Frontier in Baptist ethics history: a panel.

In the twentieth century, T. B. Maston, Henlee Barnette, Bill Marshall, and Martin England courageously spoke out against racism, social injustice, and the misuse of power. The following articles highlight the work of these four Baptist pioneers in ethics.

Barnette and Maston: We Need Them More Than Ever

William M. Tillman Jr.

Frederick Jackson Turner's seminal essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" built off the thesis that the American frontier had closed. (1) Indeed, no more new lands remained to explore. His attention was scant toward intellectual frontiers and essentially ignored theological frontiers. Turner's larger observations are helpful for setting a context for the matters that follow: the theological and specifically ethical frontiers.

With Turner's American frontier, scouts moved ahead of the general population. These individuals learned the topography and trails. They could look at a vista and diagnose how to traverse it and beyond. They were sought for counsel as to the timing for a party's movement. They engaged life circumstances in such courageous ways as to awe modern-day persons. (2)

With this paper's title, "Barnette and Maston: We Need Them More than Ever," I submit to you that Henlee Barnette and T. B. Maston have served as scouts in the Baptist theological and ethical landscape. They have been pioneers. They beat out the pathways for Baptist Christian ethics. They have served as interpreters of the gospel and its engagement with the culture. But, we need them, or their kind, more than ever, because, as a friend has insightfully observed: "The pathways grow over. The frontiers reappear with each succeeding generation."

The real theme of this presentation is, Where do we go from here? Emphases in Christian ethics are on the wane. (3) Fewer people give emphases to the discipline, especially among Baptists. (4) Recently, a slight furor was created when the statement was made that no one in the Maston tradition was going to be needed at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in the Christian ethics department. (5) The sentiment is, no doubt, in place in the other six Southern Baptist seminaries with regard to Barnette, Glen Stassen, Paul Simmons, Thomas Bland, Glen Saul, John Howell, Bob Adams, and Furman Hewitt, to name a few others.

Is it possible that delineating some of Barnette's and Maston's attributes could help identify what we are needing? Consider some of those attributes with me.

Identifiers of Ethical Topography

Both Barnette and Maston understood that the pathways can grow back over even though the basic landscape remains the same. Issues of money, sex, and power, which cover the landscape, are ever with us. Yet, Barnette and Maston pointed us to the fact that human nature is such that ethical matters have to be revisited. Our sense of ethical direction has to be retuned and resharpened from time to time. (6)

Barnette's and Maston's calls for revisiting our values took some basic shapes. These shapes were on the same track. Barnette's catch phrase has been contextual "principled-agapism." By this he meant that our life's actions are to form around the sense of the whole context in which we live, based on principles or compass directions and not a detailed roadmap, and that our life's actions are to will the well being of the whole creation, our relationship to God, relationship to others, and to ourselves. (7)

One of Maston's concise demarcations is that of the ethic of the cross. He asked, "What does it mean in a more specific way for one to take up a cross? ... A cross is something on which one dies. It involves for the Christian the crucifixion of self with selfish ambitions and purposes." (8)

Maston presented another dimension he shared with Barnette, a sense of the personal and social dimensions of the gospel. Maston noted:

   The spirit symbolized by the cross is to be applied personally by
   the Christian. We are not just to talk about it; we are to seek as
   best we can to take up our cross and follow Christ.... The spirit
   symbolized by the cross is also to be applied to the broader
   social relations and problems of life. The cross is central in the
   Christian social strategy. It is the Christian method of social
   change. (9)

Barnette had much the same idea: "There is no such thing as a 'personal' gospel as over against a 'social' gospel. There is but one gospel which is both personal and social." (10)

Marked by the hard work of biblical interpretation, Barnette and Maston each made calls for accountability to the ethical topography they identified. They called for ultimate values to be applied to historical particularities. In these applications, Barnette and Maston each understood himself and his role in the extension of Christian ethics.

What You See Is What You Get

Frontier scouts as related to us by Zane Grey or James Fenimore Cooper, for instance, stand out because of their garb and personalities. Both Barnette and Maston could be characterized by their honesty and humility, by being themselves. They could be extraordinarily disarming as they had not an ounce of prima donna or celebrityhood.

One of my treasured memories of life is one occasion when I was able to spend time with both Barnette and Maston. I invited Barnette to speak at the Southwestern Seminary chapel. We put together a small luncheon group afterwards, which included Maston. I suggested to Barnette that since he was our guest he should sit at the head of the table. He replied, in his characteristic southern gentleman drawl, "Oh, no, let Dr. Maston sit there. He is the master." The two of them begin an interesting little tete-a-tete as they deferred to one another. Finally, the decision was made that they would sit together. I turned to my wife, Leta, and commented, "I have to admit I am awed."

Able to Communicate the Lay of the Land

Frontier scouts were known for their ability to convey to travelers the lay of the land. Maston and Barnette both served as communicators of Christian ethics and of the work of great Christian ethicists. Maston appreciated Reinhold Niebuhr, his brother Richard, with whom he studied at Yale, (11) and several other interpreters of Christian ethics. Barnette was influenced significantly by Walter Rauschenbusch, as well as Reinhold Niebuhr. Barnette and Maston both built on the work of eminent ethicists of the twentieth century, and they found ways to contextualize those ethicists for Baptists. For what is the use of having scouts if their audience cannot understand what the scouts have found? Barnette and Maston, both smart men, could communicate to people less intelligent than they.

Each of these men used the media of his time, primarily the printed word. Between them, we have thirty books and hundreds of articles. I wonder what they could have done if they had used word processing. They were known for quickly and eloquently articulating perspectives to their reading constituencies. (12)

As well, each man was a mesmerizing speaker. I use videos of conversations between Maston and interviewers in my courses now and did at Southwestern after he was unable to come into classes. I observed otherwise recalcitrant-type students become mellow, and even engage the course, from the time of viewing Maston. One guess is that he conveyed a sageness, a discernment about life that people could easily sense. That discernment was based on experience with God day-by-day. Neither Maston nor Barnette talked about grace, for example, abstractly. Their sense of authenticity about the matter came through the tones of their words, the looks in their eyes, and their postures. There was little question that they spoke out of their experience. (13)

How we have known Barnette and Maston best is as teachers. Parker Palmer talks about subject-centered teaching. (14) I think Barnette and Maston, however, are examples of what I identify as a triadic approach to teaching. The components are subject-centered, student-centered, and teacher-centered. Which one is the most important? The importance depends on the context, for each moves interdependently with the others.

These gentlemen could relate to people in the teacher-student relationship. They had ways of getting into your convictional DNA. They operated as encouragers, inspirers, and investors in the future. They stirred in others the passion they felt. Each was a story-teller, a narrative ethicist before it was tagged such. As well, each presented us the stuff of which stories are told.

Their teaching legacies are linked to two distinctive places. Each stayed in one place vocationally for significant lengths of time, (15) and a kind of paradox erupts. That is, Barnette and Maston exhibited a stability, constancy the ethicists call it, while seeking. They were settlers and pioneers at the same time, obligated to a place and seeking a new land, willing to give a minority report when Christian ethics were abridged. (16)

Like the prophet Isaiah, Barnette and Maston had a vision of God that fired their imaginations, passions, and actions toward applying the gospel. (17) They saw that Christian evangelism and ethics do not form a dichotomy; rather, the paradigm is yet more complex. They realized that the gospel must be communicated as spiritual formation, as evangelism, and as ethics--all interdependent. Indeed, their gripping personalities, more even than the content they taught, are what we need.

Conclusion

Though Maston is deceased and Barnette quite aged, their legacy still asks us to go where they have been. The two men have portrayed for me what it means to be in touch with the prophetic side of the kingdom of God, pointing at horizons that should be but are not, just yet. (18)

Barnette and Maston have had impact on me. Because of knowing them, I want to be a better teacher and a better Christian ethicist. My hope is that communicating something of their scouting work makes you want to do the same.

(1.) Turner's most significant statement is "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development." See Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1963 reprint), 27.

(2.) See Paul I. Wellman, "Some Famous Kansas Frontier Scouts," Kansas Collection: Kansas Historical Quarterlies, 1:4 (August 1932): 345-59. http://www.kancoll.org/khq/1932/32_4_wellman.htm. Accessed May 10, 2003. Wellman reviews the impact of those of Kansas origins who served as Great Plains scouts. He portrays their responsibilities, as well. An earlier scouting adventure which supplies imagery for this presentation is developed by Stephen Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Another analogy, or metaphorical vehicle, for this presentation would could bear some fruitful discussion is to draw from the lives of Caleb and Joshua as they were the two Hebrews who saw Canaan as a frontier.

(3.) A provocative interview with Henlee Barnette, "Christian Ethics: Quo Vadis?" addressed this point. See Christian Ethics Today, no. 1 (April 1995), 6-7.

(4.) Ironically, few of the new Baptist seminaries or divinity schools begun in the last fifteen years offer Christian ethics in their curricula, much less have a Christian ethicist on their faculties.

(5.) A letter to the editor from Joe Trull of Wimberly, Texas, in the January 13, 2003, Baptist Standard highlights this conversation. See "Biblical Ethics," www.baptiststandard.com/2003/1_13/ pages/letters.htm.

(6.) Daniel Maquire, who teaches at Marquette University, has noted: "Life is a series of moral choices, and each and every one of us is at it all the time. There is no area of deliberate human behavior that lacks a moral dimension. The value questions are everywhere--in politics, in sex, in business, in the rearing of children, and in the realm of what one owes to one's self. Each of us has, in effect, (one's) own little method of moral evaluation. If, however, we have never visited our method with reflection, the chances are that our method is biased and imperfect, The chances are, too, that we underestimate our moral freedom and our potential as persons." See Daniel Maquire, The Moral Choice (New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1978), xv.

(7.) Henlee H. Barnett, Exploring Medical Ethics (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1982), 22ff.

(8.) T. B. Maston, Why Live the Christian Life (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1974), 160.

(9.) Ibid., 170.

(10.) Henlee H. Barnette, Introducing Christian Ethics (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1961), 4. See also Henlee H. Barnette, "The Glorious Gospel," Southwestern Journal of Theology 34:3 (Summer 1992), 4-7. and Henlee Barnette, "Stewardship of the Environment," LIGHT (Oct-Nov 1980), 5-6, 12.

(11.) Maston was especially influenced by H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture concepts, which he interpolated for his constituency in T. B. Maston, Christian and World Issues (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957).

(12.) I have watched Maston painstakingly handwriting manuscripts. Unfortunately, few people aside from Mrs. Doretta Bridgeford, his long-time secretary, could read the handwriting. He worked hard at putting what he had to say in words that nearly anyone could understand. He often mentioned that if his mother, who had about a third grade education, could understand what he wrote, then anyone could.

(13.) I was with Maston when he gave his last chapel address, "The Unfinished Agenda," at Southwestern Seminary on March 13, 1986. I was struck by his strong grip on my arm as we stood waiting for his time to speak; but, the most poignant part of the experience was the look in his eyes. There was a deep fire, passion, displayed I have rarely seen.

(14.) Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 99-106.

(15.) Barnette taught Christian ethics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1951 to 1977. Maston taught at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1922 to 1963, and most of those years in Christian ethics.

(16.) See the dissertations Charles Franklin McCullough, "An Evaluation of the Biblical Hermeneutic of T. B. Maston" (Ph.D. diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1987) and Ronald Douglas Sisk, "The Ethics of Henlee Barnette: A Study in Method" (Ph.D. diss., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1982).

(17.) David George, pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church, Nashville, Tennessee, related several years ago this idea:

      Righteous action is only possible when we are in touch with a
   source of righteousness beyond ourselves. And because we know
   that, before we can carry out the prophet's mission we must
   experience the prophet's vision. And because we know that, our own
   efforts at righteousness themselves become evil and destructive
   unless they are purified by the judgment and mercy of God.... Not
   to do this and then to go out and do battle with evil is
   presumptuous and dangerous. Not to do this is to fight short, hot
   battles and lose long, cold wars. Not to do this is to go as far
   as romantic idealism can take you and then be overtaken by
   cynicism and despair. Not to do this is to give your best shot at
   clear-cut issues like race and find you have nothing left for
   muddy issues like energy, economics, and peace. Not to do this is
   to spend your twenties and thirties hacking away at the jungle and
   then to turn around at forty or fifty to find it has grown up
   again behind you and you can't hack it any more."

See David C. George, "Encounter with God as the Basis for Ethical
Action," LIGHT (December-January 1980-81), 11.

(18.) The reader who may not be acquainted with the careers of Barnette and Maston could appreciate these sources: "Henlee Hulix Barnette: A Special Salute," Christian Ethics Today 3:4 (September 1997). Three articles in this journal (pages 15-22) are given to the presentation of the Whitsitt Baptist Heritage Society's Baptist Courage award to Barnette in June, 1997: "Henlee Hulix Barnette: An Activist" by Frank Stagg (15-20); "Henlee Barnette: Gentle Prophet" by Bill Leonard (20-21); and "The Whitsitt Courage Award: A Response" by Henlee Barnette (21-22). As well, see William M. Tillman, Jr., ed. Perspective on Applied Christianity: Essays in Honor of Thomas Buford Maston (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986) and William M. Pinson, Jr., ed., An Approach to Christian Ethics: The Life, Contribution, and Thought of T. B. Maston (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1979).

William M. Tillman Jr. is T. B. Maston Professor of Christian Ethics, Logsdon School of Theology, Hardin-Simmons University, Abilene, Texas.

"Maximum Christianity: Applied as Well as Advocated": One Good Man vs. Racism

Estelle Owens

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." (1) Attributed to eighteenth-century Irish statesman Edmund Burke, that aphorism has proven true many times in human history. No social phenomenon has testified to its accuracy more than bigotry and racism in the United States. While numerous good people stood up to be counted in the cause of wiping out this injustice, no single Southern Baptist fought it more effectively, in more settings, and on more occasions throughout his life than James Wilborn "Bill" Marshall. Throughout his career at the local church, state, national, and international levels, as the innovative president of Wayland Baptist College, and as a documentary filmmaker, Marshall demonstrated an abhorrence of racism and bigotry and a determination not to stand idly by and watch this evil triumph.

Bill Marshall sprang from a genuinely pioneer background, having been born in a covered wagon in 1908 in Indian Territory. An alumnus of Baylor and the University of Kansas, he completed his undergraduate degree in history at Texas Christian University, simultaneously earning an master of religious education degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Hardin-Simmons University later awarded him an honorary doctorate. A lifelong learner, Marshall became an amateur architect, a furniture-maker, a self-trained anthropologist, a private pilot, an equestrian, a distance runner, a filmmaker, and a linguist. Before he became president of Wayland in 1947, he served in youth ministry positions and directed the statewide youth programs for the Baptist General Convention of Texas. As the first personnel secretary of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board in 1943-47, he traveled extensively in Mexico, Central and South America, China, Manchuria, Japan, the Holy Land, and Europe. His ministry positions and exposure to international Baptist work intensified his dedication to winning a lost world and ending the racism that so often hampered that cause. (2)

Early Exposures to Racial Acceptance From his infancy, Marshall saw racial acceptance modeled in his home and in the lives of his parents. He later recalled that his rancher/farmer father "loved everybody" and made friends easily. (3) As president of their church's Woman's Missionary Union, his mother taught Bible lessons and childcare on the local Choctaw and Chickasaw reservation, taking her small son along with her. Marshall recalled that she mediated disputes between the natives and the townspeople and that the natives "all loved and respected her very much." (4) His playmates were those Native American and African American children whom his mother taught him to love because they were precious to God.

Marshall's awareness of and opposition to racism began early. Even as a little boy, he made friends with children from other races, although members of his own extended family were bigots. He recalled an incident when he was eight years old that involved his cousin striking one of his African American playmates during a dispute over a game. Speaking about it sixty years later, Marshall recalled that the incident both "made an indelible impression" and made racism "obnoxious" to him. (5) While he could conceptualize the notion of prejudice, he nevertheless "felt deeply obligated to do something about it." (6)

Doing "something about it" led to his involvement in antiracism activities during his teenage years in Arkansas City, Kansas. Arkansas City had few African American families, but one such family lived a few blocks from his own home. When white hoodlums bullied the little boy of that family, Marshall and his younger brother protected the child, walking him to and from school. Recalling this incident years later, he said that "we developed quite a friendship" with the child and his father and that he "felt highly honored, you know, to he considered his friend." (7)

Introduction to Diverse Racial Groups in College and Early Career

As a college student, Marshall became increasingly sensitive to the issues faced by people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. At the University of Kansas, he participated in varsity athletics, and he remembered being impressed by two particularly imposing freshman football players from the Haskell Indian Institute. Haskell's football team defeated UK's varsity team--an unheard of feat--largely because of the talents of those athletes Marshall so admired. At Baylor, his roommate, Constantine Monostrovsky, was a Ukrainian whose family had been persecuted by the Communists. Monostrovsky instilled in Marshall a sensitivity to the ruthlessness of Communism and introduced him to still another ethnic group. Marshall's pride in these friendships was both evident and remarkable. Integrated schools and churches in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas in the 1910s and 1920s were exceptional. Whites who had friends of color and friends from a foreign land were also exceptional. (8)

Marshall's denominational positions with the BGCT and FMB required extensive travel, and he was introduced to the extent of racism and bigotry worldwide and to the damage those concepts did to the cause of Christ. In China before World War II, he and his wife visited a missionary couple. Accompanied by a Chinese professor, the Marshalls arrived to find consternation on the part of the host missionary who explained that "we're just not accustomed to entertaining the Chinese in our house." (9) Forty years later, he recalled with amazement: "I was flabbergasted ... the bottom just dropped out for me. This I could not understand." (10) Marshall learned later that the missionary's wife had not wanted to be a missionary and that she and her children were miserable because they disliked the Chinese people. As a result of that experience, Marshall determined that the FMB must screen applicants for mission posts to be sure that both spouses were called and prepared to love the people to whom they were sent.

Leadership in the Racial Integration of Wayland Baptist College

Prior to assuming the presidency of Wayland in 1947, Marshall encountered and combated bigotry and racism as he enhanced and strengthened his own color-blind worldview. As president of Wayland, however, he made one of the most remarkable contributions of his career. In May 1951, Wayland Baptist College received international recognition for reaching the unique and precedent-setting decision to integrate voluntarily and without restrictions. African American students were to be admitted on the same basis as the Anglo, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian students who already studied at Wayland, ate in the dining hall, and lived in the dormitories. Wayland, thereby, became the first four-year liberal arts undergraduate college, public or private, in the former Confederate South to be so integrated.

By 1951, racial discrimination was a major issue that most Southern Baptists chose not to confront. Colorful, outspoken-Missouri-Baptist Harry Truman sat in the White House advocating a sweeping program of civil rights and social justice, most of which was defeated by a coalition of conservative southern Democrats and northern Republicans. Most Southern Baptists adhered to segregation and identified more with Orval Faubus, Ross Barnett, and Strom Thurmond than they did with Truman. Texas Baptists clung to strict segregation laws; and, like many other towns, Plainview discriminated against African American, Hispanic, and Asian residents. The decision to integrate Wayland voluntarily, then, was a bold step that elicited some opposition but less overt hostility than perhaps had been expected.

Marshall's leadership and quiet conviction inspired the faculty, staff, student body, and board of trustees to take this step, though they needed little persuasion. Dozens of international students, as well as native-born Hispanic and Indian students, already attended the college as a result of Marshall's determination to make provincial, regional "Wayland of the Plains" into "Wayland of the World." The decision to accept African American students on an equal basis with whites came when an African American school teacher applied for admission to enhance her credentials and retain her position. The decision to allow her and any other sincere students, regardless of race, to enroll at Wayland modeled one of the ideals the 1950-51 college catalog espoused for the school: "maximum Christianity, applied as well as advocated." (11)

Marshall and Wayland received extensive publicity for this decision. Ebony magazine ran a feature article, and local and regional newspaper coverage lasted for days. (12) The international edition of Time magazine ran a short article as well. (13) The decision and the publicity resulted in ninety telegrams, letters, and notes scrawled in the margins of newspapers. Ten opposed the decision, almost all in passionate terms that vilified Marshall and the college. The other eighty messages praised the act for three main reasons: it would aid in spreading Christianity worldwide, especially among people of color; it was a step toward equality of rights for everyone; and it was the Christian thing to do. (14) Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Theron D. Price declared, "You have raised a torch of Christian witness in Texas," for all who believe that "to love God means seriously and deeply to love those whom God loves." (15)

So successful was integration at Wayland that Marshall was selected as the keynote speaker for a south-wide conference on racial unity in December 1952, in Columbia, South Carolina. He told his young audience that segregation was a "social and spiritual blight" that mocked the life and example of Jesus Christ, "who reckoned with the souls of men, and not with their packaging." (16) Marshall urged his listeners "to launch out courageously, not necessarily loudly, with the battering ram of your collective influence, to batter down the shameful, anti-Christian wall of segregation." (17)

Conclusion

Marshall resigned as Wayland's president in 1952 and spent the next fourteen years in Brazil making documentary films for National Geographic. The subjects of his films were the Stone-Age Indians of the Amazon, especially the plate-lipped Txukarramae. Decades later, he recalled that there he had met one of the best friends of his life: "a naked Indian chieftain in the jungles of Brazil." (18) Marshall taught the chieftain to sing "Old McDonald" in Portuguese so that the chief could lead the children of his tribe in singing around the campfire. Marshall respected the humanity and dignity of this illiterate, technologically-backward, unsophisticated man whom God loved. His reaction to the Txukarramae and to the issue of racial equality and acceptance was the same as when he had been an eight-year-old boy playing with Native American and African American children whom others discriminated against and despised.

Throughout his life, Bill Marshall fought racism and bigotry. He stood up to be counted when the easiest course would have been to go along with the prevailing mores of his day. A true Christian pioneer in the area of race relations, Marshall was one good man who would never stand idly by and allow evil to triumph.

(1.) Attributed to Edmund Burke, though all searches have Failed to locate this quote in Burke's writings and speeches. John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature, 16th edition, ed. Justin Kaplan (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992), 332.

(2.) "Dedication," The Traveler (Plainview, Tex.: Wayland Baptist College, 1950); undated press release (1953); "Oral Memoirs of James Wilborn Marshall," Transcript, 3-8 June 1976, Interview #1, 1-2 (Texas Baptist Oral History Consortium, Baylor University Institute for Oral History).

(3.) Marshall, interview #1, 2.

(4.) Ibid., 3, 12.

(5.) Ibid., 21-22.

(6.) Ibid., 23.

(7.) Ibid., 28.

(8.) Ibid., 29; Marshall, interview #3, 106-07.

(9.) Marshall, interview #4, 147, 153.

(10.) Ibid.

(11.) Wayland Baptist College, General Catalog, 1950-51, 8.

(12.) See "Texas College Admits Negroes," Ebony, November 1951, 37; "Wayland Trustees Study Application of Negro Teacher," Plainview Evening Herald, 31 May 1951, p. 1; "Negro Student Admitted Wayland Summer School," ibid., 1 June 1951, p. 1; "Wayland Opens Its Doors to Negroes," ibid., 4 June 1951, p. 1; "Annie Taylor, Floydada Negro Teacher, Admitted to Wayland," The Floyd County Hesperian, 7 June 1951, p. 1; "Wayland Will Admit Negroes," Lubbock Evening Journal, 1 June 1951, p. 11 "Wayland Votes Acceptance of Negro Students," Amarillo Daily News, 1 June 1951, n.p.; "Wayland College Trustees Vote To Admit First Negro Student," Lubbock Morning Avalanche, 3 June 1951, p. 1; Ernest V. Joiner, editorial, Rails Banner, 7 June 1951, n.p.; H. M. Baggerly, editorial, "Town Topics," Tulia Herald, 7 June 1951, p. 1. "All Races Welcome At Wayland," ibid.; Bill Durham, "Wayland Students Approve, 265-9, As Four Negro Teachers Enroll," Fort Worth Star-Telegram, n.d., n.p.; "Wayland College Ends Racial Ban," Dallas Morning News, 1 June 1951, pt. 1, p. 9; Carter Wesley, "Editorially Speaking," Houston Informer, 16 June 1951, p. 13.

(13.) "To Do Right," Time, 18 June 1951.

(14.) For example, Herbert Miner Pierce to J. W Marshall, 16 May 1951; William H. Stalnaker to J. W Marshall, 16 June 1951; The James W Marshall Papers, Mabee Learning Resources Center, Wayland Baptist University, Plainview, Texas.

(15.) Theron D. Price to J. W. Marshall, 22 June 1951, ibid.

(16.) J. W. Marshall, "The Dilemma of Southern Youth," Youth and Racial Unity Through Educational Opportunity Conference, Columbia, SC, typescript speech, Marshall Papers.

(17.) Ibid.

(18.) Marshall, interview #2, 86.

Estelle Owens is professor of history and chair of the Division of Social Sciences, Wayland Baptist University, Plainview, Texas.

Martin England and the "Chief": On the Far Frontiers of Baptist Ethics

David Stricklin

In the annals of Baptist history, few persons covered themselves with more distinction in the areas of racial justice, civil rights, and peace activism than Martin England, and few labored in these areas with greater anonymity. The reasons for England's relative obscurity are many and complicated. (1) Yet the fruits of his noble and selfless work are quite well known, even though his name is seldom associated with them.

Even less well known are the ways England's service on the mission field in Burma illuminated his ethical views. These views guided much of his thinking when he returned to the United States and became involved in civil rights work and in peace activism from the 1950s to the 1980s. The few clues to this odd story reside in a small collection of notes he took during and after his time in Burma. (2) These notes focus particularly on his appraisal of the differences and similarities between life in Burma and life in the United States, especially between life among the Kachin, with whom England and his wife Mabel Orr England and their children lived and worked, and life among the wielders of power in U.S. life and culture.

Doing Mission Work in Burma

Born in 1901 to a Southern Baptist family, Martin England grew up in a mill town in South Carolina. As a boy, he dreamed of serving in Africa as a Southern Baptist missionary. In pursuit of that dream, he attended and graduated from Furman University and then studied for a period at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Financial difficulties at the Foreign Mission Board, however, kept him from being appointed as a Southern Baptist missionary, and some of his contacts encouraged him to transfer to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. There he completed his seminary training, and in 1933, England and his family went to Burma as Northern Baptist missionaries.

It was a most dangerous time to move to that part of the world. The years leading up to World War II featured growing tensions, as Japan cast its imperial gaze on the rich lands of Southeast Asia, including Burma. When the Japanese Army overran the country, most westerners evacuated. The Englands barely escaped the country and lost all their earthly belongings on a riverboat sunk by the Japanese. (3)

Building Koinonia Farm

The Englands returned to the United States and settled in Louisville, Kentucky. While there, through a mutual acquaintance named Waiter Nathan Johnson, England met Clarence Jordan. (4) England and Jordan realized that they shared a dream--that of creating an intentional community in the southern United States based on modern agricultural economy, a commitment to biblical ethics, and a desire for racial reconciliation for the South. With their wives, England and Jordon moved to Sumter County, Georgia, bought some land, and started Koinonia Farm in 1942. After the Japanese left Burma, the Englands in 1944 returned to the mission field. Clarence and Florence Jordan stayed at Koinonia and oversaw the development of the farm into a world-famous outpost for interracial witness, what they called "a demonstration plot for the Kingdom of God." Just one of the many Southern Baptists and others that Koinonia influenced was a young Sumter County native named Jimmy Carter, who years later became involved with one of the farm's best-known outgrowths, Habitat for Humanity. (5)

Many people knew about Koinonia Farm and Jordan, especially Southern Baptists who wanted to follow the Koinonia example and depart from the racist ways of thinking and behaving of so many of their fellow southerners and fellow Baptists. But few people knew about England, because he and his family left Koinonia and returned to Burma.

Working for Peace

In 1953, the England family returned to the United States for good when Mabel developed health problems. England went to work for the pension and insurance organization of the American Baptists, the Ministers and Missionaries Benefit Board. From 1962 on, he served as a field representative posted to look after the needs of American Baptist ministers and missionaries who were retired and living in the South. His covert assignment was to be a minister to persons who got into various kinds of trouble as part of the struggle for civil rights for African Americans in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. He often appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, to visit people in jar, help their families, and do whatever he could to help without calling attention to himself. This work sometimes put him in physical danger, but he kept at it and combined it with an intense devotion to peace activism, especially through a longtime involvement with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and other initiatives on behalf of peace.

Choosing "Jesus or the Chief"

To England, no starker choice existed for would-be followers of Christ, especially those wishing to hold any claim to the realm of ethics, than the choice between, as he put it, "Jesus or the Chief." His conception of this choice crystallized during his missionary service in Burma and expressed his sense of urgency regarding the need for peace and for the ongoing requirement of believers to avoid ceding spiritual authority to earthly figures instead of to God. England believed quite fervently that one of the principal hallmarks of Jesus' experience was that he challenged the ways earthly authority sought to control people's lives and force them to behave in ways that separated them from God. In a sermon titled "Jesus or the Chief," which England delivered in various manifestations during the 1950s and 1960s, he developed an elaborate series of concepts about the meaning of the age-old struggle between earthly and heavenly authority.

England's notes from the Burma years and notes he made after he returned to the United States that reflected on his Burma experiences appear in the form of a most remarkable assortment of scraps of paper, things that resemble journal entries in many ways without the formality of that layout. He often used the most modest of materials on which to record his thoughts, something that was characteristic of his very nature. England was, after all, a man who said in an undated note in these papers, "When I have more than enough, while my brother is hungry, I am a robber." His frugality extended beyond the mere desire to save money. It reflected his ethical principles, what he saw as biblical principles.

England's thoughts on the Jesus/Chief dichotomy reflected his sense that, in much of his Burma experience, local chieftains functioned as tribal deities, thwarting many possibilities that their people had to live in ways that were consistent with ethical principles, biblical or otherwise. What struck England as most significant was not the absolute power most chieftains wielded over their people, a common-enough fact of political life in many parts of the world, but that the Kachin people understood something about their spiritual lives that enabled them to transcend the chiefs hold on them.

Few things mattered to England apart from biblical calls for peace and justice. In entries in his notes from November 30, 1953, he commented on a U.S. tribal chieftain, Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had a hold on so much of the political and cultural life of the United States. McCarthyism drove to distraction vast numbers of persons who held what they would have thought to be similar ethical persuasions to England's. He demonstrated the differences between these people and himself, however, by saying, "McCarthy is amusing, because of the wrath of his opponents," and, "Don't whine about McCarthy," even as the demagogue appeared to be presenting himself as the "man on horseback."

The basis of England's disregard for the gravity of McCarthyism was simple: "Whatever else may need doing, there can be no peace between a world half starved, half glutted, between a world that puzzles how to get enough to keep alive and a world in constant danger of suffocation from its surpluses." To England, McCarthyism was only a minor annoyance compared to the crashing disparities between the wealth of the developed part of the world and the poverty of most of the rest of it.

England's sensitivity to this issue was heightened by his missionary experience in Asia. In a draft sermon titled "We Are Glad You Came," England wrote of the difficulties of visiting poor villagers, who "at times ... would perhaps be glad we went away, if only because the little they have looks even less beside our plenty." The presence of relatively wealthy westerners signified things even more troubling to some "who see in our coming the desire of the arrogant white man not only to dominate the whole earth, with his tanks and planes, and to see his wares in every market, but also to fasten on every soul his religion, his culture, his way of living." England proposed that there was some truth in this assessment, "Because those of us who come to help have also allowed ourselves to be used at times as the tool of the trader, the soldier, and the ruler from other shores."

There were, indeed, dangers, and they did not stop with maldistribution of wealth. In an undated typescript consisting of one paragraph, England proposed that "We [will not] allow ourselves to be taken alive by massive reconciliation because much of our faith has come to us through some kind of tribal religion. Even our highest resolve is often spoiled, our very holy of holies marred by what our tribe says is right." These dangers were particularly great for wealthy Christians, perhaps even those only fairly well off, who followed the dictates of the culture instead of the gospel's demands that they be reconciled with their enemies, even those who might threaten their prosperity.

Chiefs were active in many cultures, England contended. According to his notes, he found them testing nuclear weapons in 1950s America but also in the Cold War U.S.S.R. He also found them in China. Histories written by missionaries in China reported that entire villages sometimes turned away from what he called "[t]heir tribal religion," which had "taught them that people in another village were enemies if the chief of that village was enemy of their own," and turned toward "the Jesus teaching" that love should prevail among all people, "even those in another village, another race, another nation." England recognized the costs of following what, in a handwritten draft of his "Jesus or the Chief" sermon, he said Chinese converts called "the Jesus Way." These converts had to risk the wrath of the chief, whose lust for power could cost them their lives if they refused to perform acts of violence against his enemies. The converts then asked their missionary teachers, "Must we obey the chief or obey Jesus?"

Among the Kachin people, England saw believers who were willing to make the dangerous choice to follow Jesus. There was nothing necessarily remarkable about them, but England admired the courage of their convictions, which was even more remarkable because it came from otherwise unremarkable people who stood up against the culture of the chief with its traditions of violence and degradation. In undated notes England made about the image of the chief, he pointed out that the "conflict of loyalties ... [is] not just a dash of wills," that it pits the security of tribal and religious "folkways" against the real possibility that following a model of reconciliation could gain them "nothing sure, except death" for they would be "[c]ounted as enemies of the tribe." In one of the last handwritten versions of his sermon, dated October 18, 1967, England noted, "Jesus believers have often suffered at the hands of a chief when they have refused to hate those under the power of another chief." Notes from February 1971 demonstrate England's belief that wealth controls the processes working against reconciliation at the most basic levels as "the tribal religionist dare not disobey, because he must measure the worth of his life by his power over, or against, others, and things give him this power."

In a coincidence full of portent, in light of the subsequent violent history of Burma, a nation rent with civil war and genocide, part of England's October 1967 sermon draft was handwritten on the back of a fragmentary typescript which said, "A letter from Burma hints at disturbed conditions in the Kachin country. [A] great many young people ... have given up in despair or anger. The only way they know to express their feelings is to rebel against those whom they consider responsible for their frustration." (6) England realized that the danger was always great that people would fall back on the old ways of violence, even those he called "honest, competent ones who deeply crave to be useful." The power of tribal conversion could not stand up to the world-encompassing injustice of the differences between the vast wealth of part of the world and the groaning poverty of the rest.

Conclusion

It did not take going to Burma to develop Martin England's sense of ethics, even his most eloquent expression of it. But his experiences among the Kachin, in the face of a coming war and its aftermath, deepened his sense of the failings of North American, especially the United States, approaches to the use of riches and the failings of the dominant American/Christian culture to make those uses more righteous. His nature, however, was not to lapse into self-righteousness or despair, even as he contemplated the towering failures of modern Christianity. His nature also was not to realize that a large part of what made many among the Kachin able to part company with their chiefs and follow the "Jesus Way" was the example of England himself.

Part of England's continuing hope came from the steadfastness of his faith, embodied in what Albert Blackwell called "a modern parable he had written himself (though unsigned, of course) ending with these words: If we worked as hard to get Heaven into people here, as we do to get people into Heaven hereafter, we might do both." (7)

Toward the end of his life, England and wife Mabel received a letter from an old Burmese colleague, recounted by Blackwell in his eulogy for England in January 1989. The note, written during a time of growing disaster in Burma, contained a word of hope, an affirmation of faith from that far frontier:

   Kachin Christians numbering three hundred thousand ... and all
   Kachins will never forget your ministry among us. Your work, your
   love is very great! Thousands of Kachins are up there awaiting
   your coming. They will greet you with great joy. Probably many of
   them will be in Kachin costumes, standing at both sides of the
   road. You will see decorated bamboo fences, banana leaves. You
   will hear angels sing hallelujah! In the meantime, we are praying
   for you.

No doubt, one of the last things England did before he drew his last breath was to pray for the Kachins. He probably also said a prayer on behalf of the vast majority of western Christians who had failed to live up to the highest ideals of the ethical demands of the gospel. Martin England took his radical Baptist vision of those demands to Burma, to Koinonia, back to Burma, back to the South, constantly pressing faith into frontiers far removed both by geography and by temperament, and left marks felt today on two continents, mostly by people who will never know his name.

(1.) See my book A Genealogy of Dissent: Baptist Protest in the Twentieth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999) for more on Martin England's life.

(2.) These materials, mostly consisting of notes for sermons and Bible studies, are on deposit in the archives of Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. Textual references to individual items will be made by description of the item.

(3.) These experiences are described in oral history interviews I conducted with Martin and Mabel England, on deposit in the archives of Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

(4.) See England's letter, written from Burma, in Johnson's newsletter, The Next Step in the Churches, July 1941, 2. The letter describes the need for a radical break from the ordinary conduct of churches where "the principle of stewardship" clashes with "the principle of ownership." England observed that the creation of "a local fellowship of Christians" challenging "the conflicts of race, class, economic interest, and the like" was necessary before any hope could exist for reconciliation on a large scale. Jordan, one of Johnson's subscribers, read the letter and resolved to speak with England, which he was able to do when the Englands moved to Louisville. A full ran of The Neat Step can be found in the archives of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

(5.) See Andrew Chancey, "Race, Reform, and Religion: Koinonia's Challenge to Southern Society" (Ph.D. diss., University of Florida, 1998), and Tracy Elaine K'Meyer, Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South: The Story of Koinonia Farm (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997).

(6.) England's writings confirm the judgment that he was an absolute pacifist. He refused to acknowledge that there was such a thing as a "just war" Despite the ways the Kachin were drawn into, exploited, and betrayed by the warring parties during and after World War II, England would have rejected their participation in any acts of violence, regardless of the purpose, as he would those of the Japanese, the British, or various Burmese parties vying for control of the country over the yearn In a guest editorial titled "War's Alternative: Drastic and Dramatic Sharing" in Foundations: A Baptist Journal of History and Theology 15 (October-December 1972): 292-97, England linked his ideas on wealth disparity and war, calling on Christians to engage in sacrificial giving to alleviate suffering around the world.

(7.) Albert Blackwell, "Eulogy for J. Martin England," First Baptist Church, Greenville, S.C., 6 January 1989. On deposit in the archives of Furman University.

David Stricklin is associate professor of history and chair of the Division of Humanities, Lyon College, Batesville, Arkansas.