Day 66: For God? (Or, Showdown on the Edmund Pettus Bridge)
What Amelia Boynton and Jim Clark Can Teach Us About How the State of Our Hearts Shapes the Arc of Our Lives.
As the Bible says, “Everybody’s your brother. Love your brother as you do yourself. Do good unto those who do harm to you.” I look at Jim Clark as I do all of the other racists: Those people may not be totally responsible. Because they are weak and they live according to the way that they were trained, conceived in the bed of hatred, and rocked in the cradle of discrimination. And when people come up like that, you have to blame the background as much as blaming the weakness of them.
There are so many people who are like that, particularly in the South, considered great leaders by the racists. They succumb – whatever those racists want them to do, they do it. — 101-year-old Amelia Boynton, when asked, in a 2007 interview why she refused to hate Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark, the man who assaulted her on Selma’s Bloody Sunday, and whose funeral she attended.
We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our states. — Declared by US Senator Richard Russell, Democrat from Georgia, as he led the attempt to filibuster the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Imagine you’re among those segregationists after Selma. Perhaps you’re a guy like Mr. Sam, the white-identifying, likely Klansman who ran the corner store down the street from where I grew up, or his policeman buddy, both of whom I described in Don’t Dream It’s Over. Or, like Jim Clark and Richard Russell, you’ve been, as Amelia said, “rocked in the cradle of discrimination”, taught your skin is “the same color as God’s”. Let’s say you’ve lived a relatively privileged life for your entire life; one that’s offered you all kinds of outsized benefits at others’ expense. But, all of a sudden, it appears the party’s over.
First came Birmingham and “Martin Luther Coon”, followed by the march on Washington. Then came the 1964 election, which was a massive victory for Lyndon B Johnson, the largest landslide in nearly 200 years against your candidate; all because he passed that damned Civil Rights Act. Then came Selma, 10,000 “outside agitators” and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, whose passage advanced the very thing you and others from across the state had gathered to prevent – even more Negros getting the vote.
Now, think about the America we were as 1968 arrived. We were coming up on the first presidential election since the Voting Rights Act’s passage, and everyone was aware that a combined ticket of the beloved RFK and revered MLK – if such a thing were to happen – would likely result in a bigger landslide victory than the one LBJ achieved. Then, all of a sudden, Martin is dead, followed by Bobby, and Johnson has opted not to run again. And, supremacists? Instantly, they go from “Game over, man!” to “We’re back, baby!”
Following Strom Thurmond’s lead, segregationists, lifelong Democrats, jumped ship, heading for the GOP. Despite being a minority, the faction, acting like a hive mind, infiltrated the party that defeated the South and made it their new home. It’s a tactic that helped them take over everything from the NRA (which was founded by the Union Army and was, for 100 years, pro-gun control) to the SBC, from Congress to SCOTUS.
In Meeting History, we saw how Kevin Phillips’ brainchild, the Southern Strategy, helped an unlikely Nixon emerge as victor from 1968’s decimated presidential field. In a 1970 New York Times interview, Kevin described a key component of that strategy; concentrating their power: "The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South,” he surmised, “The sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are; without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."
Fast-forward forty years, however, and even Kevin, seeing what his strategies had wrought, had completely reversed course. His 2006 book, American Theocracy, presented what one New York Times book reviewer called, "A nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed, and dangerous shortsightedness."
Kevin, at least until then, considered one of conservatism’s shining stars, used extensive quotes to show how politicians were increasingly adopting this theocratic framing (far beyond the recent tendency to end every speech with “And God bless the United States of America!”), including from George W Bush, where a sitting president actually inferred that he was speaking for God.
For God. It became a phrase that could be added to any action, like adding “in bed” to a fortune cookie saying. (“You will be very successful. In bed.” “Expect a pleasant surprise. In bed.”) Only this phrase could sanction the same heinous actions that have been occurring under supremacy for decades. Detain children – for God. Subjugate women – for God. Burn churches – for God. Condemn gays – for God. Assault activists – for God. See how that works?
In The Gospel According to Gaga, we covered how Baptist televangelist Pat Robertson, in a March 1986 memo distributed to the Iowa Republican Caucus, exclaimed, “Rule the world for God.” And that wasn’t just a figurative statement. (Maybe Tears for Fears were right, and everybody really does want to rule the world.) Today, we can’t fully appreciate what’s happening in American society without understanding what “rule the world for God” means to supremacists, and how MAGA Christianity arose as a counterpoint to the humanitarian spirituality that fueled the Civil Rights movement.
At the core of this takeover effort is the Southern Baptist Convention, whose massive size (they’re twice as large as United Methodists, our second largest protestant denomination) means that there wouldn’t be much of a supremacy faction without them. Still, despite an awful origin story (born out of a split over their support of slavery), until the late ‘70s, the group was essentially neutral about every social issue it would go on to issue decrees over, and in the 80s, member churches began making honest efforts to atone for their past. All that soon changed, with the SBC becoming increasingly strident, militant and authoritarian.
My involvement in this ideological strain of faith was a fluke. You couldn’t throw a rock in Norman, OK and not hit a Baptist church, so, given this was my heritage (my granddad Olden was one of the Baptist ministers who invited Martin, a fellow Baptist, to come to their aid in Birmingham), I went along with my friends to the church that held the special college service for upward of a thousand OU students.
Back then, I had no idea there were more than 50 Baptist denominations. I thought there was just one. I remember, much later, being stunned when someone stated, rather matter-of-factly, that Mother Teresa, Gandhi and Martin were all most likely burning in hell. This clearly wasn’t my grandfather’s Oldsmobile.
My sophomore year, I “walked the aisle”, along with a bunch of other students, to become a member. I was greeted warmly, but also with a kind of anxiety I didn’t understand. I was then pulled aside to a separate room where it was explained to me, with no small amount of shame, that the church, unfortunately, still had old bylaws that barred African Americans from becoming full, instead of “mission” members. To their credit, at the next church meeting, members voted to strike that article. But the fact that it existed at all tells us something important about the America we once were.
Years later, I’d discover that such articles had been added to church bylaws all over the country in the wake of Brown v. Board. But it didn’t stop there. Before long, this ideology had positioned itself against every social movement that occurred since the '60s. When gays started coming out, Christians, all of a sudden, also came out – against gay rights – declaring them “the homosexual menace".
They fought back against women's rights, pronouncing, for the first time, that women can't be pastors or even speak in public. They railed against "Romanists" – against Catholics – especially during the Kennedy administration and RFK’s presidential bid; claiming they were more aligned with the Pope than with the United States. And even as thousands of Vietnam vets joined anti-war protests, and as public sentiment turned against the war, they doubled down, framing it as a stand against "godless communism" and labeling those same men they’d once lauded as heroes, “traitors”. Just like they did with Kevin Phillips.
They were against Welfare and "government handouts" when those supports were primarily for ethnics, but during the Great Recession, when their congregants were struggling, they were demanding government intervention. Looking back, the dividing line running through the ideology of the self-named “religious right” is as obvious as the bar once used to keep bus seating segregated. But, the amazing thing is that simply by wrapping all this in "the Bible says", they could completely deny that social supremacy was involved.
Still, there’s a kind of genius to how they flipped the narrative. By taking religious texts from an era when human beings were so much more barbaric than we are today and making them their rulebook, they were able to offer a counter-morality to the one that propelled the faithful into the Civil Rights movement, in pretty much every way.
Martin was describing the spiritual power of the movement when he said: We will not forget the Freedom Rides of sixty one, and the Birmingham Movement of sixty three, a movement which literally subpoenaed the conscience of a large segment of the nation to appear before the judgement seat of morality on the whole question of civil rights. We will not forget Selma, when by the thousands we marched from that city to Montgomery to dramatize the fact that Negroes did not have the right to vote.
So, for people like Mr. Sam and Jim Clark, it must have been shocking to look up one day and realize that society, seeing what they’d done everywhere from Birmingham to Selma, had judged them by their actions, and declared them the villains of the story. But, that’s exactly what happened. Across the nation, our ethos flipped almost overnight, with fundamental equality emerging as central to our identity, even as our demography underwent unprecedented shifts.
For instance, in 1960, white-identifying voters were nearly 90% of the voting public, and KKK members alone outnumbered all African Americans alive by almost 2 to 1. But now, in 20 years, Anglos will be just another minority. And that’s before getting to the massive non-religious majority that, today, resolutely stands against everything from bigotry and homophobia to oppression and exclusion.
Supremacists, under threat, engaged in choice-confinement; framing their options as a choice that wasn’t a choice: give up or press forward, step aside or take the bridge — for God. They did the latter. And that meant doing three things simultaneously. First, rehabilitating their image; shifting from being the villains of segregation to saviors of America.
They insisted they were no longer the people who burned crosses and bombed churches, who beat women and children for marching, who killed civil rights workers and buried them in mounds, who shouted Sieg Heil as 500-person mobs set fire to the buses full of Freedom Riders. They were no longer declaring, like Richard Russell, that they’d resist social equality “to the bitter end”, or like George Wallace, quipping that what Alabama needed was a “few first-class funerals” to quell the rise of integration.
They sanitized their language. “Nigger, nigger”? That’s out. “Homosexual agenda”? That’s in. “God is white”? That’s out. “Thank God for AIDS”? That’s in. “Pure white race”? Out. “Take this land – for God”? In. “Segregation forever”? Out. “Make America great again (the way America was back when we were segregated)? In.
Second, they geared up for war. They stocked up on guns and ammo, and took over the NRA as they declared, “He will deliver our enemies into our hands.” They enticed those who could barely keep their heads above water to join them, insisting that the reason they were struggling was because of those who had even less than they did. (Or, as Malcolm X put it, “If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”)
They established ideological outposts for disaffected segregationists, and recruited radicalized racists, ennobling their causes. Not unlike how Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich in the film, Conspiracy said, “Soldiering requires the discipline to do the unthinkable, and politics requires the skill to get someone else to do the unthinkable for you.”
This was the case with psychologically vulnerable, barely 21-year-old Dylann Roof, who ended up taking nine lives at an African American church known for its civil rights activism, saying, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go,” before attempting to kill himself, putting his gun to his own head and pulling the trigger.
And third, they convinced large facets of the American church to embrace this new gospel, declaring that the only way to do God’s will was to “take the nation for God”, language appropriated from the Christian Old Testament, which had already been appropriated from the Torah. They took the rolls of many of the largest Christian organizations and televangelist rosters and, in 1979, formed the strategically named “Moral Majority.”
The move retroactively added members to their cause and gave them the miraculous makeover they’d long been seeking. “Fuck democracy,” a speaker at a 2024 MAGA rally said, “I stand with Jesus Christ.” But even more important is the subtext; the inference that Jesus Christ stands with him.
But, even this three-fold strategy wasn’t enough. Given how much we’d changed, the only play left was wresting control of society itself, starting with the Supreme Court.
They’d seen what the Court could do, how, in the ‘50s, when civil rights advocates couldn’t get traction anywhere else, it struck down segregation, the same year that Congress was adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Or, take so-called “race-mixing”. While Democrat George Wallace was campaigning for president on a segregationist platform, SCOTUS was striking down the law that made Mildred and Richard Lovings’ marriage illegal. And so forth.
So, starting with Ronald Reagan, they switched tactics. They began deal-making. “Promise to give us Supreme Court justices,” they essentially said, “And we’ll give you the presidency.” And given that Supreme Court appointments are for a lifetime, this would turn out to be a great buy, one that, through everything from the Citizens United ruling that allowed high-dollar investments in politics to the Shelby, AL ruling that gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, allowed them to fundamentally change how our nation worked.
Adam Russell Taylor is president of the Christian advocacy group Sojourners, a role he took over from his mentor and Sojourners founder Jim Wallace. Adam is a great example of someone deftly working at the intersection of good faith, just society and beloved community. In his most recent post, titled, I Underestimated the Religious Right, beyond actions that fueled everything from Unite the Right rallies to the January 6 insurrection, he called out the faction’s “unscrupulous thirst for power and the extent to which Christian nationalism has become woven into the fabric of so much of the American church.” He continued:
And though I’ve been a keen observer of the last few decades of U.S. history, what I failed to fully see is the degree to which a resurgent Christian nationalist movement nearly 50 years in the making was growing, thanks to massive funding from oil and tech billionaires. This movement, which supercharged support for Trump, grew stronger in part through local and state level campaigns to censor and ban books, scapegoat transgender kids, and undermine religious liberty.
We must continue to resist the temptation to make this all about President Donald Trump. The truth is, what we are facing right now is about far more than a single president or even the MAGA movement. It’s a struggle that is rooted in the tug of war that has taken place throughout our nation’s history around who “We the People” includes and whether the rights granted by the Constitution and the promise of “liberty and justice for all” ever becomes real for all Americans. But one thing I recognized then — and that remains true now — is this: The majority of Americans still believe in pluralism and the ideal of liberty and justice for all.
To repair and transform our democracy, we’ll need strategic, moral resistance that helps people see how presidential abuses of power — such as the illegal dismantling of federal government agencies and freezing vital funding — negatively impact people’s real lives and fundamental freedoms. We’re also in a time in which people of faith and conscience must protect those who are being made vulnerable by the policies of the new administration including immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and Black and brown communities who will likely face increased racialized policing and brutality.
Adam comes back to recurring themes for him; how his enduring belief in the countervailing power of the Beloved Community, and of a nation where “neither punishment nor privilege is viciously tied to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, where our nation’s growing diversity is embraced as a strength rather than a weakness, and where everyone is equally valued and is enabled to thrive.”
He then concludes by saying, “The project of pushing our nation up the mountain of becoming a just, inclusive, multiracial democracy is much steeper and longer than I had hoped. But I’m convinced that despite setbacks we must keep climbing, we must keep pushing, we must keep ascending, together.” There’s something powerful in his perspective, and I found myself gratified that he’s so eloquently captured so many of the same issues I’m raising, from One More Bridge to Cross, to Fork in the Road.
Further, Sojourners’ work reminds us of two things. First, people of faith have always been at the forefront of the fight for democracy. And second, efforts to use faith to overthrow democracy aren’t actually about faith.
The Mayflower Compact written by the Pilgrims and the Pennsylvania Charter written by William Penn and the Quakers, which, among other things, guaranteed free and fair trial by jury, freedom of (and from) religion, freedom from unjust imprisonment and, perhaps most importantly, free elections; all of which became foundational components of the United States, were both written by faith groups.
Or, take abolitionist and suffragist Lucy Stone, who, at 25 years old, took a stand. Her church, the First Congregational Church of West Brookfield, MA, was voting on whether to expel a deacon due to his involvement in antislavery activities (Southern churches weren’t alone in their backing of slavery). Lucy raised her hand in objection to the deacon’s expulsion.
When the minister ignored her, saying that, as a woman, she was not a voting member, defiantly, she continued to raise her hand for each subsequent vote. She became an increasingly harsh critic of faith groups that refused to condemn slavery, and eight years later, was expelled as well. Undaunted, she joined an abolitionist church and redoubled her efforts.
Or, take James Chaney (Catholic), Andrew Goodman (Jewish) and Michael Schwerner (Jewish), Civil Rights activists who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964, as well as Jimmie Lee Jackson (Baptist), James Reeb (Unitarian), Jonathan Daniels (Episcopal) and Viola Liuzzo (Unitarian), the four people killed in Selma. Or, the nuns, priests, rabbis and Buddhist monks who marched through Selma in 1965, or the Wall of Clergy that stood face-to-face with armed troops in 2020. Or, people like Adam Russell Taylor today.
They’re all examples of what Martin meant when he said: "The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.” They were the counterpoint to those described in Letter from Birmingham Jail when he wrote, “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” We’ve never needed them more than we need them right now.
Sure, if we want, we can continue to tell ourselves that the evil we’re doing is “for God”. But, it makes no difference. Because, in the end, it doesn’t matter what any of us claim. What matters is what we do – the lives we touch and the legacy we leave. Or, as President Kennedy said, “With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”
Which gets us back to Selma, to Amelia and Jim, and to the opposing religious strains they represent. Amelia’s version taught that even people like Jim were her brothers; Jim’s taught that people like Amelia were his inferior. Amelia believed in “all or none”; Jim, in “us or them”. “A vote-less people is a hopeless people,” she famously said. And she lived that truth.
Looking back, no one would ever have thought that in a matchup between Amelia - Negro, female and nearly 20 years Jim’s senior, and Jim - armed, male, white supremacist, that history would prove her to be the victor. But that’s exactly what happened. And, her life? Its trajectory eclipsed Jim’s in almost every way imaginable, from that showdown in Selma to what newspapers reported about Jim’s funeral.
Amelia lived to be 110. She saw her story on screen in 2014’s Selma, and the following year, five months before her passing, she traversed the Edmund Pettus Bridge once again; this time, holding hands with President Obama. Whereas, Jim died alone in a nursing home, having served time for everything from mail fraud to drug trafficking to loan-sharking. Unrepentant until the end, the year before he died, Jim told the Montgomery Advertiser, "Basically, I'd do the same thing today if I had to do it all over again."
Though neither likely realized it, all along, both Jim and Amelia were choosing, writing their story’s ending, becoming the people they’d become. As are we all. But those choices never matter more than in moments of consequence, when society meets conscience. Like 1965 Selma. Like the moment we’re living in right now.
Amelia and Jim, not unlike my friend Danny, got to choose what their line in the human story would ultimately say. So do we. And, for us as a people, I don’t think the stakes have ever been higher.
Today is March 26, day 66 under this administration. We have just 590 days until the 2026 elections, 1,321 days until the 2028 elections, and 1,389 days until Martin’s 100th birthday. So, when do we fight? Today, tomorrow, and every day between now and then. Where do we fight? Anywhere and everywhere we see injustice occurring or oppression increasing. And, how do we fight? In every way we can.
The song I have for you today is Alive in the World, by Jackson Browne. I can’t think of a better summation of who Amelia was and how she lived her life.
I want to live in the world, not inside my head,
I want to live in the world, I want to stand and be counted,
With the hopeful and the willing, with the open and the strong,
With the voices in the darkness, fashioning daylight out of song,
And the millions of lovers – Alive in the world.
I want to live in the world, not behind some wall.
I want to live in the world, where I will hear if another voice should call,
To the prisoner inside me, to the captive of my doubt,
Who among his fantasies harbors the dream of breaking out,
And taking his chances – Alive in the world.
To open my eyes and wake up alive in the world.
To open my eyes and finally arrive in the world.
With its beauty and its cruelty, with its heartbreak and its joy,
With it constantly giving birth to life and to forces that destroy,
And the infinite power of change – Alive in the world.
To open my eyes and wake up alive in the world.
To open my eyes and finally arrive in the world.
To open my eyes and wake up alive in the world.
To open my eyes and finally arrive in the world.
It does seem like the religious right has negotiated the political deal of the century by granting Republicans the votes they need to elect a presidents in return for control of the Supreme Court. SCOTUS: where laws aren't made to last for a four year or eight year term, but for a lifetime.