Invoking Crisis

Performative Christian Prayer and the Civil Rights Movement

Bibliographic Data

ID8202136
AuthorsTobin Miller Shearer (corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume83
Issue2
Pages490-512
Publication date2015-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the American Academy of Religion (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7189 • E-ISSN: 1477-4585
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jaarel/lfv005
OpenAlexW2006981300
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited20

ists used performative prayer to foster socially destabilizing crisis by inviting arrest or physical violence, destabilizing the status quo, and drawing national attention to their cause. A new theoretical framework for analyzing public acts of piety and the resultant crises builds on the themes of body, word, and drama and intervenes into Bruce Lincoln’s work on the relationship between religion and social change. A final section positions performative prayer in Gandhian nonviolence theory. At root, performative prayer offered far more resources for agitation than for pacification. Framed in this way, prayer becomes a dynamic ritual that generates social change rather than static words that mark identity, and the means through which political action is taken, not a state-protected tool of personal salvation. A MAN KNELT ON the sidewalk. His arms hung loose as he raised his head in the falling rain. He was praying. On October 31, 1967, he and fifty others had gathered in Bessemer, Alabama, to protest the imprison-ment of Martin Luther King, Jr., in what the protestors deemed a

Aesthetics · Civil rights · Movement (music) · Performative utterance · Political science · Prayer · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious studies

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