Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown

Jane Dailey

Asked to explain the victories of the civil rights movement, activists have often replied, "God was on our side." Martin Luther King Jr., for example, portrayed himself and his cause as divinely sanctioned, positioning segregationists clearly across the fence. "We have the strange feeling down in Montgomery that in our struggle we have cosmic companionship," King revealed during the bus boycott in 1956. "We feel that the universe is on the side of right and righteousness. That is what keeps us going." King did not simply consider segregation unconstitutional; he considered it a sin, and its Christian champions, heretics. Speaking of the boycott in another context, King portrayed segregationists as wayward Christians who, like the Prodigal Son, "have strayed away to some far country of sin and evil."1	1
Many white supporters of black civil rights felt the same way. The director of religious life at the University of Mississippi and Methodist minister Will Campbell believed that racism was a "heresy" infecting white southern Protestantism. Integrationist Christians, referring time and again to the Apostle Paul's notion of the church as the body of Christ (Ephesians 4), denounced their segregationist brethren for poisoning and polluting that body. "The Church is first of all the body of Christ, and in that Body we are one, not races or clans," declared another white Mississippi Methodist minister. King agreed: The "church is the Body of Christ. So when the church is true to its nature it knows neither division nor disunity. I am disturbed about what you [segregationists] are doing to the Body of Christ." The "beloved community," as King explained on another occasion, had to be integrated because "segregation is a blatant denial of the unity which we all have in Jesus Christ." 2 Segregation, in other words, was a theological as well as a social and political fallacy.	2
On the whole, American historians have subscribed to King's version of the sacred history of the civil rights movement. Most books written about the struggle for racial equality emphasize the central role that religion played in articulating the challenge that the civil rights movement offered to the existing order of segregation. There are good reasons for this: as Aldon D. Morris noted in The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, black churches were the "institutional center" of the African American freedom struggle. Historians have noted respectfully the deep religious faith of many civil rights leaders and supporters and the influence of religious language and ideals on the movement. Although more recent scholarship has broadened both the organizational and ideological genealogy of the civil rights movement, even those historians who qualify the influence of the black church on the movement recognize the importance of the religiosity of black and white southerners in structuring their views in favor of civil rights.3	3
The religiosity of anti-integrationists has not fared so well in the scholarly literature. Some of the historians most engaged with the religious beliefs of civil rights activists have, almost in the same breath, denigrated the religious faith of segregationists. For example, David Chappell, who sees black Christian faith in the prophetic tradition as the key to the success of the civil rights movement, downplays the theological beliefs of white southerners and considers religious segregationists dupes at best. While in recent years a number of scholars have written sensitively about what Paul Harvey calls the "theology of segregationism" and Bill Leonard has dubbed "a theology for racism," few have treated segregationist ideas about religion with the care that has been devoted to proslavery ideology and thinkers. Harvey, Leonard, Charles Marsh, Wayne Flynt, and Andrew Michael Manis are among the few historians who have reckoned seriously with the substance of segregationists' religious beliefs.4	. . .