Clarence Jordan: A Radical Pilgrimage in Scorn of the Consequences by Frederick L. Downing

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Reviewed by: Clarence Jordan: A Radical Pilgrimage in Scorn of the Consequences by Frederick L. Downing David Stricklin Clarence Jordan: A Radical Pilgrimage in Scorn of the Consequences. By Frederick L. Downing. Foreword by Walter Brueggemann. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2017. Pp. xviii, 310. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-632-4.) Frederick L. Downing answers two questions in this book, one he articulates and one he does not. The one he does not articulate is the one of greater interest to historians of the American South: How did an ordained Southern Baptist minister who studied agriculture in college, got a Ph.D. in New Testament Greek, and became best known during his lifetime for translating the Gospels and the book of Acts into the folk dialect of the rural American South end up with an FBI file? The answer to that unarticulated question is found in the evidence Downing uses to answer the question he asks more overtly: What about this twentieth-century southern white minister caused him to depart from the behavior of so many of his contemporaries and spend his entire adult life opposing segregation and bigotry? [End Page 1054] The minister was Clarence Jordan, and the quick answer to the question about the FBI file, with myriad implications and spinoffs, is that Jordan (rhymes with burden)—along with his wife, Florence Kroeger Jordan, and some friends, Martin England and Mabel Orr England—founded Koinonia Farm in rural Sumter County, Georgia, in 1942. That act set Jordan on a path of direct and constant confrontation with the white southern racist power structure that kept him occupied until his death in 1969. Koinonia Farm was the manifestation of a dream Jordan and Martin England shared, an interracial, agricultural intentional community in the South. Its purpose was to demonstrate the practical but transformative effects of living in accordance with Jesus's requirements in the Gospels and to point out that segregation was incompatible with those requirements. From Koinonia's beginnings, African Americans and white people worked together, took their meals together, studied the Bible together, and, in many other ways, overturned the racial and class hierarchies that prevailed in the region. They took a great deal of abuse, survived firebombings, and attracted the attention of both the Ku Klux Klan and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. The longer answer to the question about how that happened and what it means for Jordan's place in the roll call of southern religious figures leads Downing into Jordan's religious development and forms the heart of this welcome biography. Jordan's upbringing in Georgia, his Baptist training, his growing awareness of the hypocrisy of church members who tormented African Americans, and his dawning commitment to racial justice and reconciliation as a student occupy almost half of the book. Downing is a professor in philosophy and religious studies, and his expertise is in religious biography. He draws much methodologically from developmental theory, especially the works of Erik Erikson and James Fowler. To a great extent, this book harks back to the days of narrative theology, when writers such as James William McClendon Jr. used life stories to find theological meaning in post-biblical experience, and it must be acknowledged that Downing seems mainly interested in using and celebrating Jordan's courageous behavior to find the saving action of Jesus at work in an often-benighted South. The book is marred by an almost unusable index, and the notes include embarrassing errors. But Downing has found enough previously underused primary material on Jordan and used the secondary literature wisely enough that details of Jordan's life and context emerge that will be of benefit to those who wish to understand the religious and racial landscapes of the South during the middle decades of the twentieth century. David Stricklin Butler Center for Arkansas Studies Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association