them engaged in observed or admitted misconduct of the scale of misdemeanor or felony.

Nobody knows what percentage practiced unobserved or unadmitted misconduct. When the ghetto calls upon such law enforcement officers for protection against crime, the response is likely to be indifference or predatory hostility. In these days when law and order has potent political appeal, it is important to realize that the crackdown does not create a law-abiding society. The toughest police in the world will never give embittered people the morale that builds community. Cops and jails dont make loyal citizens out of youths who cant find jobs or decent homes. But any society, surely our society, requires some institutions to enforce laws. We need policemennot swaggering, racist policemen, but men delegated to restrain wrong and bring law violators to court. The role of enforcement is a modest but indispensable one in any legal system. The need is obvious for a higher quality of professionalism in police forces. Part of the answer is to subject police to criticism, surveillance, review of their actions and discipline for wrongs. We Live by Illusory, Fraudulent and Decadent Values

But part of the answer is also some public appreciation for the police function. It is a long time since M artin Luther told people that law enforcement is a Christian vocation. Not many young idealists consider a career in the police force. For one thing, it is not much fun: the hours are inconvenient (twothirds of the time on unpleasant shifts) and the work either boring or dangerous. For another, police are increasingly targets of ridicule and hatred, not only from criminals but from righteous citizens. A policemans lot is not a happy one, wrote W. S. Gilbert. Society today is making it more miserable. But by doing so, society increases the likelihood that only roughnecks will become police. The more society ridicules or despises police officers, the more they become clannish, hostile and impervious to criticism. We know well the effects of self-fulfilling prophecies. T hat is, if society conspires to tell the black child that he cant accomplish much, the chances are that he wont accomplish much. Self-fulfilling prophecies can also degrade police forces. If most of the society treats police as enemies, they will become enemies. R o g e r L. S h i n n

The Demonic in American Society

WILLIAM STRINGFELLOW
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. . . . For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the poivers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of death. . . . Ephesians 6:10, 12 HE U N ITED STATES suffers a moral crisis. Whether it can be settled at all, and how attempts are made to decide it, will not only dictate how the present generations and their offspring live in the years immediately ahead, but also will determine whether this nation can become a society worthy of hum an life. If one still fancies the presumption that the earth itself will survive as a habitable planet, say, into the twenty-first century, then the moral crisis in America is especially poignant for the young whatever anxiety or harassment it causes the old just because the young have more days to live, a longer time to suffer or to enjoy. It is easy, of course, to say moral crisis without meaning anything. And there is the tendency to invoke the term without elaboration so that each person renders his own connotations, and the contradictions in meanings are evaded. President Nixon mentions moral crisis and Eldridge Cleaver writes about it. Billy Graham preaches moral crisis while Benjamin Spock pleads it. J. Edgar Hoover reports moral crisis and Eugene McCarthy ponders it. Curtis LeMay is alarmed by moral crisis while J. William Fulbright bemoans it. Manifestly these voices have no consensus. They represent radically variant interpretations of the nation in crisis. This fact stands as a caution to the rest not to be diverted by mere rhetoricno matter how well rehearsedand to insist of others and of ourselves that what is really meant be specified. T o give self-heed to this advice, let it be understood that the comments in this article are made
Christianity and Crisis

WILLIAM STRINGFELLOW, an Episcopal layman, is a provocative and well-known writer and lecturer who lived and worked in Harlem for a number of years.

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theologicallynot sociologically, politically, legally or even religiously. The biblical witness has, long since, obviated all religion, especially the primitive varieties so virulent in American sanctuaries. Nor are these statements ideological; if he be faithful, a Christian is never an ideological person, as Galatians attests. Besides, ideological disputation is invariably facetious. Theological statement takes account of every other way of speaking. It affirms, under the discipline of the biblical Word, that through all experience the pervasive reality for m ans discernment and response and the pertinent reality for the destiny of nations is the militancy of the Word of God transfiguring human history imminently as well as ultimately.

The "Restoration" of "Old Values"

It is alleged, redundantly, by the incumbent leaders and managers of the established institutions by the chief priests of both church and society that the American moral crisis has been suddenly wrought in the simultaneous rejection by three factions of the norms and traditions of the majority. All at once, it seems, the values long nurtured by the hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding, churchgoing, public-spirited, predominantly white middle classes are being deprecated and opposed by rebellious youth, by Blacks in revolt and by the recalcitrant poor. The model of white American bourgeois existence is no longer taken as a rightful or honorable inheritance by multitudes of white American bourgeois youth. Much less is it esteemed as a goal worthy of emulation by any but the most servile American Blacks. And the poor no longer even suffer it as an impossible dream. Given this moral crisis, the chief priests and their acolytes offer as remedy the restoration of these supposed old values by whatever means prove efficient and appropriate to the race and social status of the particular dissident faction. Thus, for young white ingrates: draft the draft protesters, jail the draft card burners; stigmatize social nonconformity as sexual perversion; blame drugs; escalate the surveillance of teachers; infiltrate, entrap and betray student organizations; summon troops to the campuses, then withdraw scholarships, increase tuition, stop student loans and take comfort that, sooner or later, the indebtedness that accrues for middle-class whites with runaway inflation will defeat and conform practically all of them. Meanwhile, give the black brothers a choice be
September 29, 1969

tween emasculation and confinement. Let there be more jobs in the white m ans society for the white m ans nigger; make him especially conspicuous as a model or athlete on television, or even as a bank teller. Let government subsidize more white investment in black communities and christen as black capitalism the taking by whites of profits from Blacks; reward Blacks who are dutiful in such enterprises but confine the rest to ghettos; keep them separate in black slums, hold them segregated in black shantytowns. As it was shown a few years back that police dogs, electric prods and an occasional murder would destroy peaceful civil rights demonstrations, now it is known that tanks, noxious gases and an occasional murder can quash riots. And deployment of massive military retaliatory power is a generally persuasive deterrent to violent protest. Young black males have still to be closely watched, regularly harassed by frivolous raids and false arrests and other police vigilance. Indeed, some black boys become so haughty and virile that they act as if black society were not a matriarchy. This sort should be put in preventive detention. As for the poor, the most effective measure, short of sterilization, is m alnutrition; if it does not diminish their number, at least it cripples their strength. M aintain illiteracy and, if possible, spread it by curtailing preschool education; train them, if at all, only in the skills of servants. Vest political control of welfare in the hands of local authorities whose power is directly inimical to the emancipation of the poor from dependency. Instill among both poor and prosperous the idea that poverty is a sin by invoking the old Puritanical work ethic that a man is justified by tangibly productive workeven though that ethic has no biblical sanction and technology has made it obsolete. And dont admit that most affluent Americans dont engage in work condoned by that ethic. In this way, the anomaly of poverty in America can be rationalized, and the persecution of the poor will appear to be enlightened public policy. Next, do not neglect the middle classesparticularly the nouveau bourgeoisiewho esteem themselves as solid citizens but fear they are forgotten Americans while notoriety is heaped upon draft dodgers, looters, hippies and welfare mothers suspect as whores. Do this because the successful suppression of the nations dissidents requires that the white majority be kept subdued. In the wisdom of Caesar, keep the middle classes pacified spectacularlywith parades and moonshots. T o do that, incidentally, is also to minimize the 245

onus on science, which, by becoming commercial and political, is culpable for deadly pollution of the earths environment. Multiply entertainments and sports, and expand the leisure industry to further diversion from war and waste, race and injustice, and the secret enterprises of government. All the while, neutralize the university as a humanizing influence by contracting it as a satellite of the military-industrial-scientific principality. Render the university a place where middle-class adolescents learn the benefits of conformity. Employ the media to saturate time until the mind is inundated by dullness and the conscience loses discrimination and the people become habitual spectators. Keep telling them they are affluent; cultivate in them an appetite for redundant possessions; furnish them quick access to expensive credit. Thus, the middle classes will remain as enslaved and, ironically, more impoverished than the poor, and yet they will suppose they enjoy their bondage.
When Did We Have Law and Order?

These are the covert arguments of the chief priests for repressing resistance by stopping significant social change in the name of a restoration of traditional values. The trouble with them is that most of the so-called values in question are illusory, and where they are not fraudulent, they are decadent. In either instance, the attempt to restore them by coercion is symptomatic of the real moral crisis. Some of the asserted values are illusory because they lack standing in history. T heir prominence in the mind of the white majority is the result of pathetic self-deception. Consider the cry about law and order. When, in current times, did respect for law and order break down? When students occupied the office of the Columbia University president or when a governor stood at the threshold of the University of Alabama to obstruct the law of the land? W hen did adherence to the rule of law waver? When black citizens began demonstrations to register to vote or in the 84 known racial murders since 1954 (and there has not been a single conviction)? If duly constituted authority is not heeded, is that to be charged against long-haired youth or to the tireless disobedience of school boardsSouth and North aliketo the Supreme Court of the United States, a defiance lately aided for transparent political reasons by the Attorney General? If there is an increase in crime, does it also include tax evasion, liquor violations, vehicle offensesall of which abound with impunity among the white majority? Or is a monstrous statistical hoax being perpetrated by police authorities in order to stretch their license to suppress dissent by preying upon the pathological apprehensions of the white majority? All the while, another more basic query lurks: when was that pristine era in this land of law and order to which the chief priests want to return? Was
246

it back in 1619 when chattel slavery was sanctioned? Was it during Shays Rebellion? Or when some 40 slaveowners, including Thomas Jefferson, signed the (one might say their) Declaration of Independence? Or in the times of any wars? Or during the womens suffrage movement? Or when labor revolted? Or in the heyday of Klan terrorism when more than a thousand citizens were lynched or castrated in a single decade? Or when the veterans were routed from the nations capital by tanks? W hen was this splendid day of American law and order that is to be restored? The tradition and, indeed, the ethics of violence is deep, terrible and generic in this land. There will never be law and order that is stable, equitable and enduring so long as an incumbent majority importunes the constitutional ethic or manipulates the legal system to mask or excuse their violence against the humanity of others. Some old values are illusory, but others are quite real and truly decadent. The dominant American ethic of societydating back threeandahalf centuriesis white supremacy. It has been utterly pervasive from its primitive but radical form in chattel slavery to its sophisticated but virulent forms in todays apartheid. It. infects every institution, every investment, market, election, public policy, custom, issue, man, woman and child. How white

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Christianity and Crisis

men who could subscribe to the American rvolutionary cause could at the same time condone and institutionalize white supremacy stands as an incomprehensible hypocrisy that none of the ensuing generations of American whites have undone or have wanted much to undo. Finally, we have reached the daytodaywhen white supremacy has so long brutalized the humanity of black Americans that their endurance is exhausted, and insurrectioneven insurrection certain to mean annihilation for Blacksseems the only recourse consistent with manhood. Finally, we have reached the daytodaywhen white supremacy has inbred such deadly guilt in white Americans that we have become morally insane and fully capable of genocide in the name of virtue. White supremacy is one of this societys old values that must be exorcised now, as much to redeem white men as beings as to free the Blacks.
Authentic Values

Not all threatened values are illusory, not all inherited values are profoundly decadent or fraught with ultimate peril. There are some old values that are authentic. They have been eroded or neglected or subverted and desperately need restoration. Once vindicated, they could do much to arrest Americas moral decline. Due process of law is one such value, especially as it is embodied constitutionally in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Yet what do we behold? We see an accelerating assault upon the rights of persons. These include invasion of privacy, unreasonable search and seizure, self-incrimination, excessive bail and deprivation of liberty. Violations come by electronic surveillance, no-knock statutes, prosecutions undertaken to intimidate dissenters, false arrests, harassment, infiltration and entrapment by secret police, schemes for the so-called preventive detention of citizens and contingency preparations to implement those schemes, and cynical designs to neutralize the judiciary. The attack upon the most essential prerequisites of due process today goes far beyond the venomous rhetoric of McCarthyism. It is both more dangerous and more loathsome than the Congressional inquisitions of that disgraceful episode because it is chiefly mounted by the governmental authorities against whom citizens have no protection except through due process of law. The damage already done to the process in this society is very ominous, and it is very near. It has been demonstrated recently in a society where elemental due process cannot even be assured for Green Berets. How, then, can due process be expected for Black Panthers? Let those chief priests who boast nostalgia for the redemption of old values in America show some passion for due process. T hen the rest of us can have confidence that they are concerned for some values worth redeeming and not just anxious about their own vested status. The threat to due process does not exhaust the
September 29, 1969

category of authentic civil values that are being abused, subverted or abandoned today. One could elaborate other obstructions, or one could put it all quite succinctly: American society is being rapidly militarized. This is the case not only in the realm of foreign affairswhich fell to military discretion during World War II and which has essentially remained in the military province sincebut also now in the major areas of domestic society. One sees it notably in the racial crisis, the urban scene, in education and in manipulation of the economy. Some wicked geniuses, lurking in a Pentagon toilet and plotting a coup d etat, have not been accused. The American moral problem is not so simpie that it can be attributed to a fewor even many evil men in high places, any more than it can be blamed on long-haired youth, or on a handful of black revolutionaries. Besides, our men in high places in the military-technological complex are not exceptionally immoral. They are ordinarily moral. The conspicuous moral fact about our generals, scientists, industrial and political leaders is that they are the most obvious and pathetic prisoners of the emerging technological totalitarianism in American society. There is unleashed in this society a kind of relentless, self-proliferating, all-consuming institutional processinstitutional life, reallythat assaults, dispirits, defeats and destroys human life. It does this even among, and primarily among , those men in positions of institutional leadership. They are left with titles but without authority, with the condiments of power but without control over the institutions they head. They are in nominal command but bereft of dominion. These same principalities threaten, defy and enslave human beings of other status in multiple ways, but the most poignant victim of this form of totalitarianism is the so-called leader. It might be argued, to put it differently, that in the days of Nazism the moral issue was focused upon the demonic possession of men, particularly the extraordinary personification and incarnation of the demonic in Adolph Hitler. Today, the enemy of humanity and of human life in America (and in much of the rest of the world) is the ascendancy of the demonic in the great institutions of science, commerce and the military, and their satellite institutions: the university, the labor unions and, increasingly, the church.
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This is no individuals novel notion. This is the moral issue as it is described biblically, from the Fall of Adam and his loss of dominion over other creatures to the condemnation of Jesus Christ by the chief priests and the governors. Biblically, the moral issue is always the versatile and seemingly inexhaust ible aggression of the demonic, of the power of death claiming ultimate significance or sovereignty in history over men and nations. As for rebels-the dissenters and resisters and those who talk of revolution, the Blacks, the poor and some white youthbless them as the closest thing the nation has to conscience. And remember that Saint Paul admonished all to recognize in the vitality of conscience a sign of the Holy Spirit at work. And if the conscience that the rebels bespeak seems erratic or immature, be glad for even that, for you will find precious little evidence of conscience anywhere else.

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NEWS AND NOTES

Evangelism on the Razor's Edge

Meeting in Minneapolis, Sept. 6-13, the US Congress on Evangelism assembled over 4,000 delegates from 95 denominations to get with Christ and go with him. Honorary Chairman Billy Graham promised that the Congress would explore the relation of evangelism to social action. For many speakers, the Lords road was newly paved with surprising criticism of acculturated religion, the military-industrial complex and the role of the US as a world power. However, the churchinaction workshops stressed methodology and parish programs in evangelism. The Congress approach to the black revolution was along a razors edge, avoiding unfashionable disapproval while withholding meaningful endorsement. Harlem evangelist Tom Skinner rhetorically upheld the revolution while limiting reparations to funds for training black evangelists. You must remember, he said, that it is not the black soldier who is burning his draft card and running off to Canada. Three-fourths of those who attended the black caucus were white. Similarly, Dr. Leighton Ford admonished the younger generation to tell it like it is, but two of its barefoot members were ejected from the auditorium. Dr. Graham accorded them a public apology. Senator Mark Hatfield faulted expanding American militarism at home and in Viet Nam. Of the Nixon Sunday services, he said: I ts great to have this kind of focus in the W hite House. . . . I only hope that those who speak there have no reservations about the President sitting on the front row . . . . in every service I ve attended, the preacher changed his text or went out of his way to pay a compliment to Mr. Nixon. People tend to be overawed with men in public office, and if this hinders bringing a spiritual message, we shouldnt have such services. S t e p h e n C. S n y d e r 248

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Christianity and Crisis

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