Divine Calling: A Phenix City Story

Hugh Bentley

    A voice speaks to Abraham with such authority that he feels obliged to kill his only son. Moses is called by a talking bush. Ezekiel sees a psychedelic vision of wheels within wheels. Amos is sheep herding when a phantom voice commands him to speak truth to power. Jacob wrestles with an angel. Elisha is recruited by Elijah and David by Samuel, who himself hears a disembodied voice. Jesus calls the disciples with irresistible authority to fish for folks. Jonah’s call is enforced by a great fish. Jeremiah can't speak until God touches his mouth. And Paul is struck blind.

     This last looms largest in the Baptist tradition where I was raised and is the paradigm for “once saved, always saved.” I felt social pressure to “come on down,” and was dipped at age nine, and indeed I did "believe" at the time, which was all I was asked to do, but I never felt transformed. If I’d waited for an experience like Paul’s, I’d still be waiting. Men were “called” to the ministry and ordained in front of the congregation. I assumed they, at least, had heard something more remarkable than I had ever been blessed with.

     So, against this tradition, when I was asked in a recent discussion group, “What ministry has God called you to?” my only honest answer was, “I can't say I’ve ever had the honor.” 

     I am disappointed by this, much as I am disappointed that I’ve never seen a ghost or had verifiable ESP. I have felt a spooky presence in an old house that my wife believed was haunted, and I have made some amazing guesses, but they don’t occur regularly, and a stopped clock is right twice a day. This sort of skepticism is boring, I know. I have avoided lots of false positives, but maybe at the expense of missing rare and glorious true ones. I certainly miss out on spooky fun. To hear a creak and feel draft in an old house and attribute it to night cooling may be boring, but I seem to be programmed to react that way. No Russell’s teapots for me.

     But back to divine calling, I have felt inexplicable urges, moments of courage and resolve, even a few crazy compulsions—including the compulsion to write about religion. Some of these have been good as I understand good. Some turned out amazingly well, others the opposite. Some I have embraced, some resisted. But none of my urges had a divine mint-mark. To the best of my judgement, the creator of the universe has never cut me personal orders. 

     The last paragraph may be silly, even grandiose. Of course, I’m no prophet. Nobody else in the discussion group heard the question in those terms. Everybody else answered, not “What ministry has God called you to?“ but “What ministry do you feel called to?” Divine mint-marks never came up. It was all about what they felt inclined to do. I submit that this is a vastly different question—about personal feelings, not about a divine intervention.

     I see a vast gulf, despite the similarity in wording, between being called and feeling called. The first is an objective statement, the second a subjective one. The first transcends human authority and reason, the second is imbedded in it. If you believe God truly calls you to do something, even if it seems wrong, you're obliged to do it, but if you merely feel called to do something that seems wrong, maybe you’d better stop and reconsider. People have felt called to do terrible things. 
     The poster boy for this Abraham, celebrated for obeying God’s call to murder his son. If indeed God has called him, Abraham has no choice but to take Isaac on a death march, but if he merely feels called by God, he may need to be locked up. I think we can agree that most parents who feel divinely called to barbecue their children and do so are criminally insane.

     Maybe, in spite of being old enough to know better, I am too invested in a mythological wonder—a literal participation in Olympian imagery—and ought to slap myself and get over it.  I haven’t believed since I was a child in a white-bearded lighting God on a throne above the clouds, but the Old Man still randomly corrupts my understanding when I hear the G-word. This may predispose me to avoid affixing the God-label to personal feelings. Certainly, I don’t see my feelings as God’s will in the sense that those who resist them are “enemies of God." I imagine I might be insane if I did.

     I could sit here on a semantic high horse, but I once met a man who was called, or believed he was anyway. Hugh Bentley's calling to confront God’s enemies achieved an all-but miracle. 

     In 1976, I moved to Phenix City, Alabama, to teach English and was drawn into local history. I did the first academic research into Horace King, the now-famous slave bridge builder, and restored the derelict house of a 19th century mayor. With the backing of Lenora and Joe Smith, I co-founded a Historic Preservation Society. I addressed the Phenix City centennial celebration as historian and received a certificate (signed by George Wallace himself) for documenting six National Register Historic Districts. All this meant hours of thumbing through dusty books in the basement of the Russell County Courthouse. One memorable discovery was a book of local incorporations, a slender volume with blank pages. In 1907, Phenix City, Alabama, was a working-class town across the river from Columbus, Georgia.

     If memory serves, that year there were some fifteen sudden incorporations of wholesale liquor dealerships in the town of four thousand. The explanation is simple. Georgia passed prohibition in 1907, but Alabama was still wet. Nearly every store at on the Alabama side of the two river bridges must have sold booze to Georgia. Stories abound about the “whisky bank” near the Dillingham Street bridge, a creek that caught fire when the state police raided the warehouse and broke up whisky barrels. The influence of those Georgia incorporations was irresistible. By the time Alabama went dry in 1908, bootleggers had bought the county, and for almost half a century (like the "honest" politician in the saying), it stayed bought. It was Sin City.

     According Joe Smith, a state senator and lawyer who grew up in Phenix City, the bootleggers kept a low profile until WWII, but he returned from Europe to wide-open streets of drugs, prostitution, gambling, and extortion enforced by murder. Law enforcement was paid off all the way up to the state attorney general. Fleecing soldiers from Fort Benning across the river, the “redneck mafia” used its illegal millions—equivalent to a billion dollars a year adjusted for inflation—to buy or intimidate local opposition. They contributing “generously” to Phenix City churches and schools. Imagine a billion dirty dollars flooding a town of twenty-three thousand.

     So things stood in 1950 when Hugh Bentley, a 41-year-old Baptist Sunday school teacher took on the mob, a little David against Goliath. He and a few brave others founded the Russell Betterment Association, an organization with no membership list but, from what I heard, holding meetings attended by hundreds, a groundswell that threatened the syndicate. In 1952, his house was hit by dynamite, his son blown out of bed, and both of them were beaten for poll watching a few months later, but Bentley persisted. From then on, he knew his name was on a death list.

   Supported by the RBA, Bentley persuaded his friend Albert Patterson, a Phenix City lawyer, to run for state attorney general on an anti-crime platform, pledging to clean up Phenix City. At the time, Alabama was a virtual one-party state, so when Patterson won the Democratic run-off, he was a marked man. A mob assassin—apparently a deputy sheriff—killed him. Joe Smith was on the Democratic committee that nominated Patterson’s son to succeed him, and in 1954 national guard troops imposed martial law, breaking the syndicate. I remember seeing soldiers with rifles on the bridge. A year later Look honored Phenix City as an All-American city.

     In a “This Is Your Life” episode now on YouTube (https://youtu.be/mUBicKVX2KQ), a local minister recalls the beginning of the crusade. He asked Bentley to deliver an anti-crime speech before his congregation, and Bentley paused. It could be dangerous, he said, for himself and for his family. “I asked him if Christ was not crucified,” the minister recalled on television, “if as a Christian he was not able to make some sacrifice for Christ.” Bentley paused, then reached out his hand and said, “I’m willing to pay whatever price it takes.” 

     Here is a moment of Christian calling, but its values transcend one religion. I see them in ancient Stoicism, which calls us to act according to the will of God. The Good is a category superior to good things such as life, wealth, health, and safety. The Stoics called these ordinary goods “preferred indifferents,” nice but not Good. In most circumstances, it's fine to pursue them, but never in defiance of the Good, which is an incarnate trait of God. It’s hard to imagine a clearer choice between good and evil than Hugh Bentley faced in 1950s Sin City.

     Years later, about 1982, I met Hugh Bentley at a meeting of the St. Patrick’s Church Men’s Club, where he showed a film of the “This Is Your Life” episode. I recall a quiet, pleasant old man, not physically imposing, nobody you’d take for a hero. But in the early 1950s he answered a call. This one wasn’t morally questionable like Abraham’s, but a slam-dunk on the the angel's team, a call that hundreds of good people in Phenix City didn't dare to answer. How does one man scrape up the courage to risk his life against murderous odds? A Sunday school teacher against a syndicate?

     Joe Smith, who at the time lived in the house earlier owned by Hugh Bentley, the one that had been dynamited, shared a valuable clue. He told me that Bentley came to him one day and said that he didn’t know if he wanted to sell his house (since repaired) and wouldn’t offer it to anybody else, but he figured that if Joe wanted to buy it, it was God’s will. I was struck by the wording. It makes sense that a man who felt guided by God in a small matter found strength in a great one.