Disruptive Religion

The Force of Faith in Social Movement Activism

Christian Smith, Christian Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136666100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Religion has long played a central role in many social and political movements. Solidarity in Poland, anti-apartheid in South Africa, Operation Rescue in the United States--each of these movements is driven by the energy and sustained by the commitment of many individuals and organizations whose ideologies are shaped and powered by religious faith. In many cases, religious resources and motives serve as crucial variables explaining the emergence of entire social movements. Despite the crucial role of religion in most societies, this religious activism remains largely uninvestigated. Disruptive Religion intends to fill this void by analyzing contemporary social movements which are driven by people and organizations of faith. Upon a firm base of empirical evidence, these essays also address many theoretical issues arising in the study of social movements and disruptive politics.

PART ONE

PRE-EXISTENT ORGANIZATIONS AND LEADERSHIP

1

The Black Church in the Civil Rights Movement: the SCLC as the Decentralized, Radical Arm of the Black Church

Aldon Morris

The black church functioned as the instit utional center of the modern civil rights movement. Churches provided the movement with an organized mass base; a leadership of clergymen largely economically independent of the larger white society and skilled in the art of managing people and resources; an institutionalized financial base through which protest was financed; and meeting-places where the masses planned tactics and strategies and collectively committed themselves to the struggle.

Successful social movements usually comprise people who are willing to make great sacrifices in a single-minded pursuit of their goals. The black church supplied the civil rights movement with a collective enthusiasm generated through a rich culture consisting of songs, testimonies, oratory, and prayers that spoke directly to the needs of an oppressed group. Many black churches preached that oppression is sinful and that God sanctions protest aimed at eradicating social evils. Besides, the church gave the civil rights movement continuity with its antecedents in the long-standing religious traditions of black people. Finally, the black church served as a relatively autonomous force in the movement, being an indigenous institution owned and controlled by blacks.

Scholars of the black church have consistently argued that it is the dominant institution within black society. It has provided the organizational framework for most activities of the community—economic, political, and educational endeavors as well as religious ones. The black church was unique in that it was organized and developed by an oppressed group shut off from the institutional life of the larger society. Historically, the institutions of the larger society were of very little use to blacks. Blacks were never equal partners in those economic, political, and cultural institutions and in fact were systematically excluded from their decision-making processes. This institutional subordination naturally prevented blacks from identifying with the institutions of the larger society. In short, the larger society denied blacks the institutional access and outlets necessary to normal social existence.

The black church filled a large part of the instit utional void by providing support and direction for the diverse activities of an oppressed group. It furnished outlets for social and artistic expression; a forum for the discussion of important issues: a social environment that, developed, trained, and disciplined potential leaders from all walks of life: and meaningful symbols to engender hope, enthusiasm, and a resilient group spirit. The church was a place to observe, participate in, and experience the reality of owning and directing an institution free from the control of whites. The church was also an arena where group interests could be articulated and defended collectively. For all these reasons and a host of others, the black church has served as the organizational hub of black life.

The urban church, by virtue of its quality of religious services and potential for political action, developed into a more efficient organization than its rural counterpart. Even by the early 1930s urban churches had become significantly more powerful and resourceful than rural churches. Urban churches were better financed, more numerous, and larger in membership. Urban ministers usually received more formal education and earned higher salaries than their rural counterparts. Stable leadership emerged as higher salaries led to a lower turnover rate among ministers, allowing them to become full-time pastors. The urban church was able to offer its congregations more activities and programs, which meant more committees and other formal bodies to run them, and greater organized cooperation within the church.

The great migration of blacks from rural to urban areas between 1910 and 1960 was responsible for the tremendous growth of the urban church throughout that period. Newly urbanized Southern blacks established close ties with the institution they knew best—the church. Numerous problems attended the major shift from rural to urban life, and the church facilitated the transition by offering valuable friendships and social networks through which the migrants could assimilate into urban life. Moreover, the Southern urban church was similar to its rural counterpart in that it provided an institutional alternative to, and an escape from, the racism and hostility of the larger society. Behind the church doors was a friendly and warm environment where black people could be temporarily at peace with themselves while displaying their talents and aspirations before an empathetic audience. For these reasons the urban church, like the rural church of the South, continued to function as the main community center. However, the great migration made it possible for the urban church to function on a scale unattainable in rural settings.

The urban churches of the South became organizations of considerable social power. The principal resource of the church was its organized mass base. The church not only organized the black masses but also commanded their allegiance. The fact that the church has been financially supported by its economically deprived parishioners clearly demonstrates that allegiance. Furthermore, the black community has always contributed the voluntary labor necessary to meet the church’s considerable needs in its role as the main community center. These activities emerged from an elaborate organizational structure.

The typical church had a well-defined division of labor, with numerous standing committees and organized groups. Each group was task-oriented and coordinated its activities through authority structures, individuals were held accountable for their assigned duties, and important conflicts were resolved by the minister, who usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation. A strong work ethic existed in the church, where individuals and groups were routinely singled out and applauded for their contributions. This practice promoted a strong group identification with the church as members were made to feel important and respected, an experience denied to blacks by the institutions of larger society.

CHARISMA AND THE BLACK CHURCH

Another source of the black minister’s power is charisma. The black church, a well-established institution, produced and thrived on charismatic relationships between minister and followers. Churches, especially the prestigious or leading ones, demanded ministers who could command the respect, support, and allegiance of congregations through their strong, magnetic personalities. Furthermore, the majority of black ministers claimed to have been “called” to the ministry directly by God or at least by God’s son through such agencies as dreams, personal revelation, or divine inspiration. Once such a call was accepted, a minister continued—in his own perception and, usually, that of his congregation—to have a personal relationship with God. Clearly, the congregation’s belief that such individuals enjoyed a direct pipeline to the Divine served to set them off from the rest of the population.

Charisma, however, is based not so much on the beliefs held by charismatic individuals or their followers as on performance. Experience is often crucial to performance, and most ministers who became charismatic civil rights leaders brought a great deal of experience into the movement. Most of them had grown up in the church and understood its inner workings. They knew that the highly successful minister developed a strong, magnetic personality capable of attracting and holding a following. Many of the ministers were college graduates with considerable training in theological studies. It cannot be overemphasized that much of these ministers training occurred in black colleges and universities under the direction of leading black educators and theologians of the day. They were taught and counseled by such men as Dr. Benjamin Mays, C.D. Hubert, and S.A. Archer. The Reverend G.K. Steele, one of the early leaders of the movement, remarked (1978): “These are strong men and you could hardly sit under them seriously and sincerely, without being affected.” He states further that these educators and theologians, who themselves had struggled to get an education, stressed such values as human dignity, personhood, manhood, and courage. These became core values of the civil rights movement.

During this period black universities and colleges were closely linked to the black church. Thus, a significant number of the leading professors were also ministers or closely attached to the ministerial profession, it was not unusual for the students to be required to attend daily or weekly chapel services, during which these influential cultural figures, expert in public speaking and the art of dramatic communication, attempted to imbue the students with certain values. In college as well as in the church, the future leaders of the movement were exposed to and taught the excitement and art of stimulating, persuading, and influencing crowds by individuals who had mastered the art of charisma.

The black church combines the mundane (finance of buildings, maintenance services, committee meetings, reports, choir rehearsals) and the charismatic (strong face-to-face personal relationships that foster allegiance, trust, and loyalty, and give rise to a shared symbolic world that provides an interpretation of earthly affairs and the anticipated afterlife). The charismatic element requires no allegiance to man, the government, the “city fathers,” or traditional norms of behavior. For example, when Birmingham’s blacks began to boycott buses, the Southern Conference Educational Fund reported (SCEF n.d.: 3):

The city’s famous police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, issued a decree that no Negro minister should urge his people to stay off the buses. Mr. Shuttlesworth’s response was typical: Only Cod can tell me what to say in the pulpit. And I’m going to tell my people to stay off those buses if I have to go to Kilby prison.…

Students of charismatic leadership have persuasively argued that if individuals are to be recognized as charismatic leaders, they must personify, symbolize, and articulate the goals, aspirations, and strivings of the group they aspire to lead. The ministers who were to become the charismatic leaders of the movement occupied strategic community positions which enabled them to become extremely familiar with the needs and aspirations of blacks.

The black minister, because of his occupation, listened to and counseled people about their financial woes, family problems, and health problems, as well as problems stemming from discrimination, prejudice, and powerlessness. By the same token, the black preacher was the figure who witnessed the resiliency, pride, and dignity that resided in what Dr. W.E.B. DuBois had characterized as the “souls of black folk.” The ministers listened to the educational and occupational aspirations of countless black children, along with the pleas of their parents that God and the white man give their offspring the chance to have it better than they had had. Part of the minister’s job was to single out for praise those individuals in the congregation who landed impressive jobs, were admitted to colleges and universities, or made any other personal stride.

Thus the black ministers of the 1950s knew black people because they had shared their innermost secrets and turmoils. They were happy when blacks progressed, and, with their fellows, they recoiled in shock when a member of their race was tarred, feathered, and lynched while a white mob drank beer and assembled for “show time.” The minister was firmly anchored in the center of the ebb and flow of the social and cultural forces of the black community.

Specifically, the words and actions of such leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Shuttlesworth, and C.K. Steele seemed to radiate the qualities required to jar loose the tripartite system of domination that paralyzed the black community. Their displays of courage, dignity, integrity, and burning desire for freedom earned the approval of the black masses, because such values were deeply embedded in the social fabric of black society. Moreover, these ministers, with their oratorical talents and training, were able to instill in people a sense of mission and commitment to social change. The words they used were effective because they symbolized and simplified the complex yearnings of a dominated group. This is one of the reasons blacks in the movement showed little hesitation in accepting such personalities as their charismatic leaders.

THE COLLECTIVE POWER OF CHURCHES

It was and is common for black ministers in a community and even in different communities to have personal relationships among themselves. They met at conventions, community gatherings, civic affairs, and the like. At times they exchanged pulpit duties and encouraged their choirs to sing at the churches of colleagues. Furthermore, black ministers in a community were linked formally by either a city ministerial alliance or an interdenominational alliance, through which they were able to debate and confer on issues important to the black community (Mays and Nicholson 1933: 158).

Within the ministerial alliances were to be found ministers of the poor, the educated, the unemployed, professionals, laborers, housemaids—indeed, the entire spectrum of black society. If these ministers, through their informal and formal bodies, could be persuaded to support protest activity, each could then mobilize his own slice of the community. The National Baptist Convention, one such body, operates on the national level with a membership of more than five million.

Scholars of the church have consistently noted how rapidly and efficiently information is transmitted to the black community from the pulpit. This reliable channel for disseminating information greatly enhances the possibility for mass action. The minister can deliver any type of message to the congregation; his salary is paid by the church, which frees him from white economic pressures. Moreover, with their disciplined workforces churches are able to act collectively. Once a plan of action is agreed on by a number of congregations it can be implemented systematically and thousands of dollars can be raised by a number of churches in a short time to finance a concerted plan.

THE SCLC

Scholars of social movements have been concerned with the important issue of how movements become forces in a society. Some theorists suggest that movements gather their strength by breaking from existing social structures, while others take the opposing view that movements draw their strength from preexisting organizations and social networks. In the case of the civil rights struggle, the preexisting black church provided the early movement with the social resources that made it a dynamic force; in particular, leadership, institutionalized charisma, finances, an organized following, and an ideological framework through which passive attitudes were transformed into a collective consciousness supportive of collective action.

But a new political dimension was needed to mobilize those church resources on a wide scale and commit them to the active pursuit of social change. The SCLC, because it was a church-based movement organization, supplied the political dimension that pulled churches directly into the movement and made it a dynamic force.

By 1957 local movements were under way in a number of Southern cities. They were often vigorous movements that engaged in nonviolent confrontations. In early January 1956, for example, seventy-two blacks, mostly students from Xavier University in New Orleans, were held in jail for defying segregation on a city bus. The local movement center in New Orleans was led by the Reverend A.L. Davis—an ideal man for mobilizing protest because he headed the New Orleans Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance. In March 1956, at a mass meeting called by the alliance and attended by five thousand blacks, Davis (NYT 1956) urged blacks to “rise up and let White Citizens’ Councils know the time is out for segregation.” After continuous protest action, New Orleans buses were finally integrated in the summer of 1958.

The New Orleans struggle typifies the local protest movements prevalent in the South during the middle and late 1950s. Many of the confrontations were not directed by visible movement organizations, nor did the protesters receive notoriety for their unprecedented efforts. But the clergy and the black church were at the center of the conflicts. Movement participants were meeting on a systematic basis, planning strategy, collecting funds, encouraging protest, and confronting local white power structures. For their efforts, many were paid off with bombed homes, burnt crosses, threats, and beatings. Nevertheless, the local movements endured because they were organized and rooted in community institutions.

The organizers of the various local movements usually maintained informal contact between localities and sporadically provided mutual support. At mass meetings of the New Orleans groups in 1956, $3,000 was collected for the MIA to assist the Montgomery movement (NYT 1956). A “talking relationship” existed among many local movement leaders throughout the South before the formation of SCLC. Such informal contact existed among Dr. King of Montgomery, the Reverend Joseph Lowery of Mobile, and Reverend Shuttlesworth of Birmingham. The three Alabama leaders would meet to discuss their local movements and to coordinate activities on a state level, previously the task of the outlawed NAACP. The Alabama gr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Contributors
• Introduction Correcting a Curious Neglect, or Bringing Religion Back In
• Part One Pre-Existent Organizations and Leadership
• Part Two Religious Ritual and Insurgent Consciousness
• Part Three Mobilization and Repression
• Part Four Symbolic Worlds and Activist Identity
• Part Five Religious Ideology and Disruptive Tactics
• Notes
• Index