Toward Integration

The Southern gentlemen who founded the Southern Baptist Convention with the defense of slavery as a key motivation would be shocked at the Baptists' Christian Life Commission. Battling the deeply segregationist feelings of millions of members of the nation's biggest Protestant denomination, the commission is inexorably turning Southern Baptist opinion toward the acceptance of Negroes as equals.

Last week 3,500 delegates of the North Carolina Baptist Convention condemned the Ku Klux Klan and its "perverted use of the Christian Cross." The week before, the Baptists of Virginia passed a resolution acknowledging "before God our partnership of guilt in the long, dark night of injustice and discrimination," and resolved that all Virginia Baptist congregations be encouraged to organize local Christian Life Commissions.

Sin Against God. The Christian Life Commission became a full-fledged agency of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1947 with the ostensible aim of bringing Christianity to bear on everyday life--the family, daily work, citizenship, race relations. It remained an organizational starveling until Foy Valentine became its executive secretary five years ago. A scholarly, witty Texan of 42, Baptist Preacher Valentine now runs a staff of three men and two secretaries, from a well-appointed office in the headquarters building of the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville. On a budget of $90,000, he supplies written materials to local congregations, conducts conferences and discussion groups in the six Southern Baptist seminaries, and speaks all over the South.

"I am not suggesting that we lightly cast aside our cherished Southern traditions," Valentine likes to say. "I am suggesting that we throw them aside with great vigor wherever they violate the spirit of the Bible." His objections to segregation are firmly religious. "We need to abolish racial discrimination in our country and our churches not because of a clause in the Constitution or because of the Communist challenge, nor yet because we need the votes of the watching world. We need to conquer race prejudice because it is a sin against almighty God and a rejection of the precious blood of Jesus Christ, his only begotten son."

Support from Moyers. Foy Valentine's message is getting across; there are currently branches of the commission in 14 Southern states. Valentine is a friend of Press Secretary Bill Moyers and says that Baptist Moyers is "just as interested in what we are trying to do as I am." Valentine observes that "whereas Southern Baptists, like most other denominations, have been prone to reflect the culture, there are encouraging signs that we are more interested in reflecting the mind of Christ regarding race and other moral issues. We are abandoning the culture which has had us very much its captive, and we are abandoning it in favor of Christ."

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