Freedom Faith: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Apostolic Praxis

• In Event: Fighting against White Supremacy

Abstract

The Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee’s praxis has hitherto been interpreted and described in largely secular terms. Theorists and historians rarely treat SNCC as a jointly religious and political organization in the Black Freedom Struggle in the vein of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Their declared reasons include SNCC’s religious ecumenism, its departure from its overt religious origins through the integration of secular community activists and its leaders, and the institutional embrace of an agnostic Black power ideology—among others. However, political theology occupied an essential space in SNCC’s political imagination. Preexisting secular framings of SNCC obscure how influential religious thought and practices were in shaping and moralizing SNCC’s approach to political organizing and underestimate how it crucially informed the experiences of its chief architects—beyond philosophizing the institution’s core commitments.

In this paper, I recover the religious radicalism of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s organizing praxis by reinterpreting SNCC’s organizing tradition as apostolic. The apostolic tradition dictated political disciples to emigrate to local contexts to build what Reverend Prathia Hall describes as the “freedom faith” of disaffected Black rural poor in their capacity to achieve meaningful local political reform. I define apostolic praxis using four features: (1) transient politics, (2) political education, (3) social community, and (4) the development of durable local institutions through the cultivation and reliance of local leadership. Transient politics connotes commissioning to travel to and throughout the Deep South to activate the political consciousness of disillusioned constituency by evangelizing a political gospel to transform them into political disciples. Political education involves a radical democratic pedagogy committed to helping expose citizens to a range of political ideas that they can use to contest injustice and help facilitate their political conversion into agents of political change. Social community leans into a missionary ethic, where Black citizens collaborate with SNCC workers to satisfy their needs and engage in vibrant political and social discourses of finding political and social salvation within their community. Developing durable local institutions involves creatively designing channels of Black political resistance and social uplift to actuate their political gospel. I interpret “freedom faith” as the outcome of SNCC’s apostolic praxis, where Black citizens’ spiritual, social, and political faiths were developed under the enormity of white resistance to imagine and lay claim to freedom in their visions of Black futurity.

Broadly, theorists who have sought to reconstruct the political philosophies of civil rights activists without engaging the breadth of their political theology have yet to capture the full complexity of their ideas accurately. By recentering political theology as a normative crux of their political praxis, this paper encourages theorists to theorize from the phenomenological accounts of the movement’s activists who animated the movement. I reason that this new framework for understanding SNCC’s robust grassroots organizing—traditionally treated as evidence of a democratic and secular orientation to politics—gives credence to the influence of religious thought on the normative theorizing of their most noteworthy politics. Moreover, the paper elucidates the evangelical ambit of SNCC’s praxis and highlights its instrumental role in shaping contemporary faith-based approaches to political organizing.

Author

• Da'Von Anthony Boyd, Williams College