That harks back, he recalls, to his Mississippi boyhood, where he was taught by his grandfathers, each in his own way—one to pray, the other to cuss. The years did not exactly diminish the divided Campbell personality that manages to be reverent and revolutionary all at once. Though an ordained Baptist preacher since he was 17, Will, now 53, disdains the title of reverend as "too presumptuous." He likes to sip his bourbon from a metal cup, to chew Beech-Nut tobacco and to talk in earthy, ideologically unpredictable terms—practices which don't always endear him to many fellow clergymen.
He was the civil rights standard-bearer for the National Council of Churches, the self-described "redneck" who stood with Martin Luther King Jr., H. Rap Brown and Andrew Young through the tumult of the Southern integration struggle. Campbell knew at first hand the terror of midnight phone threats and the sweaty stench of jailhouses. Yet, he notes with biting irony, the closest he ever came to harm was when a crowd of "liberals" nearly rioted after he pointed out that Ku Klux Klansmen were God's children, too.
His faith in universal brotherhood never wavered—just his confidence in organized religion. "All institutions are after your soul," he proclaims. So in 1962, concerned over the "social engineering" by liberals, he resigned from the National Council of Churches. Later he became a "steeple dropout," meaning he split from the church.
With Brenda, his wife of 32 years, Will owns a 35-acre valley east of Nashville. Their three children are grown but the Campbells are not alone. Will says he does "ten times more parish ministry than many of my cohorts." Mostly he is called on for "marrying, burying and counseling." Once he concluded a funeral eulogy by asking the audience to rise and applaud the life of the deceased. There was stunned silence, then a thunderous ovation.
The original guiding light in Will's life was his brother Joe. As barefoot lads on a hardscrabble cotton farm, Joe protected his sickly kid brother and, later, nurtured his intellect as Will went on an educational odyssey that took him to Louisiana College, Tulane, Wake Forest and Yale. It was Joe who gave him the book on racial injustices that made desegregation Will's holy cause. As chaplain at Ole Miss in the mid-1950s, he was one of the first white ministers in the South to encourage blacks to battle racism.
Joe had wanted to be a writer but veered into pharmacy. Tragically, he became addicted to the drugs he dispensed. One night in 1967 Joe went to his room, locked the door and died. "Doctors said he'd suffered a heart attack." Will says he "got tired of living." Joe's literary effort never went beyond the first typewritten page—so Will finished his life story. The result, Brother to a Dragonfly, was published last year (Seabury Press) and hailed by reviewers. After some hesitation about a movie adaptation, Will has given Horton Foote, the screenwriter of To Kill a Mockingbird, the go-ahead.
Today Campbell is the director of a loosely structured Committee of Southern Churchmen, whose message is a cryptic "Be reconciled." "Some people say to watch out for me, that I offer cheap grace," he acknowledges. But he insists "the truth is that the Christian faith just can't be as complicated as we've made it." In his inimitable way, Will Campbell has reduced the basics almost to a one-liner. "We're all bastards," he says, "but God loves us anyway."
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