NEWS FEATURE: Lawson: Churches have failed to learn theology of civil rights movement

c. 1998 Religion News Service CAMBRIDGE, Mass. _ The Rev. James Lawson, an associate of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and longtime pastor to King’s convicted killer, says American churches have failed to learn the theology of the civil rights movement. Lawson, in an impassioned April 24 speech at the Harvard Divinity […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. _ The Rev. James Lawson, an associate of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and longtime pastor to King’s convicted killer, says American churches have failed to learn the theology of the civil rights movement.

Lawson, in an impassioned April 24 speech at the Harvard Divinity School, told students and professors of theology that”our unwillingness to listen to the (civil rights) movement or to make the movement a hallmark of how we do theology and how we help congregations work not only for personal change but social change at all”is a serious shortcoming of the church today.


The Methodist preacher’s remarks came as he was tapped to preside at the funeral of King’s confessed assassin, James Earl Ray.

Lawson, whose 30-year career has been devoted to King’s ideals, was among those who invited the rights leader in April 1968 to take time out from organizing the Poor Peoples Campaign _ a proposed multiracial march on Washington _ to go to Memphis, Tenn., to support a strike by the mostly black sanitation workers. King was shot and killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel during the trip.

Lawson believes Ray, who first pled guilty to the murder but later recanted the confession, was wrongly accused.”We know today that James Earl Ray did not kill Dr. King,”Lawson said. Along with with King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and other members of the King family, Lawson has called on Attorney General Janet Reno to open a new probe of the slaying.

Lawson, 68, has never shed his dual role of pastor and activist. He is currently head pastor at Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, and hosts a weekly live television show airing on the Odyssey Channel, the interfaith cable network.

He is also a subject of journalist David Halberstam’s recent book,”The Children,”which chronicles student leadership during the civil rights movement of the early 1960s.

Lawson began his career with a missionary stint in India, where he learned the philosophy and techniques of nonviolent resistance championed by Mohandas K. Gandhi and incorporated into the core of the civil rights movement by King and others like himself. Ever since, he said, he has been devoted to perpetuating King’s vision of the”beloved community.” King’s message of healing was”very simple,”said Lawson, citing a title of one of King’s last books:”Where do we go from here, chaos or community?””(King) was the zenith of prophetic understanding and had always the great hope that this nation could be better than what it was, but also that this nation could be healed,”he said.

But Lawson is critical of what he sees as the failure of American churches to incorporate this message into either their theology or their day-to-day life.”The church has largely failed in helping us catch Martin Luther King’s vision of life,”he said.


King’s assassination is an unsolved case of a slain prophet, he said, adding that only a new and complete investigation will lay to rest the questions continuing to swirl around the killing.”It is my contention that when a prophet is killed, people need to have the truth about it if we’re to have the hope of going forward not backward,”Lawson said.”The forces were present who saw the need for the prophet to die,”he added.”We (the country) added insult to the injury”by arresting Ray without interrogating the Rev. Jesse Jackson and other eye-witnesses to the shooting about what they saw.

In an interview, Lawson said Ray’s funeral will probably be held in Nashville, the city where he died on April 23 of liver failure. Ray’s family has delayed the funeral for three weeks because they want to make sure Lawson, who has been Ray’s pastor since the 1970s, is available to officiate.

Lawson said the funeral will give him a chance to reintroduce King’s message while starting the healing process.”We would hope that the service might be a sign to the society that healing can take place,”he said.

Theologian Harvey Cox, a professor at the divinity school who introduced King to Lawson when Cox was chaplain at Oberlin College in 1957, said he agreed with Lawson’s contention that King’s death was nothing short of a”crucifixion.””There wasn’t one crucifixion, but wherever innocent people are killed,where truth speaks to power and power answers back with violence and murder,there’s crucifixion,”he said.”But that’s not the last word in our faith,”Cox added.”Resurrection follows crucifixion in the Christian tradition.”

DEA END LEBOWITZ

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