Prophet or activist? Pastor or social reformer? In the six decades since his death, the testimony and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. has been so extensively documented and analyzed that it seems almost asinine to imagine posing a new question about his life and work or the Civil Rights era more broadly.
But I want to propose that King has been mislabeled—or, more precisely, that even many of his admirers have missed a title he deserves: revivalist.
It’s well recognized, of course, that the Civil Rights Movement under King’s leadership pulsed with the gospel of the kingdom. But what I’m saying is not merely that King and many lesser-known activists were Christians whose efforts were motivated by their faith in Jesus. Rather, I want to suggest that this was not merely a political movement that used biblically inspired strategies like nonviolent demonstration. It was a spiritual movement of great awakening, even a widely unrecognized Great Awakening in the grand tradition of grassroots American revivals.
What does true awakening look like? Biblical and historical records can help us discern how God awakens nations to the love of the Father in the way of Jesus.
Christ’s own ministry should be our first example. Amid social upheaval and political violence, Jesus begins teaching in the synagogues of Galilee. He declares that the Spirit of the Lord has anointed him to “proclaim good news to the poor,” “freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:16–21). Then he hits the streets, preaching repentance because “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. 4:17, ESV).
This is not a just a good sermon topic. It’s a blaring announcement of the arrival of a new age. And Jesus does not just speak his Good News. He makes a public demonstration of its reality, confronting the injustice of illness and death itself, releasing the health care plan of a heavenly administration.
With the touch of a hand, he heals the sick, raises the dead, and embraces the outcast. These are acts of love and peace but also destruction of the order and norms of a sinful and sorrowful world. We don’t call the earthly ministry of Jesus an awakening, but it is the awakening that would spark all others. In the backwaters of Galilee, often on the margins of society, Jesus inaugurates the greatest liberation movement in human history, introducing the higher standard to which all will ultimately be held.
In the first days of the church, we see a time of awakening, too, marked by a growth of practical human wisdom and the visible working of the Holy Spirit. God in Christ destroyed “the dividing wall of hostility” between Jew and Gentile in the early church, creating one new humanity, “members of [God’s] household” from every tribe and tongue (Eph. 2:11–22).
Acts 2 records a profound moment for this unity: God’s reversal of the division of the Tower of Babel. It is only by the power of the Holy Spirit that people from all over the known world—“Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs” (vv. 9–11)—could all understand the disciples’ proclamation of the gospel at once.
“Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans?” the crowd wonders. “Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language?” (v. 7–8). The answer is that this was an awakening, only possible with the supernatural grace of the Spirit.
The distinct eras of divine activity in American history that we call awakenings are similarly marked by exposure of depravity and pursuit of social righteousness—by repentance and public revival. As Christian History explained in 1989,
It is of major importance to remember that awakenings are not simply times of enhanced personal religious experience. Awakenings have social impact. In the wake of spiritual awakenings comes social restoration. Corrupt, immoral, unjust, and ungodly people and societies can return to honesty, purity, justice, and holiness. Culture can be transformed; but first must come transformed people.
The awakenings were not masterfully designed through central planning from the corridors of ecclesial power. They relied on organic, individual responses of obedience after definitive encounters with the Lord.
The best known of these movements, the Second Great Awakening (c. 1795–1835), produced moral-reform movements around public education, social services, women’s suffrage, and the establishment of abolitionist societies in the United States and the United Kingdom. From William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect to Harriet Beecher Stowe and the New England Congregationalists, supernatural encounters with the awakening glory of God led to new pursuit of justice and public demonstration of God’s love.
This outpouring of measurable institutional reforms in addition to mass salvation should not surprise us. As Wilberforce observed, it is “the glory of Christianity, to extinguish the malignant passions; to curb the violence, to controul the appetites, and to smooth the asperities of man; to make us compassionate and kind, and forgiving one to another; to make us good husbands, good fathers, good friends, and to render us active and useful in the discharge of the relative, social, and civil duties.”
The Third Great Awakening ran through the 1930s, and I am not the first to suggest that we should recognize a Fourth Great Awakening beginning in the mid-19th century. But the awakening I see is not the rise of the Religious Right, as has been proposed elsewhere. It is the Civil Rights Movement, which exhibited that same pattern of calls for repentance and revival followed by tangible social impact.
Perhaps those—Christian or not—who aren’t active participants in the Black worship tradition have undervalued or overlooked the hand of God in instigating and sustaining this movement and its transformation of American society. Granted, a significant portion of African American spirituality and theological interpretation has been archived in songs and stories preserved through oral tradition instead of publication.
But whatever the reason, historians and theologians alike have failed to acknowledge or embrace this awakening led by the Black church (or, indeed, to embrace the Black church itself). The unholy segregation between predominantly Black Protestant traditions and predominantly white evangelical traditions has extended to how we perceive the movement of the Spirit in our own recent history.
The Civil Rights Movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. was not a revival in the sense of a mass public proclamation of the gospel of salvation. But from my vantage within America’s freedom experiment, its defining characteristic was mass demonstration of the fruits of salvation (Matt. 7:15–20).
And that public demonstration was only part of the work. A significant and necessary part of this awakening happened in hidden prayer meetings, in countless hours spent on the floor, crying out to God for help. The Holy Spirit came upon those who waited in this undignified travail, releasing specific strategies for confronting the dark powers of oppression within society.
Like the early church disciples and the abolitionists of the Second and Third Great Awakening, men and women of all ages became possessed with unshakeable hope in Christ after receiving visions, dreams, and divinely inspired ideas through prayer. Those deep movements of the Spirit may not have been visible in the newspapers, but much of the Civil Rights activism the papers did document poured from this well.
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“We experienced something extraordinary in the freedom movement, something that hinted at a tremendous potential for love and community and transformation that exists here in this scarred, spectacular country,” said Civil Rights activist Rosemarie Freeney Harding, who worked with King and served in the Mennonite tradition for many years. “For a lot of people in the Movement, our participation gave us a craving for spiritual depth.”
In this Fourth Great Awakening, millions surrendered to tenets of the lordship of Jesus. Embracing the Beatitudes, they responded to government-sanctioned persecution with the fruits of the Spirit. They embodied the spiritual longing of a generation and made prayer a form of nonviolent direct action. The soundtrack of the movement was songs of intercession and eternal hope in the promises of God, and the spiritual transformation undergirding this pursuit of social righteousness was no less robust simply because the change didn’t occur at a public altar call.
On May 17, 1957, 25,000 Negro Americans arrived at the Lincoln Memorial for a three-hour prayer vigil called the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. The purpose was to commemorate the anniversary of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, to demonstrate support for new Civil Rights legislation, and to arouse the conscience of the nation to continued pursuit of freedom and equality.
In his first major outing as the newly elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a young Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the crowd. He delivered a brilliant prophetic rebuke to Washington, charging leaders in both major parties with a “dearth of positive leadership,” betrayal of “the cause of justice,” and “a high blood pressure of words and an anemia of deeds.”
“We come humbly to say to the men in the forefront of our government that the civil rights issue is not an ephemeral, evanescent domestic issue that can be kicked about by reactionary guardians of the status quo,” King said. “It is rather an eternal moral issue.”
But later, King would conclude his speech by making an explicitly revivalist appeal—an appeal that was met with the enthusiastic affirmation of the crowd, whose responses are here in parentheticals:
Let us not despair. Let us realize that as we struggle for justice and freedom, we have cosmic companionship. This is the long faith of the Hebraic-Christian tradition: that God is not some Aristotelian “unmoved mover” who merely contemplates upon himself. He is not merely a self-knowing God, but an other-loving God (Yeah) forever working through history for the establishment of his kingdom.
And those of us who call the name of Jesus Christ find something of an event in our Christian faith that tells us this. There is something in our faith that says to us, “Never despair; never give up; never feel that the cause of righteousness and justice is doomed.” There is something in our Christian faith, at the center of it, which says to us that Good Friday may occupy the throne for a day, but ultimately it must give way to the triumphant beat of the drums of Easter. (That’s right)
King’s fervent engagement with Scripture, appeals to fellow Christians to imitate Christ’s love, and declarations of the victory of God over evil amount to half the speech.
In King’s leadership and the work of thousands of faithful activists, the Civil Rights Movement was a radical force of societal transformation that unashamedly marched under the banner of the lordship of Jesus. It awakened the conscience of the nation and continues to captivate hearts and inspire hope for the oppressed. It should be recognized alongside earlier awakenings for its reshaping of US public life and the American church.
As we simultaneously commemorate King’s life and welcome a new presidential administration into power, leading up to Black History Month, may we be provoked by King’s timeless words—and hear them not only as an activist’s speech but also as a revivalist’s sermon. It is time for the whole body of Christ to step out of suspicion and into love, to recover our shared inheritance from this unrecognized awakening.
Rev. Jonathan Tremaine “JT” Thomas (@jontremaine) is a missionary; the president/CEO of Civil Righteousness, which is a movement of holy activism; and the senior advisor of justice and reconciliation to New Room for Seedbed.
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