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Charlotte’s Holy Wars: Religion in a New South City
- Vanderbilt University Press
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93 Starting late in the 1970s, when I became religion writer at the Charlotte Observer, my editors and I agreed from the start that we would cover not only the religious personalities—Charlotte native Billy Graham, for example—and the more extreme voices shouting from the fringe but the ordinary people and churches who were the religious backbone of the com munity. After leaving the Observer some years later, I was still intrigued by the currents of religious life in the South, and the city of Charlotte, where I was living, seemed to be a revealing laboratory. In this story, written in 2005, I set out to examine the religious debate in a New South city, some of it healthy, some of it disturbing, but all of it important in trying to understand how a modern community struggles with its values. Charlotte’s Holy Wars: Religion in a New South City It was the middle of spring in 2005, a time when the Mecklenburg County Commission was considering an insurance plan for unmarried couples, gay or straight, who worked for local government. Dan Burrell, the senior minister at Northside Baptist Church—a man who had emerged in recent years as one of Charlotte’s leading fundamentalists—issued a mass e-mail denouncing the plan and calling on his fellow conservatives to join him. By his own account, Burrell was not a throwback, not a twentyfirst -century embodiment of the stereotype of southern fundamentalists . Beneath the warm wooden dome of Northside Baptist, he preaches a sunnier gospel on Sundays than Jack Hudson, his fire-and-brimstone predecessor, did. He rejects, for example, the old hang-ups of race that once tainted the message from many southern pulpits. He proclaims instead that “the Scriptures scream racial unity” and says it’s dangerous when the Christian faith is used to justify a moral wrong. Burrell sees his ministry as part of a rich and noble tradition going back to the abolitionists of the nineteenth century, but he also believes that the stakes in the moral battle are high. Whether the issue is race, right to life, or the sanctity of marriage between a man 94 With Music and Justice for All and a woman, Burrell says the time has come to take a stand—to defend with no hesitation or shame the “eternal and absolute authority” of the Bible. In recent months, Burrell has begun meeting regularly with other conservative ministers in the city, trying to put together a coalition that will speak out strongly on a whole host of issues. He has found an ally in County Commissioner Bill James, arguably the most conservative politician in the city, and a man whose career on the public stage has been driven by his strong fundamentalist faith. James believes the fundamentalists are winning. He believes, in fact, that at this moment in the moral history of the city, there are no voices of consequence to oppose them. James understands that for the last half century, churches have played a major role in the politics of Charlotte, at least in the broadest sense of that term. Led and prodded by several generations of outspoken ministers, they have tried to put a stamp on the public debate. Some of those ministers have been regarded as liberal, others conservative; some have been black, others white, but they have battled with a kind of genteel ferocity in an effort to assume the moral high ground. Today, says James, he is satisfied about the state of that struggle. “I don’t know any liberal preachers of note anymore,” he declared in the spring of 2004. “The left doesn’t seem to have any activist ministers . . . . Liberals in Charlotte have given up on busing, effectively given up on affirmative action, and won’t even bring up gay rights. I don’t know if there are any true liberals in Charlotte.” But James conceded that if that is true, it represents a seismic shift in the city. There once was a time when liberal voices thundered from some of the most prominent pulpits in town. Beginning at Myers Park Baptist Church back in the 1950s and 1960s, a pipesmoking intellectual named Carlyle Marney spoke out strongly on the issue of civil rights. Those were the days when the city of Charlotte was searching for its conscience, when blacks were sitting in at local restaurants or demanding the total integration of the schools. The eloquent liberals like Marney and Warner Hall of...