Tom Holland: evaluation

Transcript context

…But you pontificated about Roman history, about Islamic history. America is a pretty close cousin. My feeling about this is that the civil rights movement is one of a succession of great awakenings in American Protestantism and, indeed, in Anglo-American Protestantism, so let that be my sanction for talking about this. This idea that reverberates throughout Anglo-American history — that people need to be awakened to a sense of their sin and therefore to a sense of the potential for salvation — African Americans are the heirs of that as well. They inherit the Protestantism, and often the evangelical Protestantism, of the White Americans. The figure of Martin Luther King is emblematic of that. He is the Reverend Martin Luther King. He is absolutely situated in the tradition of radical Protestantism, which the Baptists are. He’s a Baptist minister. He is heir to these traditions that go back to the 17th century and the 16th century — perspectives that are often incredibly radical, the more radical fringe of Protestants. And these are Protestants who often emigrate from England to the New World because their understanding of what the Bible teaches is seen as being too radical, too hot to handle back in England. They bring with them this notion that the Bible can only be understood if mediated by the Spirit. It’s not what the Bible says in black and white. It’s what the Spirit makes you understand. It’s this, in due course, that enables Quakers and evangelicals, for instance, to argue that slavery as an institution is evil, even though notoriously and nowhere in the Bible is that ever said. For evangelicals, for Quakers, for radical Protestants, that’s an irrelevance. The Spirit has descended on them, and it has enabled them to understand that. That sense combines with the incredible power of the Exodus story, the idea that people who’ve been in bondage can be brought out of slavery and can be brought to a new world, a new land. That is what powers the Pilgrim Fathers and other emigrants from England. In due course, it’s what powers people as they move from the East Coast across America. Of course, it has an incredibly potent influence on African Americans. During the period of their servitude and in the wake after it and the failure of Reconstruction, the fact that, particularly in the South, there remains so much institutional oppression, so much institutional racism means that in the ’50s and the ’60s, when there are campaigns starting to develop calling for civil rights, calling for the rejection of repressive laws in the South, this inheritance is an obvious one to draw on, and that’s why Martin Luther King is such a potent spokesman for it. When he tells White American Christians that Black American Christians are their brothers and sisters, he is going with the grain of everything that American Protestantism, radical Protestantism has been about since the very beginning. He can articulate the power of the Exodus story and the power of scripture as mediated by people upon whom the Spirit has descended. ism, radical Protestantism has been about since the very beginning. He can articulate the power of the Exodus story and the power of scripture as mediated by people upon whom the Spirit has descended. He can do so in a way that reverberates beyond the Black churches into the White churches and secularized throughout the ’60s. It’s this great movement, I think, that — like the Spirit blowing in the wind, as it were — animates not just the civil rights movement, but all kinds of other movements as well — in due course, movements that may seem very opposed to doctrinal Christianity: feminism, gay rights, and so on. I think that the civil rights movement is incomprehensible without that heritage. It’s absolutely animated by it.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.