Contending for Righteousness

Recently an account with over one million followers on Twitter/X exclaimed: “To Kill a Mockingbird was blood libel against the South, where Southerners are depicted as backwards and wanting to convict an innocent man. Maybe that’s why it’s required reading, because it’s not a particularly interesting or well written book. It’s mean[t] to instill hate.”

This online conversation may have been prompted by a tweet from Senator Rand Paul who said the U.S. destruction of a Venezuelan boat, allegedly drug runners, ignored the lesson of To Kill a Mockingbird about killing without due process.

To Kill A Mockingbird, a 1960 popular novel by Harper Lee that became a popular 1962 film starring Gregory Peck, is not “woke” or leftwing or political. It’s America’s premier Methodist novel, about a courageous lawyer who defies public opinion by defending an innocent black man in a small Alabama town in the 1930s.  That lawyer, the widower Atticus Finch, and his family are Methodist.  Harper Lee, a lifelong Methodist, based him on her own father, an active churchman in the Methodist Episcopal Church South. The fictional family’s black maid, Calpurnia, who in almost proxy mother for the Finch children, Scout and Jem, is a Methodist. So too is the accused black rapist, Tom Robinson, whose family attends Calpurnia’s African Methodist Episcopal Church. Calpurnia assures Atticus that the Robinsons are “clean-living.” 

The fictional town of Macomb, based on Harper’s lifelong hometown of Monroeville, is divided between Methodists and Baptists, who share a friendly ongoing competition. Some residents, who are viewed suspiciously, like the mysterious Radleys, don’t attend church. But much of the town’s social and civic life centers on the two major churches. As the main protagonists are Methodists, along with the author, the story is essentially a Methodist morality tale. It expresses a Methodist ethos about pursuing righteousness, however difficult, with an underlying confidence about God’s will prevailing.

To Kill a Mockingbird includes a lot of darkness about human nature. There is sin everywhere. Chiefly there is the ongoing miscarriage of justice against Robinson, whose race ensures his doom, orchestrated by Bob Ewell, who presses his daughter to falsely allege rape. But divine grace also abounds, especially in Atticus Finch, who calmly stands down a lynch mob outside the jailhouse, with unexpected help from his young daughter, Scout, the novel’s narrator. There is grace in the warmth within the Finch family and with Calpurnia. And there is surprise grace from the nonchurchgoing and nocturnal Boo Radley, who quietly watches over the Finch children and who ultimately saves the children from their assailant Bob Ewell.

There are no plaster saints or many pure villains in To Kill a Mockingbird. Most townspeople are quirky, complex, shifting back and forth, mostly well meaning but swayed by prejudice and gossip. A few Methodists flaunt their piety sanctimoniously. Most are more quietly living their faith. Atticus Finch does not seek his heroic role but stoically accepts the assignment from the town’s judge who’s confident Finch will do his duty. Finch performs magnificently during the trial, leaving little doubt about Robinson’s innocence. But racial prejudice prevails; it’s unacceptable to believe that Bob Ewell’s daughter kissed Robinson of her own volition; so instead her allegation, fabricated at her father’s insistence, must be heeded. Sin’s corruption of the human soul, and of society, can be deep, as Methodists know.

The book opens by describing the Finch Family’s Methodist ancestry:

All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess. In England, Simon was irritated by the persecution of those who called themselves Methodists at the hands of their more liberal brethren, and as Simon called himself a Methodist, he worked his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens. Mindful of John Wesley’s strictures on the use of many words in buying and selling, Simon made a pile practicing medicine, but in this pursuit he was unhappy lest he be tempted into doing what he knew was not for the glory of God, as the putting on of gold and costly apparel. So Simon, having forgotten his teacher’s dictum on the possession of human chattels, bought three slaves and with their aid established a homestead on the banks of the Alabama River some forty miles above Saint Stephens.

American Christians of the 1930s, especially in the south, were typically in their denominations across generations, so the Methodist ancestry tracing to the 1700s was common. But note the ancestor is not recalled entirely favorably or consistently pious. He was “called a Methodist,” and while concerned about Methodism’s warnings about “gold and costly apparel,” at least as an excuse to leave his profession, he violates Methodist teaching against slavery. Here in the novel’s opening words is the south’s poisonous tragedy. Christian people buy and own slaves, defying their conscience and their faith, ensuring generations of repression and calamity, including the frequent lynching of black men. It’s the story of nearly all Christian people in every time and culture who override Christian morality foolishly to seek their superficial self-interests and self-gratification.

The Baptists in the south were no less guilty than the Methodists for the sin of slavery and all its consequences. But they share their friendly rivalry with the Methodists, as captured in the novel’s one scene:

Jem underlined it when he asked Atticus if he was going out for the Methodists and Atticus said he’d break his neck if he did, he was just too old for that sort of thing. The Methodists were trying to pay off their church mortgage, and had challenged the Baptists to a game of touch football. Everybody in town’s father was playing, it seemed, except Atticus. Jem said he didn’t even want to go, but he was unable to resist football in any form, and he stood gloomily on the sidelines with Atticus and me watching Cecil Jacobs’s father make touchdowns for the Baptists.

Methodist and Baptist morality in small town America, especially the South, meant at least public abstinence from alcohol, as the novel’s one scene humorously portrays:

Mrs. Grace Merriweather sat on my left, and I felt it would be polite to talk to her. Mr. Merriweather, a faithful Methodist under duress, apparently saw nothing personal in singing, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me…” It was the general opinion of Maycomb, however, that Mrs. Merriweather had sobered him up and made a reasonably useful citizen of him. For certainly Mrs. Merriweather was the most devout lady in Maycomb.

Devout Mrs. Merriweather has a special heart for the pagan “poor Mrunas” in Africa, for whose benefit she and the church support a missionary:

Mrs. Merriweather’s large brown eyes always filled with tears when she considered the oppressed. “Living in that jungle with nobody but J. Grimes Everett,” she said. “Not a white person’ll go near ‘em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.” Mrs. Merriweather played her voice like an organ; every word she said received its full measure: “The poverty… the darkness… the immorality—nobody but J. Grimes Everett knows. You know, when the church gave me that trip to the camp grounds J. Grimes Everett said to me—” “Was he there, ma’am? I thought—” “Home on leave. J. Grimes Everett said to me, he said, ‘Mrs. Merriweather, you have no conception, no con cep tion of what we are fighting over there.’ That’s what he said to me.” “Yes ma’am.” “I said to him, ‘Mr. Everett,’ I said, ‘the ladies of the Maycomb Alabama Methodist Episcopal Church South are behind you one hundred percent.’ That’s what I said to him. And you know, right then and there I made a pledge in my heart. I said to myself, when I go home I’m going to give a course on the Mrunas and bring J. Grimes Everett’s message to Maycomb and that’s just what I’m doing.”

The Finches of course attend the white Methodist church. But one Sunday Calpurnia takes the children to her Methodist church, saying:

You’re gonna go to First Purchase with smiles on your faces.” First Purchase African M.E. Church was in the Quarters outside the southern town limits, across the old sawmill tracks. It was an ancient paint-peeled frame building, the only church in Maycomb with a steeple and bell, called First Purchase because it was paid for from the first earnings of freed slaves. Negroes worshiped in it on Sundays and white men gambled in it on weekdays. The churchyard was brick-hard clay, as was the cemetery by it. 

One black church woman objects to the white children but the minister and most of the congregation are welcoming.

Famously in the movie, the black minister presides in the courtroom balcony with other blacks, where they are segregated from the whites below. When Atticus Finch leaves the courtroom at the end, they silently stand to honor him. Earlier, when Scout had asked her father why he was so widely criticized in town, he responded with a sigh:

I’m simply defending a Negro—his name’s Tom Robinson. He lives in that little settlement beyond the town dump. He’s a member of Calpurnia’s church, and Cal knows his family well. She says they’re clean-living folks. Scout, you aren’t old enough to understand some things yet, but there’s been some high talk around town to the effect that I shouldn’t do much about defending this man.

Scout presses for more:

“If you shouldn’t be defendin’ him, then why are you doin’ it?” “For a number of reasons,” said Atticus. “The main one is, if I didn’t I couldn’t hold up my head in town, I couldn’t represent this county in the legislature, I couldn’t even tell you or Jem not to do something again.” “You mean if you didn’t defend that man, Jem and me wouldn’t have to mind you any more. “That’s about right.” “Why?” “Because I could never ask you to mind me again. Scout, simply by the nature of the work, every lawyer gets at least one case in his lifetime that affects him personally. This one’s mine, I guess. You might hear some ugly talk about it at school, but do one thing for me if you will: you just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don’t you let ‘em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change… it’s a good one, even if it does resist learning.”  “Atticus, are we going to win it?” “No, honey.” “Then why—” “Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,” Atticus said.

Steadfastly contend for righteousness against all odds. It’s a timeless message, for Methodists and everybody else.