, Samuel S. Hill, Southern Churches in Crisis Revisited (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1999 [first version, 1967]). Subscription data in CSC Executive Committee minutes, 23 May 1967, “Committee of Southern Churchmen, Correspondence and Historical Materials, 1934-1971, folder 2,” Box 2, K/JYH, UMSC; and Egerton, “Out There in America,” The Progressive, December 1974, 34. To be sure, Katallagete's influence was not exclusive to the South. Indeed, judging from readers' correspondence, a majority of the overall readership likely did not reside in the South (although it is impossible to determine the regional identity of most readers). See readers' correspondence in folder 13.1, Box 13, K/JYH, UMSC. Mission statement, Campbell, and Holloway in Katallagete, June 1965, i, 3-5, and 1, respectively. Connelly, “Campbell, Will,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, eds. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 1315.

7.“Solution” in Katallagete, June 1965, 3. Letter, Holloway to Pat Watters, 4 October 1966, “Pat Watters, Correspondence and Articles, 1966-69,” Box 8, K/JYH, UMSC. Campbell in Katallagete, Summer 1966 and December 1965, 3 and 11, respectively. Letter, Campbell to Holloway, 4 March 1963, “Will Campbell, Correspondence, 1963-1979,” Box 2, K/JYH, UMSC. Will D. Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly (New York: Continuum, 2000 [1977]), 203. Campbell's disenchantment with liberalism was at least partly evident as early as May 1959, when in a sermon to Vanderbilt Divinity School he declared that the “Christian view on race is not the universal principle of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man as important as that is.” Sermon text in Series III: 27, Reel 110, SRC Papers.

8. Letter, Campbell to “Friend,” undated [1968-1970], “Will Campbell, Undated Correspondence,” Box 2, K/JYH, UMSC. Harmon L. Wray, Jr., “Committee of Southern Churchmen,” in Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, ed. Samuel S. Hill (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984), 181. Advertisement, undated [late 1960s], 13.2, Box 13, K/JYH, UMSC. Letter, Holloway to Egerton, 28 March 1967, 10.9, Box 10, K/JYH, UMSC.

9. Campbell wrote, “Most of our members worked hard for the passage of recent civil rights legislation. We have long recognized the need and the urgency of political measures to remedy the political[,] social, and economic abuses and inequities that are a part of our nation.” See letter, Campbell to Bundy, 7 December 1966, “Will Campbell, Correspondence, 1963-1979,” Box 2, K/JYH, UMSC. “Realism” in Katallagete, December 1965, 4. Campbell in Katallagete, Winter 1966-67, 2-3; and Winter 1967-68, 2. Katallagete did feature a few articles which invoked a Black Power critique of liberalism. See Ann Beard, Katallagete, Spring 1971, 3-5. For important treatments of the sixties-era fate of American liberalism, see Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Alan J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1984); and Gary Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” The American Historical Review 99.4 (October 1994), 1043-1073.

10. Campbell in Katallagete, Winter 1966-67, 2-3; and Brother, 248-249. Holloway in Katallagete, Winter 1967-68, 3. Law and order in Katallagete, Fall 1968, 3. “Totalitarianism” in Katallagete, Winter-Spring 1970, 3. “Law and politics” and “police state” in Katallagete, Summer 1967, inside back cover.

11. Campbell in Katallagete, December 1965, 11-13. Niebuhr in Katallagete, Winter 1967-68, inside cover. While Niebuhr, like Campbell and Holloway, criticized liberalism's optimistic portrait of humanity, he was also a founding member of Americans for Democratic Action, a leading liberal group.

12.“Baal” in Katallagete, Winter 1966-67, 5, 9. “Steeples” in Katallagete, Fall 1968, 2, 5-7. Campbell and Holloway released a book of the same title. See Up to Our Steeples in Politics (New York: Paulist Press, 1970). Katallagete, Winter-Spring 1970, 2, 4.

13.A helpful identification and description of the major themes of neo-orthodoxy is found in Douglas John Hall, Remembered Voices: Reclaiming the Legacy of “Neo-Orthodoxy” (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 125-131. For a brief, compelling discussion of the influence of neo-orthodoxy on southern thinkers, see Richard H. King, “Stoking the Fire or Polishing the Pinnacles” in Perspectives on the American South, Volume 2, eds. Earl Black and John Shelton Reed (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1984), 62-65. King wrote of Campbell's “Barthian skepticism” (70). Neo-orthodoxy and Bonhoeffer allusions in Katallagete, June 1965 and Fall 1968, 1 and 5. See Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Touchstone, 1997 [1953]). “Relevance” in Campbell and Holloway, eds., The Failure and the Hope: Essays of Southern Churchmen (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972), 7. Hawkins, 3. Foot-washing in Katallagete, Summer 1966, 1-6. “Singular” in Katallagete, June 1965, 19. For example, see Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: A Provocative Christian Assessment of Culture and Ministry for People Who Know That Something is Wrong (Nashville, TN: Abington Press, 1989). “Be” in Katallagete, Winter 1968-69, 2.

14.Katallagete, Summer 1966, 4. Katallagete, December 1965, 2. “F” in Katallagete, Fall 1969, 3-10. Bible verses interspersed throughout Katallagete, Fall 1969. “Jonah” in Katallagete, Fall 1968, 9. Graham in Katallagete, Winter 1971, 2.

15.“Police state” and “concentration camp” in Katallagete, Winter 1967-68 and Spring 1968, 5 and 2, respectively. Weapons story in Katallagete, Winter 1967-68, 35. Southern Baptists in Katallagete, Spring 1968, 2. Katallagete, Fall 1969, 6.

16.“Problem” and “victims” in Katallagete, Fall 1969, 8-9. Young in Katallagete, Fall 1970, 34. Cleaver in letter, Campbell to “Dear Friend,” undated [1968?], “Will Campbell, Undated Correspondence,” Box 2, K/JYH, UMSC. See Campbell, Brother, 217-222. “Acquittal” in Katallagete, December 1965, 13. “Wallace” in Katallagete, Fall 1968, 34. One Katallagete article even criticized organizations, such as the Council of the Southern Mountains, which were designed largely to address the needs of southern whites. See James Branscome, Katallagete, Winter 1971, 25-32.

17.“Liberal Americans” and Democratic support in Katallagete, Fall 1970 and Fall 1969, 3 and 10, respectively. Funding in letter, Holloway to “Tom” [probably Thomas Merton], 18 January 1968, 10.10, Box 10, K/JYH, UMSC; letter, Walter H. Sims to Joseph M. Hendricks, 28 December 1970, 15.1, Box 15, K/JYH, UMSC; and Hawkins, 1. For an introduction to SRC, which led the postwar shift among southern liberals toward fervent desegregationism, see Anthony Newberry, “Southern Research Council (SRC),” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 1425-1426. Weltner and Watters in Katallagete, Winter 1966-67, 18-21 and 23-31, respectively. Dabbs in Katallagete, June 1965 and Winter 1966-67, 7-11 and inside front/back covers, respectively. See also Katallagete, Summer 1967, 37-38. King, “Stoking,” 66-71. Dabbs cordially acknowledged his differences with Campbell in Haunted By God (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1972), 251.

18. On Dabbs and Gray, see draft letter, Holloway to Dunbar, undated [1975?], 10.10, Box 10, K/JYH, UMSC. Letter, Dabbs to Holloway, 27 April 1966, “James McBride Dabbs, Correspondence and Manuscripts, Undated – 1970,” Box 3, K/JYH, UMSC. Hamer in Katallagete, Fall 1968, 19-26. Letter, Percy to Holloway, 7 November 1968, “Walker Percy, Correspondence,” Box 8, K/JYH, UMSC. Gray in Katallagete, Winter 1968-69, 29-32.

19.Dunbar in Katallagete, Fall 1968, 27-33. See Dunbar, Reclaiming Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1991); and The Shame of Southern Politics: Essays and Speeches (Lexington: Kentucky, 2003). Letter, Dunbar to Campbell, 24 May 1967, “Will Campbell, Correspondence, 1963-1979,” Box 2, K/JYH, UMSC. Enclosure, letter, Dunbar to Campbell, 17 September 1973, “Leslie Dunbar, Correspondence and Miscellany, 1966-1973,” Box 3, K/JYH, UMSC. Abortion issue in letter, Campbell to Dunbar, 3 February 1975, “Will Campbell, Correspondence, 1963-1979,” Box 2, K/JYH, UMSC. Campbell's anti-abortion statements appeared in Katallagete, Winter 1974, 3. “Organ” in draft letter, Holloway to Dunbar, undated [1975?], 10.10, Box 10, K/JYH, UMSC. Letter, Dunbar to Holloway, 30 December 1974, “Leslie Dunbar, Correspondence and Miscellany, 1966-1973,” Box 3, K/JYH, UMSC. Most likely, Dunbar was responding to an article co-authored by Holloway and James Branscome in Katallagete, Winter 1974, 32-42.

20.William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), esp. 7-8. In 1962, Dunbar had argued that “when we work for civil rights we are really … working for civility.” See Dunbar, “Civil Rights and Civil Duties,” Address to Catholic Interracial Council, 28 October 1962, in Shame, 17. O'Brien, 602. “Decent society” in Katallagete, Fall 1969, 9. Percy in Katallagete, December 1965, 18. Holloway in Katallagete, Winter 1967-68, 6. Young in Katallagete, Fall 1970, 31-32. Graham in Katallagete, Winter 1971, 2. Campbell and Holloway continued their criticism of Graham in a subsequent editorial. See Katallagete, Summer 1973, 2-6.

21.For a relevant description of southern evangelicalism, see Hill, Southern Churches in Crisis Revisited. Individuals and “worldly standards” in Katallagete, December 1965, 7 and front cover. The full verse, as quoted, reads: “With us therefore worldly standards have ceased to count in our estimate of any man; even if once they counted in our understanding of Christ, they do so now no longer. When anyone is united to Christ, there is a new world; the old order has gone, and a new order has already begun” (II Corinthians 5:16 -18, The New English Bible). Campbell in Katallagete, Summer 1966, 4. Young in Katallagete, Winter 1966-67, 21, 22. Letter, Campbell to Percy, undated [mid-1960s], “Will Campbell, Undated Correspondence,” Box 2, K/JYH, UMSC. Katallagete, Winter 1968-69, inside back cover.

22. Campbell in Katallagete, December 1965, 11. “Antinomian” in letter, Campbell to “Dear Friend,” undated [1968?], “Will Campbell, Undated Correspondence,” Box 2, K/JYH, UMSC. Mock course in Katallagete, Fall 1969, inside cover. Campbell, Brother, 224-225.

23. Percy in Katallagete, December 1965, 18. Sosna, 208. “Meat” in letter, Campbell to Bundy, 7 December 1966, “Will Campbell, Correspondence, 1963-1979,” Box 2, K/JYH, UMSC. Faulkner in Katallagete, Fall 1968, inside cover. On tragedy, see also Katallagete, Spring 1974, 34-40.

24. Opry in Katallagete, Fall 1969, inside cover. Letter, Young to Holloway, undated [1969?], “Pete Young, Correspondence, Undated,” Box 9, K/JYH, UMSC. “Empathy” in letter, Campbell to Bundy, 7 December 1966, “Will Campbell, Correspondence, 1963-1979,” Box 2, K/JYH, UMSC. “Truce” in Katallagete, Spring 1974, 36. “Greater world” in Katallagete, Winter 1971, 37. “Civil religion” and “compassion” in Thomas L. Connelly, Will Campbell and the Soul of the South, 9, 139.

This article published 11/04