Questioned Your Ancestry Lately?

My grandfather, Hack Hall Sr., was a kind and gentle man. He drank a glass of chocolate milk every night, and always gave one to his grandchildren, too. I never remember hearing him raise his voice. His sternest reprimand was “Dry up,” and what it lacked in specificity it made up for in compliance.

A deeply committed Christian, a Wesleyan Holiness man, he taught his children to confess and pray every night. He loved the Bible. He was part of that generation, and that stripe of piety, of whom it would not sound right to say he read the Bible. He read his Bible. He was, in a compliment no longer common, a committed churchman.

He was the editor of a newspaper in the tiny town of St. Francisville, Illinois, and his sons loved him enough that they all followed him into the same line of work. (Their names were Hack, Jack, and Mack. Don’t ask why. I never even knew it was funny until I reached high school and no one would believe those were my uncles’ names.)

As mild-mannered as he was, there was courage beneath the surface. Once back in the thirties he wrote a series of editorials about a gang bullying southern Illinois. One day a long shiny black car pulled up across the street, and sat across from the newspaper office all day long. Just to send him a message. Didn’t deter him a bit.

One other piece of his job. He was more or less mayor of St. Francisville for some stretches of time. As such, it was his job to let any people of color who happened to wander into town know that they were not welcome to spend the night there. It was a town for white people. Everybody knew that was part of his job. The pastor at the church where he practiced Wesleyan holiness knew that was part of his job. I wonder about that …

When I was a boy, eleven years old, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. I don’t remember anyone saying anything about it at the church I attended. Maybe they did. But I don’t remember. I don’t remember any families of color ever attending our church. I don’t remember anyone mentioning their absence. The Mason-Dixon line in Rockford, Illinois, where I grew up, was the Rock River. The east side was the white side. The high schools got integrated when I attended in the 1970s. Not the churches, though.

My friend Chuck lives in the outskirts of Atlanta. One of his neighbors is in his seventies, a retired Marine Corps officer. He told Chuck that when he was growing up, a young African American in deep Louisiana, he and his friends had to walk five miles to what was then known as the colored school. They would often be passed by a school bus of white children, who were being taken to a school a mile away. The white children would call to them from the bus; ‘stupid’ being the only word I can repeat in this column. After a while, he told Chuck, you begin to believe them. You begin to think, White kids probably are smarter. That’s probably why we have to live like this. We probably are dumber.“

Psychologists have found an intriguing way to study what it is that we really like and dislike. It’s called “affective priming.” They print a word over a bouncing dot on a computer screen. If people’s response if positive, they push any key with their left hand; if negative—any key with their right.

Too discover our deeper responses, researchers will use subliminal stimulation. They’ll print a negative word (like “fear” or “storm”) subliminally, below your level of awareness. Your intuitive system is so fast it reads those words and responds to them before you are aware. So if they show a negative word subliminally, then a positive word slowly, it takes you longer to move toward a positive response.

Sometimes they will flash a subliminal picture instead of a word. When it is a picture of an African American, “Americans of all ages, classes, and political affiliations react with a flash of negativity.” Including people who report they have no prejudice at all.

Mark Noll has written a fascinating little book called The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. He notes that all the wrangling between North and South over the Bible and slavery overlooked one huge difference between slavery in ancient Mesopotamia and slavery in 19th-century America—the latter was race-based, race-soaked, racist. The deepest evil over slavery was not just the economics of it, it was the racism of it. Even northern Christians, who were opposed to slavery as an institution, were much slower to oppose racism.

Noll also notes that, over the long haul, Christian theology always tends to have a radicalizing effect on society because of one belief: that all human beings come from the same ancestor, that all human beings bear the image of God.

I thought about these stories, and many others, when I watched the nation respond to the presidential election results. I wondered what my grandfather would have thought about a man, who could not have spent the night in his town, now governing his country. I imagined the response of the retired Louisiana colonel. Quite apart from party preference or position on any number of political issues, I cannot imagine living through that moment without hoping that there might be healing for wounds that go deep and raw.

I thought about how Paul said there was a time when the dividing wall of hostility that separated the “us” group from the “them” group came down. I thought about the Azusa Street Revival and how, for a few years, black people and white people defied all polite society and worshipped together, and then when the fervor cooled and things got respectable, they stopped and mirrored the rest of society.

I thought of how when God sits on front of his computer—whatever face gets flashed on a screen—the only button he pushes is marked love. Love. Love.

I wonder about the church …

John Ortberg is editor at large of Leadership journal and pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California.