Loving Your NeighborSample

I have learned that friendship can take us across ethnic barriers, even into Ku Klux Klan territory. My friend Tommy Tarrants was a former Klan member. He opposed desegregation in the South, and this man known as “the most dangerous man in Mississippi” was blamed for many of the bombings there, which targeted churches and synagogues. He was arrested and sent to prison. While in prison, he read the Gospels and had a life-changing conversion. What he read from Galatians 3:28 convinced him that racism was wrong. He renounced the Klan and devoted his life to serving Christ and promoting the peace that only Christ can give.

Tommy and I met for the first time when we were both invited to speak at Geneva College in the fall of 1990. I wasn’t sure whether to believe that he had changed. So I brought him into a room filled with black college students where I was to speak. Instead, I invited Tommy to speak. I wanted to see if the students would believe that he had changed.

Tommy said, “I was raised in Mobile, Alabama, in the 1960s. I was a churchgoing kid. I was baptized. I thought I was a Christian. I believed that blacks were inferior to whites and that Jews, who were promoting integration, were the source of all evil. Eventually, that began to spill over into violence. . . . But God changed my heart and gave me an attitude of love toward people.” He encouraged the students to “have a friend of a different race and get to know that person and understand what life is like for them.” The Preacher and the Klansman tells our story of friendship; and we later wrote He’s My Brother: Former Racial Foes Offer Strategy for Reconciliation. Tommy is now the president of the C. S. Lewis Institute in Washington, D.C. I share this story because if extreme cases of bigotry can be destroyed through friendship, then there is no excuse for blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, and everyone else not to make the journey to friendship.

We’ve drawn some hard lines in our country today. They are racial. They are political. They are ugly. They are wrong. If we are friends of God and if the Spirit of God lives in our hearts, we must renounce bigotry and political prejudice. We should have friends who are Republican, who are Democrats, who are Independents. We should have friends who look like every ethnicity under the heaven. Why would we want to go to heaven where every tribe and every tongue will be worshiping together at the feet of our God, if we don’t want to be friends with everyone now?