I was born into the Methodist Church, and by age six was asking questions to which the available answers weren’t then, and 74 years later still aren’t, wholly persuasive. My father had asked the same questions and had resolved them to his satisfaction, centering his life on good works and the church. Though he never gave up hope for my seeing the light, he accepted me for what he once had been, and inevitably I became, an inquiring newspaperman.
From four decades as a reporter in Georgia, Florida, Virginia and finally — for most of my working life — Washington, I concluded that nobody has all the answers, about God or anything else; that there is another side on most every issue; and that nobody I’ve known in public office, from station house to White House, was either all good or all bad. Even Richard Nixon may have been a fond father.
The Christian Coalition wasn’t around in my day, but I wouldn’t have liked (and don’t now) its pious certainty and eagerness to impose it on others. But for United Press International at the House of Representatives, I covered fairly, and so fully some of my news competitors yowled, earlier evangelicals’ attempts to write school prayer into the Constitution. Nobody could agree then, or now, on acceptable language.
One key lawmaker in this running fight (as well as in passage of landmark civil rights legislation on which I also reported) joked to me once that self-righteous bluster on the prayer issue made him say “Thank God I’m an atheist.” He wasn’t, of course. He was a believer. But he believed even more firmly in the constitutional right to accept God or not. I did, too, and still do.
As an early-day battler against racial and economic injustice, my dad was a Christian ifl ever knew one, sometimes to what I viewed as excess. Years ahead of the lung cancer scare he surrendered his farm’s tobacco allotment. And at age 90, when advised by his doctor to sip a little wine before dinner, he refused lest he “fall into the habit” he had seen devastating others.
At 80 I regret not having matched, or even approached, my father’s courage, dedication and lifetime accomplishment. But to the extent that the free, fair flow of information contributes to solution of racial, social and other temporal problems, maybe I can plead guilty to having done at least some of God’s work.
Besides that, hey! Hasn’t it all been fun?