Washington National Cathedral

Sam Lloyd: Good morning and welcome, everyone. We’re here, as we are every week, to carry on this ongoing conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. And we have with us today someone who has spent a great deal of a very significant career thinking about that intersection itself: Dr. Charles Marsh, who is a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, director of something called the Project on Lived Theology.

I want to say also, on this Mississippi State Day, this is a Mississippian we have with us today. So Mississippians are everywhere at the Cathedral this morning.

Charles is a prolific writer, focusing his interests on the ways that faith shapes public life and the relationship between faith and social justice and faith and the decisions we make as public citizens. His most recent book is called Wayward Christian Soldiers. It looks at the complex relationship between evangelical faith and the religious right in the course of the last decade.

His other books have focused a great deal on the civil rights movement itself, and how faith and the issues of the south, especially in the Sixties, became intermingled. We want to start with some questions about how he has worked his way through this trajectory and how he found his way out of Mississippi. But first just let me say welcome, Charles. It’s great to have you with us today.

Charles Marsh: Thank you so much, Sam. It is a pleasure being here. And I wanted to note that we had one brief interchange at the University of Virginia in the early 1980s. I was just coming down as a graduate student to begin my Ph.D., and you were finishing your studies and were, I guess, about to begin seminary training. And you don’t remember me then, but I had this image of you as… and it’s come to me over the years as I’ve heard of your achievements and all of your accomplishments—

Lloyd: He never cleared this with me, let me be clear. I don’t know where this is going, but I’m not sure I like it.

Marsh: —a kind of radiant restless energy that really connected deeply at the time with my own sort of vocational stirrings and strivings and confusions. And as I thought of that image over the years and, of course, saw that you moved directly into the pastorate, it’s been inspiring and reassuring to me.

Lloyd: Wow. Thank you.

Marsh: Thank you. It’s nice seeing you again.

Lloyd: Now, I was going to be in charge of this interview, so I’ll return to that.

Marsh: Well, I’m a Mississippian, so we ask a lot of questions.

Lloyd: Project for Lived Theology. What on earth is that?

Marsh: Well, someone introduced me recently as the director of the project on livid theology, and I think that may be a better name for what we’re doing.

But the Project on Lived Theology is a means of bringing together academics and practitioners. It’s an attempt to build… to bridge the gap between the study of theology that often becomes very theoretical and kind of abstract, and the practices of people in community. And it’s really in a profound sense born of my own pilgrimage as a southerner and as someone who came of age in the Jim Crow south in the late 1960s as the son of a Southern Baptist minister, haunted by this question, well, was it the case that in those churches of my childhood, churches that gave me disciplines and taught me lessons and passions for which I will be forever grateful, we nonetheless practiced a kind of faith that was removed from the challenges and anguishes and conflicts of our time. And so the Project on Lived Theology is born of that whole experience of really being raised in a faith that’s not connected to life.

Lloyd: You mention your father, and you have written a very moving memoir called The Last Days, a son looking back at his father as he struggled through the civil rights era, a Southern Baptist minister in a very conservative setting with the tensions emerging in his own ministry, how could he face this tidal wave of the civil rights issue as it came across. Say something about how that has shaped who you are now.

Marsh: That’s a great question. My family moved from lower Alabama, LA as we say, to a small town in Mississippi called Laurel in 1967. And Laurel at the time had earned the reputation of the epicenter of Southern terrorism. It was home to the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, and their daily installments of terror and misery.

My father was a big-hearted son of the south, an exuberant wonderful pastor who was cheerily indifferent to the social chaos we were moving right smack into the middle of, and the civil rights movement, which I observed from various stages of pubescent awkwardness, was really our trial by fire.

I did more than observe. In 1970, I took part in the first integrated class in the state of Mississippi. I know that seems kind of late. 1954, Brown versus Board and, in fact, there had been some schools integrated in 1964 under the Freedom of Choice Plan in the Civil Rights Act. But it took another Supreme Court decision, this Alexander versus Holmes County in 1969, to finally say to local school board officials that you can’t seize on that phrase “all deliberate speed” in Brown versus Board as a means of deferring desegregation until Jesus comes back and then sets up his separate but equal eternal kingdom according to our fantasies.

And so those years were extraordinary years. My father struggled to do the right thing. He struggled with decades of white supremacy ringing in his ears to understand what Jesus wanted him to do in Laurel in 1970-1971, and to his congregation of citizens, councilors, and segregationists, he eventually preached the sermon “Amazing Grace for Every Race.” He had come a long way.

Lloyd: It took him a long time to get there.

Marsh: It took him a long time to get there, but that’s a long and complex journey. This is not the story, the Hollywood story of someone of a morning rushing out transformed, ready to embrace the day. Atticus Finch in the Southern Baptist congregation. But it’s the story, the more familiar and the more difficult and the complex one, I think, of that slow turning.

Lloyd: And so that planted the seed of an issue that you would work through for a lot of years, and that we deal with today, which is how to we live the Christian faith in some ways, in all of its provocative radical vision of what the world should be in a culture that has accommodated and resisted in all sorts of different ways.

So you went on, after your Ph.D., to write a book called Long Hot Summer, which talks about five significant characters, all of them deeply Christian: two of them very strong segregationist, and the others doing what they could on the other side to move things along. So you were telling a story of how faith takes people in different directions. Say something about what you took out of that study.

Marsh: I’d love to. In 1992, I guess, I was teaching at a small Jesuit college in Baltimore, Southern Baptist boy married to a Presbyterian minister’s daughter. I remember my uncle from Birmingham called me up and said, let me see if I have this right, Charles: you’re a Southern Baptist minister’s kid, married to a Presbyterian minister’s daughter, teaching in the Jesuit School, sending your kids to a Quaker school, attending an Episcopal Church, living in a Jewish neighborhood. And I said, that’s about it. So the real beloved community here.

And I began to notice, after finishing an academic monograph, I was about those things that you do to get tenure you know as a junior professor, writing articles that five bearded guys around the world might take an interest in, and trying to get my academic monograph published. My academic monograph was on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but this is not going to appear in any major motion picture cinemas any time soon. And I was thinking about a book on the doctrine of the Trinity, which I still want to write someday, but I began to notice that my dreams and my daydreams and night dreams and images and phrases and terms began to appear in my journals and notebooks that really were calling me back to that intense childhood.

My childhood had been intense, but the schools I had gone to, the public schools I’d gone to after 1970 in the south, had been peaceful, and I really hadn’t thought a lot about those years in college or graduate school. But now I could think of nothing else. So with a full tank of gas and a micro cassette recorder and a credit card, I set out one summer in 1994, south from Baltimore, and I just began talking to people.

Your dear uncle, Bishop Gray… I appeared at his office many, many times, not having a clue what I was doing, and you were kind enough to say, well, maybe you should talk to Ed King or Will Campbell or some of these other great unsung heroes of the civil rights movement. And I began to try to understand how it was the case that in this extraordinary story, in theater of… sort of the landscape of my own story was the most violent period of the movement 1964-65 that people were coming to the moment, all believing that “God’s on my side,” but with devastatingly different results.

So the folks like Fannie Lou Hamer and the great saints of the movement were met on the other side by Klansmen who believed that God had called them somehow to wage war against the infidels and the heretics and anyone who dared, you know, transgress their sacred sovereign south. And I wanted to sift through those conflicting images of God.

One of my models was Robert Coles’s wonderful book Children of Christ; some of you have seen that. Where he does these five different kind of narratives, trying to reconstruct the moral worlds of these children involved in desegregation in New Orleans and I to sort of reconstruct the theological worlds of five different people whose lives had come into conflict in the long hot summer of 1964.

Lloyd: Say something about that, just what different kinds of approaches they had. There was Fannie Lou Hamer, for example.

Marsh: Fannie Lou Hamer, just one of the great saints of the church. Now the French Catholic philosopher Henri de Lubac, in his wonderful book The Discovery of God, talks about a saint as someone who is not a superman, not someone who is the perfection of humanity, but someone who illuminates a new dimension, a new universe.

And Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer lived her whole life as a sharecropper on the Marlow Plantation in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Some people call it the most southern place on earth. And in 1962, she attended a mass meeting preached by one of Dr. King’s young foot soldiers in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on discerning the signs of the times in the voter registration movement. And Ms. Hamer said, that night I stepped out in faith, and I said, I’m not going to be working for Mr. Marlow anymore. I’m going to be working for Jesus in human rights activism. And really, from that night until she died in poverty in 1977, Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville, Mississippi, was the great prophetic voice of poor African American people in the Jim Crow South.

One of the stories that’s really at the heart of my narrative of Ms. Hamer is on a trip back from a voter registration workshop in South Carolina in 1963, Ms. Hamer and several other members of the civil rights movement in Mississippi were stopped in the town of Winona, and they were arrested, and they were thrown in jail, and they were beaten and tortured, and Ms. Hamer was mocked. She was mocked for her blackness, for her body, for her commitments, and it was a night of great humiliation. But early the next morning, as Ms. Hamer tells us in her own words, sometimes when you’re locked up in a jail cell and you’re just locked up there and you haven’t done anything to anybody but still you’re locked up there, well words just come to you and you start to sing.

Song broke out, and Ms. Hamer and the other friends who were in the cells down the hall began to sing, you know, Paul and Silas bound in jail. Let my people go. Jail doors opened and they walked out. Let my people go. Church happened, she said. Church broke out. In a peaceable composure, incomprehensible apart from a deep river of faith, transformed the killing despair of the jail. The singing didn’t remove her suffering. It didn’t remove the particularities of her anguish, but it named that suffering. It embraced that suffering. It imploded that suffering in a magnificent story of hope and deliverance.

Lloyd: You moved on, in your next book, to talk about the beloved community. And that seems to become your image for what the Christian faith is supposed to be about, the building of a beloved community. And you’re talking there back again to the civil rights era, about the moments where that seemed powerfully to happen, and moments where it happened and began to slip away, and that’s where you seem to really engage the life of faith and the life of politics, and how they come together successfully. But how fragile that engagement is.

Marsh: It’s a very fragile engagement. The beloved community is this rich and powerful term that Dr. King used in the end of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956. And I know you’ve just had Congressman Lewis here in recent weeks. The term “beloved community” is so much a part of his vision. At the end of the Montgomery bus boycott, this 382-day exercise in civil disobedience and Christian asceticism, Dr. King, with the word just having come down from the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the protest, Dr. King said to a jubilant audience, “Let us remember that the end is not the protest. The end is not the boycott. The end is redemption. The end is reconciliation. The end is creation of beloved community.”

The moment is an extraordinary moment, because it is as if Dr. King, in these awakening days and months of the civil rights movement, of this movement that would make our nation a better nation, a Pentecostal movement that really would sweep us and transform us, it’s giving voice to the plot line of the struggle. And the plot line of the struggle is the mission of the church, the mission of the church to be an agent of redemption, reconciliation, and creation of beloved community. And it seems as though Dr. King was inviting all of us into that story and so, in The Beloved Community, I wanted to build a bridge between the story of the civil rights movement and the ongoing work of peace and community building and reconciliation that you see in your city, that we see all around the United States, that is driven in so many instances by the deep commitments of faith.

And I wanted to also retell the story of the civil rights movement as a story of the church and to say look, let’s reckon with this lesson that the movement had a sustaining spiritual vision to pursue redemption, reconciliation, creation of beloved community. But when that vision lost its anchor in the church, lost its anchor in the convictions and the commitments of the church, it lost its vision. And its ability to sustain the practices of peacemaking in the everyday, very unsexy disciplines of building beloved community floundered.

Lloyd: One of the stories you tell is the story of how that happened with SNCC—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—coming out of a deeply Christian vision to begin with, but becoming more and more, as time went on, more committed to violence, more committed to provocation in dangerous and often destructive ways. It lost its way for a while.

Marsh: And so you read in a transcript from 1966 this astonishing meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and someone saying, Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer is no longer relevant. She is no longer at our level of development. The whole tradition of Christian peacemaking will now become a marginal part of our mission. And I see that as the movement losing its anchor in those energies, and its commitments that gave it its vision. An important lesson for the church.

Lloyd: Let’s jump to your most recent book, Wayward Christian Soldiers, a book that in some ways is almost too hot to handle, because it is framed as a conversation with your own evangelical—an evangelical Episcopalian here—your own evangelical friends, with a powerful critique of what happened to the religious right in relationship to the government in the 1990s… well, actually not the Nineties but the 21st century, the first few years. The run up to war, the way the war was authorized by so many in the evangelical world, and how you see there the Christian vision of a beloved, reconciled community lost its way in that particular piece of the church.

I want to continue to talk about how your vision provokes those in the mainline tradition as well, but say something now about how you think evangelical faith found itself losing its way in the first part of the 21st century.

Marsh: I do think that the years 2000 to 2006 will be studied by future historians and scholars of the church and students as one of the saddest examples of the church’s cultural captivity in our two-thousand-year tradition: that we began speaking of God by speaking of our own partisan loyalties in a loud voice, and we lost that sense in which the God of Jesus Christ comes to us from the far country of the Trinity, and pulls us out in faith from our own cultural islands, and from our own captivities, to finite loyalties.

And so it broke my heart, as an evangelical, as a practitioner of a generous orthodoxy, to see the way in which we began to offer up the precious language of the gospel to satisfy the kind of ravenous appetite of partisan activists and partisan politics during that period of time. And I think—

Lloyd: So part of what you’re saying is that the politics trumped the faith at that point. Politics was not seriously engaging with the scriptures themselves and what Jesus’ own vision for the redeemed community would look like. Politics was driving things at that point, even among some of these evangelical leaders?

Marsh: I think so. And I think that we lost the simple truth at the heart of the gospel story. And that is that when Jesus calls me to follow, he calls me to come and die to myself.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer talks about this moment of the first step that when Jesus calls the disciple. There is this first step, this leap into the unknown, this moment when we give up everything for the sake of the kingdom of God, when everything is called into question, when everything must change. And I’m sorry that we lost the power and the demand of that call, and other things became more important to us: access to power, being relevant, gaining political credibility, whatever. We came to regard the gospel as the… well, the gospel and… the gospel and this, the gospel and that. Failing to recognize that it’s got to be the gospel alone.

Lloyd: You walk very carefully through the sermons and teachings and pronouncements of quite a number of pastors who are clearly on the religious right. And what you keep showing is a call to arms for the sake of the conversion of the world, of the conversion of the Muslims, a sense that there is something overridingly important about this moment politically and religiously together, but without wrestling with loving your enemies and forgiving those who persecute you and turning the other cheek and building a community of reconciliation. Something got lost in there.

Marsh: Maybe Jesus? One of the most depressing exercises I’ve had is rereading the war sermons preached by evangelical leads in the fall of 2002 and the spring of 2003, which had the effect, of course, of rallying the evangelical congregations to an 87% support of the war by white evangelicals. And those sermons, looked at theologically, are bleak and discouraging documents.

Jesus rarely makes an appearance. There is a lot of attention to complex, esoteric passages in Second Kings in an attempt to sort of trace the lineage of wicked King Nebuchadnezzar to contemporary events in the Middle East. There are occasional attempts to sort of appeal to the just war tradition, but the criterion of last resort, of course, never quite worked on that argument.

When Jesus makes an appearance, it’s almost as an uninvited guest. And so it does seem that we lost our understanding that the first axiom of our faith and practice is following this new and costly path of Jesus of Nazareth.

Lloyd: What if Jesus is just too impractical? What if he’s not helpful in times like this? What is a Christian to do?

Marsh: Well, a Christian is to sing beautiful songs. One of the books that I like to use in my undergraduate courses occasionally is a book by Friedreich Nietzsche.

Okay. If you want to read a great atheist, forget all the popular stuff that’s appeared in the New York Times bestseller list. Go read Friedreich Nietzsche, and his little book The Antichrist is a book that I like to use, and Nietzsche’s explaining to Christians why he hates us, why he believes that we so often take a message that is beautiful and powerful and full of strength and world transformative, and we turn it into drudgery and bleakness, and we turn it into something ugly. And the first time I read this passage, you know, it just pounded me, and I wrote it out, and it’s over my writing desk. And he’s saying, they must sing more beautiful songs before I shall believe in their redeemer. They must sing better songs before I shall believe in their redeemer.

And I’m sorry, Sam, but our mission is not first and foremost to be relevant. It’s not first and foremost to create policy that has winning acceptance in the halls of power. It’s first and foremost to sing beautiful songs.

Lloyd: An alternative vision.

Marsh: An alternative vision, and that’s the power of the gospel, and that’s the message that you proclaim week after week after week that’s the mission of the church: to proclaim that alternative vision, the kingdom of God, the peaceable kingdom of Jesus of Nazareth, and to make it the truth that passes all understanding.

Karl Barth says that that proclamation is the real history of the world. It may not be the so-called history that we’re always seeing the media, and in the sort of the discourse of the day that’s popular, influential. But the real history of the world is the truth that is given us in the gospel, and the truth that is our mission to proclaim.

Lloyd: One more question. Then I want to turn it over to the audience. My sense, reading your book Wayward Christian Soldiers, is it’s focused on this moment of crisis in evangelical theology and life. But it has much broader implication, certainly for mainline Christianity, because it talks constantly about the temptation to take our faith and use it to support our lives the way we put them together, the temptation that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, by the way, this great German theologian who died in a Nazi concentration camp in the 1940s. This great theologian kept watching German religious leaders sell out to the Nazi regime, so that the principal national church of Germany supported Hitler in what he was doing. That’s why he was writing so provocatively.

And so, reading your critique of the evangelicals makes me ask, where are mainline denominations missing the beloved community? Where are we living a life, or worship life, over church life that’s too timid, too safe, not asking enough questions, hearing often a gospel that’s “live your best life now, become who you’re made to be,” without wrestling with what Jesus’ own vision of what our lives could be in front of us? Did you have any of that in mind when you were writing that last part of your book?

Marsh: Absolutely. And, you know, that powerful phrase that Bonhoeffer uses in his little book called the Cost of Discipleship: costly grace.

Costly grace. Grace that is opposed to cheap grace. Cheap grace is grace that I wrap myself up in like a security blanket.

Okay, so we have this extraordinary gift of God in Jesus Christ, now I can take that gift and use it in some way to affirm my own values and my own class and my own privilege and my own preference and my own taste. Costly grace recognizes that, first and foremost, the cross calls all of those values and all of those preferences into question.

Our mission is first and foremost to bear witness to the Prince of Peace and of course, anecdotally, when Bonhoeffer came to New York in 1930-1931 as a student at Union Theological Seminary, he drifted over to Riverside Baptist Church one Sunday. But he felt like, well, it was all nice and good, but it was, you know, also just kind of nice American values.

And he ended up finding himself immersed in an African American church in Harlem, and hearing in the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and hearing in black churches around New York City, a kind of power and exuberance and otherworldliness and relevance and earthiness, and call, and demand, that really shaped his own struggle and his own vocation as dissenting pastor in Germany. And I think that affirmation of God encountering us in Jesus Christ, calling us out of ourselves in costly discipleship, is the lesson that we all in the American congregations must reckon with.

Lloyd: Thank you. Questions from the audience.

Davis: Could you come forward please?

Question 1: Good morning. You speak about this ravenous culture and, in a time when a Shiite and a Sunni are fighting one another, and the parallels perhaps with that Ku Klux Klan, where each feels that righteousness, how can we be called to peace with our Muslim brothers and sisters? Because I see it in my students, these are our young people that are dying, and I don’t hear people and I don’t hear people about reconciling with the war right in our face and in our TVs.

Marsh: I’m sorry, I missed the first part of the question.

Question 1: I’m really asking how the calling of the interfaith dialogue with our Muslim brothers and sisters is coming about, because I see it as the tension with our students and with our younger generation, with our brothers and sisters that are dying.

Marsh: Yes, well, certainly that is an important part of our mission as men and women whose end is redemption, reconciliation and creation of beloved community and there are two important parts of this obligation. The first is that we remember who we are as Christians, and that we remember what our primary call is as followers of Jesus Christ. And then, of course, we reckon with the fact that there is common grace spread among the faiths and religions of the world.

And we enter into dialogue not in order, of course, to try to forge some kind of big cosmic muffin, where everyone sort of assimilated into some big religion, but speaking out of the particularity and out of the specificity of our faith. I think this has to be part of the ministry of reconciliation. Reconciliation is now a global mission for people of faith, and I appreciate your raising that to us this morning.

Lloyd: Thank you.

Question 2: I was curious on your perspective on the evangelical manifesto, although it was released a couple of weeks ago, and how that factors into beloved community.

Lloyd: Could you say that again?

Question 2: The evangelical manifesto that was released in the beginning of May, just how your perspective on that and then how that particular manifesto factors into the creation of the beloved community.

Marsh: An evangelical manifesto, I wasn’t a part of that, and but I’ve read probably the same thing you have drafted by several well-known evangelicals as a kind of call to remove evangelical community from partisan politics, and I think that’s a good thing, I suppose.

I do more generally have questions about, well, what is the proper response, what is the responsible move that evangelicals need to make after a period of accommodation and compromise. And I keep thinking that we don’t need more talk.

We don’t need more manifestos. We need a time of repentance. We need maybe to even be quiet. And I love that passage in Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, when he says life with God begins in silence before the word. And there is a silence that brings clarification, concentration and purification. And so I’m not sure that a lot more public pronouncements are in order. I am heartened, however, by what I see in my students who are students of faith, by a kind of resurgence of moral energy by a performance of a faith that is more holistic, that is less defined by the old partisan categories, but is concerned about how to be a seed of justice, how to be a healer in the world rather than someone who engages the world to manipulate it for our end. So that would be the way that I would begin to come to your very, very helpful question.

Davis: Let’s go to mike two please.

Question 3: I arrived late and so I may have missed the answer to my question. I wonder how you would respond to this: When one looks at the passion, the death on a cross, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, does it not say to us that the divine revelation through Christ does not give us permission to kill each other? Could you say something about that if you haven’t already?

Marsh: Oh, indeed, it does not give us permission to kill each other and in the story of the beloved community if you will, the story of these men and women who sing beautiful songs, the stories which we need to tell today in our churches and to our children and to our grandchildren. We don’t need more, you know, talking heads.

We need stories of those people, sometimes very ordinary people, who took the teachings of Jesus seriously, and literally and bore witness to the very end for the sake of the peaceable kingdom of God. Peace and peacemaking is the primary practice of those communities.

One of my dear friends, Victoria Gray Adams, if I could just say real quickly a word or two about her, was one of the field secretaries for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And Ms. Victoria Gray Adams spent most of her life after the civil rights years as a pastor and a spiritual chaplain at Virginia State University. And one of her last visits in my home, in our home, and this home we call the Bonhoeffer House in Charlottesville, speaking to a bunch of undergraduates, answered the question, what is the unfinished business of the civil rights movement?

Without any hesitation she said, it’s learning how to speak the language of peace, and that language of peace is the language of the gospel. It’s the new order that’s broken… breaks into the world in the event of the cross, death, and resurrection. It is the logic of that new history, that is, the history of the church.

Question 4: Professor, it’s really great to have somebody here excited about theology and action. But what we tend to see a lot of is theology in inertia. And you told us a lot about the inertia of the separate but equal. What I’m concerned about is the inertia of about healthcare. There’s 44 million Americans without healthcare. How do we get theology in action about that problem?

Marsh: Well, I mean, you would certainly have wonderful answers to that. But I draw us back to this wonderful and rich phrase, the holistic faith. So much of our gospel and so much of our theology has created divisions between the life of faith and service in the world, engagement of the social order, the importance of healthcare, the importance of human rights. And it seems to me that, if we’re taking the doctrine of the incarnation seriously, which is the center of our faith, then we have to reckon with the fact that issues of human rights, issues of health care, are not some incidental part of costly discipleship, but they are very much a part of what it means to follow after. So I would leave it at that: that what we need to do is to rethink the condition of our faith. Rethink what it means to even talk about the gospel as this whole encompassing power. And as that is made clear, then hopefully the practices and the policies will become more consistent with that affirmation.

Lloyd: Charles, one of the things you’ve been saying in your book is how we may be in a time when global Christianity is going to be teaching us some things because, in so much of what is happening in the global south, we’re seeing the vitality and energy and the quest for a holistic vision of what it means to live it out.

Marsh: Absolutely.

Lloyd: Yes.

Question 5: Dr. Marsh, I have a question that is going to take us in a little bit different direction. First of all, I am a daughter of the south. I have a father who was a Baptist minister who went to the same seminary King went to, and came back and desegregated schools in Virginia, so I come from an activist Christian tradition.

In recent years, however, I have become very concerned about the lack of moral consistency, in terms of moral argument in both left and the right in this nation, and I, like probably many people here, do not like the war we are in. But, having said that, several years ago when I was on a tourist-type of trip at Gettysburg battlefield, I heard for the first time in my heart the voice of the Holy Spirit say to me that the deaths on that battlefield were nothing compared to the deaths that we look the other way on regarding abortion in this nation. And as a teacher, a parent, I have seen post-traumatic shock that is real, in young people in particular, who have not had informed consent and you may be aware of the London Times article—

Lloyd: We need a question.

Question 5: Yes, my question is, how do you tie what Bonhoeffer would say about the sanctity of life to this issue, especially in terms of giving informed consent to young girls?

Marsh: Well, I would want to answer that without having to talk about political and policy directives, but simply to affirm your very moving observation at Gettysburg ,and to say that, in the story of the beloved community, and in the story of the civil rights movement, the affirmation of life is a consistent affirmation: that it has very much the same quality as Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on life, and that it is deserving of careful historical study to understand how that particular issue on abortion and the unborn evolved from a kind of stand against it in the late Sixties, to be more of the sort of situation we see today. Because Ms. Hamer, Fannie Lou Hamer, when she first heard about Roe v. Wade, she said, well, they’re going to start killing black babies now.

And so this is an interesting and important and, I think, urgent part of the civil rights movement. That doesn’t, however, mean that we should embrace the Republican or the Democratic party. I think, you know, the policies that we’re hearing, and the discussion we’re hearing in the election now, is a very respectful and, I think, a very welcome change in that conversation.

Lloyd: One last quick question and then we’re going to close. You and your wife Karen are working pretty hard at living out this vision of beloved community and being disciples in Charlottesville, Virginia, in this place called Bonhoeffer House. Tell us something about what your dream for that is.

Marsh: Well, my wife and I wanted to have a house that was near a major university, that would be a place of peace and a place of healing. And God does have a sense of humor, because the house that we were able to find in Charlottesville actually resembles Bonhoeffer’s house in the Gruenwald neighborhood of Berlin.

When we moved down to Charlottesville in the summer of 2000, we moved into this home near the university that now is a place of ongoing conversation, of prayer, of debate, of engagement, so students come, theologians come. We have interfaith gatherings, and it seems to me that hospitality and the whole gift of hospitality is very much a part of the way of costly discipleship, and that… the open door, even though it’s a very difficult and sometimes frustrating and, as all of you know, is an unmistakable part of bearing witness to the risen Christ. And so in Charlottesville we have this place called the Bonhoeffer House that we hope offers some place of refuge, some place of embrace, some place of hope and healing for students and townspeople and professors and others who make their way to our table.

Lloyd: On that hopeful note we should close. Next week we’re going to be together talking about one of the hardest parts of Christian faith, which is how we talk about our faith with others. Dr. Thomas Long, one of the finest preachers in the church today, will be here to preach at the 11:15 service, but at ten o’clock to talk about what it means to bear witness to our Christian faith in the particular settings where we find ourselves.

We’d love for you to stay for the service. It takes place at 11:15, in just a few minutes. For now, though, coffee is on and available in the west end, the entrance end of the Cathedral, turn left and you can follow your nose to the coffee. Charles Marsh will be back there with Karen to greet you all for a few minutes. Please join me in thanking our guest for today.

Marsh: Thank you. Thanks to all of you. (applause)