The Civil Rights Legacy and the New Monastics: Shifting Identities among American Evangelicals in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Iliff School of Theology University of Denver

The Journal of RELIGION, IDENTITY, AND POLITICS

A GRADUATE STUDENT PUBLICATION

BY STUDENTS OF THE JOINT DOCTORAL PROGRAM IN RELIGIOUS AND THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

The Civil Rights Legacy and the New Monastics:

Shifting Identities among American Evangelicals in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Author(s): Michael Clawson

Source: The Journal of Religion, Identity, & Politics, August 2012

Stable URL: http://ripjournal.org/2012/the-civil-rights-legacy-and-the-new-monastics-shifting-identities-

among-american-evangelicals-in-the-post-civil-rights-era/

Copyright 2012, The Author. All reserved. Published electronically by the Journal of Religion, Identity,

and Politics on behalf of the Author.

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The Civil Rights Legacy and the New Monastics:

Shifting Identities among American Evangelicals in the Post-Civil Rights Era

By Michael Clawson

Baylor University, Department of Religion

Since its beginnings in the early 1940s, the neo-evangelical movement has undergone

significant shifts in its religious and social identity within American culture, in part because of its

interactions with the black Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s. Led by evangelist Billy

Graham and theologian Carl F. H. Henry, among others, neo-evangelicalism (now simply called

evangelicalism) was an attempt by some conservative Protestants to move past the cultural

disengagement of their fundamentalist forebears while still holding on to fundamentalist

theological commitments (Henry 1947). Because of this new openness to cultural engagement, it

is not surprising that some white evangelicals found themselves influenced by the Civil Rights

movement. And while mainstream white evangelicals during the height of the Civil Rights era

were highly ambivalent towards the political dimensions of the black freedom struggle, other,

typically younger evangelicals, were less hesitant about getting caught up in the passions of the

movement and its aftermath. This branch, which recently has been dubbed “the prophetic

evangelicals” (Benson, Berry, and Heltzel 2012; Heltzel 2008), was inspired by the example of

the Civil Rights movement to become more politically active in support of a wider range of

political causes: gender equality, economic justice, environmental care, anti-war activism and

pro-active peacemaking, racial reconciliation, and other pressing social issues. Because of this

influence, I will argue that prophetic evangelicalism constitutes an ongoing legacy for the Civil

Rights movement among the second generation of evangelical leadership.

It is now over four decades since the first emergence of prophetic evangelicals, and a new

younger generation of prophetic evangelicals has now come of age. Typically referred to as the

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new monastic movement, this “third generation” of evangelical leaders are continuing the Civil

Rights legacy in innovative ways as they are influenced by its remaining leaders and by the

ideals articulated by Martin Luther King, Jr. and others from the black prophetic tradition. In this

way, the Civil Rights movement continues to influence the shifting identities of white American

evangelicals, playing a direct and decisive role in the formation of specific groups of young,

prophetic evangelicals like the new monastics, who themselves are also influencing the broader

evangelical community.

Though some scholarly works have dealt with the mainstream evangelical response to the

Civil Rights movement during the 1960s (Evans 2009) and others with the influence of Civil

Rights on prophetic evangelicalism in the 1970s (Swartz 2008; Heltzel 2009), this paper will

extend the narrative beyond these groups to the contemporary new monastic movement through

an analysis of recent writings and interviews with several of its key leaders. It will demonstrate

that the influence of the black freedom struggle on evangelicalism was not limited to the 1960s

and 1970s but continues among younger evangelicals in the twenty-first century. This paper will

not claim that the social concerns of earlier neo-evangelicals were in all instances more limited

or more conservative, or, conversely, that the more socially prophetic agenda of new monastics

is wholeheartedly embraced by all evangelicals today. As in any large movement, neo-

evangelicalism is diverse and holds within it many disparate voices. The concern of this paper is

simply to show that within this diversity, the prophetic legacy of the black freedom struggle has

been one important strand which continues to wield a significant influence into the first decades

of the twenty-first century.

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White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement

To fully appreciate the changes to evangelical identity with respect to race, civil rights,

and issues of social justice over the past half-century, it is important to understand where the

movement began. The neo-evangelical movement coalesced in the post-war years of the 1940s as

a new generation of fundamentalist leadership began distancing itself from the attitudes of

hostility towards secular culture held by their forebears. They instead called for both critical and

constructive engagement by theological conservatives within the broader society. The landmark

statement of the new evangelical mindset was theologian Carl F. H. Henry’s short book, The

Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, which “exploded like a bombshell in the

fundamentalist camp” (Grenz and Olson 1992, 287). There Henry reaffirmed the biblical

inerrantist and supernaturalist doctrines of fundamentalism while at the same time calling for a

move beyond the separatism, anti-intellectualism, and cultural isolationism he perceived among

fundamentalists (Henry 1947). He especially emphasized the need for deeper engagement by

evangelical Christians with the great social evils of the day, among which he included

“aggressive warfare, racial hatred and intolerance, the liquor traffic, and exploitation of labor or

management,” though his specific suggestions on how, exactly, evangelicals ought to engage

with such issues or for which particular solutions they ought to advocate was left vague (17).

Despite this call, evangelicals like Henry remained ambivalent about the legislative

demands of the Civil Rights movement and proved reluctant to voice support for that

movement’s methods of direct action and civil agitation (however nonviolent). While decrying

racism, Henry insisted that a socially engaged evangelicalism would not endorse specific

political organizations or legislative agendas, but would instead preach “divinely disclosed

ethical principles” which must then be put into practice by spiritually regenerate individuals

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(Henry 1957). While not rejecting the necessity of social reform, Henry saw such reform as

being rooted first and foremost in the “the redemptive work of Jesus Christ and the regenerative

work of the Holy Spirit” in the lives of individuals. “Christian social action,” Henry declared,

“condones no social solutions in which personal acceptance of Jesus as Savior is an optional

consideration.” Only through such personal redemption could social change occur (Henry 1964,

76-81; 1947, 45). In this way, the evangelical commitment to the primacy of evangelistic

proclamation and individual conversion was maintained. This emphasis on personal salvation

over social legislation also fit conveniently with Henry’s preference for political libertarianism.

According to Henry, government’s role was to provide for just laws and social order, not to

coerce compassion or show favor to particular groups or individuals (Henry 1966, 8-10). His

solution to the problem of racial discrimination was instead simply to encourage Christian

individuals to show neighborly love towards persons of color (Henry 1965).

That Henry’s attitudes towards race and the Civil Rights struggle were representative of a

much broader cross-section of evangelical Christianity can be demonstrated by the coverage of

racial issues and the Civil Rights movement in Christianity Today magazine, the foremost news

journal of the evangelical movement, during Henry’s tenure as editor from 1956-1968.

Throughout the whole of the Civil Rights movement, the magazine gave very little coverage to

race issues—fewer than two articles per year on average according to one count (Emerson and

Smith 2000, 46; Fairbanks 1989, 34-41; Toulouse 1993, 246). By most accounts, Henry himself

actually pushed for more coverage of race and the Civil Rights struggle but was under pressure

by wealthy financiers and other conservative editorial advisors of the magazine not to speak out

too critically against segregation (Henry 1986, 144-58, 182-83; Heltzel 2009, 83-84; Tapia

1997). According to one researcher, who surveyed the magazine’s entire coverage of racial

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issues during the period, when Christianity Today did give attention to the issue, editorials often

waffled between support for segregation and hesitant opposition to it. While frequently calling

for Christians to eliminate racial biases and cease discriminating against blacks in their personal

lives, the magazine also typically criticized the confrontational tactics of the Civil Rights

movement and advocated for what the editors considered to be a “moderate” position of

voluntary segregation, thus placing themselves in opposition to the goals of both the Civil Rights

leaders and ardent supporters of Jim Crow (Evans 2009, 263-69). A 1957 article by E. Earl Ellis,

for instance, while acknowledging that injustices were often present under segregation, also

argued that segregation was not necessarily a cause of bad race relations. He criticized those

supporting “forced integration” as “self-righteous harbingers of a new world” and argued that

they were responsible for worsening, not improving, racial tensions in the South (Ellis 1957).

Later, in a review of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Stride Toward Freedom, Ellis describes King’s

“racial philosophy” of integration as a dangerous ideology of “freedom from difference” that

would lead to the horrors of interracial marriage and communism (Ellis 1959). Because of such

expressed attitudes, one historian has described the magazine as “probably the most hostile,

though the most widely read, of mainstream evangelical thought in its interpretation of the Civil

Rights movement” (Evans 2009, 263).

This “moderate” approach among evangelicals can also be seen in the ministry of

evangelist Billy Graham, perhaps the single most influential evangelical leader of the twentieth

century. On the one hand, Graham spoke firmly against racial prejudice and moved to integrate

his crusades in 1953, more than a year before the Brown v. Board decision (“Billy Graham

Makes Plea” 1956). Graham also had a friendly relationship with Martin Luther King, Jr., who

he invited to give the invocation at his New York crusade in 1957 despite the considerable

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amount of negative feedback this decision generated among his supporters (Evans 2009, 257).

Graham clearly saw his integrated crusades in the South as his contribution to the struggle for

racial reconciliation and even claimed (after King’s death) that King had personally absolved

him of any responsibility to join the Civil Rights marches. According to Graham’s account, King

felt that Graham’s integrated crusades were important in preparing the way for King in the

South, and cautioned that if Graham joined the marches he might lose his following among white

southerners and thus the opportunity to continue this important work (Graham 1997, 426).

Indeed, one should not underestimate the power of such seemingly simple actions. As Michael

Long suggests, Graham’s crusades “offered his followers an actual experiment in reality, a real

opportunity to enter into a stadium and realize the unrealizable—a place where whites and

African Americans would sit side by side and worship their common God . . . without violence,

anarchy, and [without] a noteworthy loss of white power” (Long 2006, 96).

On the other hand, Graham’s views on social change were not substantially different

from Carl Henry’s. Graham continued to believe that the solution to all of America’s social ills

was the transformation of individual hearts through the process of Christian conversion (Graham

1953; Graham 1965, 181). Social sins, he believed, were “merely a large-scale projection of

individual sins and need to be repented of by the offending segment of society,” not corrected

through coercive legislation (Graham 1960a). He was therefore opposed to most governmental

efforts to enforce integration on the South, asserting that he was “convinced that forced

integration will never work. You cannot make two races love each other at the point of bayonets”

(Graham 1960b). Instead he counseled President Eisenhower on a path of moderation,

encouraging the Supreme Court to “go slowly” in order to give “extremists” on both sides a

chance to cool down and allow for a “peaceful social readjustment” (Evans 2009, 254).

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Likewise, while King was locked away in the Birmingham jail, Graham urged the Civil Rights

leader “to put the brakes on a little bit,” hoping for a “period of quietness in which moderation

prevails” (“Billy Graham Urges Restraint” 1963). Furthermore, as the civil unrest and urban riots

escalated during the later years of the Civil Rights struggle, Graham recoiled with horror,

denouncing even peaceful demonstrations as “freedom out of control!” (Long 2006, 131)

Graham, it would seem, was as conflicted and half-hearted in his support for the Civil Rights

movement as other white evangelical leaders of his time.

In their book, Divided by Faith, sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith

suggest that the failure of many mainstream evangelicals like Henry and Graham to fully

embrace the projects of racial justice and civil rights is due to a lack of the necessary cultural

tools to comprehend fully the nature of the problem or the appropriate solutions. They define

“cultural tools,” a term which they borrow from sociologist Ann Swidler, as “ideas, habits, skills,

and styles” that “create ways for individuals and groups to organize experiences and evaluate

reality.” Emerson and Smith note that for many evangelicals, past and present, religion plays a

key role in defining their cultural tool kit, providing them with certain transposable cognitive

strategies for interpreting all kinds of new experiences and ideas, including those regarding race

relations (2000, 75-76). Emerson and Smith identify the relevant evangelical cultural tools for

evaluating racial issues as “accountable freewill individualism, relationalism (attaching central

importance to interpersonal relationships), and anti-structuralism (an inability to perceive or

unwillingness to accept social structural influences)” (76). The kind of individualistic focus we

saw in the salvation theology and social ethics of both Henry and Graham seems to be at the

heart of all three of these tools, leading many evangelicals to interpret nearly every social

problem primarily in terms of individual choices and personal responsibility with only minimal

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recognition of social or structural failings (Toulouse 1993, 243). It is worth noting that each of

these tools, and the individualism that underlies them, have deep historical roots in the traditions

which inform contemporary evangelicalism—from German and Wesleyan pietism, to the free-

will Arminianism of the revivalist tradition, to the anti-Social Gospel reaction of the

fundamentalists. Because these tools often constitute foundational, non-negotiable beliefs for

many contemporary evangelicals, it becomes very difficult for evangelicals to see racial

injustices as based on anything more than individual sins, and thus to see the necessary solutions

as anything other than personal conversion and repentance. Indeed, for evangelicals to do

otherwise, these authors argue, would require challenging the very basis of their religious and

political identity (Emerson and Smith 2000, 89).

The Rise of the Prophetic Evangelicals

Despite the difficulty highlighted by Emerson and Smith, a small handful of evangelicals

in the late 1960s and early 70s did, in fact, begin to challenge the basic assumptions of their

evangelical heritage, becoming more fully supportive of the Civil Rights movement and its

legacy. Many of these, though reared and shaped in an evangelical context, were also influenced

by the radical political trends of the 1960s. Both of these streams, evangelicalism and radical

politics, were formative among these “younger” evangelicals, thereby shaping a movement not

wholly one or the other, but a convergence of both. This convergence produced a breed of

Christians who learned to apply their still conservative and evangelical theology not just to issues

of personal salvation and individual morality, but to socially structured crises like racial

injustice, militarism, poverty, gender issues, and ecology as well. Their distinction from Carl

Henry’s own “socially engaged” evangelicalism was a tendency to look beyond the usual

evangelical assumption that “changed individuals alone can bring about a transformed society,”

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and begin asking what specific social transformations such changed individuals might

legitimately begin working towards (Quebedeaux 1974, 36-39). Implicit in this questioning was

a strong critique of an evangelical theology that, despite its rhetoric of engagement, was

perceived as doing little to nothing to actually change real social ills (Smedes 1966, 8-10).

Because of this religiously motivated stance of prophetic critique regarding both the unjust

systems of society and the complacency of mainstream evangelicalism towards such systemic

evils, theologian Peter Goodwin Heltzel refers to this movement as “prophetic evangelicalism,”

describing it as “biblical, christocentric, and activist” in relation to issues of peace and social

justice (Heltzel 2008, 29-31).

That this strain of prophetic evangelicalism arose, at least in part, out of direct contact

and engagement with the Civil Rights struggle can be seen in the life of Jim Wallis, founder of

Sojourners magazine and perhaps the single-most recognizable and most frequently cited

representative of the prophetic evangelicals (Quebedeaux 1978; Hunter 1980; Hall 1997; Bivins

2003; Swartz 2008; Heltzel 2009). Raised in a conservative white Plymouth Brethren family in

the suburbs of Detroit in the 1950s and 60s, Wallis describes going through a period of youthful

rebellion in his mid-teens typical of many others in his generation. As Wallis relates in his early

memoirs, his feelings of alienation increasingly came to focus on the issue of racial inequalities

and racial tensions (Wallis 1983, 36). Wallis’s own parents had taught him not to treat individual

blacks differently, but, like most evangelicals, were insensitive to the problems of institutional

racism. The teenaged Wallis, however, began asking increasingly uncomfortable questions

around these very issues and sought out black Christians who could help him with the answers.

He began attending a black Plymouth Brethren church in inner-city Detroit and engaged in

numerous conversations with its leaders. He especially recalls meeting Bill Pannell, a traveling

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African American evangelist and Brethren youth pastor in the Detroit area, whose book My

Friend, the Enemy had left a deep impression on the young Wallis (38-39). Pannell himself

eventually became a major figure in the evangelical world as the first African American on the

Trustee Board of Fuller Seminary in 1971 and a highly regarded professor of evangelism there

since 1974. Pannell would also be a contributing editor to Wallis’s own Sojourners magazine.

Other currents of the black freedom struggle also influenced Wallis. He cites, for

instance, The Autobiography of Malcolm X as one of the most influential books on his life, along

with Charles Silberman’s Crisis in Black and White. Wallis also describes seeking out first-hand

experience with the more militant and radical streams of black thought, especially among the

young black workers and students he met during his summer factory and custodial jobs. Meeting

with their families in the inner city ghettoes of Detroit transformed Wallis and created in him an

ongoing passion and preoccupation with the place of black people and the black community in

American society. Wallis recalls studying the Kerner Report in-depth following the 1967 “race

riots” in Detroit as he struggled to understand the systemic, structural injustices that underlay his

own personal experiences in the black community (Wallis 1983, 39-46). These experiences also

helped Wallis to realize that his evangelical gospel had social dimensions equal in importance to

the message of personal salvation. Wallis was not alone in this discovery. “To many of us,”

wrote Donald Dayton, another younger evangelical like Wallis who later became a professor of

historical theology at Northern Baptist Seminary, “the Civil Rights movement and its principles

of fundamental human equality seemed not only more right, but more biblical and Christian than

positions taken by our elders” (Dayton 1976, 4). This assessment was supported by the fact that

many young evangelical students on numerous Christian college campuses joined in Civil Rights

protests during the early 1960s (Swartz, 154-65).

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Following the path of many other sixties radicals, Wallis’s early exposure to the Civil

Rights movement and racial tensions in America’s northern urban centers led him into other

forms of activism, especially in protest against the Vietnam War. Eventually growing

disillusioned with what he saw as the social dysfunctions and ideological inconsistencies of the

New Left, Wallis gravitated back towards Christianity after college, enrolling at Trinity

Evangelical Divinity School, a seminary north of Chicago in the conservative Evangelical Free

Church denomination. There he gathered a small group of like-minded seminarians who

eventually became the founding group for the People’s Christian Coalition, a communal living

experiment on the north side of Chicago which later moved to an impoverished African

American neighborhood in Washington, D.C., changing its name to the Sojourners Community

in the process. They also began a monthly publication called the Post-American (later changed to

Sojourners). This magazine featured a strong critique of both the Vietnam War and institutional

racism in America along with other pressing social issues. It also often included African

American evangelicals among its contributors (Wallis 1983, 72-108).

From the beginning, the response to the magazine was strong—55,000 subscribers to the

Post-American at its highest circulation, compared to over 100,000 for Christianity Today during

the same period from 1971-74 (Swartz 2011, 82), and Sojourners (and Wallis in particular) soon

became a prominent voice for the younger, prophetic evangelicals. Though their relative

numbers were small compared to mainstream evangelicalism, the growing coalition of prophetic

evangelicals was exceptionally vocal and highly visible, and tended to have an impact far beyond

their organizational strength. A watershed moment for this new movement was the signing of the

Chicago Declaration for Evangelical Social Concern in November 1973 by a workshop of nearly

fifty prominent evangelical leaders. These included not just Jim Wallis, but many other younger

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prophetic evangelicals as well, including Tony Campolo, Sharon Gallagher, Richard Mouw, Bill

Pannell, John Perkins, Ronald Sider, Tom Skinner, and Robert Webber, who would each

continue as increasingly prominent leaders in their own right in the decades to come. It also was

signed by a number of evangelical leaders from the previous generation, including Carl Henry

himself. The statement included the following confession:

We acknowledge that God requires justice. But we have not proclaimed or demonstrated

his justice to an unjust American society. Although the Lord calls us to defend the social

and economic rights of the poor and oppressed, we have mostly remained silent. We

deplore the historic involvement of the church in America with racism and the

conspicuous responsibility of the evangelical community for perpetuating the personal

attitudes and institutional structures that have divided the body of Christ along color

lines. Further, we have failed to condemn the exploitation of racism at home and abroad

by our economic system (Sider 1974, 1).

The emphasis on structural injustices, both economic and racial, evident in this statement

marks a major shift in evangelical thought compared to the individualism seen among the older

generation of leaders during the previous decade. The subsequent rise of these younger leaders

also indicates a shift in the broader evangelical identity. Indeed, as Mark Toulouse suggests,

“The Chicago Declaration, if anything, marked a passing of the torch to a younger generation of

evangelicals who would fulfill Henry’s call in ways he had not really ever imagined” (2006,

238).

The aftermath of this Declaration included the formation of Evangelicals for Social

Action led by Ron Sider, organized to implement the vision of the Chicago Declaration, along

with numerous other ministries focused on issues of social justice and racial reconciliation. This

Chicago gathering also helped draw various black-led racial reconciliation ministries into closer

association with the leaders and institutions of white evangelicalism. These included John

Perkins’ Voice of Calvary ministry and evangelist Tom Skinner’s own ministry association, of

which Bill Pannell was then the Vice President (Quebedeaux 1978, 156-59). Despite occasional

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setbacks and difficulties in bridging the racial divide between black and white evangelicals, these

ministries grew throughout the 1980s, eventually coming together in a loose coalition known as

the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA). John Perkins, who initiated the

CCDA, sees himself in the theological and social justice tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr.,

carrying forward King’s vision of the beloved community by promoting the three-R’s of

Christian community development: reconciliation (between races), relocation (by persons of

privilege to places of need), and redistribution (of talents, hopes, dreams, and materials). For the

past two decades now, the CCDA has represented the spearhead of the reconciliation movement

within evangelicalism (Emerson and Smith 2000, 54; Marsh 2004, 153-88; Heltzel 2009, 160-77;

Marsh and Perkins 2009).

The involvement of black evangelicals like Perkins, Skinner, and Pannell, along with

provocative prophetic white evangelicals like Wallis who continue to model proactive

partnerships with the black community (Heltzel 2009, 191), has attuned mainstream white

evangelicalism to the need for racial reconciliation in the post-Civil Rights era. The explosion of

events, resources, and organizational mergers and new organizational practices aimed at

furthering this goal witnesses to this shift among evangelicals. After the mid-1960s, for instance,

Christianity Today steadily increased its coverage of racial issues and published more on race in

the last two decades of the twentieth century than any other time in its history. Add to this an

increase of emphasis on reconciliation at Billy Graham’s crusades and the Promise Keepers

events of the mid-nineties, and it is small wonder that in 1997 the Wall Street Journal could refer

to evangelicalism as “the most energetic element of society addressing racial divisions” (quoted

in Emerson and Smith 2000, 63). This new reality represents a significant shift in evangelical

identity—from a movement espousing a highly individualistic theology and social theory to one

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which includes room alongside this traditional perspective for a more structurally focused social

analysis and socially oriented ministries.

The Emerging Generation of Prophetic Evangelicals

For all of the emphasis on racial reconciliation among evangelicals over the past several

decades, this strain of prophetic evangelicalism and the continuing Civil Rights legacy it

represents has not become the dominant trend within the white evangelical movement, especially

regarding the more complex issues of structural racism. As Emerson and Smith remind us, for

many white evangelicals, racial reconciliation is still primarily conceived of only in terms of

reconciliation between black and white individuals. Challenge to the broader social systems of

inequality is almost wholly absent in many circles. Many white evangelicals still assume that

changing individual hearts and minds is the only thing that needs to be done about the lingering

problem of racism (Emerson and Smith 2000, 66-68).

Some of this may be due to the eclipse of prophetic evangelicalism by the rising

Religious Right in the 1980s, despite the fanfare the former had received in the mid-seventies

(Schäfer 2011, 111-47). The conservative backlash to the radical social reforms of the 1960s and

70s was paralleled by (or perhaps even produced) a resurgence of social and theological

conservatism within the evangelical movement, as marked by the emergence of “family values”

leaders such as James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the potent media outlets they

controlled. David Swartz further argues that this right-ward turn in evangelicalism also happened

to coincide with an increasing fragmentation among the forces of the “evangelical left” due to

the tensions created by the rapid spread of identity politics in the late seventies and early eighties

(2011, 106). It became increasingly difficult for progressively-minded white males, evangelical

feminists, racial reconcilers, and other minority or interest groups to see themselves as part of a

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broader coalition when so often their concerns seemed to compete for attention and resources.

For these reasons, many prophetic evangelical leaders and organizations remained relatively

minor players within the evangelical world throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Despite this relative marginalization, prophetic evangelicals kept a toe-hold in certain key

locations within the evangelical world, most importantly in many of its seminaries and liberal

arts colleges as well as prominent youth and campus ministries (Quebedeaux 1978, 84-114).

From these centers of influence, over the past four decades prophetic evangelicals have been able

to mold many up-and-coming evangelical leaders into a more socially engaged expression of

faith. Perhaps as a result of this influence, a new shift has occurred within the evangelical

movement since shortly after the turn of the millennium. Historian Joel Carpenter, for instance,

traced a thirty-year trajectory from the Chicago Declaration to the new resurgence of evangelical

passion for social justice in a December 2003 Christianity Today article on “Compassionate

Evangelicalism.” Increasingly, evangelical leaders of all stripes, not just those explicitly

associated with prophetic evangelicalism, have developed a new passion for social concerns and

especially those relating to “creation care” (an evangelical euphemism for environmentalism),

global poverty, urban renewal, and racial diversity (Kirkpatrick 2007; O’Keefe 2008; Gushee

2008; Pally 2011). The National Association of Evangelicals, for instance, has made very

specific statements on each of these issues in recent years (Sider and Knippers 2005, 363-75;

Heltzel 2009, 127-59). Likewise, many notable mega-church pastors from across the evangelical

theological spectrum and across the country—from the Neo-Reformed Tim Keller at Redeemer

Presbyterian in New York City (Keller 2010), to seeker-sensitive Bill and Lynne Hybels at

Willow Creek in the Chicago suburbs (Galli 2009) and purpose-driven Rick Warren at

Saddleback Community Church in Orange County, California (Morgan 2005), to the emergent

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Rob Bell of Mars Hill Bible Church in West Michigan (Bell and Golden 2008)—have made

social justice a key aspect of their ministries in recent years. At the same time, numerous

parachurch organizations focusing on advocacy for various social causes, or on domestic and

foreign missions to serve the urban poor, have sprung up in the past decade (Tizon 2008, 71-97;

Chester 2003, 13-16; Hoek and Thacker 2008, 1-12). Editorial trends in Christianity Today

magazine, the flagship publication of the evangelical movement, also reflect this shift. For

instance, the percentage of articles on social justice and ecological concerns in CT’s editorial

pages since 2004 has more than tripled compared to the previous eight years.1 It seems likely that

this resurgence of social concern among evangelicals is a flowering of the seeds planted by the

prophetic tradition over the past three decades. Though lying relatively dormant for some time,

the theological and institutional groundwork laid by earlier generations of prophetic evangelicals

has enabled them to now burst forth into new life. 2

In the midst of this general turn towards social justice, one particular subset of the

evangelical movement known as the new monasticism has been especially deliberate about

reconnecting itself to the Civil Rights tradition and to the stream of prophetic evangelicalism that

grew out of it. The new monastic movement has its ostensible beginnings in the mid-1990s and

early 2000s as groups of young, white, middle-class evangelicals chose to leave behind their

lives of privilege and live in community with and among the poor, typically in places of urban

decay, what they call the “abandoned places of Empire” (Rutba House 2005, 10-25). These

groups, however, trace their own roots further back, having drawn their inspiration and much

guidance from the Catholic Worker movement, the Christian Community Development

Association, Anabaptist communities like the Bruderhof and Reba Place Fellowship in Chicago,

and other experiments in “intentional community,” many with beginnings in the Jesus People

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movement of the 1960s and 70s, as well as those like Koinonia Farm in Americus Georgia which

have their roots in pre-Civil Rights era efforts for racial integration and reconciliation (viii).

Indeed, as Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, a key spokesperson for the new monastics, puts it, “If

new monasticism is a movement, it’s much more like a river that we fell into than a march that

we helped to organize” (Wilson-Hartgrove 2008b, 26-31). The current incarnation of this

movement towards intentional Christian communities among the poor began in 1996 when a

handful of students from Eastern University, an American Baptist school near Philadelphia, were

motivated to stand in solidarity with a group of predominantly African American families from

the inner-city Kensington neighborhood who were in the process of being evicted from St.

Edwards, an abandoned Catholic church in which they had taken up residence. This collective

eventually evolved into a community called the Simple Way and has since inspired dozens of

similar communities nationwide (Claiborne 2006b, 55-67; Moll 2005).3

Borrowing the term “New Monasticism” from Jonathan R. Wilson’s 1998 book, Living

Faithfully in a Fragmented World, over sixty neo-monastic leaders gathered in North Carolina in

June 2004 to write a voluntary rule for their various communities. These communities outlined

twelve marks of the new monasticism:

1. Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire.

2. Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us.

3. Hospitality to the stranger.

4. Lament for racial divisions within the church and our communities combined with the

active pursuit of a just reconciliation.

5. Humble submission to Christ’s body, the church.

6. Intentional formation in the way of Christ and the rule of the community along the lines

of the old novitiate.

7. Nurturing common life among members of intentional community.

8. Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children.

9. Geographical proximity to community members who share a common rule of life.

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10. Care for the plot of God’s earth given to us along with support of our local economies.

11. Peacemaking in the midst of violence and conflict resolution within communities along

the lines of Matthew 18.

12. Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life. (Rutba House 2005, xii-xiii)

Though each neo-monastic community has its own distinct character and pattern of life, these

twelve marks provide a clear picture of the passions that motivate and guide the new monastic

movement as a whole.

While each of these twelve marks has some relevance to the neo-monastic concern for

racial reconciliation and justice, mark number four, “lament for racial divisions within the church

and our communities combined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation,” makes this

commitment specific. This emphasis on “just reconciliation” springs from many sources, not

least of which is the ongoing influence of the prophetic evangelicals of the 1970s. The

similarities between Shane Claiborne, one of the founders of the Simple Way and easily the most

recognizable and widely read leaders among the neo-monastics, and the early career of Jim

Wallis, for instance, are remarkable. Both were raised within the white evangelical church, and

both underwent an awakening to broader social issues in part through direct exposure to the

realities of black urban poverty. Both went on to found an intentional community in an

impoverished African American urban neighborhood and a magazine dealing with the

intersection of Christianity and social justice (Claiborne’s Simple Way community publishes

CONSP!RE magazine). Likewise, both Claiborne and Wallis have been motivated by their

exposure to urban poverty and racial justice issues to extend their activities into other areas of

social concern, most notably protesting war and American militarism. Just as Wallis engaged in

anti-war activities in the late sixties following his exposure to the Civil Rights movement, so did

Claiborne choose to go to Baghdad in 2003 with a Christian Peacemaker Team to show

19

solidarity with the Iraqi people in opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq (Claiborne 2006a;

Wilson-Hartgrove 2005).

Despite these similarities, Claiborne and the neo-monastics do not trace their direct line

of influence through Wallis himself, with whom they only became acquainted after their

movement was already underway. Instead they point to Tony Campolo, a well-known

evangelical author, speaker, social activist and sociologist, under whom Claiborne and many

other neo-monastic leaders studied while at Eastern University (Shane Claiborne, personal

communication). Founder of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education, which

helps “at-risk” young people in the inner cities, and frequent collaborator with Jim Wallis and

other prophetic evangelicals, Campolo has served as an important mentor for the new monastic

movement. In this way he represents a direct link between the first generation of prophetic

evangelicals from the 1970s and the new emerging generation in the twenty-first century.

Claiborne and the new monastics share another similarity with Wallis, Campolo, and

other first-generation white prophetic evangelicals. Both have been profoundly influenced by

their collaboration with and mentorship by black evangelical leaders, and most especially John

Perkins of the CCDA. Perkins first heard of the Simple Way in the early 2000s and soon came

for a visit to see their community first hand. Claiborne himself recalls having already read and

been inspired by Perkins’ 1976 memoir of his own ministry and civil rights work in Mississippi

in the 1960s (Perkins 1976). Soon after their first meeting, Perkins invited Claiborne to serve on

the CCDA’s board of directors, though because of Claiborne’s busy speaking schedule he is now

only on the board of advisors. According to Perkins, Claiborne and his neo-monastic colleagues

embody the same vision for reconciliation and community development that drives the CCDA,

and offer a hope for passing along its mission to a younger generation. For his part, Claiborne

20

describes Perkins as a mentor whose leadership Claiborne was eager to submit to and follow

(Claiborne and Perkins 2009, 13-15). Both Claiborne and other neo-monastic leaders like

Wilson-Hartgrove have emphasized that Perkins’ vision for the beloved community, and

especially his 3-R’s method (Relocation, Redistribution, and Reconciliation) for realizing this

vision, has significantly informed their own approach to intentional community (Shane

Claiborne, pers. comm.; Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, pers. comm.; Wilson-Hartgrove 2008b, 30-

31).

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove points to other black leaders who have similarly influenced

him and the neo-monastic movement. Like Claiborne, Wilson-Hartgrove is another young white

evangelical who attended Eastern and participated in the Simple Way before returning to his

native North Carolina to attend Duke Divinity School. There he helped found the Rutba House, a

new monastic community in a multi-ethnic neighborhood of Durham, North Carolina, and

eventually became an associate minister at the predominantly African American St. Johns

Baptist Church. In naming black leaders who have been particularly inspirational to him

pursuing this path of new monasticism, Wilson-Hartgrove specifically mentions what he has

dubbed “the Mt. Level School of Theology,” consisting of three black theologians from Duke

Divinity School, Willie Jennings, William Turner, Jr., and J. Kameron Carter, who each attend

Mt. Level Baptist Church where Turner himself serves as pastor. Beyond these scholars, Wilson-

Hartgrove also recognizes the mentorship of William Barber, pastor of Greenleaf Christian

Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and current president of the North Carolina NAACP,

whom he credits with first opening his eyes to the realities of race in the South as a teenager. He

also names local Civil Rights leader Ann Atwater, who began as a community organizer in

Durham in the 1960s through the influence of Martin Luther King, Jr., as both a personal friend

21

and his “mother in the faith and in the movement” (Wilson-Hartgrove 2008a, 18; 2009, 26-29;

Davidson 2007). Their influence, along with Perkins’ 3-R’s, are what inspired Wilson-Hartgrove

and his wife Leah to follow the path of relocation to an African American neighborhood, to join

a black church, and to submit to local black leadership in their pursuit of racial reconciliation and

social justice.

The influence of both black and white prophetic evangelicals can also be seen in the

ideology and values these neo-monastics take from the Civil Rights leaders, and especially

Martin Luther King, Jr. Accounts of King’s experiences and pointed statements by him appear

frequently in the writings and sermons of the neo-monastics. Above all they point to his radical

love ethic as the guiding principle of their own efforts at a “just reconciliation.” Love for

enemies and the practitioners of injustice informs much of the neo-monastic practice—from the

decision of Claiborne and Wilson-Hartgrove to go to Iraq as witnesses for peace, to the direct

action they take against unjust laws in their communities, to how they handle violence within

their own urban neighborhoods (Claiborne 2006b, 202-08; Claiborne and Haw 2008, 296-97).

While acknowledging that the black separatists and black power advocates of the Civil Rights

era have challenged and helped to nuance their own thought about the dynamics of racial justice,

the approach of those in the neo-monastic movement still primarily mirrors King’s ideals of

integration, reconciliation, and the restoration of broken relationships between the races

(Claiborne, pers. comm.; Wilson-Hartgrove, pers. comm.; Claiborne and Perkins 2009, 162-65).

They are not naïve, however, about the dynamics of power often present in attempts by

white reconcilers to identify and integrate with the African American community. Wilson-

Hartgrove, for instance, speaks about the tendency of downwardly mobile whites to romanticize

poverty in their attempts to escape their lives of middle-class privilege, even as lower-class

22

African Americans are still struggling to climb out of powerlessness and destitution. Instead, he

concludes, our goal should be to become part of a new family “where rich and poor share

together so that the rich are no longer rich and the poor are no longer poor” (Wilson-Hartgrove

2008a, 64-65). They admit these are difficult and complicated dynamics to navigate, however.

Chris Rice, another neo-monastic leader with roots in the CCDA, suggests that the “tricky terrain

of . . . learning to stick together in the intersection of ones moving from power and others

moving from the margins” calls for a practice of lamenting those failures along the way that

remind us that we are not God. In such lament, Rice says, neo-monastic communities are “signs

of hope” that keep alive the memory of Dr. King as an “Amos-like prophet of the church naming

sins of militarism, racism, and materialism” (Rutba House 2005, 60, 66-67).

This three-fold emphasis on “militarism, racism, and materialism” is yet another way the

new monastics have adopted the legacy of King, who in his later years spoke out not just for

black freedom, but against both the war in Vietnam and against the exploitation of the poor by

America’s capitalist system. This appropriation of King’s legacy can be seen especially in the

practices of the neo-monastics as they imitate the non-violent direct action pioneered by Dr.

King and others in the Civil Rights movement. Already we have noted the new monastic witness

against this most recent war in Iraq. Closer to home, Claiborne and his community have engaged

in numerous acts of civil disobedience (or what they like to call “holy mischief”) in protest of

unjust laws targeted at the poor and minorities. Some years ago, for instance, the city of

Philadelphia passed ordinances making it illegal to panhandle, lie down on sidewalks, sleep in

parks, or distribute food in public, all of which were aimed at restricting the visibility of the

homeless population of the city. In protest, Claiborne and his community organized public pizza-

party communion services for the homeless, and began sleeping out with them in the parks.

23

Eventually, as a result of their eventual arrest and acquittal, the ordinances were declared

unconstitutional. On another occasion Claiborne and his friends were arrested for holding a

prayer service at the Lockheed Martin headquarters in protest of that company’s global arms

dealing. More recently they were arrested for staging a sit-in at a notorious gun shop in

Philadelphia. And in 2006 Claiborne was again arrested on the steps of the U.S. Capitol building,

this time together with John Perkins, Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis, and other evangelical leaders,

to protest George W. Bush’s proposal to raise defense spending while cutting funds for the poor.

In defense of their decision to break the law on these occasions, Claiborne frequently cites Dr.

King’s statement that “There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for

a red light. But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes through that red light. . . . There is a fire

raging . . . for the poor of this society. . . . They need brigades of drivers who will have to ignore

the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved” (Claiborne 2006b, 232-37;

Claiborne and Haw 2008, 294-96; Claiborne and Perkins 2009, 136-40; Heltzel 2009, 174). In

these forms of creative, non-violent direct action, Claiborne and the new monastics demonstrate

what they have learned from the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, and how they are

carrying this tradition forward into the twenty-first century, not just as activists, but as prophetic

evangelicals motivated by faith to help realize their vision of the coming kingdom of God.

Conclusion

The effects of the mid-twentieth century struggle for African American Civil Rights

continue to ripple within American evangelicalism. As we have seen, this tradition of racial

reconciliation and non-violent direct action in the cause of social justice has been successfully

passed to two subsequent generations of prophetic evangelical leaders and lay persons. From

leaders like Wallis and Perkins with roots in the original Civil Rights movement, the torch has

24

now been handed to a younger generation of emerging leaders and most especially to the new

monastics. These new monastics have deliberately claimed this heritage and yet at the same time

are recombining it with a renewed emphasis on creating intentional and ordered spiritual

communities among and with the poor. While still concerned about the structural injustices that

contribute to problems of poverty and racism, they also see the need for communities of faith,

justice, and reconciliation that begin to practice on the small scale the kind of transformations

they would like to also see in the broader society. In this regard they remain within the broad

tradition of Carl F. H. Henry and Billy Graham, with their insistence on the need for

transforming individual relationships, and yet are also wise to the larger picture of social sin and

structural injustices emphasized by their prophetic evangelical forebears. At the same time, they

demonstrate the continuing evolution of this evangelical identity as they move beyond both the

individualistic ethics of the first generation, and the social ministries established by the second

generation, to demonstrate a localized, communal embodiment of racial justice and

reconciliation within these neo-monastic communities. And though both prophetic

evangelicalism and the new monasticism still remain minority streams within the broader

evangelical movement, their influence has been growing steadily over the past decade. Through

them, black prophetic Christianity continues to influence white American evangelical identity

and to play an integral role in the shaping of American evangelicalism as a whole.

25

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Zondervan. 1 These percentages are based on an as yet unpublished study, conducted by the author, of political editorials in

Christianity Today over the past 25 years. 2 While further work is needed to establish direct connections, as noted in the preceding paragraph, such seeds can

be found in the justice, race, and poverty focused programs established at many evangelical colleges and seminaries

over the past forty years—the Human Needs, Global Resources (HNGR) degree program at Wheaton College, for

instance, in the missions and parachurch ministries noted by Tizon and others, and among evangelical campus

ministries like InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, which have long had a focus on social concerns (Swartz 2008). 3 For a map of current neo-monastic communities, visit http://www.communityofcommunities.info/.