Missions Resources - Bibliography
Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today
Authors: Charles Marsh
ISBN: 0465044166
Publisher: Perseus Books
Number of pages: 320
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary:
Reviewed by Paul Grant
It's hard to talk about Christians working for justice in the public arena, because faith is such a politically weighted topic. But some of recent history's most courageous social reformers have been silenced in corporate memory, because their beliefs are distateful to a public less than enthusiastic about Christians acting on their beliefs. In Beloved Community, Charles Marsh introduces us to a few of these people.
Every January we get a nice treat: Martin Luther King Day, a civic holiday with its own cute mascot, located between Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. King was that courageous man in a black suit, the story goes, who told America to stop being racist. He gave us such inspirational thoughts as,
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
To our intellectual impoverishment Martin Luther King’s dream speech is well on its way to the canon of feel-good tolerance, for two main reasons. For one, King believed in that most unpopular of Christian beliefs: judgment. Two lines down in the same speech, he said,
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
In other words, King believed true equality and character judgment went hand in hand. This is a core belief in the church from day one. The Holy Spirit has continually chosen for moral leadership in the church people of all nations, ages and educational backgrounds. The church has also taught the radical notion (contradicted centuries later by Machiavelli) that kings must submit to the same truths as peasants.
Secondly, King was less of a pacifist than either mainstream America, or Malcolm X’s followers will have us understand. “It would be fatal for the nation,” he said,
To overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end but a beginning. Those who hoped that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
In other words, there is a time and a place for revolt. Even more bewildering to our ears, there is a time when the revolt will come to an end. Revolt will shake the nation “until the bright day of justice emerges.” The most common-sensical rebellion today is rebellion for rebellion’s sake, for the purpose of individualistic dissent.
But King was operating under a different mindset: beloved community. This is a theological statement about the nature of the church. Far from a collection of individual Christians worshiping God alongside each other, the church is a new people altogether. What was truly radical about King’s vision was not that the “sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together,” but that they would do so “at the table of brotherhood.”
Family is more significant, and more lasting than any legal equality hammered out across a negotiating table. King’s understanding of the civil rights movement’s place in history was that by clearing the legal and social obstacles of segregation, community would emerge. It wouldn’t end at the passage of good laws, and the removal of bad laws.
King’s faith in the power of civil rights to trigger community was his tragic mistake. The history of the fifty years since the Montgomery Bus boycott, which thrust the young King to national prominence, shows that popular segregation does not require the support of law. We are still segregated in this country, and we’re asking the wrong questions toward solving this great conundrum.
We talk tolerance, as well we should, but in the church we believe in compassion – in suffering alongside the hurting – something much bigger than tolerance. We talk acceptance of those who are different, but in the Bible’s record of the early church, we see not acceptance, but people becoming family with one another. Becoming a beloved community is far more difficult – and therefore more miraculous – than mere equality under law.
On a more hopeful note, beloved community never died, even as the Civil Rights movement lost steam, fragmented and lost many its leaders to murder. The story of Christians pressing onward and upward toward justice in the here and now, starting with Martin Luther King, and continuing today is the subject of Beloved Community, Charles Marsh’s new book. It ought to be required reading for all Christian activists: there is a distinct pattern to success and failure in the Christian pursuit of beloved community, and Marsh dissects it all.
All this is far more important than coalition politics, because beloved community is a subset of the church – a community created by God and sent into the world. Christian activism is thus a different critter altogether than many other social reform movements, liberal or conservative, with whom the Christians in question may agree or disagree. Ultimately, this is God’s story. God’s overarching mission in the world is to create a kingdom for himself, and populated with people who have been rescued from their own sin, and reshaped into a distinct community. The Greek word for church – ekklesia – literally means “called out” from the rest of society. Beloved community is just a fancy way of saying “Church as it out to be.”
From the collapse of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Community, through Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri fellowships, to several of today’s spiritual and community leaders, Marsh’s book is a message of hope for Christians: Beloved Community is alive!
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