Podcast: The Remarkable Legacy of Francis Grimké (Drew Martin)

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Remarkable Impact of an Overlooked American Theologian

In this episode, Drew Martin reviews the life and ministry of Francis Grimké. Drew outlines Grimké’s lasting impact on American christian theology and how he exemplified a grounded, well-balanced minister and civil rights activist in a way that we can still learn from today.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

• Why Is Francis Grimké So Remarkable?
• A Brief Biography
• Grimké and Frederick Douglass
• Grimké’s Impact on the Evangelical Church in America
• Balancing Gospel Ministry and Civil Rights Advocacy
• An Untold Story
• A Question for Grimké

Matt Tully
Drew Martin serves as associate professor of systematic theology at Covenant Theological Seminary. He’s also the author of Grimké on the Christian Life: Christian Vitality for the Church and World from Crossway. Drew, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Drew Martin
Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
In the preface to this new book that you’ve written, you write that this man, Francis Grimké, is one of the most underappreciated figures of American religious history. Before explaining why you think that Grimké was so important, before you even really tell us who Grimké was, because my guess is that most of our listeners have maybe never heard that name before, or maybe they have recently, but they’re just kind of vaguely familiar with him, I wonder if you can start by telling us why you think he is so unfamiliar to most of us.

Drew Martin
That’s a good question, and it’s one that’s hard to answer certainly. It requires some speculation. But if we’re open to some speculation, it does raise some questions for us as to how American religious history has been told. And I can think of at least two factors that might impact how we remember him or how we fail to remember him. One is we just in general have not always emphasized the role of minority voices in the telling of American religious history. And fortunately, over the last few decades, that problem has begun to be addressed, and a lot of work has gone into recovering many of those voices. And so certainly, that’s probably a factor. But another factor might be that Grimké doesn’t fit into a box very easily. When historians tell stories, they like to have categories that make things easy to remember.

Matt Tully
And maybe it’s not always a sinister motive, like you said. It’s a simple pedagogical dynamic of we’re trying to make this accessible for someone who’s just learning.

Drew Martin
Sure. Anyone who’s ever been in a classroom at almost any level has probably experienced something like this, where you’re trying to take topic and communicate it in a way that’s understandable and digestible for your audience. And then when you do that, you take shortcuts and you use categories. And the good thing about that is it makes for easy narratives and stories that are memorable and people can digest them and take them away. The downside is that every now and then, if there are figures that don’t fit into the boxes, they get left out of the story. And so because Grimké really does not fit into an easy box, I think it’s likely that that’s been a factor in why people don’t remember him today.

Matt Tully
So if you had to boil down just one or two things about Grimké that make him so remarkable (and we’re going to unpack a lot of this), what would be your summary statement of why he is a figure worth reclaiming, so to speak from, the recesses of history?

Drew Martin
The first three words that come to mind there are his brilliance, his spiritual maturity, and his timeliness. He grew up enslaved, and after the Civil War he was freed, and he began going to some schools. And as he did so, it was quickly very obvious that he was very bright, and so he was sent up north to study academically. And so that trajectory just carries right through his formal education experience. His seminary professors make note of how bright he is. He’s just a brilliant person and extraordinarily so. But smart people don’t necessarily make for people we should listen to. In addition to being brilliant, he was also very spiritually mature, and that’s something that you see exhibited at a very early age. You read in some memoirs that his brother writes about the spiritual influence of their mother on them, and then some experiences he had in church. And that carries right through as well into his ministry. He’s steady, and he goes through a lot, and in spite of going through a lot, he’s able to maintain a balanced perspective on things. And that kind of leads into the third point, just that he understood the moment that he was living and the time that he was living in very well. He was able to use his brilliance and spiritual maturity to address very complicated situations on the ground in the church and in American society in a way that sets him apart.

05:04 - A Brief Biography

Matt Tully
What are some of the basics that we should know about—who he was, when he was born, and where he was born?

Drew Martin
Sure. He was born in 1850, and as I said before, he was born enslaved on a plantation just outside of Charleston, South Carolina. His mother was Nancy Weston, who was a biracial slave. His father was the owner of the plantation, and so inherits his father’s name. But his mother’s clearly his most significant influence growing up, both in the home but also spiritually, as I said a moment ago.

Matt Tully
What do we know about his parents? What do we know about their relationship and even the dynamic that he had with his biological father?

Drew Martin
That’s a tricky one. We know a few things from Archibald’s (his brother) memoirs. Interestingly, Francis himself doesn’t write very much about that, so we don’t know very much from him, at least not in the materials that I’ve looked at. So we just don’t know a lot about him. Some of that you have to reconstruct based on how relationships between plantation owners and the mistresses that they took, and usually those stories don’t look very good.

Matt Tully
Because that was a pretty common dynamic on some of these plantations.

Drew Martin
That was. There’s one historian, the last name’s Ferry, who wrote a really good dissertation on Francis Grimké in the 1970s, and he talks about how Nancy has a pretty significant role on the plantation. She’s in charge of many of the aspects of the daily running of things. And at the same time, they don’t live in the big house. They live down in the slaves’ quarters. And so not everything might be as bad as it could have been, but many parts of it clearly we’re pretty bad. And then one thing that changes is that Henry dies, and as a result of that, there had been a time where they actually were able to live in Charleston. He had given them quite a bit of freedom, but then, through a series of circumstances that take place, another family member essentially acquires the boys as his slaves, and then their life becomes very bad. And so the interesting for Francis is his life really does go up and down, living on a plantation early, and then later in some of his adolescent years living in the city of Charleston itself with some degree of freedom, but then back a slave. And those back a slave years right before the Civil War go really, really badly. The way he’s treated is very, very harsh. It’s really hard to even read because of just the harshness of the situation that he experienced.

Matt Tully
You mentioned the Civil War. Essentially, some of Grimké’s key formative years were during the Civil War as a young adult, as a young man, living in Charleston. Again, a major location when it comes to the history of the Civil War. What do we know about the impact that the war had on him and his family? Did he ever write about his thoughts on what happened?

Drew Martin
That’s another interesting question. And again, one of the things about Francis is that he doesn’t in his writings leave us, at least those that are collected in his Stray Thoughts and Meditations, with many of his reflections on his childhood. He’s just very silent about those things. We get a little bit more from the things that Archibald writes about himself, so that’s an interesting difference between the two brothers. But what we do know is that during the early years of the Civil War, one of the things that happens is he’s trying to escape from a very bad master. And that leads to quite a few times where he’s captured and then beaten, and it does seem as if those experiences, which by at least one account he endured pretty stoically, you might make the case did leave a mark on him. He just goes through some really, really hard things as a child. Whereas for some that might break people, it seems like his resilience through those things gave him a strength to face later events in his life. So you’re reconstructing some of that detail based on not a lot of things that he says about himself, but I do think if you look at all the sources together, you are able to reconstruct at least some of that.

Matt Tully
And what do we know about his Christian faith as a boy or as a young teen?

Drew Martin
As a young teen in Charleston, he’s going to a Presbyterian church. They have a ministry where they’re caring for children in the community, And so we know that’s a big part of things. We know from Archibald’s memoirs that their mother prayed with them and taught them the Bible, and that was a very significant, probably the most significant, influence on him. So he has things within his own home, but he also has the benefit of seeing from an early age what a good church can look like—one that actually cares for people and reaches out and tries to gather people in in order to teach them about who God is.

Matt Tully
After the war, Grimké moved up north and started to attend school. What did he study, and where was he studying?

Drew Martin
After the war, the first place that he goes to study is Lincoln College, and he does very well there. He ends up becoming the valedictorian of his graduating class. He has a period of time where he thinks he might do law school, and so he briefly attends law school. He realizes that’s not for him, and he ultimately ends up at Princeton Theological Seminary to study divinity.

Matt Tully
Princeton is in the north, and so he was obviously allowed to be enrolled there, but what would it have been like for him to be enrolled at Princeton at that time? Would he have been accepted by his classmates and professors? Was there segregation happening at that time at Princeton?

Drew Martin
The short answer is yes, there certainly was segregation happening there at that time. And at the same time, in the early years when he first arrives, there’s a bit of an unusual inclusion that they do experience, and we get some of the story from some of the things that Matthew Anderson writes in a book where he talks about their Princeton experience. Matthew Anderson was another colleague of Grimké’s, and he ends up pastoring a church in Philly called Berean Presbyterian Church. And there are several other African American students who are there at Princeton. When Grimké and his colleagues first arrived, they’re actually able to live in the dorms alongside the other White students. And so while, of course, given the time in which they are, there are many ways in which they’re treated differently, there’s at least a level of formal inclusion in the life of the seminary. And one of the things that’s interesting is later on there is a trajectory of less inclusion of African American students at the seminary. And Matthew Anderson records that there’s a time where students are no longer living in the dorms.

Matt Tully
That’s such a tricky thing about the way history works sometimes is it’s not always a linear progression or progress. Sometimes there are these ups and downs and backtracking.

Drew Martin
That’s right. So things ebb and flow, and they get better and worse. And I think it’s always good to remember that. Especially if you’re living in a hard time, there’s a temptation to think, Well, things are just getting harder, and they’re always going to get harder. Other times, when you’re living in a good time, you can become overly optimistic because things are good and they’re just going to get better. And I think Grimké’s story is a helpful reminder that things sometimes go up and down. And certainly, that was the case in terms of his experience as a Black student at Princeton Seminary.

Matt Tully
So while he’s at Princeton, he comes into contact with both Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield, and they both speak highly of him as a student. Can we speak a little bit about their relationship? What do we know about how much they knew of him? Did he take classes with them? Was there any kind of relationship there?

Drew Martin
He was there at the same time, and so we know from Charles Hodge’s own pen that he refers to him as one of the brightest amongst his students. The recollection that we have from Warfield comes from a letter written by one of his family members recalling that B. B. Warfield was talking about Grimké and had some very positive things to say about him. And that was memorable enough that he included it in a letter. So it seems that not only when he was there but in the years after he continued to leave an imprint on people such that they’re still talking about him after he’s gone.

Matt Tully
But we maybe don’t know a lot about the details.

Drew Martin
No, we don’t have a lot of the details of what his classroom experience was like. But there’s a really good project, if people are interested in doing some more work on these folks, Matthew Anderson has a really wonderful book that narrates some of the classroom experiences. And I think a good project would be to look at not just Grimké but some of his other colleagues and to tell that story. So if there’s anybody out there who is looking for a good academic project to work on, I think there’s actually lots that could be done.

Matt Tully
Does Princeton have archives where they might have student records that go back that far?

Drew Martin
There are those archives, and then you have other collections. For Grimké, if you go to Howard University, there’s this incredible trove of things there on him particularly. But yes, Princeton does have archives. And then there’s also some things that end up at Westminster Seminary, but Princeton Seminary also has some as well.

Matt Tully
After school he goes and becomes a pastor at a church. Tell us a little bit about what his first pastorate looked like.

Drew Martin
Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church has an interesting history of its own. You have some early pastors who are really gifted in reaching the African American community that’s in the city of Washington, DC, broadly. And then, as time goes on, it seems like Fifteenth Street becomes more and more a church where you have some upwardly mobile and very successful African American leaders, and so that’s a lot of who’s at his church. And one of the really interesting things when you start reading the sermons and also some of the things that he records in various places in his notebooks and if you dig into the archives, one of the things that he’s always wanting to do is to challenge those folks in his congregation to see the many gifts that they have been given from the Lord and then to use them boldly. And so he does not show favoritism to people in his congregation because of their high status. He’s constantly challenging people. If you’ve ever been a minister in a church, you know that it’s a difficult thing to challenge people.

Matt Tully
People who are paying your salary, to some extent.

Drew Martin
That’s right. And he’s not afraid to do that. "You need to be in church regularly, and you need to be participating in the things that we do, and this is what it looks like to live as a Christian." And he doesn’t seem like he’s very hesitant to tell even these pretty successful folks that they need to be doing those things.

15:47 - Grimké and Frederick Douglass

Matt Tully
That boldness seems to characterize his life. There was a confidence in the Scriptures, confidence in what he was reading there, and he was willing to say that to others. We’ll come back to that in some of his early civil rights actions. A couple other things that I thought were really interesting are that he was good friends with Frederick Douglass and actually officiated his wedding to a White woman, which at the time would’ve been quite controversial, to say the least. Can you remind us who Frederick Douglass was, and what do we know about their relationship?

Drew Martin
Sure. Well, of course Frederick Douglass, one of the great workers for abolition and then also for rights for African Americans in our country.

Matt Tully
Douglass famously was kind of friends with Abraham Lincoln and spent a lot of time with him at the White House, and he was almost a counselor to Lincoln, in some ways, throughout the war.

Drew Martin
That’s right. Douglass would regularly attend Fifteenth Street Church, so it seems that one of the ways they got to know each other was through his participation in the ministry of the church. But also it does seem as if they are, because of proximity in interacting with each other in their homes, we know that when Douglass was married (this is his second marriage after his first wife died), that that took place in the Grimké home. And that may have been partially because they wanted to avoid having a big public event. But it also testifies to the fact that if they’re not going to have a big public event, there is one person that he trusts well enough to help him to do this well.

Matt Tully
Would this have been a secret wedding? Was it unlawful for him to marry a White woman at the time? Or was it just that it could have caused trouble for them?

Drew Martin
In the District of Columbia, it was not unlawful at the time. While I’m not sure if I would call it a secret wedding, it was definitely not a publicly announced wedding—not even to the Douglass children.

Matt Tully
Wow. That’s a whole other level to the story, I guess.

Drew Martin
Yeah. And you can understand why, because immediately after they are married, it’s explodes in the press, both in White periodicals and Black periodicals. And almost no one thinks this marriage is a good idea. And so you can see why Douglass would’ve wanted to, for his own sake, his wife’s sake, and for various other reasons, wanted to keep that out of the public eye.

18:03 - Grimké’s Impact on the Evangelical Church in America

Matt Tully
Wow. Wow. A couple other things and then we’ll get to Grimké’s legacy and the significance for us as we think about the history of the evangelical church in America. It’s interesting to read that Grimké also served on the board of Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, DC that still exists today and is a really significant institution. And then he also helped to found the NAACP. So help us understand what his involvement was in some of these early civil rights activities, and how we should view him in light of that.

Drew Martin
One of the first things to stay here is that he saw his role first and foremost as a pastor, and that shaped his priorities. He was very careful not to allow anything that he’s doing because of his passion for social activism to cause him to be unable to carry out his role as a pastor.
So he’s regularly preaching, he’s regularly teaching; and at the same time, he just has an incredible level of energy to attend to other things. So on the one hand, he is regularly teaching and recording in his writings statements about how it’s important not to neglect the ministry, not to devote your attention to other things. And in his own life, he even turns down opportunities. He was offered the role of president of Howard University, for example, along with a number of other opportunities. W. E. B. Du Bois is recruiting him in relation to the NAACP and wants him to be in the group of people that is sort of founding the organization. And Grimké works hard so that his brother, who’s an attorney, can be in that role rather than himself as a pastor. So you see a lot of ways in which he is really working hard to make sure that his role as a pastor is not being neglected. And at the same time, as you say, he’s involved in quite a few different organizations, institutions, and movements related to social activism. If I’m not mistaken, he is actually, to this day, the longest serving member of the board of trustees at Howard University. So he was very dedicated in his role there. He’s also involved in a whole litany of different institutes and organizations mostly related to education but also to other things related to service in the African American community. He’s involved in the Hampton Institute. He is part of this Afro-American Council. You could go on and on and list all of the different things that he’s involved in. But the story of his involvement in the formation of the NAACP is I think one of the most interesting and undertold parts of not just his own story but also the NAACP story. I talk about this in a book that I’ve written on Francis Grimké, so I’ll leave it to folks to go there if they’re interested in the deeper story. But there is one little anecdote that I like to talk about, which is that there are a series of meetings that take place in the years leading up to the formation of the NAACP. And at that time, there’s actually a factional divide between those who follow W. E. B. Du Bois on the one hand and Booker T. Washington on the other.

Matt Tully
What was the ideological difference there between the two of them?

Drew Martin
I think for Du Bois and also Grimké there’s a sense that that Booker T. Washington is too willing to accommodate to White society in some ways. But not just that, that he also is almost willing to do or say anything in order to get money for his organization. Basically, they see him as too willing to concede too much. And that is, of course, a complicated subject. And at any rate, it’s that particular perspective that sort of wins out in the formation of the NAACP. And that story’s more complicated than the way I’ve just told it. So folks should certainly go into the details there. I don’t want to give that part of the story short shrift. At any rate, those two figures are both writing Francis letters in the lead up to some meetings where all of this falls out. And it’s interesting to read those letters. Du Bois considers Grimké one of a handful of people who are sort of very supportive and influential on his side, and also needed in order for his influence to carry the day. And so he sends him some really funny advice: "Here are the five positions, here are the people and where they line up, and here’s how we should act in the meeting in order to get what we need to get done."

Matt Tully
He’s kind of giving him talking points?

Drew Martin
Not just talking points but even strategy advice for how the meeting’s going to go. That’s interesting in its own right, but one of the things you take from that is that Du Bois, for whatever reason, though he has some very different social and especially theological religious views from Grimké (he was not very Orthodox in his views of Christianity), he sees Grimké’s involvement as essential to the success of this movement that will eventually become the NAACP. And so Grimké is a huge part of that story. But when you read the standard accounts of the early years of the NAACP, he is very rarely part of that story. Or if he is, he’s a minor footnote. But he’s involved in the center of the NAACP’s work, not just in its formation but right on to the end of his life. Towards the end of his life, Du Bois ends up actually resigning from the magazine of the NAACP, and in the weeks in which he is resigning, he and Grimké are exchanging letters. And the issue that finally leads him to resign is an issue on which he and Grimké take different positions. And so Grimké’s influence, you might make the case, is actually closer to the center of the NAACP in the 1930s than Du Bois’s is even.

Matt Tully
So what do you make of the fact that Grimké’s voice is not really part of the story, as told by the NAACP? Do you think it’s related to his Christian convictions?

Drew Martin
I think it might be. In terms of how the story is told, one contributing factor may be that Grimké doesn’t fit the boxes that people want when you tell that story. Usually the story of the NAACP is told by those who like it or those who don’t like it, and those who like conservative orthodox Christianity or those who don’t like it. And so because Grimké is a pretty orthodox Christian figure on the one hand but a very progressive figure in relation to his views on race and other things, he isn’t, from the perspective of today, a person who easily fits into the boxes that usually are informing the way that you talk about something like the NAACP. So I wonder whether or not it’s because he’s not "conservative" or "liberal"—he’s something else.

24:59 - Balancing Gospel Ministry and Civil Rights Advocacy

Matt Tully
So it’s easier just to leave him out. In your book there was one quote that I thought was really interesting. You write, "Grimké distinguished between preaching the gospel"—which as you’ve said, he held very highly; that was a central part of his calling as a pastor— "and fighting race prejudice. But he did not separate the two." So he distinguished them, but didn’t separate them. "He believed in racial pride and solidarity, but also racial humility. He called racists to repent, and he willingly offered forgiveness and reconciliation." I just think he exemplified, as you said, this perhaps category-breaking both/and approach when it came to his work as a gospel minister and as an advocate for civil rights. And so how do you think about that legacy, and how might we as Christians today learn from his example?

Drew Martin
Well, I think one of the things in relation to his legacy is that it’s valuable to recover wise leaders who’ve been able to negotiate these sorts of things carefully and with nuance over many years and in complicated circumstances. And so this is a person who has done this well, and in his own day, he was recognized for having done this well. So I think recovering the legacy and then just learning about how people did these things is something that’s really important. I’ll just say one more thing about that and then I’ll add something else. But in relation to this, I remember reading one historian’s work on the early Civil Rights Movement, and in that book (that’s Gary Dorrien), he talks about all of these different factions. And one of the things that’s really interesting is that Grimké, if you read his letters, is interacting with people in all of these different groups. They’re writing to him. He’s writing them. And so he clearly has very strong orthodox Christian convictions that do not allow him to collaborate in every way with many of those figures. And at the same time, there are some ways in which he can collaborate with most of them. And you see him figuring out how to form alliances where he can but also being wise about where he can’t.

Matt Tully
That’s such an interesting thing because oftentimes we think of it as being a binary choice. It’s either we can fully affirm what somebody’s doing and partner with them in that, or we need to completely separate from them. And so we either compromise, perhaps, to do the former or we just separate and isolate ourselves to do the latter. But you’re kind of saying there was a way that he would not compromise his theological convictions, and yet found a way to partner together—sometimes in limited ways, perhaps.

Drew Martin
I think that’s exactly right. And the fear that sometimes people might raise about that kind of approach is that it just leads to sort of a mushy middle. And one of the things that I think is most interesting about Grimké is that if there’s one thing you can’t call him, it’s mushy—in any direction. He’s just very provocative. He’s never unwilling to speak the truth in a way that might run the risk of offense. He is willing to say whatever needs to be said. So it’s not mushy, but he has such clear principles in his mind that he is able to partner in ways that make sense according to those various principles. And I think there are very few people that I’ve spent a lot of time with as historical figures who have the kind of clear wisdom expressed over a long period of time in influential ways that he had. So that’s the first thing I was going to say. I think the other thing to say in addition to that, just learning from his life piece, is that one of the principles he holds is this ability to distinguish but not separate. And he actually applies this in relation to a number of different categories, but in relation to the gospel, one of the things that’s really interesting about him is that he very clearly distinguishes the preaching of the gospel from the preaching of God’s law. So the law are commands; those are things that we’re to do; this is how we’re to live; God has revealed these things in the creation itself and also in Scripture, and so we can know how we should live from those places, and we’re obligated to do so. And you can preach from those things. Where God has revealed his law in Scripture, we should preach those commands. But we shouldn’t confuse that with the preaching of the gospel in the sense of everything pointing to the life and the death and the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. And so very central to him is the preaching of the gospel in that sense, which he uses various terms for: the old gospel or the simple gospel. But we might call it preaching the gospel narrowly. But he also has in his mind that that preaching of the gospel can’t be disconnected from the preaching of God’s law, because it’s the law that leads to conviction of sin on the one hand, and it’s also for the Christian who knows Christ and possesses the Holy Spirit. It’s that same moral law that teaches us how to live. And so because he wants to distinguish those things but also not disconnect them, he can also speak of the gospel in a second sense, as the gospel broadly, in a way that includes the preaching of both the law and the gospel in its narrowest sense. And so that’s just one example of his ability to distinguish without separating. Another example would be when it comes to what he variously called "sacred things" and "secular things" or "temporal things" and "eternal things" or "material things" and "spiritual things." He used a lot of terms to talk about these sort of two sets of things. There’s a real temptation for Christians today to either make the mistake of failing to distinguish between these things, as if bodies and souls can’t be distinguished and so forth, or as if heaven and earth can’t be distinguished. You could probably think of other examples. There is a tendency in some circles to forget those distinctions. In the good desire to talk about material things, we forget that we also need to hang on to spiritual things. So some people just want to talk about one, or even maybe worse than that, to collapse them into the same categories if they’re all the same thing. So Grimké never makes those mistakes. But he also always wants to talk about all of those things and not to separate them. He always wants to hang on to them all. And so while he always is talking about the distinction, he’s always talking about both. He refuses to separate. And so you have this guy who preaches these sermons on the spiritual mission of the church and how we just need to preach the gospel and do evangelism and so forth. And at the same time, this is the same figure who’s, on his own time, involved in the formation of the NAACP, or even, with his wife, hosting an art club in their home on Sunday nights, which is one of my favorite little obscure tidbits. They have a weekly art club in their home. They listen to music. They talk about visual art. They sing together. It’s a really interesting thing about him. So you have this pastor who thinks that the preaching of the gospel and the ministry of the church as an institution and the saving of souls is the most important thing who is also deeply committed to living faithfully in this world as a material creature.

32:12 - An Untold Story

Matt Tully
You obviously have spent a lot of time with Grimké—reading him, reading about him—what was it, Drew, that first connected you to Grimké? Where did you first hear his story? How did you decide to actually really dig into his life?

Drew Martin
I think I first heard about his story during my PhD years when I was studying at Vanderbilt University. One of the blessings of studying there was that there was a very significant interest in African American religious history in general. On the other hand, I didn’t find that I was being exposed to the full range of that, even there at a place like Vanderbilt that really wanted to explore those things. And so as a Presbyterian pastor, I was just interested in my own denomination’s story. And so I thought, Well, I should probably inform myself as to who the Black Presbyterians were and and what they said. And fortunately, there are a number of folks who’ve been doing good work on Grimké in various different dictionary articles and journal articles. I think Mark Noll has done a lot with this and Sean Lucas. If I start naming names, I’ll forget to name all the names. People that have written kind endorsements of this book have been doing a lot of work on this topic for a long time. And then I think the thing that really got me interested in him is that after PhD work I was working to plant a PCA church in Charlotte, North Carolina. And we just felt like it was very important for us, as we were moving into a predominantly Black community and we have two pastors, myself and another co-pastor, Charles McKnight, who is African American, and we have a diverse launch team—we felt like it was important to be able to give people theologians to read who reflected the diversity of our congregation to the extent that we can. And even more than that, just to be able to understand that Black Presbyterian history is a rich history. We were literally planning the church in the neighborhood where there was a historically Black college, Johnson C Smith University, that was the Black Presbyterian School preparing people for ministry. And so we just wanted to know that history for ourselves and to be able to help the members of our church to be able to know that history for themselves as well. And Francis Grimké is one of the easiest people, actually, to learn about and to read because Carter Woodson, who’s famously associated with the creation of Black History Month, is the one who collected his works. There are four volumes of those works that you can access online. So it’s just really easy to read him.

Matt Tully
He’s very accessible.

Drew Martin
Yeah, very accessible. And that got us interested. And then you start reading him and you realize this is a person who is uniquely gifted in connecting his faith to his life in the world and to the problems that he’s facing in American society. And he’s doing that in a way that hangs on to the truth of the Bible but is also engaging in the world in a thoughtful and live way. And so that general interest led to a realization that this is someone who I might really want to learn from if I’m going to be able to pastor in this community well.

Matt Tully
It’s so cool to see that even the connection in Charleston to Grimké’s own personal history.

Drew Martin
That’s true.

35:26 - A Question for Grimké

Matt Tully
If you could sit down with Grimké today over a meal and have a conversation with him, what would your first question for him be?

Drew Martin
Oh, that’s a good question. I think I might ask him, Is there anything that you have changed your mind about over time? As you’ve read the Bible more and as you live life more, what have you learned? And maybe it might not be something that you’ve completely flip flopped on, but what is something that you now would talk about with a different nuance or you’d have a slightly different take on it? I would like to hear him say that in his own words. As a historian and having read almost everything that he’s written, I have some theories about what his answers might be.

Matt Tully
So there are hints of shifts he might have had?

Drew Martin
I think so, but I’d like to hear from him what they were so that I’m not just trying to reconstruct that as a historian. I’d like to hear from him what he’s learned over the years.

Matt Tully
At the risk of going further than what the evidence actually affords us, what would be a theory of yours based on his writings that you think might be true, that you might hear from him during that dinner?

Drew Martin
Well, I think one thing that he’s wrestling with throughout his ministry is this question of how do I center on the gospel and how do I primarily wear my pastor’s hat, etc. on the one hand, and how do I address these very important matters of social concern on the other without confusing those projects?

Matt Tully
That sounds like a question that many pastors probably today feel in different ways.

Drew Martin
It’s just really a difficult thing to know how to do. For example, in the 1928 presidential election, he records these reflections on how he, in his own mind, supports one candidate over the other. And he has all the reasons why, but he also records why it’s inappropriate for churches to become political activist centers, advocating for one party or the other.

Matt Tully
So he’s not doing that from the pulpit?

Drew Martin
He’s not doing that from the pulpit, though he certainly has an opinion about it. He tells us in his notebook what the opinion is, but he is not advocating for that from the pulpit. And so he has this sensibility that there is a distinction between morality, or even Christian morality, and his personal convictions about it on the one hand, and the application of that to politics on the other. And at the same time, he recognizes that you can’t separate those things out fully. And so just watching him try to negotiate that tension over the years, wearing the different hats that he does, it does seem as if there are times where he is more open to directly applying his faith to something politically, and there are other times where he is more careful about it. And it would be interesting to know in which of those occasions is there a principle and in which of those occasions is it him just being inconsistent? Are there cases in which he’s changed his mind? I explore that at some length in the book that I’ve written, and I have some theories about it, but I’d always just like to be able to ask someone.

Matt Tully
Absolutely. Drew, thank you so much for introducing us, I’m sure many of us, to Francis Grimké for the first time, a really incredible voice who’s got so much to offer Christians today as we read him. And as you said, his works are available online for free, which is just an amazing resource. And then your book is also a wonderful introduction to his life and his ministry. Thank you.

Drew Martin
It’s a joy to have the conversation with you, and I’m glad that people are talking about Francis Grimké.

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