2 of 9
King himself was a large part of the campaign's fascination: a tall and wiry man of indefatigable energy, he made himself a menace to every white minister who presided over a segregated parish. He would appear in a well-appointed "pastor's study" at inconvenient hours, eager to explain that Mississippi was fast becoming a Nazi state and that he—the minister sitting irritably behind his desk—had better fast join ranks with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church. The presiding Mississippi Methodist bishop was so annoyed by King's antics that he had ordained him to "the ministry of the Christian tradition" without any denominational affiliation to a conference of the United Methodist Church. Tirelessly perfecting his role as the Lord's prophet, King rendered judgments and demands with a righteous anger bordering on arrogance.
What did the campaign accomplish? Virtually nothing by way of strategic successes. Yet of all the acts of nonviolent direct protest leveled against a segregated society, none registered as a more painful reminder of the South's own failed ideals than the pervasive inhospitality displayed toward black and interracial groups of Christians seeking a seat in the pews. The church visitors created a space where previously unspoken ideas on religion and race came to dramatic expression. The most common of these was the shaky, troubled inclination to value the integrity of the gospel less than the Southern Way of Life. When that inclination reached public articulation, as it did in the varied responses to the church visits, the default of theological credibility bore severe consequences—none more striking than the white church presenting itself as hostile to the gospel—indeed, to Christ himself. Even an occasional open door only confirmed in the final analysis the white church's failure to reckon with the cost of true discipleship—the all or nothing, the willingness to give up the securities of culture and custom for the sake of bearing witness to the power of the resurrection.
In this manner, the church visits reconsidered also create a space for a new way of thinking about the civil-rights story as a whole—one more attentive to the deep religious texture of the movement, to the complex theological dramas at play. They remind us that, for many participants in the movement, the struggle for black equality under the law was, at the core, a struggle for the integrity of the gospel. They remind us that—in some perplexing way—God was there, too, working through the Holy Spirit toward a more vigorous expression of God's "spontaneous overflowing love."3
Theologian Karl Barth once raised the nagging question of how the world would look if we let ourselves be led far beyond what is elsewhere called history and into a strange, new world—into the world of God. "The paramount question," he wrote in an early essay, "is whether we have understanding for this different, new world, or good will enough to meditate and enter upon it inwardly. Do we desire the presence of 'God'? Do we dare to go whither evidently we are being led?"4 In other words, how would history be told if we let ourselves really believe that God was in Jesus Christ reconciling the sinful world to himself and people with each other? If that fact mattered more than the demands of academe, more than the laudable achievements of a sober methodology, more than anything else in the world?
share this page
RSS Feed
