The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today.

The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today. By Charles Marsh. (New York: Basic Books, c. 2005. Pp. x, 292. $26.00, ISBN 0-465-04415-8.)

Charles Marsh is a theologian and the director of the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia, and his orientation in this book is unabashedly apologetic. There is much southern history here, including especially helpful treatments of Koinonia Farm and of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). But Marsh's purpose is to remind people of the centrality of a Christian vision of reconciliation to so many efforts to secure justice for underprivileged and underrepresented people in the United States, especially in the South.

The book's title comes from Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision, articulated in the earliest days of his emergence as a leader in the civil rights struggles. Marsh invokes it in saying King's goal was not just to break down the legal segregation of southern--and much of U.S.--society but also to bring down the emotional and spiritual animosity that drove the separation of races and classes in southern society. To King, and to Marsh, this task was part of nothing less than the redemption of fallen creation manifested in the sin of injustice in all its forms, the undoing of which would result in the creation of the beloved community. Marsh sees this vision, with its basis in Christian faith, as the organizing principle--the lifeblood of the black freedom movement. That the movement's achievements are so often measured by formerly closed institutions being opened to African Americans and the gain of formerly unavailable jobs and public offices and that the movement in its later years and in its more militant wings seemed so secular deter Marsh not at all. He sees religious instincts, language, and images permeating vast dimensions of the struggle and sees the "desacralizing" of the Port Huron Statement issued by Students for a Democratic Society in 1962, for example, as a "modernist conceit that what black people do and say in church cannot possibly be taken seriously" (p. 4). He also dispels the notion that SNCC was the non-or irreligious counterpoint to the pastor-dominated Southern Christian Leadership Conference, finding SNCC's roots deep in Christian theology. He acknowledges that after 1964 SNCC "moved away from Christian formulations of nonviolence and beloved community," but in this move, he says, SNCC "was left with a vision of community narrowed to the whims of self-authentication alone" (pp. 90, 124).

Marsh's work is perhaps most valuable in confounding stereotypes, some deeply cherished. For instance, he allays the misconception that all evangelicals, even all fundamentalists, hold conservative or reactionary political views. In this course he explains the thinking of John Perkins, the biblical literalist, African American preacher, and social justice activist whose theology put him more in line with what came to be called the New Religious Right but whose passion was for justice rather than contorting Christian teachings to bolster militarism and corporatism. In some of his most gripping prose, Marsh depicts Perkins's harrowing experiences in Mississippi.

This book's interweaving of historical narrative with theological analysis based in Christian apologetics guides Marsh's contention that the goal of reconciliation held by King and others was no end in itself. Rather, he argues, it was a reflection of an even deeper spiritual imperative, saying, "If King is a prophet it is not because he called America to its better sell but because he risked everything on the premise that the word of God is true when it names Jesus as the peace of the world" (p. 128). Whether the reader is prepared to go that far with Marsh's analysis, his book offers cogent reminders of the central place religion often occupies in southern social change and a corrective to many of the misplaced formulations purporting to explain religion today.

DAVID STRICKLIN

Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Little Rock