Related articles and links |  1 of 3

Charles Marsh thinks the religious motivations of civil-rights workers don't receive enough attention in mainstream accounts of the civil-rights movement. In The Beloved Community, Marsh tells the story of the civil-rights movement, beginning in Montgomery, Alabama, in the context of the Christian faith of those who risked their lives not just for equal rights, but also for the gospel. Marsh says that many of those who are carrying on the work of reconciliation today are those in the faith-based community who have taken up the calling of early civil-rights activists. Marsh is professor of religious studies and director of the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia. Marsh spoke with CT online assistant editor Rob Moll.

What is the Beloved Community?

The "beloved" community phrase has been used by social philosophers to describe the culmination of world history in some kind of universal brotherhood. But King believed in original sin, so he didn't share that understanding of beloved community. He understood beloved community as something that is a gift of God. He often tied that to the new order, which came in to time in the event of the Cross and the Resurrection. For him, the beloved community had a distinctively Christian understanding. The very possibility that there can be reconciliation between black and white, for King, was grounded in the Incarnation.

Your book talks about Christian radicals who worked to create beloved community. What is a Christian radical?

I get that term from the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I think of the wonderful term he offered in Cost of Discipleship, "costly grace." Cheap grace is that sense that we are entitled to the benefits of our salvation and can luxuriate in it and not do anything in terms of bearing witness to the harder demands that attend discipleship. Costly grace is radical discipleship to Jesus Christ.

I think the term radical is an overused term, but there's something so arresting and so compelling about the stories of those men and women who are committed to Jesus Christ in an absolutely wild and radical sense. I am challenged to get off my lazy rear too, when I reckon with these stories.

Dr. King is celebrated in the public square in Black History Month and Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a great political leader, social organizer, an orator, a kind of poet of democratic ideals. But Dr. King always said, "In the inner recesses of my being, I'm a Baptist preacher. I'm the son of a Baptist preacher. I'm the grandson of a Baptist preacher." I think the fact that King has been deracinated from the pew and the parish by secular historical narratives is a real thinning out of the fullness of his memory and who he was. Who he was, is a radical Christian.

The Montgomery story, more than any other in King's life, focuses our attention on the real Christ-shaped character of his goal. I wanted to get a sense of the civil-rights movement, some of these radical Christians who are often marginalized in the secular narrative, back into the civil-rights story, like Clarence Jordan and John Perkins. John Perkins, in my opinion, the most influential African American church leader since Dr. King, does not appear in any civil-rights book that I have ever read.

Koinonia Farm also doesn't appear in civil-rights narratives, but they're still in Georgia practicing racial reconciliation.

Yes they are. Clarence Jordan, who founded Koinonia Farm in 1942, died in '69, and the practice of the common purse was abandoned by the farm in '68. It's not only one of the most fascinating stories about radical Christian community in American history that's not fully appreciated by the church, but it's also the birthplace of Habitat for Humanity. This is the community Millard Fuller and his wife stopped by on a summer afternoon and become a part of. Habitat is now based in Americus, just a few miles away from Koinonia.

next page... |  1 of 3

February (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49