Growing up in a Southern Baptist congregation in rural North Carolina the 1980s and ’90s, I was captivated by the drama of the biblical story and animated by a personal relationship with Jesus. I wanted to do all I could to advance God’s kingdom, and for reasons I didn’t entirely understand at the time, I thought that meant becoming a Republican president of the United States.
When I was 17, I went to Washington, D.C., to serve as a page for South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, and there amid the hustle and bustle of Capitol Hill, I began to feel a deep tension between what the Religious Right was doing in Jesus’ name and the Bible verses I’d memorized in Sunday school. My political theology had led me to an impasse, but I didn’t know any other way to follow Jesus in public.
Back home in North Carolina, I tried to explain all of this to my pastor. He listened carefully, then asked, “Have you ever heard of Tony Campolo?” I had not. A few weeks later, I was sitting in the chapel at Wake Forrest University to hear Tony preach for the first time. There I received a message that would shape the rest of my life.
Tony Campolo died earlier this week in Philadelphia, Penn., where he lived his whole life. He was 89 years old. If memory serves and my math is correct, Tony was 62 on that fall evening in 1997 when I heard him deliver a message that he preached thousands of times across the U.S. Jesus’ mission was to bring the kingdom of God here on earth, Tony explained, and a personal relationship with this Jesus necessarily entails joining God’s movement for justice in this world. This wasn’t simply a truth Tony wanted people to know; it was a visceral reality that he wanted you to feel. I felt it that night, and I decided I would attend Eastern University, where Tony taught for over 50 years, to figure out what it meant for this vision of Jesus and justice to direct my life.
Looking back now, a quarter century later, I see how Tony’s life shaped my own. When the political operatives of the New Right partnered with Jerry Falwell and other Southern Baptists to use Christian faith to rally a reactionary political movement in the 1970s, Tony understood what was happening. His father had moved his Italian family to the Black Baptist church in his West Philadelphia neighborhood when the church they’d been part of left during white flight. As a young pastor in the Philadelphia suburbs, Tony had told his congregation he could not continue as their pastor when they refused to welcome Black members. His academic study of sociology helped him name the cultural forces at work, but Tony was always an evangelist, inviting people into God’s good way.
The political movement that recruited young people like me in the 1980s and ’90s substituted “traditional values” for explicit racism, but Tony was a watchman on the wall. He raised a prophetic warning that this was not only dangerous for our common life, it was detrimental to the church. Tony debated Jerry Falwell on television and churned out books to give people in the pews an alternative perspective on the cultural wedge issues that the organizations of the Religious Right constantly pushed. David Black, who was president at Eastern University when I was a student there, used to tell the story of how he called Tony’s office one day and got his secretary, who told David that Tony couldn’t talk because he was finishing a book. “That’s OK, I’ll wait,” David deadpanned. Tony understood the forces he was up against. He had no time to waste.
Since before I was born, Tony had poured himself out to make sure that a kid like me could know the faith of Baptist dissidents in colonial New England, of the Black and white abolitionists who challenged slaveholder religion, of Charles Finney and the Second Great Awakening that called people to give their lives to Jesus and to the movement for justice. About the time I heard him at Wait Chapel, he was speaking 500 times a year. He knew communities like mine were inundated by a diseased theological imagination and a political movement that had hijacked Christian faith. But Tony also knew that the movement Jesus started was even stronger. Over the past two decades, he shared what he’d learned from a life of public ministry with an ever-expanding network of “Red Letter Christians,” encouraging us to partner with one another in building up a Jesus’ movement that offers a viable alternative to culturally captive forms of Christian life. It was a gift to gather with him over the years, think practically about the challenges before us, sing the old gospel hymns he loved, and pray for one another in the Spirit.
About six weeks ago, I got to visit Tony for what turned out to be our last conversation in this life. We hadn’t had a chance to visit in-person since our mutual friend and fellow Red Letter Christian, Rev. William Barber II, and I started the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy, along with other colleagues at Yale Divinity School. I told Tony about what we’ve been doing over the past two years to gather sources from the many traditions that have held Jesus and justice together and introduce students to the moral fusion movements that have pushed the US toward a more perfect union. As practical as ever, Tony wanted to talk about the nuts and bolts of everything. I wanted him to know that I’d never have found my way to this work if it weren’t for him.
Before I left, we prayed together. As Tony laid his hand on my shoulder, I thought back to how he’d helped me find my way when I was a confused young Chistian. As he prayed for the church’s witness in the midst of today’s Christian nationalism, I thought about my students who are so hungry to build beloved community and offer their generation a life-giving gospel. And as he said “amen,” I felt the Spirit that had been praying through Tony stirring in me. I thanked God for sending this prophet who both cried out against injustice and called us deeper into community with Jesus.
He was a gift to me, even as he was to many. But I suspect the church in America won’t fully recognize the importance of Tony Campolo’s witness until we’ve repented of the sins he named and embraced the kingdom of God that he preached for three-quarters of a century. Because I knew Tony and the gospel he preached, I know God’s movement will outlast the kingdoms of this world and their false prophets. In whatever form it takes, that Beloved Community will remember Tony alongside Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr., and Dorothy Day, as a faithful voice during his sojourn in America’s public square.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is assistant director for partnerships at the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy. A preacher, author, and community cultivator, he is a member of the national steering committee of The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. He is the author, most recently, of White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy with William J. Barber II.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!