MUCH of the narrative of the West, at least as it approached the 20th century, was one of progress. The idea was that those movements — profit, secularism, science — would and could replace the ways of the past. These new movements were based in the ways of the world, not the ethereal ways of heaven.
Inevitably, Christianity became a target of such rhetoric. There no longer needed to be an elision of God and man in the person of Christ if God was, as Nietzsche claimed, dead. Those who foresaw the 20th century as destined to be a great era of political and social progress were soon disabused by reality. It turned out that much of what had been taken for granted as part of the fabric of what that world viewed as civilisation — from international law to personal morality — owed its threads to Christianity.
The question that this brave new world posed Christianity was this: how can a faith which has a God of love and justice at its centre remain credible in such an unjust world?
Justice, in particular — that concept of what was right — was suddenly “up for grabs” in a way that it had not been since the days of Rome. Christianity was often in the forefront of the resistance to such evils; yet, as we now realise, it was often complicit in their incubation and propagation as well.
Nowhere is the starkness of this truer than in the Deep American South. If we are to learn what Christian justice meant in a changing world, we perhaps have to look to somewhere with more painful nuances.
As the 20th century progressed, America had become even more resolutely Christian than Europe was. Yet that meant vast gaps in what practice of the faith meant in a country that was so polarised. When violence or persecution broke out, as it often did in the world of Jim Crow, the question of what justice looked like inevitably followed. And that question was inevitably shaped, on every side, by the Christian faith.
To see it at its most powerful — and thereby to learn something about how Christianity shaped our ideas of justice more generally — we must go to a shrapnel-marked church in the Deep South and see justice and redemption in painful practice: 16th Street North, in downtown Birmingham.
Unsurprisingly, in the aftermath of the end of slavery in the United States, there was a flowering of black churches. One such was “The First Colored Baptist Church of Birmingham”, founded by two pastors — James Readon and Warner Reed — on 20 April 1873, just eight years after the end of the American Civil War.
From 16th Street, the church became involved in much more than the reading of scripture and the business of prayer. Or, rather, the reading of scripture and the business of prayer led the church to seek justice for its community, as, in the Jim Crow era, they were denied access to basic aspects of engagement in society which their white fellow believers could take for granted, such as education and legal representation.
The 16th Street Baptist Church became known for its commitment to justice. That commitment was to bring both glorification and unimaginably tragic loss.
ON THE morning of Sunday, 15 September 1963, Claude Wesley had dropped his 14-year-old daughter Cynthia off at church for the Sunday-school class. Claude took the opportunity to fill up his car at a gas station just a bit further down 16th Street. Even at 10.21 a.m., it was a hot day, and the attendant took his time over the filling hose. As he did so, suddenly a blast rang out across the calm of the Sunday morning. There had been an explosion in the basement of the church. Wesley abandoned his car and ran towards the smoke and debris that now surrounded the foundations of the building. There, in the confusion, he tried to find his daughter, but in vain.
The bodies of Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Carol Denise McNair, and Addie Mae Collins were propelled through the air having borne the full force of the blast from the dynamite hidden behind the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Cynthia, Carole, and Addie Mae were 14 years old. Carol Denise was just 11.
The bomb had been planted earlier that Sunday morning, and detonated just as the basement set of rooms were filling up with young people attending the Sunday school. Those who planted it were members of the Ku Klux Klan. The 16th Street Baptist Church had been targeted because it had become known as a centre for the work where the black community sought political, legal, social, and educational justice.
On 12 April that year — Good Friday — Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, and fellow clergymen Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth led a march to the city hall of Birmingham, which started at the 16th Street Baptist Church. They did so to protest that the treatment of black people under the segregation laws of the American South was unjust.
They had been specifically told not to do so by the city’s famously brutal Commissioner for Public Safety, Bull Connor, and had been warned against it in a public letter by a number of Alabama clergy who, while sympathetic to King, felt that the march was a step too far on Good Friday.
In response, King wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” when he sat languishing under arrest by Bull Connor’s men. In it, King deliberately drew on the symbolism of Good Friday. The Early Church had long associated the crossing of the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt with a prefiguring, a foreshadowing of the salvation of the Cross. As King had argued before in his essay “Why We Can’t Wait”, the Israelites’ march to freedom was mirrored in Christ’s march to the cross, and now again mirrored, in the eternal spiral of the history of God’s purposes, in the marches he was organising from the 16th Street Baptist Church.
As such, King later argued, the day was not ill-timed at all, but rather absolutely appropriate. In doing so, he threw down the rhetorical gauntlet to those who said that they supported his aims, but not his methods. If these were the methods of the God of justice, then why was it wrong for the people of God to employ them?
King’s calling out of hand-wringing was attractive to some, controversial to others. More importantly for the history of the 16th Street Baptist, it also indisputably made the starting point of the march a target for those implacably opposed to any change in circumstances at all.
Six months after King assembled his supporters on its steps, the Ku Klux Klan struck the 16th Street Baptist Church with the bomb that killed Cynthia, Carole, Carol Denise, and Addie Mae.
The specific targeting of children would stir a new phase in the movement for civil rights in the United States of America. In many ways, it achieved what King had tried to do. The horror that the targeting of children naturally elicited, the sheer injustice and evil of it all, was instrumental in converting many moderate Christian Americans to the cause of civil rights.
This is an edited extract from Twelve Churches: An unlikely history of the buildings that made Christianity by Fergus Butler-Gallie, published by Hodder & Stoughton at £30 (Church Times Bookshop £24); 978-1-3997-3130-0.
