The Final Commemoration of William Porcher DuBose; Or, a Tale of Two Saints
TODAY WAS THE LAST commemoration of William Porcher DuBose on the calendar of the Episcopal Church, and August 14 was the commemoration of Jonathan Myrick Daniels on the same calendar (although moved in most places this year because it fell on a Sunday on which many anticipated the commemoration of St. Mary the Virgin). The men shared a church and a Lord, and for a time a week of eucharistic inscription as models of Christian living — indeed as heavenly intercessors for those of us who continue in our earthly course. One remains on the calendar, and one has been removed by a vote of the General Convention meeting last month in Baltimore. A moment of examination is in order.
Jonathan Daniels is among the most important modern American Christians nobody outside the tiny Episcopal Church has ever heard about. As a Virginia Military Institute cadet, the New Hampshire-born questioned his childhood faith against a background of bereavement and family illness. He graduated as valedictorian at VMI and proceeded to Harvard for graduate studies in English. There, in 1962, he experienced conversion to the new life at the Church of the Advent and determined to live out the social implications of the Mass. In his time and place, this was the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Daniels interposed his body between an Alabama county deputy with a shotgun and a 17-year-old African American activist, Ruby Sales; he was shot to death at the age of 26 and acknowledged immediately as a Christian martyr. The Episcopal Church received this acknowledgment into its annual worship in 1991.
William Porcher DuBose, described by church historian Norman Pittenger in 1957 as the “only important theologian that the Episcopal Church has ever produced,” was born in Winnsboro, South Carolina in 1836 into a family with more than 200 slaves on a 2,500-acre plantation. He was graduated from the Citadel in 1855 and entered the South Carolina diocesan seminary in 1859. DuBose left the seminary to enlist in the Confederate Army, saw action at the Second Battle of Bull Run, was injured, and imprisoned. After a time as prisoner of war, he was made deacon in 1863 and rejoined the Confederate Army as a deacon-chaplain-officer.
DuBose was ordained priest in 1866 and became chaplain to the University of the South at Sewanee from 1871 to 1883; he was professor in its theological departments from 1877 to 1908, a period during which he produced scintillating explorations of the theology of the New Testament. DuBose asked questions as an American and Episcopalian that continue to enlighten his readers: how does Jesus save? What is priesthood? What is the Good News in Christ? What are ecumenical councils? He also wrote in favor of the nascent Ku Klux Klan as “an inspiration of genius,” and promoted the honor of his fellows in arms from the short-lived Confederacy. There is no written indication that he ever repented of what we now call the deadly ideology of white racism. He died in 1918 and gave his name to a seminary that functioned in Monteagle for 20 years.
DuBose appears the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church in 1979 after the development of substantial regional and national support for his sanctity, with a prayer: “Grant that by [his] teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.”
Worship numbers are notoriously difficult to measure, but I reckon that most Episcopalians who read daily Morning and Evening Prayer or attend a midweek Eucharist encountered both men this week. DuBose was deleted from the calendar just six weeks ago, and it is unclear to all when this deletion takes effect, or how users of our many liturgical books and printed materials in many languages will come to know about it. Five bodies made resolutions acknowledging the great internal difficulties embodied in DuBose’s lives and teachings; the resolutions were combined and passed with concurrence. There has been no time for the change to be made on our paper calendars or annual ordos, and the phone-based apps many of us use for the office have not been updated yet. In 2021 Sewanee removed DuBose’s name from the 97-year lecture series in his name and honor; the stained glass windows in his memory, the bronzes, the statue, the monuments — all remain in place as the prayers are now dislodged and DuBose’s school and family wrestle ardently with his legacies. We are in the process of the reception of a deletion; DuBose remains with his liturgical materials on the church’s website, in the Wikipedia saints portal, in all of the unofficial websites about Anglican saints.
It is hard to know what these two commemorations mean in the span of four days.
Daniels spilled his blood, the seed of the Church, as proof that Jesus Christ ended human race as a necessary marker of only-chosenness, as his own testament that whiteness compelled him to lay down its self-referential protection to save the life of another, for his testimony that Jesus Christ abolished race as a justification for ownership or deprivation of one by another. Greater life indeed hath no man.
DuBose, claiming the same Jesus and reading the same scriptures, using the same Prayer Book, nourished generations of scholars in their exploration of the same sacrifice Daniels expounded fatally and differently at the wrong end of a gun. DuBose cultivated a piety still recognizable in the century after his death: Prayer Book Catholicism from the Cumberland Plateau with the best of its manners, priorities, preferences. He being dead yet speaketh only what has led to his addition and his removal in the space of 40 years. The epistle appointed for his commemoration had always in any case begun “Not many of you should become teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.”
This is probably the last week when both men will be in our books and on our screens as examples of godliness, but it cannot be the last time we examine the notable juxtaposition. The church in which a seminarian (Daniels) can write to his mother that he looks forward to discussing his experiences in the South with his mother over their next martini — and suffer martyrdom days later — is the same church in which a devout Greenwood, Mississippi parishioner (Byron De La Beckwith) can murder a Civil Rights leader (Medgar Evers) and escape prosecution for more than 30 years. The history is as recent as we allow it to be, as near as our pews, as close as our BCPs and the pages at the front we read during sermons.
It can be said, and well, that it is unseemly for a northerner with pink skin born during the last weeks of the Carter administration to comment on matters that took place in different places and times in different communities. But the rub is in the last bit: the communion of saints, the Prayer Book calendar, and the immediacy of racial reconciliation as priorities for every Christian community make the questions mine as well as anyone else’s; by giving Christians both Daniels and DuBose, the church has made them both the business of all of us. And while I suspect it will always be the case that the people making decisions about which pink people belong on the calendar or should be excluded from it will also be pink, this does not excuse the announcement of the dilemma.
How do we sing the Lord’s song with calendars made strange in our own land and lifetime — the introduction of a saint who must now be removed, the acclamation of a martyr whose work is incomplete? There is something at work here other than the operation of “creative tension,” or “growing edges.” Would any great and good thing be lost by waiting a century before considering whether men and women who are not martyrs should be raised to the altars in official ways?
Local, unofficial devotions help Christians to become more of what we should be without inscription by committees who can then decide they are inappropriate for universal commendation. The vocation to martyrdom, on the contrary, is catholic on its own and unrelated to commissions. An intervening century might have allowed adequate time to review writings about the Klan in combination with those about soteriology and Christian anthropology, giving us time to separate wheat from chaff without an embarrassment of sanctity.
