Theology Today - Vol 39, No. 2 - July 1982 - ARTICLE

267 - Excess of Virtue

Excess of Virtue
By Lowry Bowman

"Do not aspire to be a judge, unless you have the strength to put an end to injustice." --Ecclesiasticus 6:6

THE EMERGENCE of the Christian Right, the national tumult over abortion, creationism versus evolution, the Coalition for Better Television, library censorship, prayer in public schools- all such matters-can be seen in microcosm by looking at what happened in a small, rural community in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. They led to political chaos with neighbor against neighbor, clergy against clergy, and to fist-fights over such secular matters as land use planning. And payment of real estate taxes, too. It began over a profound morality play.

At first glance, no more unlikely place for such a battle could be found. Abingdon, Virginia, a town of 4,300 mostly pious souls, is the county seat of Washington County, and the proud boast is that this was the first county to be named for the Father of our Country. Farming country, where rich limestone valleys between two imposing mountain ranges support lush grass for grazing and the growth of burley tobacco.

Anglicans who ruled the Virginia Colony before the American Revolution did not tolerate Baptists, Lutherans, or other deviants, but they extended a cautious welcome to Ulster Presbyterians who began pouring into the colonies about 1720. Headquarters of the Church of Virginia (never the "Church of England in Virginia") at Williamsburg was happy to have these war-like "Scotch Presbyterians" take up land on the western frontier as a buffer against the Indians, just as the English king earlier had been happy to move them from Scotland and England to the north of Ireland as a buffer against the Catholics. (That war still is raging.) By 1770 these Presbyterians virtually had taken over what is now Washington County. They were fierce in their religious beliefs-particularly in regard to inflicting them on others. In 1773 they called as their first regular pastor the Rev. Charles Cummings, a native of Donegal, Ireland. Parson Cummings accepted eagerly. He was out of work at the time.

The calling committee quickly vowed to submit to Cummings' "instruction and reproofs, in public and in private, and submit to the

Lowry Bowman is the editor of the Washington County News, Abingdon, Virginia. For fifteen years he served with United Press International in Washington, and then moved to Abingdon to run a "peaceful country weekly newspaper," or so he thought. The local disputes, intertwining religion and morality, disrupted the otherwise peaceful community. "A country editor," he observes, "is trapped squarely in the middle of these conflicts.

268 - Excess of Virtue

discipline which Christ has appointed in his Church." They had their fingers crossed. Cummings, a determined man (his log manse still stands in Abingdon), decreed immediately that his new congregation would sing nothing but the new, free-wheeling, foot-stomping hymns of Isaac Watts, the man who wrote "Joy to the world." The congregation was equally determined that it would sing nothing but the solemn, slow, literal translations of the Psalms that were the work of Francis Rous in the old Scottish Psalter of 1650. So, the first book battle.

It was a big split, and it led ultimately to the construction of two Presbyterian churches, one of which now is known as Barter Theater, the State Theater of Virginia. A secular temple. The training ground for such Hollywood notables as Gregory Peck, Ernest Borgnine, Ned Beatty, and others. The rift was not healed until 1857.

James Hilton, the British-born author of such classics as Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Lost Horizon, and Random Harvest, lived in Abingdon. When he moved away and when he died in 1954, he left directions that he be cremated and his ashes shipped-via Parcel Post-to Abingdon. His burial marker is inscribed with his own words from Lost Horizon: "All things in moderation-even the excess of virtue itself." And another line: "He kept at heart and throughout all vicissitudes the tranquil tastes of a scholar." The postman walked down the street proclaiming to anyone who would listen: "Looka here. I got Jimmy Hilton's ashes in this cigar box." Not the place for a book battle

In the early spring of 1974, a small group of parents-fifteen in all-attended the regular monthly meeting of the Washington County School Board and demanded that it immediately remove from eleventh grade English classes the "Responding Series" of literature textbooks. The leader of the group was Bobby W. Sproles, who, at that time, operated a small grocery in the city of Bristol, Virginia, about fifteen miles west of Abingdon.

Sproles said the series contained "common curse words" such as "damn" and "hell." "Evil comes from this kind of thing," he said. "We should hold our children off from seeing these words as long as possible." The School Board was non-committal.

At the next meeting, Sproles' group was back in force. There was standing room only. The Rev. Tommy Tester, pastor of the Gospel Baptist Church, said "the demons of hell have entered the bodies of our educators." Sproles asked women and children to leave the room as he read the offensive words. Two children left. Sproles read: "By god … poor bastard …God damn the Prince of Wales … sick as a pink-assed baby in the crib."

All the offensive quotations were from Billy Budd, a modern adaptation of the Herman Melville novella by playwrights Louis O. Coxe and Robert Chapman. Melville wrote the story shortly before his death in 1891 after a long dry period of wrestling with religious and social questions. It is a profound statement. A moving story. A morality play.

269 - Excess of Virtue

As editor of the local weekly newspaper and the father of three teen-agers, I felt it necessary to investigate this complaint. I read the textbook from cover to cover and agreed fully with the editors who wrote in their preface that it was intended to "jostle your thinking." The three-act play which Coxe and Chapman had made of Billy Budd opens with a depiction of cutthroat and brutalized sailors on a British warship in 1798. The only thing that gives their lives meaning is their common hatred of the obscene Master-at-Arms, Claggart, who rules by terror. It is a realistic portrayal.

Enter the good, pure, gentle Billy Budd. His simple goodness stirs something long forgotten in the souls of the sailors. They begin to believe again in the possibility of good in this world. But Claggart sees in Billy a threat to his power. He must be destroyed. He accuses Billy of fomenting treason. Shocked and surprised, Billy swings around. His elbow strikes Claggart in the head, killing him. It is an accident. Everyone knows that. But the rules of war are strict. Billy must die for killing a superior in wartime. For the captain, it is a particularly agonizing situation.

The captain tries to explain to Billy his own inner agony. "The world we breathe is love and hatred both," he says, "but hatred must not win the victory … pray for those who must make choices." Billy understands. The crew threatens mutiny to save him from the hangman's rope, but, as he goes to his death, Billy stops them with the cry: "God bless the captain!"

Obedience unto death. The obscenities of the opening scene are forgotten, even though they were necessary to the story. We would not have the great penitential fifty-first Psalm without David's adultery and his murder of Uriah. One is necessary to the other. That, at least, is what I wrote as an editorial in the Washington County News in support of the School Board which had unanimously rejected Sproles' complaints. I also wrote that the only way to get "dirty words" out of the schools would be to padlock the restrooms.

III

Enter the Rev. Tom Williams, pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church about three miles west of Abingdon. He and Sproles led a huge crowd to a meeting of the County Board of Supervisors to demand that it cut the school budget and fire the acting school superintendent, Dr. B. G. Raines. "You hold the purse strings over the School Board," Sproles said. The Supervisors said it was strictly a School Board matter.

Sproles and Williams sought an injunction in the Circuit Court. Williams read the disputed passages to Judge Aubrey Matthews who said that while they might be offensive to some outside the context of the story, the School Board had violated no laws. He dismissed the case. Having lost in the School Board, the Board of Supervisors, and the Circuit Court, Williams vowed to "take it to the people."

For the rest of the year, monthly meetings of the School Board and the Board of Supervisors were chaotic shouting matches at which little regular business could be transacted. Dr. N. Grant Tubbs, a Mormon,

270 - Excess of Virtue

was appointed School Superintendent, and Williams immediately demanded his resignation. "Don't unpack any more of your suitcases," Williams told Tubbs at the first School Board meeting of his tenure. "They are not interested in logical discussion," Tubbs told me in a wild understatement.

Williams placed ads in the daily newspaper in Bristol calling for 1,000 "Concerned Citizens" to storm the next meeting of the School Board. About half that many showed up, enough so that the meeting had to be moved to the high school auditorium, where Williams told the crowd to the sound of many "Amens" that "the teachers are being paid to teach children how to cuss and be ungodly." It was a tense situation.

The Rev. Robert Anderson, pastor of St. John Lutheran Church, followed Williams to the microphone in a vain effort to defend the School Board. He was shouted off-stage as a representative of "those liberal Abingdon churches."

The Rev. Richard F. Taylor, then pastor (now retired) of the Sinking Spring Presbyterian Church of Abingdon, the church Parson Cummings founded in 1773 and the largest in town, tried to pour oil on the waters the following Sunday with a sermon entitled "Billy Budd and Jesus Christ." All the stories in the disputed textbook "have something of the redemptive aspect of grace," he said. He called Billy Budd "almost an etching of the cross."

I printed his sermon on the front page of the newspaper. But by this time things already were out of hand. The School Board capitulated, and when school opened in the fall of 1974, all literature instruction was suspended for the first six weeks while the Board hunted for a "blander" textbook. The county's two state legislators sponsored a resolution asking the State Department of Education to avoid textbooks containing "offensive" language. But Billy Budd was no longer the issue. It was now a question of power.

Sproles and Williams, with the help of others who felt it would be more democratic, succeeded in transferring to the elected Board of Supervisors the power of appointing School Board members, and Sproles announced he would run for the Board of Supervisors. Both accused the School Board of hiring "over-educated personnel." Williams demanded the right to search all school libraries for objectionable books. Teachers were intimidated. Tom Hall, president of the Washington County Education Association representing 600 teachers, reported anonymous death threats, public ridicule, name-calling, and late-night phone calls. "This has had an adverse effect on the teaching-learning situation," he said. "Tension has been instilled."

Sproles was elected to the Board of Supervisors by 141 votes over the one Supervisor who had sided with him in the textbook battle. (The county has seven election districts, each of which chooses its own Supervisor.) At his first meeting, the other Supervisors agreed to open

271 - Excess of Virtue

each session with prayer. Williams was first. He prayed that "wisdom from above may rest on this board." That prayer has not yet been answered.

Williams followed his prayer by demanding that the Board of Supervisors cut at least a million dollars from the school budget or he would advise his followers not to pay county taxes. And he said he was being harassed by Sheriffs deputies trailing him in hopes he would commit a traffic violation. "Young people in the schools are dropping over in the balls from drug overdoses," he said, while Sheriffs deputies "do nothing but ride around in slick, well-washed cars." A grand jury investigated this complaint and found "no factual basis for such allegation."

Having won the textbook issue, Williams and Sproles campaigned against passage of a Comprehensive Land Use Plan for the county. A public hearing on the plan turned into a near-riot in which members of the County Planning Commission were hooted off-stage. Williams called the plan the work of "communists" and "middle-class intellectuals." One offended Supervisor chased Sproles off the stage and had to be forcibly restrained from following him into the largely hostile crowd. (The land use plan was passed a year later under pressure from farm groups to protect them from rapidly escalating land prices.)

Sproles and Williams finally came to power in the elections of 1979 after which Sproles found himself with a four-vote majority on the seven-member Board of Supervisors. He was elected chairman.

Throughout 1979 both men had pressured the School Board without success to adopt "Scientific Creationist" textbooks selected by Williams for high school biology classes. Once again they vowed to take this battle "to the people." "None of my ancestors ever hung by their tails in a tree," Williams said.

After resisting for more than a year, the School Board again gave in. It adopted a one-paragraph statement worked out by Sproles, Williams, and two School Board officials saying that when the "origins of life" are mentioned in the classroom, teachers must point out that there are religious points of view that form the basis for special creation theories. The statement mentions specifically Genesis 1:1 and 1:27 but omits the final phrase "male and female created he them."

That summer the Board of Supervisors cut the school budget by $1.2 million. The County Administrator reported that many people simply were not paying their taxes.

In March, 1980, three businessmen-two convenience store owners and one the owner of Abingdon's only book store-were arrested on charges of selling pornographic materials, largely such magazines as Playboy, Dude, Hustler, and the like. The Sheriff swore under oath that Williams originated the complaint, although Williams denies it. It ended in a mistrial when the jury could not agree. During the trial,

272 - Excess of Virtue

however, the defense introduced as evidence several popular novels from the county's public library-novels by Sidney Sheldon, Phillip Roth, and others. It argued that the magazines in question were no more pornographic than these novels in popular demand and therefore could not have offended the public morality.

Williams, who sat through the trial, went immediately to the library and demanded from Librarian Kathy Russell White a list of all those who had checked these books out of the library. She refused. The library's Board of Trustees (all appointed by the Board of Supervisors) supported the librarian and condemned any attempt at censorship of library shelves.

The library has a standard procedure to be followed when anyone dislikes its selection of books. There is a complaint form to be filled out and presented to the Board of Trustees. Williams refused the form and went this time directly and immediately "to the people." Sproles, citing "egg-headed liberals," vowed to cut off money for the library unless the books were removed.

But this time there was immediate reaction. Two opposition groups emerged immediately: the "Friends of the Library" organized under the leadership of Jack Kestner, a retired newspaperman and author of several books for children, and the "League of County Voters" organized under the chairmanship of Dr. G. A. Larsen, son of a Lutheran missionary.

Larsen called for reason instead of "paranoia." He said of Williams and Sproles: "Despite their proclaimed religiosity they have proven themselves to be false prophets. The people now in power have accomplished a great deal by using methods that I find reprehensible."

I tried the reasonable approach in a newspaper editorial by paraphrasing Martin Luther: "No matter how ethical or 'moral' we may be," I wrote, "that does not necessarily make us acceptable to God. We become acceptable only when we accept God's acceptance of us. The forced obedience of a slave is not the fulfillment of Christian ethics." And I quoted from Paul Tillich's History of Christian Thought: "It is most unfortunate that Protestantism is always tempted to revert to the opposite, to make the religious dimension dependent on morality. Wherever this is done, we are outside the realm of true Protestantism. But fine theological arguments are feeble weapons in a street battle. Sproles has threatened to run me out of business.

The public library case has attracted national attention. All three major television networks, city newspapers, and many free-lance writers have descended on a bewildered little Abingdon. Hollywood actor Ned Beatty, who started in Abingdon's Barter Theater and sang in the choir at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, came back to investigate the possibility of making a documentary movie on the subject. Williams has

273 - Excess of Virtue

appeared on national TV talk shows - one a debate with author Sidney Sheldon that produced much beat and little light.

The tumult played a major role in Abingdon's municipal elections of May 4, 1982. Spokesmen for three incumbent town council members charged that spokesmen for three challengers were allied with Sproles and Williams. That charge resulted in a $1.7 million libel suit-yet to be tried.

It apparently helped re-elect the three incumbents who promptly began studying a plan to annex the suburbs surrounding Abingdon to raise the town's population above 5,000. Under Virginia law, a town with more than 5,000 population may declare itself a city and literally secede from the county in which it is located, taking its tax base with it. If successful, the move would cost the county government much of its tax revenue.

With a solid majority on the Board of Supervisors, Sproles hit back by hitting the library, the school board, and the sheriffs department where it hurts the most-in the pocketbook. He cut the school budget by $900,000 to eliminate a promised ten per cent pay raise for teachers. He cut the sheriffs budget by $109,000, and the sheriff said he may be forced to sue the county. (Earlier, Sproles called for creation of a "county police force" under control of the Board of Supervisors.)

Sproles and his majority cut the library's 1982-83 fiscal budget $16,000 below its 1981-82 funding level. State Library officials said this will automatically cost the library $50,000 in state aid, all of which is earmarked for purchase of books and similar library materials. The immediate effect of the budget cut is that the library has had to curtail its hours of operation drastically.

Billy Budd has been forgotten along with Hilton's admonition against "the excess of virtue itself."

"Obscenity," as the late Heywood Broun observed, "is such a tiny kingdom that a single tour covers it completely." It should, of course, but the tourists keep returning.