Through My Christian Prism, or at the Port Rail

By Larry Clayton

Larry Clayton brings a refreshing, Christian perspective to these essays that examine the human condition, sharing his thoughts on everything from the flighty and humorous to the serious and transcendent.

His musings and insights--almost of all of which were published as op-ed columns in the Sunday edition of the Tuscaloosa News in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and national newspapers like the LA Times, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Times, and Miami Herald—seek to make sense of life.

In the tradition of a newspaper op-ed, the essays share profound lessons on everything from religion to history, politics, foreign affairs, education, sports, and other important topics.

While many of the writings revolve around Christian themes and history, Clayton is not afraid to tackle problems that almost everyone has faced, such as the daunting, and humorous, experience of getting through an airport checkpoint these days.

He laces his stories with wit and wisdom derived from his faith and his experiences as a teacher, writer, and even as chairman of the Department of History at the University of Alabama. He references the "port rail" that--when not on duty--he used to hold on to and dream and think a bit while serving on a ship in the Navy making its way through the waters and waves of the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Mediterranean ocean and seas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Aug 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781480879928

Larry Clayton

Larry Clayton is a historian who has published more than a dozen books with major academic and commercial presses like the University of California Press and Harcourt, Brace. He has taught about and traveled through much of Latin America over his career, beginning with life as a boy in Lima, Peru, the son of an American dad and a Chilean mother. He is the former chairman of the Department of History at the University of Alabama.

Book preview

Through My

Christian Prism,

or at the Port Rail

Larry Clayton

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Copyright © 2019 Larry Clayton.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-7993-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-7994-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-7992-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019910616

Archway Publishing rev. date: 8/15/2019

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

—C. S. LEWIS, FROM THE WEIGHT OF GLORY AND OTHER ADDRESSES

The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.

—JOHN 10:10 (NKJV)

Then they said to Him, What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?

Jesus answered and said to them, This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.

—JOHN 6:28–29 (NKJV)

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

1 Life in These United States

Good Times

My Personal Time Machine

Something for Nothing

Castes in America

Compassion, or How We Relate to People

Listening to the Latest Ideas

Why Mexicans Aren’t Coming to the United States

2 On Working and Playing

Work and Play

The Business of America Is Business

3 The Old and the New

Out with the Old

Will the Real Moses Please Stand Up?

To Change or Not to Change, Part 1

To Change or Not to Change, Part 2

4 Sports

Christianity and Golf

5 War

In Service

Watching the Vietnam War, Redux

You’re in the Army Now; America at War

Honor in Warfare

What Happened to Our Citizen Army

Veterans Day 2017

Doolittle’s Raiders

Surprising Warfare

Missing in Action on Memorial Day Weekend

Remembering Gitmo

6 Law and Authority

In Search of the Correct Final Authority

7 Politics

Self-Interest and Community

We All Need Heroes; Why David McCullough Can’t Sleep Well at Night

Slavery and Freedom

Corruption

Can You Be a (True) Christian and Still Be a Successful Politician?

8 Christianity

On Asceticism

The Church Ladies, or into the Jail We Go

We Take Religious Freedom too Lightly

Theocracy

When the State Trumps Religion

Nice Shoes: Or Tuesday Nights in Jail

9 Christianity in History

Anne Hutchinson

Everyone Did as They Saw Fit

The Great Awakenings

10 Words and Language

Words

Language

The Degradation of Our Language

The Keys to Our Future

11 Truth

Truth

12 History

Purging

History

On Grieving and Abraham Lincoln

Solving the Immigration Conundrum, or Lining up the Present with the Past

13 Humor

The RV Adventure: An American Dream

Breaking News: Thomas Jefferson Expelled from American History

Guns

My Inbox, or Everything You Need to Know

14 Flying

Virtual Reality versus Reality

15 Family and Genealogy

There’s a Hispanic in My House!

Levi Young and Some Memorial Day Reflections

Foreword

During my years at the University of Alabama, I learned that there is a very big difference between minoring and majoring in history. Minoring in history is not that difficult if you are the kind of student who does well in survey and lecture classes and listens in class. You get just enough of a taste of the advanced classes to know whether you would excel as a history major. Larry Clayton, the author of this book, tells me occasionally that I have the makings of a good historian because I ask the big questions.

While that might be the case, on this point, my friend, who not only is a true historian but also is one of substantial reputation, is wrong. I might ask the big questions but don’t have the patience to do the reading and research required to answer those questions. A history minor like me knows enough to ask the big question, but he would much rather know good historians and ask those questions of them, whereas a history major would plunge into the library or archives, sift through the data, and record and formulate an answer to those questions.

My history minor from our state’s flagship university has given me good conversational skills at cocktail parties and enough knowledge to pose semi-intelligent questions to historians. That is my real skill, posing questions to other people. My interview skills and ability to size up who might be able to answer my questions were sufficient to allow me to make a living as a journalist for more than thirty years.

There is a big difference between a historian and a journalist. A historian knows something about his subject and records what he knows. A journalist knows little or nothing and records what other people know. The sooner a journalist understands that, the better he will do his job.

I did learn from my history minor at Alabama one peculiar aspect of the American character. Americans historically dislike inherited wealth. I was told by one of Larry’s colleagues that it stems from the country’s break with inherited titles of nobility during its founding period. It manifests itself in current politics with the incessant rants against wealth and privilege leading to constant efforts to level the playing field. It is with that knowledge that I must confess that I inherited Larry.

He and the columns that are collected in this book are not my creation or discovery. He was a published author long before I became the de facto editorial page editor for the Tuscaloosa News and had been writing occasional commentaries for the paper well before I stumbled into the job.

From the beginning, Larry’s pieces were a godsend. The News has a weekly Sunday feature called Ideas and Issues that is supposed to put thought-provoking reading material in front of subscribers on a day when they allegedly have time to recline on their living room couches and absorb something a bit weightier than the latest on fashion trends and ballgame scores. I wanted local voices whose commentary needed to stand the scrutiny of a community that included a substantial number of college faculty. Who better than a published PhD in history?

He also had an interest in a subject that I believe the news media has come to ignore, if not regard with disdain—the role religion plays in our history and current culture. If from a penthouse overlooking Central Park that particular perspective might appear irrelevant; it most certainly is not in semirural Alabama. Here, you avoid scheduling things on Wednesday evening because people still attend midweek services on that night.

Larry’s unpaid contributions became increasingly frequent but did not decline in quality. I think I turned one down just to demonstrate that I would and for no better reason. Finally, I decided to make an honest columnist of him by marrying him to the paper and giving him some remuneration for his labors. I had hoped for a column that leaned toward religion and history. As it turns out, that is not quite what I got. And that, I believe, is because Larry does not see faith as a thing of the past, something that we still see as a distant plume of smoke from a fire that reshaped the landscape but had long gone out. For him it is living and real, and his columns reflect that. More often than a retrospective, I got from him thoughts on how faith influences his life and our society.

Working with Larry was easy but not perfect. At one point, I got tired of converting numbers from words to numerals in accordance with AP style along with a few other small stylistic things. I emailed Larry a list of style changes he needed to make in his columns. His reply was basically. Nope. He said he’d used academic style too long to change. I sat staring at the reply and wondering if anything I had said in the email could have been construed as a suggestion. In the end, I decided I shouldn’t antagonize someone sending me pretty doggone clean copy with clockwork-like regularity. I returned the favor when Larry objected to one of my headlines for his column. He wanted to pull a Paul Harvey-like surprise at the end of the column. I simply made his ending surprise the headline. When he objected, I told him I was the editor and I wrote the headlines. That’s how it works. I think he puzzled my reply much as I had his and just responded with a shrug. Such is the relationship between writers and editors.

Larry was also not exactly who I expected him to be. If you were to sit down on a stool next to Larry at a local diner or bar and engage him in casual conversation, you wouldn’t know instantly that he is either a professor or a Christian. He is a plainspoken person not given to be either preachy or grandiose. On the other hand, you couldn’t spend any significant amount of time with him without knowing that he was both a Christian and a professor. Both a true faith and a love of one’s professional calling eventually leaches into ordinary conversation. His writing is much like him, unassuming, unadorned and direct. Like Larry, it’s not all that predictable either. He is a Protestant with a deep respect for the Roman Catholic Church. He is rebellious enough to enjoy the freedom of a motorcycle ride and unassuming enough to grub around in the soil to produce homegrown tomatoes. There is an unmistakable conservatism in his positions but no lack of compassion for the impoverished, imprisoned and those who wish to come to this country for a better life. But there is no wishy-washiness when he takes a position, something that has given discomfort to the socialists and those who wish to purge religion from society in the paper’s readership.

Above all his writing reflects the way he views life, through the lens of a true Christian who believes that faith in Jesus Christ is the cure for what ails people and the society they live in. He demonstrates equally that Christianity is a spiritual state within and a way of living life and treating other people. He incorporates both the faith and beliefs of conservative Bible-believing Christians and the humanitarian concerns of their liberal counter parts. It’s not often you find both in one person or one author.

—Robert DeWitt, former editor of the editorial and opinion page, The Tuscaloosa News, Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Preface

All sorts of things prompt people to buy books. Some books are to entertain. A good novel by John Grisham would be an example. But Grisham also probes deeper into issues that interest him and his readers, like justice and truth, for example.

Some folks, whether browsing online or maybe at your local bookstore, are struck by a catchy title, like There’s a Hispanic in My House. What on earth is this about? Read on.

Others may buy books to instruct us on something, like a how-to manual. What to eat to avoid cancer. How to lose weight. How to attract the other sex successfully. How to train your dogs to obey. How to train your wife to be obedient.

Ha! Just kidding. I wanted to see if you had read this far.

Other books are autobiographies by celebrities in politics, entertainment, the media, and any area really where people stand out in the news. We want to know their personal stories. How did they get there? We especially like Horatio Alger-style stories: poor boy grows up and by hard work earns a million dollars (or much more in today’s way of reckoning fortunes of course) and rises out of poverty in slums and moves to Palm Beach. We like inspirational stories.

We like detective novels, whodunits. Spy novels are in the same genre. James Bond was a character in novels long before he became a movie hit.

Some of us are history nuts and want to know why General George Patton was such a good warrior.

Or were we really surprised at Pearl Harbor? Did President Franklin D. Roosevelt know about Japan’s plans to attack us? If he did, he apparently let it happen to get us into a war that he so desperately thought we needed to get into to defend England and democracy and freedom in the world.

Some of us are driven, or influenced, in some fashion, by a strong religious environment that colors everything we say or do, which covers just about the entire human experience since we are what we say or do. My prejudice is that—like one of my great heroes, the Irish-English writer and Oxford professor, C. S. Lewis—I see the world through the prism of my faith, which is Christianity. My Christianity comes from what I was taught, and learned, although the process was long and one that was gradually revealed to me, like I suspect what most of us go through.

Like C. S., you will find what follows is my view of our world through the eyes of a Christian. Or, to be more specific, not simply through the eyes but through the presence of my faith in virtually everything I think or do. For you Christians, I am of course writing of the Holy Spirit who guides and lives within us after we accept Jesus Christ in our lives as Lord and Savior.

Now for a demurral. The Holy Spirit does not dictate every instance of my life. If I miss an easy putt on the golf course, I am just as apt to invoke some other expression rather than continued thankfulness for Jesus in my life. I am not thinking of the Holy Spirit when I brush my teeth or in so many quotidian things we do as we wander through the portal of birth/creation into this life.

Our lives are complicated. That is perhaps the understatement of the year. Some folks wish they lived in simpler times, but I don’t think there were simple times at any point in the human existence. There may have been fewer choices and distractions, but the human condition has always been complex, from the prophets of the Old Testament dealing with their stiff-necked Hebrew brothers to today’s whacky media mavens who bombard us twenty-four hours a day with news, most of which is inane and useless.

What you have before you are my impressions and reflections on the human condition, from the flighty and humorous to the serious and transcendent, largely—but not always—filtered through my faith in the teachings and actions of Jesus Christ. They are stories that help make sense of life, and virtually all were published as op-ed columns in the Sunday edition of my hometown newspaper, the Tuscaloosa News.

I think all readers deserve to know a bit about the author. I sometimes turn to the back cover of a book, or the flap, or the last page, and read a bit about the author before plunging into the magnificent work (all authors think their writing is in some form of magnificence) that begins at the front of the book. In this case, I have included a little essay, There’s a Hispanic in My House! in the last chapter. There you can read a bit more about me if you are curious.

Introduction

The apostle Paul wrote almost poetically, and with a wonderful economy of words—so, like Paul, and unlike many of us writers—that for now we see through a glass, darkly; but then [we will see] face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known (1 Corinthians 13:12, New International Version, or NIV. Unless otherwise noted, all future references to Scripture taken from the NIV).

Paul, like most ancients, was writing of a type of mirror, which in many cases were made of brass and polished to reflect the image. Mirrors as we know them today were not invented until the nineteenth century, so Paul was only seeing an image imperfectly. Or, in other words, we will never see God and all his glory perfectly until we pass into his kingdom, but we can see reflections, albeit imperfect ones, though a glass darkly.

Not only do I see things through the Christian prism—my own glass darkly—I tend to collect what I see in writing. As I wrote over the years, especially since the 1980s and ’90s, I realized I was directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, precisely expressing my growth as a Christian in my writings.

Fifteen or twenty years ago I wrote about anything and everything that crossed my view, curious to see if could package what I was either living or observing into