Today, America's self-styled liberals, within the churches as well as without, are mounting a battle to the death to banish all traces of religion from the public square. Casting the dismemberment and murder of unborn babies as individual right—not the right of the baby to life, but the right of the mother to the "ownership" of her body—they angrily vilify those who oppose their campaigns as bigots bent on erasing the separation of church and state. Very much like those who defend same-sex marriage as another inalienable individual right, they promote their cause with a passion and anger quite uncharacteristic of dispassionate liberal rationality. True, the argument from individual rights constitutes the cornerstone of liberalism, but in these cases and others, it is being perversely distorted, primarily through demands that any opposition be condemned as oppression or discriminatory harassment.

These and other movements for a seemingly endless succession of new individual rights have explicitly adopted the model of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, tying their various causes to the moral righteousness of the struggle to abolish legal segregation. But they singularly fail to understand the dynamics of the movement they seek to emulate. In A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, David L. Chappell of the University of Arkansas presents the struggle for civil rights in an arresting new perspective. And his illuminating account implicitly raises important questions about the struggles of our own time.

Chappell takes his title from the famous speech, "I Have a Dream," which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered before the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in 1963. In that speech, King said he would return to the South buoyed by the faith "that his people could hew 'a stone of hope' from 'a mountain of despair.' " During the 12 years of King's public career as leader of the movement, legal segregation toppled throughout the South. The real question, Chappell insists, is how, in little more than a decade, King's followers accomplished what white liberals, frequently in control of the White House and the Congress, failed to accomplish in the preceding three decades. Not surprisingly, there is nothing simple about the answer, and Chappell's sophisticated analysis never pretends that there is. The struggle for civil rights, he insists, "did not consist entirely of politics and grassroots organizing, as books and documentaries on the subject have so far implied." Brewing beneath the surface of those actions was "a change in American culture, a change in what Americans thought and felt when they talked about things like freedom, equality, race, and rights."

According to Chappell, the foot soldiers, mainly black southerners, who propelled this change were not motivated by modern liberal pieties about progress and the inevitable triumph of human reason over barbarism and bigotry. Their motivations derived from "older, seemingly more durable prejudices and superstitions that were rooted in Christian and Jewish myth," specifically, "a prophetic tradition that runs from David and Isaiah in the Old Testament through Augustine and Martin Luther to Reinhold Niebuhr in the twentieth century." This prophetic tradition, Chappell insists, was never exclusively Christian and can be extended, by another route, to include a descent from Muhammad to the mature thought of Malcolm X. It can even be extended to atheists, who may adopt a more prophetic mode than many self-consciously "modern" 20th-century Christians, who were often quick to subordinate outmoded injunctions of "thou shalt" or "thou shalt not" to "I want" or "I feel."

This tradition, as King professed, had little to do with facile optimism either about people or about prospects for transforming the world. Indeed, the black leaders for whose thought Chappell was able to find sufficient intellectual records "believed that the natural tendency of this world and of human institutions (including churches) is toward corruption." But, like the Hebrew prophets, they felt compelled to harangue the world about its failings, even when they expected it to revile them for their efforts—and they were determined to do what they could to achieve justice, even as they maintained a clear-sighted recognition of human fallenness.

The white liberals who supported the movement were cut from a different cloth entirely. In the first place, they lacked southern blacks' sense of urgency and mission. However sincerely they may have opposed the injustice of segregation, they had no personal experience of its pains and no passionate convictions about the timing of its demise. Believing in the power of reason and the inevitability of progress, they were content to await the unfolding of appropriate changes. Liberals took pride in having substituted reason for blind, irrational faith, although the most thoughtful and intelligent among them had a keen understanding of what they had lost.

To flesh out the contrast between this faith in progress and the hopeful pessimism of the black southerners who led the movement, Chappell provides a brief but insightful discussion of liberalism's intellectual trajectory, from William James and John Dewey to Lionel Trilling, and on to the renewal of optimism in Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma, published in 1944, and Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center, published in 1949. The most arresting section of Chappell's discussion of liberal thought comes in the pages he devotes to the earlier liberals, the most articulate and sensitive of whom clearly recognized the cultural and political vulnerability of their faith in reason. John Dewey, the philosopher and educator who especially focused on the challenges of democracy, sadly recognized that liberalism offered no adequate substitute for faith. Like other liberals, Dewey believed that modern society was in serious need of a modern substitute for religion, but he never devised one. Following World War II and the rise of Stalinism, liberal anxieties persisted, notably in the thought of Lionel Trilling. Myrdal and Schlesinger introduced a note of optimism, but neither really engaged the underlying problem of the loss of faith. Dismissing the darker pessimistic strand in America's legacy, they focused on optimism about human nature and the possibilities of social change.

Seen through the lens of the leading black activists' view of the fallen and depraved character of human nature, liberal optimism seemed more than slightly facile, especially liberal views about the natural—indeed, inevitable—improvement of the position of minorities in general and black Americans in particular. Black leaders harbored no such rosy expectations of their fellow citizens, yet, as Chappell acutely demonstrates, their very pessimism on that score derived from the same faith that sustained them through a long and difficult struggle—the "stone of hope" evoked in Chappell's title and King's speech.

But if liberalism did not offer a solid meeting ground for black and white views of the world, a certain conception of religion still did. In a penetrating discussion of King's thought, Chappell emphasizes King's debt to Reinhold Niebuhr, notably Niebuhr's "rejection of both liberalism and neo-orthodoxy." Niebuhr's choice of "prophetic religion" as the best name for his outlook applied equally well to the theology of King, who embraced it as his own. But the cultural influence did not flow in a single direction. Niebuhr's thought, as Chappell argues, had been influenced and enriched by the same black Baptist tradition that had nurtured King's early years and decisively shaped his sensibility.

White liberals may have had little understanding of the faith that sustained King and his followers, but they have rarely dared to dismiss it out of hand. Other standards entirely have prevailed in their attitudes toward the white southerners of the "Bible Belt," whom they readily dismiss with scorn. In attending to what white southern ministers thought and said, Chappell offers an argument as surprising as it is persuasive: the militant segregationists, he suggests, suffered from the same lack of sustaining faith that crippled the liberals.

The white segregationists who filled the pews would doubtless have welcomed some theological justification for their racist beliefs and practices, but their preachers had none to offer them. Their antebellum predecessors, who were defending slavery as a social system but rejected theories of racism, which they often tolerated in practice, had argued with conviction—and massive evidence—that the Bible sanctioned slavery. Their successors, who were called upon to offer a biblical justification of racism and racial segregation, knew that none existed. Their refusal to offer their segregationist congregations the justification they desired resulted in more than a few ugly confrontations.

Through telling examples, many of which will stun readers, Chappell demonstrates that in case after case, from the Presbyterians to the Southern Baptist Con- vention, ministers faced expulsion by their congregations for their suspected integrationist leanings. Ironically, many of these ministers may have supported segregation as a social matter, but they could not, in conscience, bolster the segregationist cause with any evidence of biblical sanction. Their fidelity to their reading of the Word of God led many segregationists to see Christianity as the enemy and thus, however inadvertently, contributed to introducing a new interest in the primacy of politics into at least some strands of southern Christianity.

A Stone of Hope abounds with such ironies, not all of which will appeal to contemporary sensibilities. It offers a genuinely fresh perspective on the struggle to end legal segregation and to inaugurate a measure of racial justice. Chappell's research is impressive, and although footnotes do not clutter the pages, they and the bibliography account for more than one hundred pages of a 344-page book.

King's thought has received abundant attention, but few have matched Chappell's sure and subtle understanding of its underlying Christian conviction of human sinfulness. It is common to assume that southern blacks readily saw whites as sinful—and often with good reason. It is much less common to recognize that leaders like King also acknowledged the inherent sinfulness of black southerners. For all but racists on either side, the conclusion is inescapable: if, "of one blood He made them," then it inexorably follows that sinfulness adheres to the human condition shared by people of all races. The whole point of the civil rights movement was to affirm that fundamental equality of condition, yet many find irresistible the temptation to paint one side as entirely good and the other as entirely evil. The end of segregation assuredly did not show many white southerners at their best, and it did show many black southerners as capable of more than common courage. But as Chappell reminds us, the majority of both groups went about their lives, hoping the worst of the storm would pass them over.

A Stone of Hope will engage a wide variety of readers. Scholars will appreciate not merely Chappell's learning but his keen feel for relevant sources and his gift for weaving together the overlapping threads in the intellectual life of groups that are usually treated separately. General readers, including the many already well versed in the vast literature on the movement, will appreciate a new and challenging account of a story they thought they knew backwards and forwards. And all readers will encounter a King who, in essential ways, appears even more complex and interesting than they had suspected. After all, a heroism grounded in optimism is admirable and uplifting, but a heroism grounded in the pessimism of prophetic faith is decisively more impressive and moving.

Ultimately, Chappell implicitly challenges all of his readers to reflect anew on the successive struggles to establish the rights of different groups—and the rationales advanced to justify them. Does the civil rights movement offer a valid prototype for all the struggles that have subsequently been waged under its aegis, or does it stand alone? Do all of the causes that pass as struggles for long and illegitimately withheld rights enhance the significance of the movement or chip away at its unique place in our national history? Chappell makes it difficult to doubt the centrality of faith to the unprecedented triumph of southern blacks. Liberals, however well-intentioned, suffered, as Dewey had feared they would, from that lack of deep moral conviction. And white segregationists ultimately lost because their cause lacked all moral justification or religious sanction. A Stone of Hope should make us all thoughtful.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is Eléonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities and professor of history at Emory University, and the founding editor of The Journal of The Historical Society. She and her husband, Eugene Genovese, have just completed The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Thought of the Southern Slaveholders, forthcoming in the next year or so.

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