The Beloved Community - Faith and the Civil Rights Movement (Review)
THE BELOVED COMMUNITY
How Faith Shapes Social Justice From the Civil Rights Movement to Today
By Charles Marsh. Basic Books. 282 pp. $26
By COLMAN MCCARTHY, a former Washington Post columnist who directs the Center for Teaching Peace and teaches nonviolence at five area universities and three high schools.
If faith-shaped beloved communities exist, as theologian Charles Marsh ardently and reverentially argues, one of them surely isn’t the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC ). In mid-November, when reviewers were receiving galleys of what the author calls his “exercise in Christian apologetics, an apologetics of lived experience, cast in historical narrative,” ( p. 217) not much love was on display in the old-line civil rights group. Its leader, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, one of several preachers including Martin Luther King Jr. who founded SCLC in 1957, resigned with this parting uppercut: “For years, deceit, mistrust and a lack of spiritual disciple and truth have eaten away at the core of this once-hallowed organization.” (Washington Post, Nov. 12, ’04) At the SCLC convention the summer before, when the previous president Martin Luther King III quit, the incivility among the civil rights people was so rancorous that cops were summoned to keep God’s peace.
Even without this dismal display of Christian cheeks not being turned, much less brotherhood being riven asunder, Marsh has a difficult case to make that social justice gains since the mid-1950s are faith-shaped. Not for want of trying, and while offering generous portions of well-crafted prose, he comes up short. What exactly does he mean by faith? Providing no precise definition, Marsh apparently assumes a reader will understand the meaning of faith—the Christian kind—and be ready for his “story of how Christian faith gave rise to and sustained the civil rights movement.” (P. 2)
The assumption is overly grand. Is faith the kind that recovering alcoholic George W. Bush, an Episcopalean turned Methodist who seldom attends services, speaks of: “There is only one reason I am in the oval office and not in a bar. I found faith. I found God.” (New York Times, Oct. 26, 2004). Or is it the self-assured faith of Rev. Franklin Graham: “The God of Islam is not the God of Christianity. It’s a different God, and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion.”
Marsh, a liberal-minded professor of religion at the University of Virginia and a thoughtful writer whose earlier works include the valuable “God’s Long Summer,” “The Last Days” and “Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” begins with Martin Luther King Jrs’ taking a pastorate in Montgomery in 1954 for $4200. It’s a well-known story, as told by many biographers from Taylor Branch to Marshall Frady: a young ambitious Baptist minister with no pacifist leanings reluctantly drawn into nonviolent protest against racism. Marsh moves to Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinania, an Americus, Ga., farming commune of white people committed, like the early Christians, to a communal purse and living “the Way of Jesus.” Members in the late 1960s included Millard and Linda Fuller who would go on to found Habitat for Humanity.
In six other chapters Marsh ranges from homageful accountst of Cbrist-centered people who choose to live among the marginalized in places such as Mound Bayou, Miss., Baltimore’s Sandtown, Harlem, Oakland, Calif., and Charlottesville, Va. Marsh, assuredly, is a partisan in full intellectual communion with believers he sees as “bearing witness to the Prince of peace in a violent and hurting world.” (p207). Firmly in the wing of American Protestantism that gets much of its current moral and intellelctual energy from the writings of Stanley Hauerwas, Vincent Harding and The Christian Century and Sojourners magazines, he has scorn for the Christian Right and its zealous but selective stands against abortion: “lacking a commitment to the poor and the excluded, conservative white opposition to abortion produced nothing so much as a generation of pious patriots,”(p143). Its “campaign against abortion became a cynical posturing for a political edge that obscured its deep complicity in killing by other means.” (p144).
In his enthusiastic heaping of credit on faith-shaped social reformers whose religious bents he agrees with, Marsh couldn’t resist swiping at the unchurched. “Atheists,” he speculates “have been with us for a long time—long enough to notice that they have not in fact given us much evidence to suppose that the godless heart is capable of a more generous hope than the religious.” (p135) Perhaps not, but neither have the godless hearts started holy or unholy wars that have slaughtered millions in the name of one deity or another. And what of the large numbers of secular foundations—from the Fords and Rockefellers to the MacArthurs and Gateses—whose billions have helped create the social reforms that Marsh supports? What of major American corporations such as Home Depot or Starbucks, whose executives may be godless or god-fearing, that not only are generous in dispensing money to their local beloved communities but provide jobs? Is it impious to ask how many jobs Martin Luther King Jr. created?