Paul Thompson is Dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of History at North Greenville University. He is the author of A Most Stirring and Significant Episode: Religion and the Rise and Fall of Prohibition in Black Atlanta, 1865–1887. We are thrilled for his visit to the Arena today–perfect timing, as we kick off a two-week forum at Current on the state of the university.
You have been a teacher, professor, and university administrator for over three decades! As we get rolling on this new academic year, what advice would you give new students who just recently arrived on a college campus?
Live your life during college with purpose. Know why you are in college and own it. These four years are an investment in your future; don’t squander your investment. College is not about experiences for the sake of having experiences, it is about learning and growing from your experiences in a more mature and intentional way than you did in high school. You have not arrived at college because you know so much, you’ve arrived at college because there is so much you do not know (about this world, and how to live in it).
You are blessed –financially, intellectually, relationally – to be able to make this investment, because not every eighteen-year-old who once dreamed of attending college is able to make this investment, and for some of them it is for reasons beyond their control. It is very likely that you are able to make this investment at this point in your life because of good things that happened to you that you are not responsible for, and because bad things did not happen to you.
For example, your parents might have a high level of education, the culture of your family taught you from a young age to set high goals for yourself, your family believes college is worth the investment for you regardless of how you pay for it. On the other side, it’s likely that your parents never had an injury (or worse, didn’t die), so your family didn’t need you to work to support them. The lines have fallen together in pleasant places (Psalm 16:6) for you to be able to go to college. Do not take this opportunity for granted.
On a related note, what advice would you give faculty, whether new or seasoned, as they return to teaching this fall?
I will share what I shared with my faculty at the beginning of this year. These nine months of teaching are “planting time” for us. There is a “seasonality” that aligns with how God designed the world that inheres in the education profession. What we teach, how we teach, and the relationships we develop with our students all plant seeds in the lives of our students, and we need to approach what we do with all the seriousness of a farmer planting his or her crop. All crops need to be watered and nurtured, and there are also things that prevent crops from being healthy and productive.
It is instructive to recall that in the Gospel of Mark Jesus rhetorically asked his disciples that if they couldn’t understand the parable of the seed and the Sower, how would they understand any parable (Mark 4:13)? While it is planting time for us, truth is that we will also be watering seed sown by others (parents, teachers, pastors, employers, grandparents, etc.) and likely doing some weeding and rock removal (courtesy of some previous influencers like teachers, pastors, employers, and even parents). When I taught high school, I used to get asked “why did our elementary school teachers tell us Columbus proved the world was round?” I had to do some weeding.
But another important thing to remember is that each kind of plant requires a different amount of time before reaching maturity. We must remember that our students resemble crops in this way also. This summer I was blessed when a former high school student of mine from the 1990s reached on out Facebook. I had forgotten about her, but she still remembered not only me, but conversations we had where I shared the Gospel with her, and she is now living for Christ despite some difficult teen years. She said I was one of the first people to share the Gospel with her. Over the years others watered and nurtured that seed that the Holy Spirit had enabled me to plant. Of course, in this regard I can talk about former students who after a career in secondary education have begun doctoral programs, following my career path, or former students who following all sorts of successful career paths many years after being in my classes. I could talk about notes of gratitude received years after a student has graduated.
In addition to everything you are doing day-to-day as an administrator and professor, you are also a productive researcher. Your first book examined religion and prohibition in Black Atlanta in the late 19th century. What is the overall story that you are telling in that book? Do you think this story connects to the present statistics–that African-Americans are less likely to drink than other groups? And what role does religion play here?
A Most Stirring and Significant Episode traces the movement of temperance thought or sentiment from the North to postbellum black Atlanta. I argue that black and white northern evangelicals used churches and schools to teach temperance, or teetotalism, to Atlanta’s freedpeople in the years immediately following emancipation. In nineteenth-century southern urban life, Atlanta was exceptional because it did not have an established antebellum free black community, like such cities as New Orleans, Charleston, and Richmond. So temperance thought evolved as Black Atlanta evolved. It was “baked into” its earliest institutions.
The first part of my book explores the literature and networks of churches, schools, and benevolent organizations that introduced teetotalism to Black Atlanta, and the second part provides the most detailed narrative yet published about African Americans’ involvement in Fulton County’s 1885 and 1887 prohibition votes. In 1885, black voters mostly supported prohibition, but they switched their vote in 1887. Their votes determined the outcome of each election much to the consternation of the whites on the losing side of each election, many of whom were interpreting blacks’ citizenship “worthiness” based on their prohibition vote.
The temperance message resonated with African Americans because of their relatively strong commitment to evangelical Christianity, but also because of the internal racial conversation about how blacks should live as freedpeople and citizens. In the late nineteenth-century, middle class Americans largely viewed teetotalism as the most moral approach to alcohol consumption, so many blacks saw it as beneficial for the “progress” of the race.
Other prohibition votes in 1887 in Texas and Tennessee, however, also revealed that black voters were leaning against prohibition by this time. As a result, the movement in the South hit pause for several years, and when it relaunched in the late 1890’s, white prohibitionists had allied themselves with segregationists, so that future prohibition reformers did not bother appealing to black voters.
What are the broader questions that fascinate you in your reading, thinking, and writing these days? Any particular books that you have read recently (whether business or pleasure) that really stood out?
For the last few years, I’ve been reading on the issue of race from a biblical perspective. I’m excited about what seems to me to be an explosion of books on the issue of race by evangelicals in the last twenty years. I had thought sometime back that I myself would write a book using Scripture to illuminate matters of race, but for various reasons I’m not so sure about that now. There are several good books available that are written from a strong Christian perspective and that also incorporate secular scholarship. For example, I really like the books White Awake and White Lies by Daniel Hill, Reading While Black by Esau McCaulley, From Every People and Nation by J. Daniel Hayes, Faithful Antiracism by Christina Edmondson and Chad Brennan, and Why This New Race? by Denise Kimber Buell.
Each of these works treat race in a serious manner, understanding that just because it is a social construct does not mean it’s not “real.” (I’m so tired of the facile assertion that since race isn’t biological it isn’t “real.”) Ideas about race are indeed in a continuous state of creation and revision, and like other ideologies, they provide a rationale for all sorts of individual and corporate socio-cultural traditions and practices that will forever shape the human experience. I firmly believe – perhaps idealistically – that a proper understanding of sound scholarship and God’s Word should make believers the best equipped people to honestly and justly interact with and confront this manifestation of human fallenness. But sadly, I see very little manifestation of this within American evangelicalism writ large.
I particularly like Buell’s book because she points out how several early church fathers talked about Christians as a new “race” of people comparable to other races. Her thesis undermines a lot of scholarship on the socio-cultural nature of Christian identity, but these early church leaders were merely building on the revelation in I Peter 2: 9-10 where Peter teaches that believers “once were not a people but are now the people of God.”
I think most Christians would act differently if we genuinely viewed our identity in Christ as real as being black, or being an American, or being a southerner. I think too many Christians treat our identity in Christ as a patina overlaying other socio-cultural identities, and don’t give serious enough consideration to how fundamentally different we are supposed to be as people “born of God” (John 1: 13) who are aliens (I Peter 2: 11; Philippians 3:20) and ambassadors to our earthly nation (II Corinthians 5: 17-20). If believers really saw themselves this way, I think we’d act a lot differently in the public sphere than we currently act. This is my current academic interest, really, and spiritual burden for the church. I am working to better articulate my thinking on this and to find venues to proclaim it.