This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 10, 2012 - A society of the righteous is not necessarily at risk if fewer people are affiliated with houses of worship, Charles Marsh, a nationally recognized scholar on religion said Thursday after a lecture at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.
Marsh was responding to a question about a Pew study that has distressed many in organized religion of all faiths. Poll data released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life showed that over the past five years there’s been a 5 percent increase in Americans who are unaffiliated with any house of worship. Most of that drop is white Protestants, as black Protestants and Catholic numbers are steady. Even TV comedians found the poll fodder for comments last night.
Marsh came to St. Louis from Charlottesville, Va., to lecture on two mid-20th century church leaders who were martyred for standing up for Gospel values, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and American preacher Martin Luther King Jr.
“I don’t think Dietrich Bonhoeffer would be upset (by the poll findings), he believed that there are good people, righteous people who do good works (and are not part of churches) and some of them were among the first to speak out against Hitler," said Marsh, who is finishing a book on Bonhoeffer’s life.
The Nazis first banned Bonhoeffer from publishing. He tried to get other German Lutheran and Evangelical and Confessing Christians church leaders to speak out against the Nazi regime. But most who expressed opposition did so only in veiled, fogged expressions about the governmental flaws, Marsh said. Some went along with Nazi ideas to removed Christian pastors with Jewish ancestors or even the idea of removing the Hebrew Bible from the Bible.
“They did not have the courage to speak out directly,” Marsh said. “Were not able to express their ideas against the Nazis with candor."
Bonhoeffer was hanged in 1945 at the age of 39 because he spoke out about Gospel values and against many aspects of Hitler’s Nazi regime including its terrorism of the Jews.
While some Confessing Church men did speak out, many of those who joined Bonhoeffer's call were among those then called the "unchurched”: Germans who were not affiliated with any house of worship. They included many self-identified humanists and atheists, Marsh said Tuesday. “They were the ones showing courage.”
By the time of his execution near the end of the Nazi regime, Bonhoeffer said that “there was a time when in order to be righteous one has to act righteously.” Ironically at the age of 26, when he first came to the U.S. on a Sloan Fellowship to study at Union Theological Seminary in New York he wrote that many Union professors including Reinhold Niebuhr were too involved with social justice issues and less concerned with “pure” theological issues. In his diary, Bonhoeffer called one course in social justice a “dumb seminar,” Marsh said. By the end of the 1930-31 school year he was transformed.
Bonhoeffer and a fellow seminary student Frank Fisher, an African-American minister from Alabama, made a road trip around the U.S., which included visiting Concordia Seminary in Clayton. What really moved him were poor Black Protestant churches in the South.
Bonhoeffer wrote that “in a church of outcasts of America” he found a the best example he’d ever found of preaching the Gospel, Marsh said. When Bonhoeffer returned to New York he taught two Bible courses a week at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, then led by the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr.
Bonhoeffer returned to Germany more aware of society’s outcasts. In April 1933, four months after Hitler assumed dictatorial power as German chancellor, Bonhoeffer's essay "The Church and the Jewish Question," was the first to publicly explore Nazis terrorizing the Germany’s Jewish people; and he called on the churches to react.
With Martin Luther King Jr., the experience heading up what was supposed to be a short Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott sparked by Rosa Parks transformed him from a comfortable pastor of that city’s black intellectual church, to enduring the terror of having his home bombed. The able King might have been a comfortable seminary professor but circumstances pressed him to become the nation’s civil rights leader and eventually a strong opponent of the Vietnam War, Marsh said.
Five days short of 23 years separated the murder of each man. Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis April 9, 1945. King was murdered April 4, 1968. Both men were 39 years old at their deaths.
Marsh came to St. Louis from his home in Charlottesville, Va. for the Danforth talk. He is director of the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia. The visit was a reunion. He was a graduate adviser to Danforth Center director R. Marie Griffith when he was a Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia.
Also in the audience was Marsh’s childhood friend Lydia Ruffin who grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, in Laurel, Miss. led by Marsh’s father. Ruffin a well-known St. Louis singer and songwriter is the founder of Art and Soul Café, which uses the arts to explore spirituality at various venues.
Marsh explored his Laurel roots in his 2001 memoir “The Last Days: A Son’s Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a New South.” “That got lots of talk in Laurel,” Ruffin said with a wide smile.
The South is never far from Marsh’s other work including his 1997 book “God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights,” which won the respected 1998 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. He also wrote the 2005 “The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today” and “Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity" (2007).