Faith Works 3-10-23

Faith Works 3-10-23
Jeff Gill

Three years and a hundred and always
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It was three years ago this Sunday that my father died, quite suddenly. He was 85, so you can't call it a complete surprise, but it was at the time. Coming after three hard funerals in a row at the church I served, of men I knew well and respected greatly, it was a season of hard losses, even if they were all in their eighties and nineties.

As many of you who have lost parents know, you never entirely lose that impulse of thinking "I need to tell Dad about that" or "I wonder what Mom would say." It's a frequent reaction for me even still.

In our last few conversations, we talked about history and genealogy as we often did. And I was thinking even in 2020 about 2023, and the Klan stories I was already researching and seeking to understand back then, set in Valparaiso, Indiana where he raised me, and in Licking County, Ohio, which has become my home.

But there were questions I never got around to asking, or perhaps more to the point there were follow ups that came to me later which now can't be asked in person. How did he and the committee he reported to decide on what went into the congregational history they wrote in the 1980s, and what was left out? What kind of discussion did they have about those days, which some of the other committee members would have remembered where he, born in 1934, would not?

Yet there are elements of the story that emerge even as some avenues are blocked. Just my initial retellings of some of the Klan story in the Midwest spurred my younger sister to tell me about encounters she'd had with a family down the street that we had never talked about to each other, being eight years apart. A man who had accosted me about his childhood Klan memories, wishing they were still around, had a daughter my sister worked with, and she had also talked about her dad's stories, and how they had Klan robes of her grandfather and great-grandfather still in a closet in the basement.

An older minister reached out to me once about the almost confusing focus of the Klan in those days, at least in the North, on anti-Catholic rhetoric. You look at the pictures, and even as you read the stories, for someone living after the third resurgence of the Klan during the Civil Rights era, you think about racial prejudice and hostility towards African Americans. That horrible contradiction of faith and racism translates into Klan imagery and language all too easily.

But my correspondent confirmed what a more careful reading of local articles says clearly - and my apologies for the language I'm about to quote from the public press of those days - where Klan speakers are always ranting in the 1920s about "Catholics and Jews." And the Jews they bemoan are always somewhere else, usually New York, but the vitriol about Catholics in general and priests and nuns in particular is immediate and local and specific. "That's who they wanted us to fear."

And Catholics today assure me there's still hints of that bias afoot today, but here's where the exploration of history has a hint of hope for me. Again, you have to read at length to catch just how angry and hostile the anti-Catholicism of the Klan was then. So how did we get past it?

A pessimist might say we just displaced it, turning anti-this into anti-that. It's one theory. I'd like to think, cautiously, that maybe we have learned something over the years. That's what I'm looking for, how we've learned to expand the circle, to increase our understanding of who we mean when we say "us."


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's hopeful, even if it doesn't always sound like it. Tell him where you see improvement at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.