Charles Marsh > Quotes

“Beyond the ephemeral and the dark stands “a sign from eternity, solemn and mighty, bathed in the radiance of the divine sun of grace and light—the cross. And there [God] hangs, his arms outstretched as if to embrace the entire world in love.”42”
― Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Lillian Smith’s reflection on her Southern childhood: “I do not remember how or when, but by the time I had learned that God is love, that Jesus is His Son and came to give us more abundant life, that all men are brothers with a common Father, I also knew that I was better than a Negro, that all black folks have their place and must be kept in it, that a terrifying disaster would befall the South if ever I treated a Negro as my social equal.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“How did it happen, Percy asks, that a fairly decent people has become so completely deluded about itself, “that it is difficult to discuss the issues with them, because the common words of the language no longer carry the same meanings?”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“Black churches, especially those that had opened their doors to whites, burned at a rate of one every week and would continue to do so for the next year.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“she knew that the heart of God is love, movement in the most basic sense.6 Such love arises out of surrender, and equally out of strength, and yet still ultimately out of a place beyond surrender and strength. As Sally Belfrage says, “Mrs. Hamer was free. She represented a challenge that few could understand: how it was possible to arrive at a place past suffering, to a concern for her torturers as deep as that for her friends. Such people were rare. All of them began by refusing to hate or despise themselves.”7 Nonetheless, for Mrs. Hamer, the way beyond surrender and strength was not through resoluteness, habituation, or sheer will power, but through God. Love like this, love like Mrs. Hamer’s, cannot ground itself. “Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me on,” she testifies.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“Ain’t no such thing as I can hate anybody and hope to see God’s face,” she reminds us.5 Her invitation to join the “new Kingdom of God in Mississippi” reaches wide, bursting open the closed doors of the closed society.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“Yet of all the acts of nonviolent direct protest leveled against the closed society, none registered as a more painful reminder of the South’s own failed ideals than the pervasive inhospitality displayed toward black and interracial groups of Christians seeking a space on a pew.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“King was convicted of trespassing in his own hotel and sentenced to hard labor for a week. In local and national papers, King explained to reporters that the long of days chopping wood and cutting grass, supervised by guards riding horseback on the roadside, caused him no despair; on the contrary, he had been “morally strengthened” by his attack on the “idol of segregation.” He told an Alabama reporter, “I consider myself in approximately the same situation as early Christian martyrs who were put to death for refusing to put incense on the statue of the emperor. We refused to put a pinch of incense on the idol of segregation.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“And if the white people don’t stand with the Negroes as they go out now, then there will be a danger that after the Negroes get something they’ll say, ‘Okay, we got this by ourselves.’ And the only way you can break that down is to have white people working alongside of you—so then it changes the whole complexion of what you’re doing, so it isn’t any longer Negro fighting white, it’s a question of rational people against irrational people.”89 The civil rights movement needed to foster this new reality, to seek, as Moses said, a “broader identification, identification with individuals that are going through the same kind of struggle, so that the struggle doesn’t remain just a question of racial struggle.” Moses also invoked the vision of the beloved community, the ideal of a universal brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind, which Martin Luther King, Jr. had eloquently proclaimed in his recent sermons.90 Moses’s position was principled and philosophical and ultimately more persuasive.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“People spoke, without blushing, of “Christian” morals, values, families, clubs, and society—even of “Christian fun and wholesomeness.” The closed society had taken the divine into its own possession; it had brought God under its nervous management.102”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“In their midst, Mrs. Hamer stands with her feet solidly grounded, the welcoming woman in love with the welcoming God. She shows us that the person of faith dare not retreat into racial narcissism or private virtuousness, but must “drink the earthly cup to the dregs”—and only in so doing know the fullness of God’s goodness and the resplendent openness to life and to others that follow.3 Mrs. Hamer embodied the conviction that the God of biblical faith is a liberating God; and those who would please him do so not for the sake of duty alone, but out of deep love and gratitude.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“WHEN Ed King surveyed the white Christian establishment in Mississippi on the eve of Freedom Summer, he saw a people afraid to let go, paralyzed by an intricate knottiness, binding the heart and the soul; he saw people whose imaginations had closed tight against the hurt of others.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“the shepherd of First Baptist’s highly influential congregation, Hudgins preached a gospel of individual salvation and personal orderliness, construing civil rights activism as not only a defilement of social purity but even more as simply irrelevant to the proclamation of Jesus Christ as God. The cross of Christ, Hudgins explained at the conclusion of a sermon in late 1964, has nothing to do with social movements or realities beyond the church; it’s a matter of individual salvation.27 The congregation at First Baptist knew exactly what Hudgins meant.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“She said to Humphrey, “Do you mean to tell me that your position is more important to you than four hundred thousand black people’s lives?”126 For Mrs. Hamer, this was about the ascendancy of truth over politics; divine justice over liberal shrewdness. This was about “the beginning of a New Kingdom right here on earth,” about curing “America’s sickness”—and not with another remedy from the prevailing ethos of utility and power but with an injection of new vision and energy; not with a view toward political expediency”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“Jesus rejected hatred,” Thurman wrote in a prose poem published in the Methodist student magazine Motive. “It was not because he lacked the vitality or the strength. It was not because he lacked incentive. Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“For this Christ stood outside the closed society, outside the doors of the segregated white churches, beyond the Southern Way of Life. This Christ signaled the power of the new breaking into the old. No wonder that those who follow after in obedience cannot help but appear peculiar and alien, always the outsider, their commitments propelled by a “grammar of dissent.”103”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“I think the question of genre is one of the most pressing questions facing those of us who care about lived theology.”
― Charles Marsh, Lived Theology: New Perspectives on Method, Style, and Pedagogy

“A northern minister writing in the Methodist magazine Behold concluded after returning from a Sunday with Ed King’s church visitors, “What has happened in Jackson, Mississippi not only dramatizes the segregated nature of the church and its false unity, but also reveals that the church has capitulated to the culture in which it dwells…. The church, like a chameleon, blends in with its background so that it loses its identity.”101 The white church that sanctified and blessed the Southern Way of Life preached a gospel of comfort. A pleasing correlation adhered between proclamation and culture; and in any case, those untamed or sinful elements in culture which threatened piety’s innocence were reproached by a faith almost completely purified of compassion’s harder demands.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“Now if you lose this job of vice president because you do what is right, because you help the MFDP, everything will be all right. God will take care of you. But if you take [the vice-presidential nomination] this way, why, you will never be able to do any good for civil rights, for poor people, for peace or any of those things you talk about. Senator Humphrey, I’m gonna pray to Jesus for you.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“Percy—who was born in Alabama and raised in Greenville, Mississippi, by his uncle William Alexander Percy—reached the conclusion that in the attempt to reconcile increasingly contradictory claims about social life under Jim Crow, segregationists had forged a discourse wherein all assertions became both equally true and equally false, “depending on one’s rhetorical posture.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“Mrs. Hamer said, “I had been workin’ at Marlowe’s for eighteen years. I had baked cakes and sent them overseas to him during the war; I had nursed his family, cleaned his house, stayed with his kids. I had handled his time book and his payroll. Yet he wanted me out. I made up my mind I was grown, and I was tired. I wouldn’t go back.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“As a result, the prevailing syllogism goes as follows: “1. There is no ill-feeling in Mississippi between the races; the Negroes like things the way they are; if you don’t believe it, I’ll call my cook out of the kitchen and you can ask her.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“I’m sick and tired of violence,” he told an audience in Yazoo City, “I’m sick of the war in Vietnam. I’m tired of war and conflict in the world. I’m tired of shooting. I’m tired of hatred. I’m tired of selfishness. I’m tired of evil. I’m not going to use violence, no matter who says it.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“Nonetheless, it is better still to say that Mrs. Hamer’s life was a parable of divine love embodied in human history, and that the movement she gave her life to happened as a convergence of wills—of the God whose righteousness flows as a mighty stream with a people readied by time and cruelty.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“Few of them knew who she was…. But here was clearly someone with force enough for all of them, who knew the meaning of ‘Oh Freedom’ and ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ in her flesh and spirit as they never would. They lost their shyness and began to sing the choruses with abandon, though their voices all together dimmed beside hers.”95 Although a well-known cast of speakers had been organized for the week, and the daily schedule offered a full slate of lectures and workshops, it was Fannie Lou Hamer whose indomitable presence was everywhere felt by those in attendance and who brought the purpose to focus.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

“The thinking he brought to the task was simple at its heart, and yet severe in its demands. If a person calls himself a Christian, he must give up everything and follow Christ. In Mississippi in 1963 and 1964, “everything” meant, first and foremost, giving up the practices of white supremacy; but it also meant giving up class privilege, educational pretension, anything that kept one from opening up and going the whole way. The Christian life must be lived for others.”
― Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights