When after all it was you and me

Last updated on: March 12, 2018 at 5:18 pm by Fred Clark

When after all it was you and me 2018-03-12T17:18:41-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I know about Koinonia Farm and Clarence Jordan’s cotton-patch socialism, but I know next to nothing about the Delta Cooperative Farm or Providence Farm — two other experiments in Christian socialism and racial justice in the rural South that began years before the Jordans and Englands broke the soil in Americus, Georgia.

Robert Ferguson explores their stories in his new book, Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi. Ferguson summarizes his book for John Fea’s Author’s Corner series:

Focusing on two interracial, Christian socialist communities in the rural South, the book argues that former sharecroppers and their allies enacted significant cultural shifts that placed their communities in the vanguard of human rights struggles in the 1930s to the 1950s. From the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, residents of Delta Cooperative Farm and Providence Farm acted out moments of modification that created egalitarian, democratic communities and which were ultimately quashed by white massive resistance to the black freedom struggle.

The farms were founded, partly, by Sherwood Eddy, a longtime missionary with first the YMCA and then later with Christian Action. He was, first and foremost, an evangelist, and very much the kind of Bebbington-esque Christian who could be claimed as a part of American evangelicalism.

Expensive university press books are why they invented library cards.

But then again, “Christian Action” was originally called the Fellowship of Socialist Christians, and was a project largely promoted by Reinhold Niebuhr and others now regarded as “mainline” Protestants. So contemporary white evangelicals might not want to claim him as one of their own.

The Niebuhr connection is intriguing not just because Eddy’s theology seems so much more evangelical than old Reinhold’s, but because Eddy also seems like just the sort of unchastened Rauschenbusch-style progressive that Niebuhr criticized so effectively. Sherwood Eddy seems like a character out of a Charles M. Sheldon novel.

Sheldon was the evangelical Kansas preacher and semi-socialist whose book In His Steps was accidentally never copyrighted, and thus became a Harry-Potter-level publishing phenomenon. That’s the book that gave us the question What Would Jesus Do? That question lives on as a popular evangelical slogan — WWJD? — even though white evangelicals no longer answer it anything like the way Sheldon did. (What Jesus Would Do, Sheldon believed, was democratize the means of production, among other things.)

Ferguson’s title seems a bit overstated. The fine folks at Delta and Providence were clearly hoping and trying to “remake the rural South,” but that ambition was squashed and suppressed within decades. But the possibility of such a remaking — and the possibility of attempting it without awaiting permission from The Powers That Be — is something Ferguson hopes readers will take from his book. As he says:

In times of national polarization, history doesn’t have to be a weight that paralyzes us. We should never look at the world and say, “well, it’s always been that way” and then go about our days weighted down by an ahistorical, erroneous understanding of the past while doing nothing about the present. Rather, history can liberate us when we understand that in the face of overwhelming hardships — such as, say, the Great Depression or Jim Crow — historical actors have posed radical changes and set about achieving those changes.

This inspirational, aspirational use of history can be a Good Thing. It is good to recognize and try to learn from the exceptional heroes of the story. That can be, as Ferguson says, liberating.

But it can also be dangerous. It tempts us to identify with the heroes in the story, to imagine that we’re like them and that we would have played their part had we been in their time and place.

That’s unlikely. And it’s made even less likely the more we indulge the idea that it’s true. The majority of white evangelicals in rural Mississippi were not like Sherwood Eddy. The majority of white evangelicals were those who made up the “massive white resistance” that crushed these experiments in “interracialism, Christian socialism, and cooperative farming.”

It’s good and important to engage in what Donald Dayton called “Discovering an Evangelical Heritage” of radical faith and dedication to justice. But we should read those stories cautiously, keeping in mind that, as Mal Ortberg put it, “I Would Not Have Been Burned as a Witch in the Early Modern Era No Matter What I Would Like to Believe About Myself and Would Have in Fact Been Among the Witch-Burners.”

As we decorate the graves of the just, we mustn’t flatter ourselves by imagining “If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.”

evangelicals

history

racism

Previous Post

March 12, 2018

The Half Has Never Been Told

Next Post

March 13, 2018 Abortion and hospitality: we know what we feel (sometimes)

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who was cast into a pit by his brothers?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Joseph Daniel Moses Jacob