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Historians, journalists, sociologists, political scientists, and theologians have been picking over the corpse of the Civil Rights Movement for more than thirty years now. Most scholars have given due credit to the black church for giving birth to the Movement, and in recent years many scholars have delved into the history and theology of the black church to show precedents for the direct action of the 1950s and 1960s.1 Other scholars, spurred by the controversies the Movement generated but not writing about it directly, have found a long tradition of collective self-respect developing in the black church, which often expressed itself in defiant acts of resistance in the face of overwhelming odds long before the Movement emerged.2 So the mass direct action of the 1950s and 1960s now appears, to students who read about it for the first time in college courses, as something with a history behind it, a history centered in the black church.
But virtually all scholarship on the Movement's church roots has been devoted to showing that, long before the boycotts and sit-ins made the headlines, the black church acted politically in ways that have been forgotten, or that the black church's message was "political" in ways that are not obvious to outsiders. Scholars have almost never considered the other side of the coin: that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s-an overtly political movement-had religious dimensions that are not obvious to outsiders, and that these religious dimensions also have an historical tradition behind them. Specifically, hardly any scholars have mentioned even in passing, and none have ever analyzed in detail, the ways in which the Civil Rights Movement fit into a long tradition of religious revivals, going back to the First and Second Great Awakenings, a tradition that incidentally transcends the cultural boundaries of the black church.3
In the broader field of religious studies, scholars of revivalism in America and Africa have for many years been showing that religious revivals, which have no explicit political and social messages, often had far-reaching political and social effects-indeed that revivalists unwittingly served to usher in political and social revolutions.4 But these scholars have not remarked on the other side of their coin either: that explicitly political upheavals, such as the Civil...