White Soul

Christian Century, March 19, 1997 by Hal W. Le Mert, Jr.

By Tex Sample. Abingdon, 207 pp., $14.95.

In contemporary idiom, says Tex Sample, "God chose the `trashy' people and formed the `trashy church.'" That's a good exegesis of Paul's description of the earliest church in 1 Corinthians: "not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is low and despised in the world." Sample attacks the church that has taken on the trappings and politics of middle- and upper-class life and has ceased to speak to "working class" people.

Sample defines the working class as made up of those whose work is "physically hard . . . dead end, monotonous, boring," and "endured for what happens when one is not working." Following the outlines of a class he teaches at Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri, he convincingly argues that country music "speaks" the life of working people. He insists that the mainline churches have rejected the very people who first peopled the church.

Sample introduces us to lyrics that reflect the pain and the joy of the working class. Country music is their soul music, he says. (He does not mention, but he could, that a good portion of our hymnody began in the songs of working people.) In this music is a message churches are not hearing. Sample points to the powerful politics involved in making decisions about this genre. "The struggle over music and other forms of art is far more than an aesthetic one. It is permeated with the politics of distinction, with contestation over prestige. It is easy to forget that culture is an area over which we do battle." In the church, the working class has lost the culture war.

Sample stops short of challenging the hymnody so dear to mainline worshipers and does not suggest a new hymnody that might cross cultural lines. Only by implication does he address the important issue of the music that divides the church so painfully into racial and cultural ghettos. But Sample does envision a caring church, a church that listens to the white soul music and recaptures its working-class origins. He makes us consider what a "trashy" church, in the best biblical sense, might look like.

The book asks readers to examine church ministry in light of the contradictions that so many people live. It is a wonderful catalog of the politics, the pastoral needs, the hopes and the conflicts, even the theology of working people. But it leaves us to work out for ourselves the dilemma of how the church can escape its profound cultural captivity.

Reviewed by Hal W. Le Mert Jr., pastor of Southminster Presbyterian Church, Prairie Village, Kansas.