For the record: in my book, I REJECT the idea that “religion” drove the civil rights movement.

I write about something called PROPHETIC RELIGION. I define this narrowly. Only a very few black leaders had the power to inspire masses to acts of self-sacrifice. These prophetic black leaders were often rebelling against “the” black church (which never existed as a monolith). The black church could be quite conservative. It could sometimes be an opiate. It was many things to many people.

I think Reverend Wright and some of his defenders often misrepresent “the black prophetic tradition.” I think we only have one instrument to help us discern who’s a true prophet: the rear-view mirror. Anybody who calls himself a prophet–and makes his own congregation feel very comfortable about themselves and focuses all the rebukes on people outside his own community–has a hard time meeting any reasonable historical standard of a prophet.

(Conventionally, historians of religion distinguish Prophetic religion from Priestly. Prophetic means disruptive: it rarely appears in pure form, most often at the beginning of a new religion or sect, i.e., the destruction of an old religion. If you have heating and air-conditioning bills, mortgage payments, etc., it’s pretty hard to be a prophet.) Rev. Wright may some day look like a Prophet. Who knows?

Jesus looks like one, but few of his followers do. I write about six men and women who appear to fit the bill, on occasion, before they died or returned to normal, unprophetic life. That’s in my book on the civil rights movement, A Stone of Hope (2004).

Chris Hitchens might learn a lot about religion if he considered that the Pagan Romans attacked Christians because Christians were “atheists.” Christians didn’t have the nerve to believe in a supernatural being: they believed in a mere man. So the Romans said. (See Robt Wilken’s book, Xians as the Romans Saw Them.) Karl Barth–the greatest 20th c. Xian theologian–echoed the Romans’ view. Most people who call themselves Xians really are atheists, Barth said. They lack the existential nerve to take a leap into the unknown.

I think Xians and atheists–true atheists and true Xians–have a lot in common: skepticism about a lot of conventional wisdom in our culture. (I concentrated on skepticism about Progress–which Marx called “that great Pagan idol”– in my book.) As a young atheist years ago, I was drawn to the bravery of a few in the civil rights movement. It’s a kind of intellectual and moral as well as physical courage. I don’t think you can understand it without understanding the way most people in the movement accounted for it: in religious terms. But they rejected all the BS about “religion” that you guys reject. I think if you distinguish that rare “prophetic” moment from the maintenance of normal, priestly religion, you’ll get it. I’m just using that as a label for that rare contagion of excitement that seizes people at the founding of a new religion. They’re usually criticized–as ML King and others in my book were–for being faithless and irreligious. They’re scorned and often persecuted by the keepers of normal religion. Thank you. DC

I think I’ll pull back my disapproval and reserve judgment while I listen more to others’ reviews.

Still, my comment remains valid. Hitchens is criticized for having an inaccurate view on history because another guy, who grew up being told religion is good, injected religion as the cause of the civil rights movement. It was basically “Hitchens has all this evidence of religious hypocrisy and debauchery, but David Chappell told me what I wanted to hear, so that proves it!”

Plus, I generally think Hitchens is a prick. Which, of course, has nothing to do with the accuracy of his book.

I don’t know if his book about the history of the Civil Rights Movement is correct about the role of religion, but the guy certainly has the qualifications to write one.

That error, if it is one, doesn’t disturb me much anyway. Oppenheimer’s article has enough others to turn me off.

Seriously, that quote is totally fallacious. “zomg u guyz, people have grown up hearing religion is responsible for the civil rights movement and inspired white people to free slaves in the civil war, so the fact that people liked a single guy’s book regurgitating it proves that it must be true! lollerskates”