John Archibald’s “Shaking the Gates of Hell” and public theology (Review)

In his debut memoir, Shaking the Gates of Hell, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist John Archibald subpoenas a piercing indictment on southern Christian culture. His castigation of white evangelicalism, in particular, illuminates how white Christians have not only aided and abetted in the sins of racial and systemic injustice but are, indeed, one of the greatest threats to the Church — and America.

While most reviews characterize Archibald’s reflections as a combination of family and social history, my theological inclinations view his work as public theology. Public theology seeks to engage public discourse with inquiries and questions about the nature, status, and substance of the Christian Church. Upon discovering his deceased father’s sermons, dating back more than five decades, Archibald puts his father, a former Methodist pastor, on what I call “pulpit trial” while guiding his readers through damning moments in American history regarding racial injustice and a person’s right to be — to live, to love.

Christians have not only aided and abetted in the sins of racial and systemic injustice but are, indeed, one of the greatest threats to the Church — and America.

Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter From The Birmingham Jail,” a response to white clergy insinuations that King’s quest for justice in Alabama was “unwise” and “untimely” serves as a prophetic voice and witness to Archibald’s pulpit trial, where he convicts himself, too, with the charges of socialized privilege and cultural power.

“I had read all the inspiring parts of King’s letter…but I read right over the damning parts, those that charged my world like an indictment in the days after my birth. What if? What if…[the letter] charged my family, too?”

While Archibald’s memoir title comes from the voice of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, his criticisms of his father’s sermons, the United States, and the American South seem to juxtapose hell as something more than an otherworldly embodiment of Wesley’s salvific theology. Archibald joins the voices of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and even Malcolm X in defining America as hell on earth. Concluding that certain pressures prevented his father from finding the “words to shake the status quo of segregation, to shake the gates of hell.”

After King’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 3, 1968, Harry Belafonte recalled a conversation where King, the apostle of hope, portrayed a pessimistic, hopeless view about progress in America: “We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know we will win, but I have come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house.” When Belafonte asked King what the solution was to this incendiary problem, King said, “Let us not stand by and let the house burn.” The fiery, white nationalist attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, is a clear indication that after fifty-three years of King’s death, America is still burning, still on fire.

Archibald’s reflections highlight how complicity and silence, even from people of “goodwill,” like his parents, perpetuate America’s hellish existence.

If the people of America are “tied in a single garment of destiny,” as King once said, then Archibald reveals how demons and ghosts, both past and present, have disfigured God’s image and upheld incendiary idolatry. His memory, however, serves to tell places like Alabama and Georgia that it is not the job of Black people to save white people from history’s demons and white supremacy’s ghosts. No, it is the job of white people to accept the responsibility of their ancestors, elders, and parents’ sins, in hopes that the South — and thus America — might be rescued and redeemed from the wicked residue of its ruin.

If the people of America are “tied in a single garment of destiny,” as King once said, then Archibald reveals how demons and ghosts, both past and present, have disfigured God’s image and upheld incendiary idolatry.

It is often bewildering how some white evangelicals believe themselves to be “born in sin and shaped in iniquity” because of Adam and Eve yet, for some grave reason, cannot seem to repent for the sins of their slave-whipping, hood-wearing, pulpit-preaching Karens and Steves. Even today, many embrace these sins of history, like the Confederacy, as holy grail.

If the American South is to get free from the iconographies and ideals of the Lost Cause, and disfigure the shape of racism and white supremacy in the United States, then more white people, Christians and otherwise, must do what Archibald does in this memoir: shake the gates of hell, which includes the Church, in hopes of delivering us from evil.

White evangelicals and southerners must muster enough courage, integrity, and strength to deny themselves, take up the Cross of justice, and shake the gates that have had them bound for centuries.

That’s what Archibald does here: writing about hell while yearning for heaven on earth, knowing he — knowing we — may never see it.

While Archibald may never call himself a prophet, his debut memoir is indeed prophetic — a cornerstone of public theology.