June 3

Will Campbell and Clinton Jones

Author

David Barnhart
June 03, 2025

Today marks the death, in 2013, of Will Campbell, white Baptist minister, author, and civil rights activist who was particularly effective at speaking across racial lines in the South. He was convinced that God loved the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and that the work of liberation was also liberation for the oppressor. He refused to see the world in terms of “good guys” and “bad guys,” and argued in several court cases as an expert witness in Christian ethics against the death penalty.

Today also marks the death, in 2006, of Clinton Jones, an Episcopal priest and gay rights activist, focused on ministry with LGBTQ persons in the 60’s through the 80’s. 

Reflection:

In an interview, Will Campbell said: 

I think that Baptist heritage and history have been so badly waylaid and hijacked in recent years, and so scandalously politicized, that most who call themselves Baptist — I speak here of my own Southern Baptists — have no idea where they came from.
…

I know who Isaac Backus and John Leland were. I know that they were Baptists of the Colonies, and the First Amendment to the Constitution was their idea and that without them the notion of separation of Church and State, that notion that is being so dangerously threatened by the revisionists, would not have been. And I know who Roger Williams was. The Baptist hijackers want Church and State to be one, and they are wrong. But, regrettably, they are prevailing.

In another interview, he summed up the gospel this way: 

…That's what it's all about. You can read it there, or in Mark or Matthew, or over in Luke. But what it all means is so damn simple: We are bastards, but God loves us anyway.

Prayer: God, thank you for loving us bastards too much to leave us in our self-imposed misery. Amen.