Remembering the great American writer Reynolds Price (1933–2011), who died yesterday at the age of 77 from a heart attack. Price was an award-winning novelist, poet, and Duke University professor but (even more importantly to many of us) he was a self-described “outlaw” Christian, who modeled a passionate, serious, and searching life of faith. He fully understood the tensions between the transformative power emblematized in the life of Jesus Christ and the often stifling legacies of institutional Christianity, and he assumed responsibility for these tensions in his commitment to humility, self-examination, and justice-doing.
In Price’s own words, here is “outlaw Christianity”:
“I was born during the Great Depression, and was largely reared, in a county with a black population of some 65 percent; so another large factor in my separation from church was a growing awareness, in the 1940s and fifties, that all white American churches (wherever located) were astoundingly indifferent to racial injustice. It’s accurate, I think, to say that I heard no single word condemning or seriously questioning American, not to mention Southern, racism from the pulpit of my family churches or that of Duke University in my childhood and youth. Nor do I think that any prior member of my family, in the major Protestant churches of North Carolina, can have heard any such word from at least the end of the Civil War till, say, the mid-1960s (and the cliché continues to hold—no hours in America are more segregated than those of Sunday morning).
“As I was awakening to the willful racial self-blinding of white Christianity, I also became aware of another blindness that was—if anything—even more inexplicable (racists did at least have, as a desperate warrant for their convictions, those passages of the New Testament that urge the subservience of slaves to their masters). Then in the South, and widely elsewhere, many churches effectively ignored the plight of the poor, as they go on doing today—as I still do, socketed as I am in the deluxe surroundings and tended by warmhearted and reliable family and friends. Then, more slowly, I grew aware that the churches’ intolerance of any forms of sexuality beyond the traditional choices of marriage or chastity left me a literal outlaw.”
