‘Free at last!’

‘Free at last!’ The words come from Reverend Martin Luther King’s famous speech ‘I have a dream’ from August 1963.2 The speech and those words evocate all what the sixties stand for – but also some of the dilemmas and paradoxes of the historiography of the period. The religious dimension in the speech is evident. However, there is virtually no room for religion in the general (political, social and cultural) historiography of the 1960s,3 and insofar it does speak specifically about religion, it usually does so in terms of crisis, decline, and secularization – the ‘death of God’ –, while Church and religious history rather explore the variety of ecclesiastical reactions and particularly forms of religious renewal (sometimes, as in many histories of Vatican II, rather disconnected from society at large).4 Freedom is mainly associated with sexual liberation, not exactly what King intended. It is therefore striking that almost exclusively ‘white’ men and women dominate the debate. I’m one of those too, but try to take a slightly different, ‘decentralized’ perspective to reflect upon the uses of ‘freedom’ with regard to religion in the sixties, taking in consideration the complexities of the changing context of the time. King’s freedom incidentally did not focus on religious freedom either, which dominates the debate on freedom and religion today, especially in the US

Political science · American Political and Social Dynamics · Catholicism and Religious Studies · Race, History, and American Society