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The Civil Rights Movementas Theological Drama CHARLES MARSH In this paper, I ask what a theological analysis of the civil rights movement might look like and how such an analysis might open up an interpretive framework within which scholars and activists could learn new lessons from the period. A good place to begin is with a basic question. I raise the question—which may at first appear slightly crude in its formulation —as a way of clarifying the two contrasting fields of discourse available to us. Did the church people in the movement believe what they said about God or did they use religion as an opiate of social reform? More specific questions follow: Did Martin Luther King, Jr. believe that the universe came into being through the gracious decision of a divine Creator, that human dignity and the "sacredness ofall human life," as he said, would be forever grounded in an ontological certainty; and that this divine Creator had revealed himself in Jesus Christ, reconciling the world to himself? "In Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile. In Christ there is neither male nor female. In Christ there is neither Communist nor capitalist. In Christ, somehow there is neither bound nor free. We are all one in Christ Jesus."1 Or did King seize upon Pauline language because he liked the way it subverted the claims of white supremacy? Further, did King believe that agape love had become incarnate in this same Jesus, such love that transformsthe intent ofhuman desire and community ? Did he care about faith's integrity, its truthfulness and coherence ? Or were his gestures to the church and Christian tradition always performed with a free-wheeling sense of irony? Did King really believe that the "Word of God" fell upon him when he preached and when he spoke—"like a fire shut up in my bones," that "when God gets upon me, I've got to say it?" Or did he indulge in a little "Pythian madness" as a clever means of revving up the troops?2 One could ask similar questions to King's fellow travelers. Did Andrew Young believe that "God had changed the world through the shedding of innocent blood," that the unshackling of humanity's bondage to sin in the 19 20 The Movement as Theological Drama Easter event enabled the movement's own liberating energies?3 Or did the black struggle's idea of freedom emerge from essentially human aspirations ? Did Victoria Gray Adams really believe what she said about the movement being "the journey toward the establishment of the kingdom of God"? Or did she use eschatological language as an effective way of dramatizing the urgency of change? Was John Lewis's civil rights life a testament to radical discipleship? "I had to learn to turn myself over and follow," he said, "to be consistent and follow, and somehow believe that it's all going to be taken care of; it's all going to work out."4 Or was he simply giving voice to his presumption that time was on his side? The questions are important not only because they raise issues critical to the role ofideas in the civil rights movements and to the historiography of the movement, but even more for the fact that they force one's hand on theological matters great and small. Was Fred Shuttleworth's life embraced "by the everlasting arms of Jesus," as he always believed, or was his sense of the divine "Yes" something like a psychic defense against feelings of worthlessness? Were Fannie Lou Hamer's prayers answered in the summer of 1964, as were those of her friends and family, when hundreds of student volunteers came South to work alongside local Americans in voter registration and civil rights organizing? Or was her piety a quaint though heartwarming expression of her desperation and desire? Similarly, when Mrs. Hamer emerged from a night oftorture in a Winona, Mississippi,jailhouse and said, astonishingly—"It wouldn't solve any problem for me to hate whites just because they hate me. Oh, there's so much hate, only God has kept the Negro sane"—was she bearing witness to the complex Christian tradition ofredemptive suffering and cruciform forgiveness, or just using the language of "costly grace" as a cover for her crushing humiliation? These questions force our hand on theological matters. What I mean is that the questions require us to make up our minds about the way theological ideas "functioned" in the civil...

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