God with Us: Lived Theology and the Freedom Struggle in Americus, Georgia, 1942–1976 by Ansley L. Quiros (review)

Integrating theology into history requires formidable resources. At minimum, a mastery of theological nuance and a means of integrating belief with politics, society, and economics are necessary. If writing from an intersectional framework, the task only becomes more complex. Ansley L. Quiros models how to engage in such a demanding historical enterprise. Her examination of the theological skirmishes over civil rights in Americus, Georgia, deftly weaves together the stories of Clarence Jordan and Martin England’s Koinonia Farm, local white segregationists, and black congregations in the area. Rigorously researched, passionately written, and historically nuanced, God with Us: Lived Theology and the Freedom Struggle in Americus, Georgia, 1942–1976 contributes to our understanding of the religious forces at play in the South during the mid-twentieth-century phase of the long black freedom struggle.

Although other scholars have explored similar territory, Quiros moves the conversation forward by braiding the perspectives of segregationists, integrationists, and the black church into a microhistory. Likewise, she is particularly adept at employing the “lived theology” framework to explore those various perspectives (p. 5). Quiros’s explanatory powers are evident throughout. When explicating her framework for analyzing religious forces, she states, “Simply put, lived religion examines action to understand belief while lived theology examines belief to understand action” (p. 6). Elsewhere Quiros eschews caricature and stereotype. Witness, for instance, her commentary on white segregationists: “they emerge as people seeking to preserve their faith and their way of life from the outside incursions of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, the National Council of Churches and the federal government” (p. 56). Yet some of Quiros’s historiographical analysis lacks the nuance she extends to her subjects. For instance, her claim that “historians’ marginalization of unsavory religious views has perpetuated an overly simplistic, triumphalist narrative of the civil rights movement” undervalues the robust scholarship that, somewhat ironically, she draws on to develop her own narrative (p. 4). The work of David L. Chappell, Carolyn Renee Dupont, Paul Harvey, Stephen Haynes, Charles Marsh, and many others have pushed back against this triumphalist narrative rather effectively.

Still, Quiros makes her stakes clear. As she notes of the black freedom struggle, “It was not just civil rights but Christian orthodoxy that was at stake” (p. 5). Likewise, Quiros demonstrates that her treatment of religious forces in the civil rights movement shows that the struggle in Americus, as in many other parts of the South, was “one without a predestined victor” (p. 5). Those stakes are never more evident than in her treatment of the events at Koinonia Farm. To be certain, the book offers vivid portrayals of the segregationist theology that thrived at white congregations clustered around Lee Street in Americus; the black theology that flourished at Bethesda Baptist Church, Campbell Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the smaller black churches in their orbit; and the integrationist theology that motivated the activists who participated in the kneel-ins at local segregated congregations. Yet the moments of highest drama emerge in the depictions of events at the integrationist experiment in “redemptive agriculture” practiced at Koinonia (p. 23). As much as the book seeks to balance the three theological streams of integration, segregation, and black theology, the Koinonia narrative runs widest. The cover’s feature photograph of the integrated Camp Koinonia establishes her core interest. Note also her high praise: Koinonia “was a prophetic ‘voice in the wilderness’ in the segregated South. It was a voice that would be misunderstood and suppressed, at times heard only by the sun high above” (p. 16).

In the end, Quiros offers a well-written, theologically and historically sophisticated, and thoughtfully nuanced text, one that will appeal to those interested in the civil rights movement, religious studies, and the many dimensions of the struggle for freedom...