"What a magnificent book! Charles Marsh writes eloquently about 'lived theology' in the context of the civil rights movement and related social and religions endeavors such as Koinonia Farm near Americus, Georgia, which emphasized social justice, racial reconciliation and redemption. Read every word. You'll be enlightened, revived, and blessed." -Millard Fuller, Founder and President, Habitat for Humanity International

"Charles Marsh is one of our best theologians, one of our best historians, one of our best storytellers. In this book -- his most expansive and ambitious one to date -- he places the Christian faith of the civil rights movement in a larger context: he shows us the faith that drove that movement, but also shows that its energy is still potent today, among places and people that we pay insufficient attention to. Most important, Marsh articulates a vision for renewal, a way that the larger community of faith can recover its passion for true social justice. This is a vital book by a major American thinker." -Alan Jacobs, author of Shaming the Devil and A Visit to Vanity Fair

"In this fascinating account of faith in action, Charles Marsh examines the necessity of hope, the seemingly contradictory truth that a vision of Christian transcendence animates lasting struggles for social change...The Beloved Community calls Christians back to a politics of empathy and social justice and activists back to the sustaining life of the faith. Marsh aims for nothing less here than the resurrection of the evangelical Christian left." -Grace Elizabeth Hale, Author of Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940

"Charles Marsh brings the eloquence of a memoirist, the skill of a historian, and the insight of a theologian to this remarkable study of Christian faith and the pursuit of social justice in America. The stories Marsh tells are thrilling, and inspiring, and sometimes sad. This book will want to make you stand up and shout; and kneel and pray; and then go out and do something remarkable." -Lauren F. Winner, author of Girl Meets God and Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity

Even without this dismal display of Christian cheeks not being turned, much less of brotherhood being riven asunder, Marsh has a difficult case to make that gains in social justice since the mid-1950s are faith-shaped. Not for want of trying, and while offering generous portions of well-crafted prose, he comes up short. What exactly does he mean by faith? Providing no precise definition, he apparently assumes a reader will understand the meaning of faith -- the Christian kind -- and be ready for his "story of how Christian faith gave rise to and sustained the civil rights movement."

The assumption is overly grand. Is faith the kind spoken of by that recovering alcoholic George W. Bush, an Episcopalian turned Methodist who seldom attends services: "There is only one reason I am in the Oval Office and not in a bar. I found faith. I found God." Or is it the self-assured faith of Rev. Franklin Graham: "The God of Islam is not the same God [as that of Christianity] . . . . It's a different God, and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion."

Marsh, a liberal-minded professor of religion at the University of Virginia and a thoughtful writer whose earlier works include the valuable God's Long Summer, The Last Days and Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer, begins with Martin Luther King Jr.'s taking a pastorate in Montgomery in 1954 for $4,200 a year. It's a well-known story, as told by many biographers from Taylor Branch to Marshall Frady: A young, ambitious Baptist minister with no pacifist leanings reluctantly is drawn into nonviolent protest against racism. Marsh then moves to Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia, an Americus, Ga., farming commune of white people committed, like the early Christians, to sharing funds and living "the Way of Jesus." Members in the late 1960s included Millard and Linda Fuller, who went on to found Habitat for Humanity.

In six other chapters, Marsh ranges from glowing accounts of Christ-centered people who choose to live among the marginalized in places such as Mound Bayou, Miss., Baltimore's Sandtown, Harlem, Oakland, Calif., and Charlottesville, Va. Marsh, assuredly, is a partisan in full intellectual communion with believers whom he sees as "bearing witness to the Prince of peace in a violent and suffering world." Firmly in the wing of American Protestantism that gets much of its current moral and intellectual energy from the writings of Stanley Hauerwas, Vincent Harding and the Christian Century and Sojourners magazines, he has scorn for the Christian Right and its zealous but selective stands against abortion: "Lacking a commitment to the poor and the excluded, conservative white opposition to abortion produced nothing so much as a generation of pious patriots." Its "campaign against abortion became a cynical posturing for a political edge that obscured its deep complicity in killing by other means."

In his enthusiastic heaping of credit on faith-shaped social reformers whose religious bents he agrees with, Marsh can't resist swiping at the unchurched. "Atheists," he speculates "have been with us for a long time -- long enough to notice that they have not in fact given us much evidence to suppose that the godless heart is capable of a more generous hope than the religious." But what of the large numbers of secular foundations -- from the Fords and Rockefellers to the MacArthurs and Gateses -- whose billions have helped create the social reforms that Marsh supports? What of major American corporations such as Home Depot and Starbucks, whose executives may be godless or god-fearing, that not only are generous in dispensing money to their local beloved communities but also provide jobs? Is it impious to ask how many jobs Martin Luther King Jr. created?

Reviewed by Colman McCarthy
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.