Where Are the Religious Leaders

Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama: March, 1965

I may have missed their presence at the demonstrations that have been happening all over the country, most recently in Louisville, Kentucky, but I doubt it. Since the events of the 1960’s, church attendance in the U.S. and all over the world has continued to fall drastically, perhaps partly because the clergy no longer seem to be involved politically.

It wasn’t always so.

One of the striking photographs of the second protest at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in March, 1965, shows a white clergymen in formal attire in the front line of the march.
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This was on Bloody Sunday, March 9, 1965, after James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, was beaten to death when leaving a restaurant in Selma. Reeb was white and the men beating him to death were white.

As recounted in Honor Moore’s fascinating autobiography, The Bishop’s Daughter (Norton), her father, Episcopalian Bishop Paul Moore Jr., had been commuting once a month from New Jersey to Mississippi to continue work as chair of the Delta Ministry. In Newark, he answered a call from Father Luce, rector of Grace Church, to respond to a riot that had torn the city. With Father Luce, Bishop Moore walked the black neighborhood where the riot had exploded after white policemen beat a black mother. From the darkness, a voice called, “Hey, Father Moore, how you doin’?” and soon he was surrounded by young black men whom he’d coached in baseball.

Then the police descended, “charging the crowd, waving their night sticks….firing their pistols while the mayor of the city disregarded a delegation of young people, clergy of all faiths and civil rights leaders who had sought to be mediators early on.”

Although Bishop Moore had been strongly drawn to march with Dr. Martin Luther King at the Pettus Bridge in Selma, he decided it was more important for him to go to Washington as head of the Coalition of Conscience with other religious leaders to try to persuade President Lyndon Johnson to send federal troops to Selma to protect the protesters.

The Coalition organized a demonstration across from the White House in Lafayette Square, persuading the vestry to allow St. John’s Episcopal Church to be used as headquarters and setting up signs, microphones and banners on the church portico. This is the same church President Trump used to appear with a Bible in hand after authorizing the violent clearing of protesters from Lafayette Square. Now the police use much more damaging weapons than their nightsticks.

I don’t remember reading or hearing that the current rector of St. John’s protested the misuse of the premises for this blatantly political purpose.

Oddly, the visit of the Coalition of Conscience is not mentioned in Robert A. Caro’s massive three-volume biography. I have other issues with this much-lauded, way too long account, especially in view of the essential work done by Caro’s wife, Ina Caro, for which he thanks her but who receives no formal acknowledgment as co-researcher or even co-writer. This is the old way.

We are in a different world, sixty years later, at a crucial time when if religious leaders have any hope of being relevant, they would surely be seen and heard supporting calls and protests to end the hideous injustices inflicted on minority populations. But as far as I can tell, there is only a vast silence.

We have no Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

It turns out, to my great satisfaction, that the Bishop of St. John’s Episcopal Church did protest.

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