c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.)

UNDATED _ In an interview several years ago, the Rev. Billy Graham said that”the race issue,”as he termed it, continued to be America’s most intractable problem.

And so it remains to this day.

Consider our struggle: The nation honors its most eloquent prophet _ the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. _ while threatening to undermine his legacy. We celebrate the history of black achievement while debating policies that may limit future achievement.

To paraphrase James the apostle, both blessing and cursing proceed from the nation’s collective mouth. Such hypocrisy, James says, makes us unstable in all our ways.

Little wonder, then, that journalist Tom Wicker felt compelled to chronicle our national dilemma in a new book,”Tragic Failure: Integration in America”(William Morrow). It documents in painful detail the country’s studied abandonment of the commitments it made in the 1960s that have led to the entrenched social apartheid of the 1990s.

Moreover, Wicker offers what one reviewer described as”a daring new approach to make our society more responsive to the not-rich and the not-powerful.” Left unsaid, however, is the story of the Christian church’s contribution to the current state of affairs. Nor does Wicker offer any insight into how the church can minister healing to the nation’s wounds.

Yet the church’s role as both cause and potential solution must be understood before any treatise on race relations can be considered completely valid.

Wicker, of course, is the former political columnist whose opinions graced the op-ed page of The New York Times for many years. The author of 14 other books, including”A Time to Die,”which chronicled the rioting at New York’s Attica Prison in 1971, Wicker is a veteran observer of the politics of race.

His reportorial and analytical skills are put to good use in”Tragic Failure,”as he recounts how issues such as poverty, crime, affirmative action and unemployment have become convenient forums within which race _ however thinly veiled _ can be debated in the most venal terms.

Moreover, he notes that recent occupants of the White House _ especially Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton _ have shrewdly crafted their policies to appeal to white, middle-class conservatives, who constitute the majority of the voting populace.

The effect in many cases, according to Wicker, has been a knee-jerk shift to the right in public policy: Giving the voters what they want rather than providing the nation with the well-reasoned, moral leadership it needs.

Meanwhile, the voice of the Christian church has been anything but moral and well-reasoned.

As Thomas Edsall demonstrated in his 1991 book,”Chain Reaction,”self-described born-again Christians constitute a critical mass of the white, middle-class voters on whom conservative Republicans have pinned their hopes. This has given conservative groups like the Christian Coalition the impetus they needed to become power brokers in the political arena.

On the other side of the racial and political divide stand the vast majority of African-Americans, including many Christians who have joined forces with Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam in his attempts to develop a social and political juggernaut of his own.

Thus the stage is set for a racial confrontation that Wicker’s”daring new approach”_ a third political party made up of remnants of FDR’s New Deal _ cannot begin to address.

It is here that the true church, the church within the church, must emerge. For at the core of the church, away from the talking heads which so often damage its witness, are the church’s true believers.

Similar to Edmund Burke’s little platoons, the church’s true believers do the dirty work of the Gospel, fleshing out its principles in the toughest of times.

The Rev. Robert Graetz is a true believer. In 1955, as the white pastor of an all-black church in Montgomery, Ala., the 27-year-old Graetz distinguished himself as the only white minister who participated in the Montgomery bus boycott.

Despite the fact that their home was bombed twice _ along with those of Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy and others _ Graetz, his wife and two young children remained in Montgomery throughout the boycott (and for two years afterward), with Graetz chauffeuring members of his church to and from work.

It is true believers like Robert Graetz who exemplify the real meaning of the Christian Gospel. Theirs is a leadership that is worth following.

MJP END ATCHISON