Holy Wars at Home: Religion and Activism in U.S. Social Movements

A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. By David L. Chappell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 360 pages. $34.95 (cloth). $18.95 (paper).

La Lucha for Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami. By Miguel A. de la Torre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 204 pages. $55.00 (cloth). $21.95 (paper).

Las Hermanas: Chicana/Latina Religious-Political Activism in the U.S. Catholic Church. By Lara Medina. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. 240 pages. $24.95 (paper).

In his 2000 book, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation, Scott Appleby notes the importance of local religious leaders since "about two-thirds of contemporary wars turn on issues of religion, ethnic, or national identity."¹ Appleby examines conflicts in South Africa, Bosnia, and Southeast Asia to highlight the work of peacebuilders—those working to break the cycle of violence in their communities. Appleby's study confirms our understanding that holy wars happen in other parts of the contemporary world. David L. Chappell, Lara Medina, and Miguel A. de la Torre demonstrate that such struggles are alive and well in the United States, and that the spiritual warriors are not necessarily who we might expect. On the left, where American studies scholars are presumed to be, the idea of "spiritual warriors" in our midst brings to mind conservative Christians, evangelicals, even religious extremists. If we asked these "spiritual warriors" about religious extremism, we would perhaps hear about Islamic terrorists. Such is the rhetoric on religion in the United States in the early twenty-first century.

As Appleby and others have suggested, academic and political conversations often either minimize the importance of religion or emphasize the damage done by religious extremists. Lara Medina rightly points out that religious narratives have been overlooked by Chicano studies scholars who resist highlighting the contributions of the Catholic Church in Chicana/o communities. She cites the estrangement of many Chicano scholars from the Church, the associations of Catholicism with colonialism, and the Marxist bent of early Chicano studies as reasons for this exclusion. Chicana feminists, in addition, criticized the patriarchal hierarchy of the Church. Similar assumptions seem to have informed American studies scholars in recent years. Each of the authors under review here, however, finds that spiritual warriors are ordinary people, living in extraordinary moments and capable of extraordinary accomplishments, some in the name of religion in the twentieth-century United States.

David Chappell's study of the civil rights movement, and opposition to it, considers prophetic religion as the difference between success and failure in the U.S. South in the 1950s and 1960s. A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow focuses on the intellectual leadership of various movements. Chappell examines the role religion played on both sides of the slavery debate, and finds that southern preachers vigorously constructed the South's benevolent defense against the "anarchical and irresponsible 'freedom'" offered by the North. White southerners did not have the same support during the civil rights movement, and in fact identified their churches as enemies in their struggle to maintain segregation. In the mid-1950s, according to Chappell, representatives of southern Baptist and Presbyterian congregations voted in favor of desegregation (5). In what Chappell suggests is a desire to avoid controversy, most white southern clergy remained neutral, at least publicly, in the debate on segregation.

Whereas ministers and theologians provided intellectual and spiritual leadership for the proslavery movement, in the 1950s and 1960s segregationists were dependent on newspaper editors and lawyers for guidance. These "respectable segregationists," as Chappell terms them, attempted to center the debate on states' rights, rather than on race. To counter the charges of racism, editors encouraged increased funding for education, emphasizing the goal of separate but equal facilities for blacks. The challenge for these respectable segregationists was how to rally the troops, so...