The Death Row Preacher: Part II
Reflections After Thirty Years
From Righteous Anger to Nuanced Understanding
In Part I of “Death Row Preacher,” I told a story about a 1994 mandatory high school assembly in Mississippi. The theme was “don’t do drugs” and featured a talk by a death row inmate from Parchman Prison. This graphic, strange event has become a touchstone moment in my life. The actions of the school leaders, my classmates, and my own interpretations and reactions have profoundly influenced my understanding of faith, education, and personal courage.
After the event, I spent years—years!—telling this story with righteous indignation. I was adamant about no prayer in school, no expression of faith of any kind in any setting. My position was absolute, my conviction unwavering. There could only ever be a system where this free expression was abused, used improperly, going far beyond needful faith expression to become intrusive, coercive, even taunting.
But time has a way of softening even our most rigid beliefs.
Over the years, this pivotal tale has taken some unexpected turns. What was once a straightforward black-and-white story of religious oppression has evolved into something far more nuanced—a meditation on community, the value of witnessing darkness, and the complex relationship between faith and education.
The Importance of Hopeful Dialogue
In preparing to write Part II, I reread Part I to help me think about all the various places where my perspective has evolved. In the reading, I kept returning to one particular phrase that reveals how my teenage certainty may have limited me. The line in questions occurs after I contacted the ACLU, when I was contemplating the consequences my family and I would face if I lodged a complaint about compulsory participation in a faith-based event. I worried about threats to my family, both verbal and physical, and vandalism to our home. When asking myself if these acts could feasibly be perpetrated upon us by our neighbors, friends and even family, I wrote, “I had no doubt they might.”
“I had no doubt they might.” I failed to grasp the irony of this statement before I posted it online. I am glad of it. It reveals something important about certainty itself. Of course, there can never be no doubt that someone might hurt us, maim us, undo us. But my certainty that something might go terribly wrong needed a flipped certainty that something might go right. That my concerns might be understood. That I might find kindred souls who also felt trapped in that auditorium.
To be fair, I might have walked down those bleachers and to the double doors, asked to leave and found no locked door at all. Some teacher might have pressed the long silver bar of the door, pushed the door open and told me quietly to go sit in the office until it was done. I was certain I would get in trouble if I spoke up, but I gave no one a chance to prove me wrong—to say, “We get it!” I still have my doubts that would have happened, but I will never know. Isn’t that the first rule of conflict management? That we try to resolve problems without escalation? That we give people a chance to do the right thing? To hear us?
On the other hand, what could the school have done to better prepare me to express myself in the moment in a calm and measured way? To feel that I could solve the problem with my community, not without? I am sure that many in my community believed that we should always first attempt to solve problems at a local level with dialogue and compromise. I am also sure that many in my conservative community believed in freedom of religious expression. They wanted this desperately for themselves. Some just needed a reminder that this freedom can only be nurtured and preserved when we make room for the dissenters.
An open dialogue in the classroom about our values as a community and as a country would have gone far to limit problematic behavior. We were teenagers, and teenagers need helpers. We needed people to show us how to be brave in small, ordinary ways. Saying no, saying I would prefer not, voting with our feet—these are powerful and brave actions. They are not loud and showy or angry and destructive.
We must intentionally equip students with tools of rhetoric and logic to express dissent in productive ways. This allows for small, peaceful, every day, and mundane protestations. Without these tools, students are left with only the choice between silent compliance and dramatic confrontation.
Finding Value in Darkness
Whenever I tell this story, I am always amazed that people get upset about the talk itself. But this has never been the source of my upset. Honestly, as disturbing as it was, I am glad I saw it. It changed something inside me forever. And not for the worse.
It made me aware that there are some people you doubt can ever really be redeemed. That evil does exist. At five, my father found my mother and I hiding in Louisiana. He walked out from behind a row of bushes, snatched me up and threw me in his truck. He then attempted to kill my mother, dragging her behind the speeding truck, spinning the truck around with the aim of taking her under. When he was stopped by police at the county line between Mississippi and Louisiana and placed in the caged back of a police car, he looked like a rabid animal. It was a look I will never forget, and I felt very lonely in my witnessing of it for a very long time.
That high school assembly actually made me feel less alone. We were all in that room together, and even though we might not get along or like each other, we were all facing this evil together. In not one of my many tellings of this tale, have I ever mention being angry at any of my peers. That’s not a common occurrence in my tales of high school angst and woe. That must mean something.
Looking back now, I wonder about the adults in charge. I wonder if that principal and that minister knew what they were doing. That they were wise to his act. Knew that this guy was no good! No good and using us! And used him nevertheless. I like to think so.
I am proud I sat through that talk—no tears, head nodding along with the cool, tough boys. Because even though I felt like he walked out there all alone to face us—that was just dramatics! I have to give it to the Baptists: they put on a fantastic show! The prisoner could never have hurt any of us. We were safe to feel deeply unsafe. And it made us stronger.
Beyond My Perspective
This realization that I had acquired strength from the experience helped me see how others in that auditorium might have had entirely different but equally valid responses to what we witnessed. Where I lived, these kinds of expressions of faith were normal, necessary even, for the members to feel like they were thriving. I lacked the maturity to see beyond my own discomfort. Many students would have needed to process their fears and anguish with practices from their own faith tradition, just as I needed to process the experience in a way that tied me to my own.
I learn better when I hold new information up to the different lenses through which I view the world: my faith lens, my science lens, my art lens. It is important to allow people the freedom to witness how the view changes with each shift of the lens. We cannot deny that inquiry to others, even when we don’t agree with or even like many of their faith practices. I hope that people extend this grace to me even when they don’t agree with the tenets of my faith or how I interpret and understand and struggle with them myself.
This insight has been reinforced by my training as an anthropologist. As an anthropologist, I’ve noticed something peculiar about how academics and social justice leaders approach faith and the expression of it. They are often very kind and understanding of the faiths we study that are remote or removed from their own personal experience. But they cannot extend those same courtesies to faith traditions encountered firsthand, every day. I think that’s very normal and understandable.
Personal experience creates emotional charge. When we have been hurt or felt excluded by a particular faith tradition, it’s harder to maintain scholarly distance. But this bias deserves examination, especially when considering how to create inclusive environments.
If I had seen myself in my school, at that assembly, as a stranger in a strange land, a teenage anthropologist, I would have observed my discomfort. I would have meditated on what differentiated my experience from that of my peers. I would not have been offended by the difference between my experience and theirs, but would have questioned why it existed, pondered how to bridge the divide. We must train ourselves to reflect on that bias when considering a faith group we have had real or perceived negative interactions with during our formative years.
This bias became even more apparent to me when I left Mississippi for graduate school in upstate New York and found myself in an unexpected position. I became a kind of de facto expert on the experience of being a southerner. Strangely, just five or six years after the event, I, who understood so little about my high school hometown, was regularly called upon at events to speak for Mississippians as a collective. I found myself defending the people of my hometown and home state against people that disparaged them, made fun of them, called them stupid and naïve. All those little mundane defenses handed out here and there at conference coffee chats and graduate student parties allowed room for a change in my perception of the event and of myself.
I now seek to recall the practices in my hometown in the way I might if I were an anthropologist visiting a distant land. This anthropological distance has allowed me to see potential solutions that my teenage anger obscured.
A Choice Between the Bleachers and the Door
These insights have changed how I think about navigating differences in belief within educational communities. So how do I make sense of this event today? What lessons do I reflect on when I teach a history class and then watch the students file out of the classroom, on their way to Friday Mass at the little Catholic school at which I teach?
I still sympathize with and support the girl that wanted to get up and walk out the door, that was so angry and alone that she wanted to stir the pot and spoil their fun. I also want to put an arm on her shoulder and ask her to be calm, to give people a chance to find a place for her, even if that place was in the school office abstaining from the event. I would ask her to recognize the need for faith and education to coexist.
What would I have done differently if I had been in charge way back then? How would I have tried to bridge the divide? I believe the answer is transparency and choice. Schools should be honest, deliberate and above-board with their communities about their beliefs, values and the common practices used to engage students with those values and beliefs. This straightforwardness goes far to alleviate concern, confusion, and undoes that festering feeling of being misled. Accompanying that candor is an admission that to protect your own rights to expression, you must extend that courtesy to others.
What might transparency and choice look like in practice? Picture a school that sends home a letter at the beginning of each semester outlining upcoming assemblies, their purposes, and alternative arrangements for students who prefer not to participate. Imagine a school handbook that clearly states: “We believe faith and learning complement each other, and we occasionally host speakers who discuss how their personal beliefs have shaped their life choices. Students who would rather not attend these presentations may spend that time in the library with supervised study.”
I have seen this kind of accommodation work beautifully at interfaith events where organizers announce at the beginning: “We’ll be having prayers from several traditions. Please participate as feels right to you, or simply observe respectfully.”
What might have happened if there had been greater transparency and school choice? Perhaps, I would have found a school not too far away that better suited my needs as a student. People could talk openly about how my high school handled these kinds of events and assemblies versus how other schools in the area managed similar events. Perhaps I could have attended another school that was not as religious but had a school newspaper or theater program (my school had neither). Conversely, perhaps another student at a different school would have considered the strong science program at my high school and happily attended my school instead, benefitting from a school that prioritized expression of faith and a commitment to scientific inquiry.
I used to think there was only one way to skin a cat, to brush up against a brute, to beat a bully, to stand your ground. I think now there may be no need for any of that. You just need a world where you get to choose the bleachers or the door.