The Door Interviews
Will Campbell (1973)
The
following interview came from THE DOOR.
I came across it in 1996 and it served as a major catalyst for my rethinking. It doesn’t seem so radical to me now but at
the first read it was fairly magical. Its
impiousness moments actually helped make it more thought provoking. It’s better to swallow the gnats rather than
the camel than vice versa. – C.T.Haun
Will
Campbell won’t fit in a box. He’s been
“Country Boy” (Amite County, Mississippi); he’s been “Ivy League” (Yale
Divinity School). He’s been
“conservative” (Southern Baptist); He’s been “liberal” (National council of
Churches). He’s ministered to poor
blacks; he’s ministered to members of the Ku Klux Klan. Mostly though, he’s “down home” and
Christian. Several years ago a professor
of theology at a campus where Will spoke years ago kept demanding of Campbell,
“But what’s your actual business, Rev. Campbell? I mean, what do you believe in?”
Will
snapped back,
“Look, I been trying to tell you, I believe in Jesus, goddammit. Jesus!”
Life
Magazine described Campbell as being “engaged in a quiet assiduous guerrilla
ministry” to a congregation of the “desperate and dispossessed.” Most of his witness is made up of haphazard
occasions as he attempts to respond to the people God has placed in his
path. He makes his home now on the
outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee.
Will Campbell
grew up in Mississippi, was baptized at age seven in a creek behind the East
Fork Baptist Church, was ordained at age seventeen, later graduated from
divinity school, and subsequently joined the civil rights movement in the
South. He dropped out of that when he
became disenchanted with the political approach to solving the world’s
problems.
Today,
under the auspices of the Committee:
Witnesses to Reconciliation (formerly Committee of Southern Churchmen),
Will does, in his own words, “whatever a country bootleg preacher does—givin’ speeches, writin’, marryin’, buryin’, baptizin’.” His
recent books include Forty Acres and a Goat, the children’s parable Chester and
Chun Ling, and a parable for grown-ups, The Convention; a Parable. Even in 1973, the time of this interview, he
spoke from a rich background of experiences and ideas.
DOOR: Many of our readers aren’t familiar with
the Committee of Southern Churchmen.
Could you tell us what it is and what it does?
CAMPBELL: You’re looking at most of it. It’s a small group primarily of steeple
dropouts (that’s the term we use) in the South representing every
denominational background from Church of God to Roman Catholic (depending on
which way you move up and down the scale), and every occupational group who
have for the most part dropped out from under the institutional, structured, steepled canopy, but who still believe very firmly some
things about the Christian faith. I
think we’ve seen, particularly in the South and I assume everywhere else, an
awful lot of people who’ve become disillusioned with the institutional
church. They drop out of that, and they
drop out of the Christian faith. . . which is
indicative of the fact that they had an idol in the first place. They assumed that the institution had
something to do with the Christian gospel, and it doesn’t.
DOOR:
You make quite a distinction between the steepled
institution and the Body of Christ.
CAMPBELL: Absolutely.
DOOR: I
read where you said that “the steepled institution is
one of the greatest barriers to the proclamation of the radical gospel.” Could you get into that a little more and
tell us what you mean by the “radical gospel?”
CAMPBELL: It’s difficult to summarize. I believe that the Bible ought to be read
like any other book—at one sitting like a novel or a physics book—and then you
can tell what it’s about. But you can’t
do what all of us have been taught to do because some guy back there very
conveniently divided it up into verses and chapters. That wasn’t the way it was written at all, of
course. And we pick out one and say,
“But it says here!” Well, that’s like
trying to exegete a chapter from a William Faulkner novel. You’ve got to read Faulkner’s entire novel,
and then you can say this book is about such and such. The Bible is a book not about love, or about
justice. It is not a book about mercy,
not a book about judgments, but a book about who God is, and who man is, and
then who God is in relationship to what man does and tries to become. I think the radicalism could probably be
summarized by Paul when he talks about the fact that we no longer judge any man
by human standard or human categories.
And that is radical because it wipes out all things that man had
done—like national boundaries, race, flags, education, who’s smart and who’s
stupid, and all the things that we have used to describe one another and divide
one another.
DOOR:
Is that one of the main distinguishing marks you see in the
institutional church—they keep building boundaries?
CAMPBELL: Well, the church is an institution. This is one of the things we’ve been talking
about this weekend—the inherent evil of all institutions. At least that’s what I’ve come to talk
about. All institutions are inherently
evil if by definition (I hope I can remember—it’s been a long time since I’ve
studied sociology) an institution is an organization set up to meet the
continuing needs of the group. Then you
make one other assumption which has to do with anthropology, the basic nature
of man, what man is really like. Whether
you put it in theological terms, or sociological terms, or psychological terms,
it comes out to the same thing: namely,
that man is basically less than all right.
He’s basically self-loving, self-serving, and
self-seeking. Theologians used to call
it original sin. Folks got the notion
that original sin had something to do with a snake crawling around and an
apple, and genes, and zygotes. All
original sin means is that if you and I are standing on the edge of a mountain
on a ledge the size of this, we might be able to work it out where we both
could stay there. We might. But we haven’t been able to do it on a world
scale, because there’s plenty of room to stand now, but we keep pushing each
other off. We go all the way around the
world to drop bombs to kill one another.
But you and I might be congenial enough or even smart enough to say,
“There’s room for both of us here, and let’s stay.” But if the ledge begins to crumble and pretty
soon it’s about the size of this tape recorder, then if I had anything to do
with it, I’m pretty sure which one of us would go off plummeting down the side
of the mountain. If you had anything to
do with it, I know who’s gonna go. That’s original sin; that’s all we’re talking
about.
Now you assume that pretty soon in
the life of that organization, it’s going to come to exist to meet the needs of
itself, no matter what it’s set up to do, whether grandiose or idealistic or
anything else. Very soon it’s going to
be existing to meet its own needs, and the classical
example of that is the Christian church.
It’s not the only one certainly.
But institutions are not run by pastors, or board of deacons, or
trustees, or committees. Pastor, or
presidents or chancellors or boards of trustees or deacons are run by the
institution. They just think they run
it, but they don’t have anything to do with it.
So the pastor very early learns to fit in, and we put it in all kinds of
terms: “We have to get our people to
love us before we can preach to them,” or “We’re gonna
behave like a rubber band—we know just how far we can go.” But we all learn to behave. A good chancellor or a good college president
doesn’t have anything in the world to do with education. He has to do with meeting the needs of that
institution. What are the needs of that
institution? Buildings,
libraries, more PhDs on the faculty who may or may not be teachers, or even
scholars for that matter? The
good chancellor doesn’t exist for any reason that has to do with
education. The good chancellor is one
who does well by that institution. The
good president of the United States is one who does well by the United States,
and this is what the Christian has never understood in the Vietnam War. I have been against this war, but I have
never taken the position that what we did over there was not good for the
United States. I think in all
probability it was. You can make a
rational argument either way on that one.
But I don’t serve the United
States. I’m not called to serve it. I don’t think God created the United
States. But the good president and the
good Senate and the good house of Representatives are
those who are meeting the needs or doing what is best for the United States
without any regard for moral judgment or Christian views of vocation or
anything like this. And I think you can
apply that, I believe, to any institution in existence.
DOOR:
How do you see your group overcoming some of these problems and not
becoming an ongoing thing, or not being run itself?
CAMPBELL: When I talk in those terms, I never mean to
imply that I’m some kind of exception. I
was meeting with a group in Toccoa, Georgia, and I
made the statement that I thought the demise of the Christian faith began when
some P.R. man dreamed up the gimmick of full-time Christian service and we
started paying one another to be Christians.
One of the brethren jumped up, red-faced, and said, “Well, you get
paid!” I didn’t mean to imply in any way
at all that I’m an exception to what I’m talking about. Sure, I’m trapped by institutions and the
Committee of Southern churchmen is, in a sense, and institution. And the fact that we bend
over backward trying not to be an institution is probably the very thing that
is institutionalizing us. You
can’t escape those things.
I’m
reporting and trying to interpret what I think is happening in the world
today: mainly that the nature of
institutions is involved in what that crazy Frenchman, Jacques Ellul, talks about in his book, The Technological
Society—the process of technique. He
applies it in particular to politics.
There is a way, a technique, to running government. And this is why it seems ridiculous to me
when someone becomes disillusioned with the Stars and Stripes and goes and
unfurls the banner of Hanoi or Peking or Havana, as if there’s anything
different happening there. There’s not
anything different happening there. This
technique, this sort of automatic pilot we seem to be on, the technique for
running government, is just as true in Hanoi as it is in Washington. That’s the way it’s done.
That’s why
I don’t vote anymore. It just doesn’t
make any difference. It’s not that I
think that politics has become that corrupt; it probably isn’t’ as corrupt as
it has been in many other periods in American history or world history. It’d not that I despair of the kind of people
that run for political office. You know
some of them are “good people.”
The only
reason I’m tempted to go back and register and do all the stuff you got to do
to vote, which isn’t much, is just a matter of casting. I get tired of getting up every morning and
seeing and hearing the latest utterances on the “Today Show” when I’d rather
see somebody else. But it’s in the same
sense that I’d rather see Liza Minnelli than see John Wayne. It’s a matter of casting. Neither one has anything to do with what’s
happening in the script. But other than
that it doesn’t make any difference who the president
of the United States is. That’s not the
way power operates. That’s not where
it’s at. It seems to me that there’s
been ample precedent in American politics that we could learn that by now. When Lester Maddox was elected governor of
Georgia, a friend of mine who’s in the house of
Representatives refused to run in the general election even though he’d won the
primary. He said, “I’m not going to
leave my name on the ballot because two years from now there won’t be any
constituency in the fifth district. I
won’t have any constituency. This man is
crazy, and the state of Georgia is going to collapse because a crazy man can’t
run something as big as a state government.”
Well, he not only ran it, but some of the New Left writers are hailing
Maddox as a sort of new Populist—Lester Maddox whose only claim to anything was
the sale and distribution of axe handles to people to keep black folks from
eating his fried chicken. He might have
been crazy, but he’s not the first crazy governor in the United States, and he
won’t be the last. He’s about as much a
Populist as William Buckley. There’s not
a Populist bone in his body. But the point
is that Georgia as a government entity, as a state, went merrily on its way and
nothing happened.
DOOR:
So you don’t see not voting as a cop-out? You think things are going to keep going
regardless of whether you vote or not?
CAMPBELL: No, it’s not a cop-out. Who cops out?
The one who exhausts whatever energy, time, effort, and muscle he has
somewhere else, or the guy who keeps on waving one banner or another and saying
that things are going to be different?
And if you
or anybody else disagrees with the process of technique, then I challenge you
to show me one secretary of Agriculture since old man Hyde who has done
anything but make the situation worse.
Now there have been some people that we would call good people. I thought Henry Wallace was a good man, but
the policies of Henry Wallace have been the things that have driven the people
off the land and into the cities. TVA
(Tennessee Valley Authority) is an example.
I was glad to see it. I thought that it was progress and good for my
people and for me, and yet today TVA is the biggest buyer of strip-mine
coal. It has taken more people off the
land than any other agency of government.
I went up
to Kentucky not long ago and had a funeral for a whole town which the TVA had
decided they wanted. They had built
Barclay Lake and Kentucky Lake and here was this land left in between. So again
some technician, somebody in TVA who is ruled by this process and who is ranked
by the programs he designs and carries through, says, “Let’s have the land between
the lakes. We’ll name it Land Between the Lakes, a very romantic, pretty sounding
name.” It just happens there are a lot
of human beings in there, some of them being thrown off the land for the third
time. So they had a funeral for the
whole town of Golden Pod, and the folks came by with little artifacts, threw
them in a casket, and we buried it. Now
the Land Between the Lakes is gonna
be for folks who make $25,000 and up.
They come in with their camping equipment and all the rest, big boats
and yachts, and get close to the lakes.
There’s even going to be Camp-a-port there. A Camp-a-port is where folks fly their plane
in and camp alongside the runway. And
not many people on food stamps have jet airplanes.
Now these
aren’t bad people. Frank Smith, who’s a
former congressman from Mississippi and was defeated because he refused to run
a racist campaign, is one of the world’s foremost ecologists who’s
written books on the subject. Frank
Smith is not a bad man, and yet it’s the Frank Smiths of the TVA that persist
in these policies—buy the strip-mine coal because it’s the cheapest. And the same thing for the
military. It exists not even for
national defense any longer, which would be bad enough, but to serve the needs
of the institution called the Pentagon.
And all what we call liberal progressive Programs somehow turn out to
make worse the things that they were designed to correct. So after a while it’s not a matter of
despairing; its’ just a matter of two and two do sometime, sooner or later, make
four.
DOOR:
What would you tell Christians then?
If you can’t change the church and you become part of an institution
yourself, what creative things can you do as alternatives?
CAMPBELL: I can’t deal with that question. The answer is all about you. It’s everywhere. All I could do is give
acts of this apostle, but arrogance, humility, or modesty circumscribe
that. But there is plenty to do. I can tell you what I’d do, but that’s kind
of an exercise in vanity or something.
All I can say is I’m never idle and I’m never bored.
DOOR:
So you see a person as responding to a situation and doing whatever
comes up? That’s the basic way he should
handle it?
CAMPBELL: I can see him responding in the spirit of
the Christian faith. Sure that involves some risk, and he even may do the wrong
thing and he too may make it worse. I
know that. What I see him not doing is
trying to devise an institution that’s going to be any different than any other
institution. I do a lot of cussing about
public schools, but if somebody asked me to build a better public school
system—I can’t do that. Some folks say,
“If you’re so critical of the United States, why don’t you go somewhere
else?” Well, my answer to that is, “Why
don’t you go somewhere else? I don’t want
to go anywhere else.” They say, “Can you
think up a better constitution, say, or a better government system?” No, I can’t, and that’s not my job; I’m not
going to try to. Because to try to do
that would be a denial of everything I believe in. If all institutions are inherently evil, then
the one I build would be inherently evil.
Much as I’d like to, I haven’t been exempt from original sin.
DOOR:
Then what’s the purpose of being critical since you know people who are
going to respond with, “What’s your alternative?” Do you see your role as a prophet?
CAMPBELL: I’m a reporter. I’m not being critical. I’m
saying that in my judgment this is the way things are. Now there may be preaching involved in that. It seems to me that the role of the preacher
has always been to sound the alarm and point out where the idols are. I think what we’re talking about is a lot of
idols that we fall down and worship. We
worship the church as and idol. We
worship education as an idol, and it has been absolutely nothing but an
idol. Education hasn’t helped us solve
any of our problems. And we worship
politics as the Messiah. And in the
Christian Tradition, I think this is the role of the preacher too. Point out where the idols are. You stumble and bust your ass, but you
persist in going down that road. Other
than that I don’t see myself as being critical.
I see myself as a preacher, as a reporter. The only efforts are not man’s efforts. There’s something else going on.
DOOR:
In specifics, how do you see the institutional church today in the
United States? How does it differ, say,
from the scriptural norm?
CAMPBELL: In the church described in the New Testament,
as I understand it, there is first of all absolutely nothing to suggest that it
ought to have a building. Certainly
there might be a building, but then we all go on to behave as if the building
was the church.
In
apostolic days, I think, a theological seminary would not have been thought
of. The bishops rose out of the
congregation. If you needed somebody to
do a specific job, you ordained them.
The original ordination was just for somebody to do the shit work,
waiting on tables so the apostles could be free to do some preaching. I don’t have any quarrel about giving people
specific jobs, but there’s just nothing so complicated about the Christian
faith that it’s going to take you three to seven years what it’s about. There’s no reason in the world for that
except institutional reasons. Today the
major institutional reason for divinity schools, and seminaries to a lesser
extent, is because we too have fallen down and worshipped at the shrine of
academe. Our learned doctors are just as
learned as any other scholar of any other academic discipline. And if we run out of things to be academic about,
we write papers and footnote them in German.
We just reach out and create something. “God is dead”—now what the hell is that
supposed to mean? And yet the learned
papers and journals were filled with this for four or five years. Of course right now we’re in kind of a dry,
dry spell. . . there’s no telling what some learned doctor is going to create
to write papers and theological journals about.
That’s a difference from the apostolic church.
There’s
also the whole fashion in which we have identified with the culture. I referred to it last night as equating the
Christian faith with sixth-grade civics.
The good Christians are the ones who behave the way a good boy and girl
behaves or learns to behave in a sixth-grade civics class. This is what we preach and this is, for the
most part, the way we live.
So
naturally we look at the court prophets as the highest, most influential
religious leaders today. Elton Trueblood, Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale. These are the people who speak to the alleged
leaders, the presidents—they are the court prophets. This is really to be expected as long as we
go racing to Caesar, trying to make a pope out of him on every moral issue in
the world. Right now it’s the one on
abortion. So Caesar’s with the Catholic
Church. We want to get a constitutional
amendment passed. We simply don’t have
the moral leadership to state that abortion is murder, which I happen to
believe it is. We don’t need to ask the
state if this is morally right. What we
do, you see, is base everything on the law.
If it’s not against the law any longer, that makes in morally acceptable
within the community of believers.
That’s not rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; that’s
rendering to Caesar the things that are God’s.
We saw
that in the civil rights crisis that boomeranged so badly on us. In the activist days of the liberal wing of
the church we said very little about the morality of race. We said, “Let’s be good boys and girls and
obey the Supreme Court. It is now the
law of the land,” as if that had anything to do with it. Then we put it into terms of law and
order. We were really the ones who
dreamed up that term, law and order, so that in a span of three short years we
saw that term appropriated by the bigots, and we saw a presidential campaign
waged on law and order. Dick Gregory
said that law and order became the new word for “nigger.” So when do we learn? I’m not being critical
or negative. I’m just trying to report
what I see.
DOOR:
So you feel that this is something peculiar to today’s culture or that
it’s something that’s always been?
CAMPBELL: I think it has always been, but the
difference is that before it has always been possible for the rebels to bitch
up the system. In the technological era
I really think that’s not possible any more.
It’s just virtually impossible to bitch up the system. Again, in the name of progress, in the name
of liberal politics, we have programs. I
was riding down south of the city of Chicago a couple of summers ago, and my
host, who was an outstanding liberal Christian layman, showed me all these
miles and miles and miles of high-rise apartment houses built for low-income
people. That meant black people. He said, “There are schools there, churches,
supermarkets, gymnasiums, swimming pools, department stores, everything. These people never have to go outside.” I thought, you know, that’s cool. The only problem is,
if necessary, they may NOT GO outside.
So you don’t have to gun people down or gas them or build barbed-wire
entanglements—that would be too easy.
The radicals could bitch that up by throwing their bodies on the wire
and chanting “freedom” and making a witness.
But how are you going to throw your body at high-rise apartment
buildings, which in the first place were put there for the people you claim to
have in your best interest. Are you
going to say, “Well, we don’t want adequate housing for these folks!”? But we build the concentration camps. They’re
technological in nature and they’re outs done in the finest democratic
tradition, so anybody would be a fool who’s opposed to it. It’s not like Nazi Germany, as yet. But the real paradigm for concentration
camps in the technological society is the things we’re doing in the name of
progress. Am I saying let’s not have
progress? I’m just saying we don’t
apparently know what progress is. I
think it results in the fact that we have somehow forgotten what education or anything
else has to do with the quality of life.
DOOR:
Is there such a thing as progress?
Maybe it’s a value we don’t understand and shouldn’t strive for?
CAMPBELL: I don’t know.
If it is, we don’t seem to be making it.
I can speculate in theological terms that all these towers that we build
in the name of man are Babel. They’re
towers of Babel because the Lord is not in them.
DOOR:
Many of our readers are youth leaders in the church. They have a lot of questions and are doing a
lot of struggling, but they’re still there.
Would you have a word for them?
Would you tell them that they are perhaps wasting their time in an
institution and they should begin to move in creative ways outside the steepled church?
CAMPBELL: No, because right away they’re going to want
to know, “like what?” And I can’t tell
them like what. All I can tell them is:
If God be God, he can work anywhere he wants to, including the mahogany pews,
the red carpets, the stained glass, and all the rest. I’m not trying to limit God; all I know is
he’s not calling me under the steeple. I
can’t say that for anybody else.
DOOR:
The word “renewal” has been big lately.
Do you feel that as long as renewal remains under a steeple, it’s a
waste of time? Or do you think that real
change can take place in the church that’s going to change from being a self-serving
institution to becoming more God serving?
CAMPBELL: I don’t believe that it’s possible to reform
an institution from within. There are
people trying, and I respect them and love them. They say we are going to stay and fight this
thing out. But the minute you really get
close, something goes wrong: you’re
sleeping with the organist, or your hair’s too long, or you drink whiskey, or
something. So you’re not going to be
there any longer. And if you really
start getting close, if you really start saying, “We don’t need a building,
let’s sell this thing and give it to the poor,” they’ll have you committed for
that one. You have to remember the
nature of the institution.
DOOR:
Do you feel there are some strides being made toward what you feel would
be an acceptable form of the church?
CAMPBELL: Well, you see, I can’t talk in terms of what
would be an acceptable form for the church.
DOOR:
Do you think it should have a form?
CAMPBELL: I think it’s inevitable that it will. I know that, but again, I don’t find in the
New Testament that it is, in fact, anything but a relationship.
DOOR:
How about church leadership? I
think the people here are going to be influenced by what you’ve said, and I
think the people you work with in the South are influenced. Whether or not you want to be a leader, you
are. Do you see this as legitimate?
CAMPBELL: Well, I’m not a leader. You’re wrong about that. I’m not a leader, and I don’t want to be a
leader. I don’t want to have any
disciples and I’ll never have any. If I looked back at a bunch of folks
following me, I’d fall apart. I’m trying
to be a disciple, and I think that’s all it’s about. I’m trying to be a follower; I’m not trying
to be a leader. I’m not smarter than
anybody else; I don’t know more than what other folks know. I think an awful lot of people see what I see
because it’s so obvious that they can’t miss it.
DOOR:
I’m not trying to drive this point into the ground, but it seems to me
that in the New Testament they had some leaders that provided them with
direction...
CAMPBELL:
... who rose out of the ranks....
DOOR: Yeah.
Do you see this happening? Should it happen with the community of people
that you might have?
CAMPBELL: Well, not if you structure it. Because once you do then you’ve got to set up
guidelines and standards—“We don’t want a minister unless he’s got a B.D.” Again, I can’t improve on the structures we
already have. If we’re talking about
structures, let’s just keep what we’ve got.
Keep showing them up. We’ll have
a “Key ’73,” and if that doesn’t work we’ll have “A Million More in ‘74” and
whatever rhymes with ’75 and ’76 and all the rest. Which seems to me is going down a bit in
history. I’m not saying we’re not going
to have institutions; I know we are and I know I’m involved in a lot of
them. All I’m saying is
you don’t ever take them seriously. And
that you see them as the enemy. You
know that they’re after your soul—every last one of them is after your
allegiance.
DOOR:
Would you amplify that?
CAMPBELL: Well, I know, for example, that Caesar can
make me bow down to him. It happens all
the time, and it’s going to happen next week when I make out my income tax. He’ll force me to do it, and if I don’t send
it to him, he’ll come get it with a little extra to pay him for coming to get
it. It’s again a part of that
technological society where every penny I make and everything goes into this
computer and it’s impossible to bitch up the system. It’s so built in: if you don’t do what you’re
supposed to do, the machine kicks your card out and they come and take it away
from you. And all these institutions make me bow down and worship them, and the
only thing I can do is try to hang on to a little tiny shred of humanity and be
able to chuckle or snicker when I bow down and put a pinch of incense on their
altar. I used to say that “I’m free and
I’m not going to do that,” and so on.
All I know to do is to go on shaking my head negatively to Caesar and to
all institutions as much as my gut and my nervous system will let me do.
More can
be read about Campbell here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_D._Campbell
More from The
Door can be found here: http://www.wittenburgdoor.com/home.html
The Door? In 1971 a publication named The Wittenburg Door came out. Its name smacked of the infamous wooden
church door where Martin Luther tacked up the ninety-five theses for scholarly
debate which sparked the Reformation. Only
they misspelled Wittenberg and later shortened it to The Door. It was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek,
humorous, smart-aleck magazine for professional youth workers and it quickly
evolved into a satirical evangelical magazine that “refused to take anyone or
anything in the church seriously.” It
has lampooned many of the sacred cows of the churches and had no mercy on
shysters like Robert Tilton and Jim Baker.
But there is one thing that the Door was always serious about: the direction the evangelical church was going
in. Their interviews often showed
this. Honest and daring questions were
asked by the Door which no one else was publishing and honest and daring
answers were given. In 1989, Zondervan published a book entitled The Door Interviews. The
interview above was its first (and best) chapter. - CTHaun