ש: Race and Religion in the 1950's. Via
Clayton Cramer, I learn
that there is a
a new book out on the 1950's civil rights movement and religion:
A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow,
by David L. Chappell. It is
reviewed in The Atlantic Monthly,
In the mid-1950s the Southern Baptists and the Southern Presbyterians each
overwhelmingly passed resolutions endorsing desegregation, and appealing to all
southerners to accept it peacefully (in the Southern Baptist Convention the vote was
staggeringly lopsided--about 9,000 to 50). In a land that embraced literalist views of
the Bible, nearly every important southern white conservative clergyman and theologian
averred that there was no biblical sanction for segregation or for white supremacy. And
the country's--and world's--best-known Southern Baptist, the North Carolinian Billy
Graham, shared the pulpit with Martin Luther King in 1957, commended what he called the
"social revolution" King was leading in the South, and, having no truck with what he saw
as the modern, secular concept of racism, insisted, even in the Deep South and in
contravention of local laws there, that his revival meetings (along with his ushering
staffs and choir) be integrated.
...Chappell, a liberal atheist, goes further, contending, again convincingly, that the
ethos of the southern black movement-- its pessimistic view of human nature, together
with its ultimately redemptive faith-- was not merely different from but in essential
ways antithetical to northerners' tepid liberalism. He points out, for instance, that
Martin Luther King's often fundamentalist religious views and his excoriation of such
elements of secular culture as rock-and-roll were positions foreign to his liberal
sometime allies, and that the secular liberal creed of pluralism and political equality
had proved inadequate and largely irrelevant to the contest in which southern blacks
were engaged.
I think maybe the reviewer is wrong and Graham not a Baptist, but this is nonetheless
interesting. I wonder how the Southern Episcopalians and Methodists-- more liberal
denominations, but more bound to convention and less to the Bible-- felt on the subject?
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