Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (review)

Acts of Conscience is a milestone in an ongoing shift in US historiography away from a generation of relative neglect of the Christian left. It appears at an auspicious moment and propels the discourse forward in a very helpful way. Already Kosek's book and the dissertation from which it grew have won the Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Best First Book in the History of Religions from the American Academy of Religion.

Kosek carves out a distinctive and valuable niche by focusing on a nexus of the Protestant left that has sometimes been overshadowed, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, or FOR. At times he focuses more specifically on one especially neglected FOR leader, Richard Gregg, who popularized the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi. Kosek gives special attention to Gregg's ideas, which are close to the heart of his analysis.

Having chosen this worthy focus, Kosek relates FOR's leadership cohort—sometimes expanded to people who passed through FOR on their way to related groups—to developments in a wider field of US social and cultural history. His insights about democratic theory and the role of media and spectacle, although understated, are thoughtful and stimulating. His rethinking of intellectual-political genealogies—for example, the stress in American Studies on Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. DuBois as compared to Gandhi—is similarly understated yet important.

Occasionally Kosek risks overstating his claims for (1) FOR's relative importance and distinctiveness vis-à-vis other parts of the fluid religious-political formations around it, as well as (2) the capacity of a close analysis of any single group to be an adequate base of evidence for a thorough rethinking of US democracy or "an alternative history of the 20th century." On this second point, I prefer Kosek's formation in a Journal of American History article based on his third chapter, where he says that his study "opens a window on the early trajectory of non-violent action as an intellectual, theoretical, and political project . . . show[ing] . . . the elusive goal of non-violence to be crucial not only to the history of pacifism and the civil rights movement but also the general development of modern American dissent." This packs a greater wallop because it is stated more precisely.

Returning to the first point, FOR's distinctiveness compared to overlapping parts of the Social Gospel and Norman Thomas type socialism is sometimes murky. Also, Kosek's account of Catholic peace groups would be different if the book were a "Catholic-Worker-centric" perspective on FOR as opposed to a "FOR-centric" account of the Catholic Worker. And it is one thing to argue that a tradition of FOR tactics and a continuous genealogy of FOR leaders translated smoothly into CORE's Freedom Rides and key tactics of the early SNCC—a case which Kosek makes beautifully—but another to argue that the mere arrival of FOR's Bayard Rustin and Glenn Smiley in Montgomery, with the force of Gandhi's and Gregg's ideas behind him, decisively changed the course of the civil rights movement. In the latter case one can appreciate Kosek's point about FOR's important intervention in Montgomery, while still wishing for a more complex account of influences there from other parts of the Christian left such as the Highlander Center, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s educational mentors, or sectors of the black church.

Thus the book invites further meta-reflection on the genealogies being constructed and what is at stake in putting Gregg's ideas at the center of them. And if the FOR cohort was not as central to late 1950s and early 1960s moral-political formations as its leaders hoped it could be, by extension its relative displacement from influence in later years may have had less ripple effect than these leaders feared.

Let us note well, however, that these very analytical limits are also a strength of this book. No study can do everything, and this one...