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I was born in April of ’63 outside Birmingham, just days before MLK wrote his remarkable letter from the Birmingham jail, which among other things excoriated the white church for silence on matters of race.
Like many white people in the South, I was never taught the importance of that document, or that message. Not at home. Not as school. Certainly not at church.
My father was a preacher, and his father and his father and his father before. I never doubted their goodness, because I saw the way he treated people every day.
But one day a couple of years ago I found, in my own basement, the file cabinet that held every sermon my father ever gave, typed and dated and filled with notes. It launched me on a search of what he said from the pulpit in those oh-so-critical moments.
I found heroes and villains, and what author William Nicholas calls a “conspiracy of silence” in the church itself. I found what MLK said in that letter on a personal level: “There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.”
It became the basis for my book, “Shaking the Gates of Hell,” which comes out in … 50 days now – March 9. It is about silence, and responsibility. I was haunted by the question. If you have a pulpit and fail to use it for all the good you can, can you claim goodness at all?
We all have a pulpit, by the way. Some just have louder mics.
