Have You Got Good Religion? Black Women’s Faith, Courage and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement
By AnneMarie Mingo
University of Illinois Press, 240 pages
Published March 26, 2024
Mingo foregrounds Black churchwomen as primary theologians who understood “God’s alignment with them” to endow them with moral authority and, from a position many would consider “powerless,” to harness the extraordinary power to remake their world.
From its opening cameo of George Bess Jr.’s murder – the “accidental” drowning of a six-foot-tall Black man in a three-foot-deep Mississippi creek – Have You Got Good Religion? grabbed my heart and refused to let go. AnneMarie Mingo expertly adapts the womanist virtue ethical method inspired by the late Katie G. Cannon to the first-person accounts of Black churchwomen who led the Civil Rights Movement from their marginalized locations.
Mingo’s ethnographic research into the lives of activist Black churchwomen – including personal interviews – adds complexity to the more limited perspective of scholars who focus on the “headline” stories of the era’s male pastors and activist leaders. She does this by illuminating the larger sociohistorical background of women’s activism and by analyzing the interactive factors of family structure, gender roles, migration, the role of the Black church and the ways women lived out their faith in local and national contexts.
Mingo gathers important recent research on the Civil Rights Movement and links it theologically and historically to the Movement for Black Lives and other contemporary human liberation efforts: “(These Black Churchwomen) understand faith as an anchor and guide for radical resistance of any system or structure that limits human flourishing … When White Christians, including women, did all they could to reinforce the construction of White superiority that saw Black life as disposable during the periods of enslavement, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, Black women knew the religion these White Christians embraced was not good. When White Christians sat comfortably silent in church on Sundays in the face of Black death at the hands of police officers who may have worshiped next to them in pews, Black women knew that practice of religion was not good.”
Mingo draws on Cannon’s womanist virtue ethical method to illuminate the powerful shared values that functioned as connective tissue, joining the witness and moral example of thousands of Black churchwomen with local Civil Rights activists and young people against the daunting pushback of racist authorities and unrepentant by-standers. I found Mingo’s development of the value of theo-moral imagination to be particularly compelling precisely because she embodies it in the classroom. I am a colleague of Mingo’s at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and co-teach a class with her. She evokes students’ imagination in insightful, intentional ways to help them imagine a different world and find the inner strength to work for it.
Following the “bottom-up” methodology of liberation theologies around the world, Mingo foregrounds Black churchwomen as primary theologians who understood “God’s alignment with them” to endow them with moral authority and, from a position many would consider “powerless,” to harness the extraordinary power to remake their world.
I anticipate seminary and college professors, preachers, Sunday school teachers and youth leaders will find Have You Got Good Religion? a provocative text to connect with contemporary movements for social justice through the kindling of freedom, faith, courageous resistance and theo-moral imagination. God knows the American church and our wider society today desperately need thousands of local faith-rooted activists who can imagine that another world is possible — and who will risk their lives to create it.
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