The Church Needs a More Complicated Atticus Finch

 

Everything I learned in childhood was a lie.

That is how Jean Louise (Scout) Finch, and I feel about a hundred pages into Go Set A Watchman, Harper Lee's sequel of To Kill a Mockingbird.

When we first meet Scout, she is the six year old narrator of To Kill A Mockingbird. Her father, Atticus Finch is a well respected lawyer in Maycomb, Alabama. Atticus agrees to defend Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a young white woman, Mayella Ewell. Atticus gets Robinson acquitted. Even though race relations in Maycomb remain relatively the same, Scout grows up with a father she has elevated to God-like status.

Fast-forward twenty years. Scout is now twenty-six, and goes by her full name Jean Louise. Atticus is still a respectable figure at seventy-two, but he relies on the help of Hank (Jean Louise's poor childhood friend) to help him run his practice, and his sister Alexandra to look after him. Jean Louise returns to Maycomb from New York City for a two week holiday. Instead of having a pleasant time wading deep in nostalgia, Jean Louise discovers that Atticus is a member of the Maycomb citizen's council- an organization determined to maintain Negro segregation. Jean Louise becomes violently ill. Everything she learned in childhood was a lie.

I sympathize with Jean Louise. I remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time when I was sixteen. Like Scout, I too thought Atticus was God. He was smart, kind, compassionate, loyal, and deeply concerned for justice. I wanted to name my future son Atticus, but since I was sixteen, I had to settle for naming my first cell phone (a silver flip phone) Atticus because it was helpful, reliable, and unassuming.

When I read that Atticus is a member of the Maycomb citizen's council, I too wanted to throw up. How could Atticus Finch be a racist?! Everything I learned in childhood was a lie. It was not until I read Jean Louise's conversation with her Uncle Jack that I realized my mistake:

... now you, Miss, born with your own conscience, somewhere along the line fastened it like a barnacle onto your father's. As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man's heart, and with a man's failings-I'll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes 'em like all of us. You were an emotional cripple, leaning on him, getting the answers from him, assuming that your answers would always be his answers (265).

Now that I have finished reading Go Set A Watchman, I believe that it is a more timely novel today then when it was written in 1957, especially in how it helps me think about the church.

Growing up, the church was my Atticus Finch. It was the place where good people went to worship a good God. It was a place untouched by racism, sexism, or violence. But as I grew up I realized that just because people go to church does not mean that they are always good. I have seen many "perfect" church families implode because of affairs, drug addiction, and unemployment. This summer, I read how nine good church- going people were gunned down in Charleston, and I read about black churches burning in the south. The church was my Atticus Finch, and Atticus was a racist. Everything I leaned in childhood was a lie.

But was it? Or had I, like Scout, created an unrealistically perfect church in my head, then tried to bolt the second the church stopped living up to my inflated expectations?

Go Set A Watchman is a timely novel in 2015 because Lee is forcing us to confront the unrealistically perfect images we had of life as children. Atticus Finch is not God and that's a good thing. We do not need Atticus to be God because we already have a savior in Jesus Christ. The church needs a more complicated Atticus Finch because it needs to be able to see itself for what it really is, not what it was fifty years ago when the Sunday School classes were packed, and the offering plate was always full. We need to stop seeing the church as a failure unable to live up to our unrealistic expectations, and ask ourselves how the Holy Spirit is moving in the midst of our complicated, imperfect congregations. For it is in these complicated, imperfect congregation that we can best hear the words of the prophet Isaiah:

For thus hath the Lord said unto me,

Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.