Opinion | This Artist Has a Mission to Call White Americans to Truth
Thompson went to seminary, then moved to Charlottesville, Va., to be a campus minister and eventually became a pastor of a predominantly white Presbyterian church. Around the same time, he enrolled at the University of Virginia to pursue a doctorate in religion. There, he intended to write on Augustine and European intellectual history.
Then, in 2006, while on vacation, he went into a bookstore and, on a whim, bought a collection of essays written during the civil rights movement. As he read essays by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he found language to articulate the gulf that had opened between him and his friend Greg in the fourth grade. Dr. King and the broader civil rights movement resonated with Thompson’s Christian faith and also named what he was beginning to intuit about injustice involving systems and structures. After his vacation, he contacted his adviser and told him he wanted to switch focus and do his dissertation on Dr. King.
Over the next decade, Thompson immersed himself in Black intellectual history, reading Dr. King, Howard Thurman, Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, bell hooks and African American poetry. “My narrative about America was changing,” Thompson explained. “I was being taught by African American activists, intellectuals, pastors, poets to see the truth about America that had been utterly invisible to me.” He discovered, on a trip back home during this time, that a grandfather and a great-grandfather of his had been members of the Ku Klux Klan.
When I ask how this made him feel, Thompson said that what struck him most at the time was how the family had kept this secret for so long. It was clearly a source of shame for people he loved. At the same time, it seemed strangely matter-of-fact. A relative told him that in his grandfather’s town, “the Klan was everywhere,” and a part of civic life for most white men. Thompson began to preach about racial justice in his church. Some congregants balked. One approached him asking, “Why do you always talk about Martin Luther King and how he was victimized and not talk about how Sarah Palin is victimized?”
Others wanted to learn more. Three hundred people came to a class at his church on African American church history. In 2014, he went on a writing retreat at a river house on a former plantation to work on his dissertation. At 1 a.m., reading about the horrors of rape and abuse endured by African Americans, he said, he slid his chair back from his desk and spoke out loud to the empty room, “I am a pastor in the longest standing white supremacist social order in history.”
He had thought, as an evangelical pastor, that his primary challenges were rising secularization or late-stage capitalism. But he realized that “the real missionary challenge to Christianity in America is the way we have materially instantiated a white supremacist social order.” He adds: “It was as clear as it could have been to me. And I knew that my life was going to change.”
It did. After the massacre in June 2015 at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, S.C., Thompson began to form deeper connections with Black religious and civic leaders and decided that he needed to leave white-dominant institutions.
