“Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. This is also why you should pay taxes.…”
The epistle could be used to defend anything. Barry McCarty’s interpretation, which appeared to turn things inside out [“Governments are necessary in order to establish order and justice”], was the interpretation of a believer. Though that injunction about taxes seemed to go against some of his Jesse-crat political beliefs. The whole of that chapter, in fact, could be said to be contrary to his ideas about government. But I did my reading later. I couldn’t at the time raise the points with Barry McCarty.)
He said, continuing his thoughts about the 13th chapter of Romans, “That teaching suggests that the first function of government is to establish order, to punish the lawbreaker.” He went on: “But nowhere in the Bible are such things as charity enjoined as duties of governments. They are definitely enjoined as the duties of individuals, but never of government. So I have a personal obligation to feed and house and clothe the poor.”
“You?”
“Yes. The poor who it is in my power to help. There is another biblical belief that shapes my passion for strict constitutional government. The Bible teaches that we are fallen creatures, that men are by nature sinful. The way that constitutional government provides a remedy for that is that the collective power of men is checked and balanced. I believe that the basic difference between the liberals and the conservatives is that the liberals believe in the perfectibility of men, and conservatives do not.
“Conservatives believe that human beings are fallen creatures whose collective power must be checked and balanced. Look at social spending in this country. Their belief—the liberals’ belief—is that, if you give the right people enough money, they will eliminate poverty. I don’t think that will ever happen. What will happen is that those people who have all the power and money become king, and because they are human, in some way sinful creatures, they will find a way to abuse that money and power.
“I question the very morality of the federal welfare system. If you were hungry, and I take you home and feed you, that is benevolence, because I have chosen to show charity towards you. But when the federal government legally plunders me through taxation in order to give to you, I consider that immoral.”
He had so far not been interested in answering personal questions. He hadn’t given a personal twist to any of his ideas. So I hadn’t been granted any human understanding of his political drive. I tried again now. I knew that he had not been born in North Carolina, but had come there from Atlanta. I asked about his background.
He didn’t reply directly. He said he had got an up-to-date biographical sketch in his word processor. And, saying with a smile and a shake of the head how strange it was for someone like him to be using a word processor, he sat before the instrument, pressed various keys, and after a while presented me with a printed text. It was formal, an account of his education and his professional experience, his political life, and his career as a Church of Christ minister.
I put the sheet with the other papers he had given, and asked what his father did.
“My father was a fireman. He served in the U.S. Navy in World War II, and for the first eleven years of my life he worked as a firefighter in East Point, Georgia—a suburb of Atlanta. Then, until 1981, the year of his death, he was a safety engineer for an insurance company.
“I was two weeks old the first time I was in church. I grew up in the Church of Christ. I happen to come from the branch of the church that uses music in its worship. Our people don’t have the Calvinistic belief that you have to see some sort of miraculous sign to become a Christian. Our approach is more rational.”
“Did you have the weekend camps?”
“I attended Christian-service camps as a boy.”
“Someone told me that he found those camps boring.”
“Some of my fondest memories and friendships of childhood come from my experiences in Christian camps.”
He came to Roanoke Bible College from Atlanta when he was eighteen. He was the first person in the history of his family to have a college education; and the course of study he had then started on was like an extension of his family faith. He was proud of his doctor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh. When I asked about the subjects he had taken for that degree—rhetoric and argumentation—he said, “I found I was attracted to the basic skills of thinking and speaking. These are two keys to just about any field of endeavor in life.”
I told him about what I had seen of the Church of Christ in Nashville. Had he had doubts, like two of the people I had met?
“I have found that whenever I have questioned my faith I have always been able to find that evidence confirmed rather than denied my beliefs. I don’t think I ever came to a place where I had any crisis. It has been a lifelong growing process. As I learned more and more about science I found the world to be a more and more complex and intricate phenomenon, which confirms my faith.”
Did he feel that the church made too many demands on people?
“We live in a secular society, and a real commitment to Christianity becomes harder and harder. However, I don’t think that that observation can be used to determine whether Christianity is true.”
I asked about the strength of the Church of Christ in the region.
“The movement began in the early nineteenth century, through the efforts of a Scottish Presbyterian preacher, Alexander Campbell. Campbell said he wanted to be just a Christian. Campbell lived in West Virginia. From there the movement moved west and south.” So it was fairly new in eastern North Carolina. The Church of Christ college had been founded in Elizabeth City in 1948. “To provide ministers and Christian leaders on the Eastern seaboard.”
It was an impressive set of buildings, occupying two residential blocks in what Barry McCarty said was the nicest part of the town. Most of the buildings were turn-of-the-century frame houses. The college had also bought eighteen acres across the road, beside the Pasquotank River. That was an Indian word, Barry McCarty said, meaning “where the current divides.” The way he said that made me feel that he had some romantic feeling for the Indian past on this grand coast. But that wasn’t so; he had got that fact about Pasquotank from The North Carolina Manual. Two dormitories, in brick, had recently been put up on the Pasquotank land. There were now 160 students at the college. In five years the college was hoping to have two hundred.
All his professional life had been spent with religion and related matters, and he hadn’t found it dull.
“I find the Christian life an adventure. To know God and to share in making him known to others is the greatest quest upon which any human could set himself. I would say that my views are stricter than most. I will admit that.”
I asked him to describe the people of the region.
“Most of the people here are very traditional and very conservative. They would be of basic European stock.”
“Scottish, mainly? That was what I was told.”
“Not Scottish. Most people can’t remember that far back. They are very American. Southern. One of the phrases you might hear, or see on a bumper sticker, is, ‘American by birth, Southern by the grace of God.’ The people of this region are proud to be Americans and Southerners. They are small farmers, many of them with one or two
hundred acres. Some of them are fishermen. Some work in the tourist trade. There isn’t a lot of heavy industry. People are more tied to the land here than in Raleigh or Charlotte. I like the small-town atmosphere. The suburb where I grew up had very much of a small-town flavor, where you knew your neighbors and they knew you.”
“What do you feel is the difference between people here and people in towns?”
“I probably qualify for membership in the yuppie society, as someone with a doctor-of-philosophy degree from a major American university. But I have a respect for the old values of Southern culture. Earning money is not the most important thing in my life. The people here have a devotion to principle over a love of profit. The basic difference from the towns is materialism. People in the towns are more devoted to things than ideas. The people here admire a statesman, a man of principle.”
“But they like people to look after their economic interests?”
“Helms is interested in the right of the individual back home to earn a living for himself. The small farmer, the small entrepreneur.”
But how could the small farms last? Tobacco was on the way out.
He agreed. He didn’t himself like the idea of the tobacco subsidy, and he thought that most of the farmers accepted that tobacco was on the way out. “I know many people here in North Carolina who do not earn their sole livelihood through farming. You will find people who will be farmers and carpenters, farmers and mechanics, or farmers and other things. Or they will farm and log. I do not own a wood stove now. Before, I would buy firewood from a man who farmed in the summer and logged in the winter. The average person in eastern North Carolina—the colloquial phrase would be ‘down east’—is not wealthy. They are working-class people.”
And the future for them?
“I’m not in a position to predict the future of the small farm. But I would make two observations. One would be that simple, decent people have been working and making ends meet for centuries on this continent, here in the Americas. I see most of the folk of eastern North Carolina as being sons of pioneers. The people who carved this country out of the wilderness did so by simple, honest labor, and there wasn’t a gigantic federal system to take care of everybody—the people on Roanoke Island and later at Jamestown.
“The second observation is that these simple, honest people who are laboring down here are not so far behind the times as they appear. They watch the same TV programs as people in Chicago or New York or Atlanta. And many of them send their children to school in Chapel Hill or Vanderbilt or Raleigh. What I’m saying is that the conservatism and values that are held are held by choice, and not through ignorance of what the modern world has to offer. They are timeless values, enduring values.
“And here in eastern North Carolina, when you talk of the future, you talk of something that only God knows for sure. And these folks know God pretty well.”
“How would you describe your opponents?”
“People who believe that government has all the solutions.”
“And locally?”
“It’s hard to find any flaming liberals down here.”
“Describe the region.”
“It is one of the places where old Southern values still reign. It is a beautiful land, green, with much water. It is a place where people live close to the land, even those who don’t live on farms. And you have many people who enjoy the water. There’s fishing, hunting. The land is good here.”
The beauty of the land, the outdoor life—I had heard it before, from many kinds of people.
Barry McCarty himself was a hunter. He hunted duck; he was looking forward to the opening of the dove-hunting season. And without any prompting from me, he spoke of his resentment of the federal regulations about guns. He possessed the conservative ideology complete, even down to this, its most puzzling aspect: the right to have guns.
He said, “For the first time since talking to you, I find myself almost concerned how I present this attitude about guns.” I liked that “almost concerned”: it might have come from his training in speech or rhetoric. He went on: “Often Southerners are portrayed as gun-toting rednecks, racist, and it is said that a Southerner who really cares about his right to own a gun is really a member of the Ku Klux Klan. This connects with our discussion earlier about the Bill of Rights. Under Article 2 the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed. I think you will find among Southerners that since they are jealous of all their constitutional rights they are also jealous of their right to keep and bear arms.
“I will live at peace with my neighbors. But I will not hesitate to protect myself and my wife and family against an intruder. A gun in such circumstances is the civilized man’s last line of defense against an uncivilized man.”
I said I had been told in Mississippi that the hunting grounds of the common man were shrinking. Was the same thing happening here?
“Not yet. The world constantly changes. We have to adapt. You have to be ready to defend your way of life. There are some values that never change.”
“But the physical world changes.”
“Yes. I used to write with a pen. Now I use a word processor and computer.”
How was he defending his way of life?
He was going to pay for his children’s education at a private Christian academy. It was going to cost S100 per boy a month. It was going to be expensive for three boys. “But we’ll do it.” And this led to his other point. “Excessive taxation is a threat to my way of life.”
I was moved by his passion and directness, and I read out to him what Jim Abrahamson of the Chapel Hill Bible Church had said to me about the Religious Right. They were people, he had said, who were easy to ridicule; but they represented a necessary common sense.
Barry McCarty’s eyes softened behind his glasses. He was surprised and pleased by what I had read out; he hadn’t been expecting this degree of understanding. He became philosophical.
“Up until the seventeenth century Western civilization basically was Christian. Within that world view the universe and everything in it, including human beings, had meaning and purpose. In the modern view the world is just one damned thing after another. A horrible world view. Ultimately a world view human beings cannot live with. It cannot last. It will destroy itself.
“When you look at the paintings of the Dutch masters and other artists whose work was informed by the Reformation in Northern Europe, the world view is of a world God made and God is in control of. A world in which individual people possessed freedom and dignity because they had been made in the image of God. That’s why Rembrandt would bother to paint a picture of a woman cleaning a fish or slicing a loaf of bread. Because that woman had infinite value to God—she was made in the image of God.”
Easy to ridicule, conservatives like himself? But he had been to a major university, he said; he had studied philosophy; he knew the modern world. People knew that about him.
He said, “That is why they feel that that man, the man who has looked at the new world and dismissed it, is to be feared.”
The eyes that a minute before had been soft grew hard. And I felt—quite suddenly—that within him, within the correctness of dress and manner, was a fire.
When we had talked on the telephone to arrange our meeting, I had asked him to think of some educative or illuminating thing he might show me in Elizabeth City. He hadn’t forgotten. At the end of our meeting he took me to see the Confederate Memorial in the Court Square. It had been put up in 1911 by the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy, a chapter that, he said, perhaps no longer existed. He showed the memorial: the pillar (suggesting mass manufacture), the soldier at the top. He said nothing more about it; he said nothing while I looked. And then it was time to drive him back to the Bible College.
I asked him about the blacks of Elizabeth City. He spoke with puzzlement and sorrow about them. Most of them had the Southern work ethic, he said; most of them, in their values and day-to-day life, were conservatives. But they did
n’t vote conservative; they voted for black candidates.
It had been a long day, and it was a long drive back. About fifty miles from Elizabeth City, on the narrow, crowded road, there was a nasty-looking accident: one car smashed in, another overturned, people running to the spot, and then the sound of an approaching ambulance.
My thoughts remained there for a while. And it was only a day or so later that I saw that Barry McCarty had opened our meeting by showing me the Stars and Bars in his office; and had closed it by showing me the Confederate Memorial.
The past transformed, lifted above the actual history, and given an almost religious symbolism: political faith and religious faith running into one. I had been told that the conservatives of North Carolina spoke in code. The code could sometimes be transparent: “Tobacco Is a Way of Life” being the small farmer’s plea for government money. But in this flat land of small fields and small ruins there were also certain emotions that were too deep for words.
JIM APPLEWHITE took me one day to see his family farm in Wilson County, in what he said was the heart of the eastern-North Carolina tobacco country. We went first to Wilson, the main town of the county. It was ten miles from the farm—I knew that distance from the poems and from Jim’s talk.
Wilson was a more substantial town than I had expected. The residential part through which we drove looked rich and settled, with big houses set back in wooded gardens. In the old days money in Wilson came principally from the tobacco market. On the other, industrial side of the town (we drove through that side on the way back in the afternoon) there were the tobacco warehouses.
We stopped at a supermarket to buy nuts and fruit for lunch. Ahead of me in the checkout lane was a drunken young black man with cans of beer. His speech, already Southern-slow, was made slower by drink, and he seemed to be making private sounds rather than words. The cashier, a white girl, was correct, appearing to notice nothing, speaking the supermarket’s formula of thanks after she had taken money and given change. The forecourt, when we went out to it, looked less attractive: supermarket carts, litter, some lounging blacks. It wasn’t a place to have a car snack in.